The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  Lech Lecha, the parashah that relates in great detail the exhausting and depleting travels that Abram, later Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, had to undertake in order to reach the land that God has promised to him—travels that, we learn, include harrowing and violent encounters with the battling chieftains of the territories among which Abraham and his kin must one day dwell, places like Sodom and Gomorrah, places where terrible wickedness dwells—this parashah, so filled with movement and turmoil and violence, ends on an uncharacteristic note of stillness. One day, when Abraham is ninety-nine years old and has still not fathered a son by his wife, Sarah, God appears to him and announces two important pieces of news. First, God declares that he has decided to establish a convenant with Abraham and his descendants, to whom God promises vast tracts of land in an eternal possession. And second, he announces to the old man, who thus far has only produced a son by his Egyptian serving-woman Hagar, that Sarah will bear a child in the next year. The boy, as we know, is born, and the name that God gives him is, as we also know, Yitzhak, “He laughed.”

  In the context of these promises, which must indeed have seemed incredible, it is worth pausing to consider a detail of God’s speech to Abraham. When God first speaks to his prophet, he says, “I am El Shaddai”—the first time that this peculiar epithet appears in the Torah. For some scholars—although not for Friedman, who, seeing a connection between the Hebrew shaddai and the Akkadian sadu, “mountains,” dismisses the epithet as meaning nothing more than “the One of the Mountain”—the name has considerable symbolic meaning. Rashi explains the words at some length, for instance. For the medieval Frenchman, “I am El Shaddai” means “I am he that there is in My Divinity enough for every creature”: which is to say, the name contains an implicit guarantee that the Deity can keep the promises he makes. One further gloss on this passage—Be’er BaSadeh, taking a leaf from the midrashic commentator Bereishit Rabbah—explains further the reason that such a guarantee is necessary: Abraham feared that circumcision, which God will demand as a sign of his new people’s commitment to him, would dangerously isolate him from the rest of humankind, and hence God had to reassure him. In Bereishit Rabbah 46:3, we are told that Abram said, “Before I entered into this bris people came to me. Will they really continue to come to me after I enter the bris?” This is why God, at the moment he makes his promises and, as we shall see, demands the establishment of the ritual of bris in return, declares himself to be “enough.” This “enough” is, therefore, what we may call a “positive” use of the word, and therefore quite different in sense from the rather wry way in which another Abraham, my grandfather, liked to use it. For instance: whenever he would hear that So-and-So, typically an aged cousin of the branch of the family he shunned, had died at some vast old age, he would nod his handsome head a little and say, Nu? Genug is genug! Enough is enough! He would make this grim little joke often as he took me around the family plot at Mount Judah and pointedly recite the ages at which his sisters had died—twenty-six, thirty-five—and then steer me a few steps away to the bronze footstones of his first cousins Elsie Mittelmark, who died at eighty-four in 1973, and her sister Bertha, who died at ninety-two in 1982, more than three times as old as her cousin Ray, Ruchele, had been when she had died a week before her wedding. Genug is genug!

  At any rate, God makes these extravagant promises to Abraham, and whatever the name he uses at that moment may mean, his fulfillment of his promises suggests that his power is, at least according to this text, “enough” to fulfill them.

  Promises work both ways, and as I have mentioned, in return for the promise of protection and abundance that he makes to Abraham, God requires a permanent sign of the bond between him and the chosen people, a symbol that will be cut into the flesh itself. Hence the last event that is narrated in parashat Lech Lecha is a rather curious one: a mass circumcision that takes place just before Yitzhak, whom of course we know as Isaac, is born. After God’s appearance as El Shaddai, Abraham took his thirteen-year-old son Ishmael and all of his household and all of his slaves, both those who were born into slavery and those who were purchased, and circumcised them all. This circumcision, of course, is the visible and inalterable sign of God’s covenant with the Hebrew people—this same visibility, this same inalterability later being one of the reasons that you are more likely to hear stories about women who, like Anna Heller Stern, were able to pretend, because of a lucky accident of genetics, that they belong to non–chosen peoples when the chosen one was being eradicated from the face of the earth, than you are to hear about men, since even when the men were, say, blond and blue-eyed, their flesh was marked by the covenant that was established by God with his chosen people, as narrated at the conclusion of parashat Lech Lecha. In my experience, at least, the men either hid, like Bob and Jack and the others, or fled, like Bumo Kulberg, who was named for his grandfather Abraham—a man whose name was both Kulberg and Kornblüh; Bumo Kulberg, who, in the fullness of time, had his child, a girl, who in time had her own daughter, a girl whose first name, Alma, means “soul,” and whose last name, as it happens, is not the name of her father, but the name of her mother’s father, Kulberg, since there is no one else left to carry this name forward into the future. It is, at least in part, the profound emotion behind the decision to embrace that particular inheritance that led Adam Kulberg’s daughter to say, at the end of our first night with him, The best thing that happened to my father is Alma. It’s like—all the pain and unhappiness, Alma makes it good again. He says he is living for Alma.

  At any rate, a famous question about the conclusion of Lech Lecha is this: Why does God wait until Abraham is ninety-nine years old before he establishes the mark of the covenant for him and his household and descendants? After all, as Friedman puts it in his modern-day commentary, “God has known Abraham for years” by this point: “Why not command it at the beginning of the relationship?” Friedman then goes on to answer his rhetorical question in a way that I find persuasive, I who know the Torah less intimately than I know the Odyssey, a story of an epic struggle to attain home that withholds the satisfaction of a family reunion from its hero not for the moment of homecoming itself, but for the aftermath of many trials and tests by means of which he proves that he deserves that reunion. Why does the moment of circumcision, the moment at which a new kind of family is created, come so late in Genesis’s narrative? Friedman asks. Because, he answers, the circumcision is only a sign of the covenant.

  So why not make the covenant itself right at the beginning? he persists.

  Because, the rabbi tells us, Abraham has to endure many trials to show that he deserves the covenant. This, it occurs to me, is as much a narrative as an ethical consideration. For if parashat Lech Lecha fails to convey the effort, the struggle that must be endured over time, by which Abraham earns the covenant, the climactic gesture will feel flat and anticlimactic: we will not feel, as we are meant to, the finalizing impact of the scene of mass circumcision, that visible and inalterable sign that Abraham is unique in the world, that he and his people have been singled out for something special, have been chosen.

  4

  HOME AGAIN

  (A False Ending)

  FOR A LONG time, I thought this was the end of our travels, and the end of the story.

  After we returned from Denmark, and I began to think back on all the trips we’d made and all the stories we’d heard, a phrase of Alena’s kept ringing in my mind. It was like what she was interested in was not so much the story of her grandmother but how to tell the story of her grandmother, she had said that night. How to be the storyteller. Here again, it occurred to me, was the unique problem that faces my generation, the generation of those who had been, say, seven or eight years old during the mid-1960s, the generation of the grandchildren of those who’d been adults when it all happened; a problem that will face no other generation in history. We are just close enough to those who were there that we feel an obligation to the facts as we know them; but we are also just
far enough away, at this point, to worry about our own role in the transmission of those facts, now that the people to whom those facts happened have mostly slipped away. I thought of this; and saw that, after the tens of thousands of miles that Matt and I had traveled over the past year, a year of almost solid journeying, what we had, in a way, was a story about the problems of proximity and distance.

  On the one hand, we had learned so much, so many facts, a great many details, as a result of getting close to those who had been there, who had themselves been close to the event itself. And even this information, these facts, would have disappeared had we not arrived in time to cull from those people what was important to us—would have disappeared because the protagonists of our story, Shmiel, Ester, the girls, four girls whose names we now know, were, inevitably, the secondary characters in the stories of those who had survived. In the tales we’d heard in Australia and Israel and Sweden and Denmark, the Jägers could be nothing more than the friends, the neighbors, the schoolmates, but not the mothers, the fathers, the sisters, the brothers, the ones you never stop thinking about. This is why, if we hadn’t found the few remaining Bolechowers, Shmiel and his family would have become that much more lost, as, over time, the heirs of those who did survive recalled and recorded what was important to them—to the Greenes and Grunschlags and Goldsmiths and Grossbards and Adlers and Reinharzes and Freilichs and Kulbergs—and, inevitably, allowed the rest to disappear, the names of the neighbors and friends and schoolmates of those original survivors, names that would stop having significance as time passed, just as I have allowed to fall by the wayside names that I have heard as I searched for the Jägers, names that weren’t central to my story.

  To be alive is to have a story to tell. To be alive is precisely to be the hero, the center of a life story. When you can be nothing more than a minor character in somebody else’s tale, it means that you are truly dead.

  Still, I know well that it’s possible for even secondary characters to have a shadow existence, possible for walk-ons to persist into the present, assuming that someone wants to tell their story. Who would my grandfather be now, if I hadn’t sat at his feet when I was a boy and learned by heart the stories that he told me?—stories that are of course all about him, in one sense, and in that sense are pleasurable to hear merely in the way it can give pleasure to know an interesting thing, which is the pleasure of knowledge, of the scholar; but, in another sense, are about what it means to be a member of a certain family, and in that sense have a larger worth to a greater number of people, and for that reason are surely worth preserving.

  So the trips that we took brought us into proximity with a past that, like the people who inhabited that past, we thought we had lost forever; and from that past, about those people, we rescued so many facts. What had we learned, after all of that traveling? He was deaf, she had pretty legs, she was friendly, he was clever, one girl was aloof, or possibly easy, one liked the boys, or perhaps played hard to get. She was a butterfly! He had two trucks, he brought the first strawberries, she kept a spotless house, he was a bigshot, they played cards, the ladies crocheted, she was snooty, hoch Nase! She was a good wife, a good mother, a good housewife: what else is there to say? They called him “the king,” she carried her books like this, her eyes were blue but had a brown quarter here, they went to the movies, they went skiing, they played volleyball, they played basketball, they played Ping-Pong! He had the first radio, the aerial was so high, only two men in Bolechow owned cars, and one of them was him. They went to shul, or didn’t, or only went on High Holidays; they davened, they made tsimmes on New Year’s, they sneaked into that Polish butcher’s place and ate sausages in secret! He loved his wife so much, au au au au au!

  It was a nice family, a fine family.

  It was a life, it was a life.

  We had learned all that, which we had never known before—because just as the survivors, the people who had seen these things and remembered them, began to die away, we learned where they were and we got close to them and heard what they had to say.

  We learned all that, and of course we learned their stories as well, the storytellers’ stories; and so that will become part of our story, too. The hiding places, the bunker, the attic, the rats, the forest, the false birth records, the barns. And there is the story of the present: the people we met and talked to, their families, the food we ate, the relationships that were formed now, today, against odds of 99.2 to 1. And from all the traveling, all that getting close, I found something else, too: a brother whom I’d never really known before, a deep-feeling and soft-hearted man, an artist who says little and sees much, and worries more than I do about feelings, a man whose arm I broke once because, at least in part, he had a name of which I was jealous.

  So there is proximity, and all that it brings you.

  And the rest? For although we got close to those who were there, there was also the problem of distance. A physical distance, first of all, at the time it was all happening, a spatial difference between where the survivors were and where our lost were: different houses at first, then different Lager, and, finally, different hiding places. After a certain point, it was simply impossible to know what was happening to other people. There was, too, a kind of psychological distance: when you are the protagonist of a life story that has become, of necessity, a tale of animal survival, there is little room for digressions, for looping, leisurely rings of further narratives about other people. And now, even more, there has intervened that other kind of distance, the distance of the six decades between then and now, a crevice that has opened up between the happening and the telling, a void into which so much has fallen.

  Because so much time had passed and so much had disappeared, there were only tantalizing fragments: fragments that, now that we had talked to everyone and there were no more fragments to find, were finite in number, and could never, it was now clear, quite come together to make a whole picture. The blond boy who wasn’t Jewish—he loved her so much, too. She went to meet some friends, I think. She was taken to that place and after a day and a half she stood naked on a plank and was shot. She listened as the piano played, as the man was made to sit on the hot stove. She was raped. She may have been raped: could be. The first Aktion was in October. It would have been cold. They were taken and put on a cattle car and went into the gas chambers, that was in the second Aktion. It was in September. It was in August. It was the mother, the father, the youngest. It was the mother and the daughter. She worked in the barrel factory, she found herself a place inside, when everyone else was in the cold! She was still alive in ’forty-one, she was still alive in ’forty-two, she was with Zimmerman and no one saw her again. No, she was with Halpern, she was very loyal to her sympatia, she was easy, who knows? She was with the Babij, she was killed with them in ’forty-three, who can say, the last person to see her left in ’forty-two. She came to the Arbeitsamt one day, she talked to a girl called Lew and a man called Altmann. She was embraced as her friend said, Come, give me a kiss. They sat for three days in that courtyard and watched as children were thrown from windows, as Mrs. Grynberg stood there, dazed, with the bloody bits hanging from between her legs. She fled to the Babij with her sister. She stayed in town. He loved her so much. He hid her in his house. Zey zent behalten bay a lererin. A Polish teacher was hiding her in her house. She was pregnant. A Polish schoolteacher was hiding them in her house. She was pregnant by someone, but not by Ciszko. The maid betrayed them, a neighbor saw them. She was alone, she was with her father. It was Ciszko, it was an art teacher. A woman. Sedlak. Shedlak. Serlak. Szedlak. Szedlakowna. Szedlakowa. No one knows where she lived.

  Impossible to tell.

  Long ago, I had begun my search hoping to know how they had died, because I wanted a date to put on a chart, because I thought my grandfather, who when I was a boy used to take me to graveyards where he would talk to the dead, my grandfather whom I knew to be flawed but had adored anyway, who had had breakdowns, who had committed suicide, might rest a lit
tle easier—a sentimental notion, I am aware—if I could finally give an answer to the question that, when I asked it of him, he would merely repeat to me with a shrug and a shake of his head that said he would not talk about it: What happened to Uncle Shmiel? He would retreat into an uncharacteristic silence, then, and I told myself that one day I would find the answer: that it was here, it was then; that now we knew, could go to a place where we could put a rock on a grave and talk to him, to Shmiel, too. We had gone to learn precisely how and where and when he had died, they had died; and had, for the most part, failed. But in failing we’d realized, almost accidentally, that until we went nobody had ever thought to ask about what can’t be put on a chart: how they had lived, who they were. By the time we returned from Copenhagen, I was aware of this irony—that in the end, we’d learned far more about what we hadn’t been looking for than about what we’d set out to find. But of course, so much of our journeying had been like that.

  So it was distance, I thought when I was done with all my travels, that in the end would always prevent me from telling the kind of story I had hoped to be able to tell: A story that had a beginning, a middle, and an end. A story that, like my grandfather’s stories, began with all the time in the world, and then speeded up as the lineaments became clear, the characters and personalities and plot, and ended with something memorable, a punch line or a tragedy that you’d always remember. We had learned so much more than we’d dreamed possible, but when all was said and done I couldn’t tell the whole story, couldn’t rescue that for them, or for my grandfather, or for me.