The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  THERE WAS NOBODY home at old Prokopiv’s place, so after dropping Stepan at home, where his irate wife was waiting on the porch, hands on hips, wondering where he’d been all morning, we drove to the German Colony and found the address he’d given us for Mrs. Latyk, the old woman whose brother had worked for Uncle Shmiel.

  As he likes to do, Alex knocked on a window rather than the door and in Ukrainian called out, Is anybody home? After a minute or two, a white-haired woman appeared at the chain-link gate that led to the tidy little backyard. Her deeply lined but animated face, the broad, surprisingly mobile features, the frank nose with its ski-slope tip, the strong white hair pulled carelessly back into a little bun, the vigorous, large hands that flapped and waved as she walked slowly to the gate, even the intense cornflower blue of her thin cotton housedress—all these projected a kind of solid trustworthiness. Alex talked to her briefly and at some point said Shmiel Jäger, and she nodded vigorously and said Tak, tak, and beckoned for us to come through the gate. As she motioned to us to sit down on some plastic chairs in a corner of her little shaded yard, she told us she had been born in 1919. No, she said, Stepan had been wrong: it was her uncle, she said, who’d been Shmiel’s driver, not her brother. But yes, of course she remembered Shmiel Jäger. She didn’t see him often herself, and so didn’t remember the children—she thought there might have been a daughter—but sure, she remembered Jäger, he had a big truck. His drivers would drive this truck to Lwów and pick up all sorts of goods there, clothes and food and fruit—

  Strawberries, I thought—

  —and other things, and transport them to various places…

  And so it went. We talked for about half an hour, and she shared with us what memories she had: homely things, everyday things. Things we’d heard. She knew that Jäger had lived somewhere near the Rynek, but the house wasn’t there anymore; another house had been built on the site where his had been. Yes, her uncle had liked working for Jäger, she said. And Jäger had loved her uncle! They were close, not just a man and his worker. Jäger was known as a nice man, a generous man. People liked him. Her uncle’s name? Stanislaw Latyk. Stas, she said. His children had long ago moved to America; if we wanted, she would give us their names and addresses. The son in particular, she thought, would remember a lot. I said yes, that would be nice, and thought to myself, Maybe they’d have charming stories to tell, too. (“And Jäger loved our father!”) She brought out a piece of paper, and as I copied the address, she showed us snapshots of her uncle, the whole family. I promised I would call her cousins in the States when we got home, and soon after this, when we had shaken her firm hand warmly, we walked back to the Passat. Alex’s instinct was right: we shouldn’t waste too much more time on these interviews.

  As it happened, I did phone the children of Stas Latyk a few weeks after we got back from that trip, although the stories they told me were not charming. When I talked to Lydia, the daughter, who now lives near New Haven, she gladly lingered over what memories she could summon, trying to help in whatever way she could. Yes, sure, she remembered Shmiel Jäger, she said: her father had been very friendly with him, they were close. During the war, she added, her father had his own big truck—he’d stopped working for Shmiel and gone into business for himself during the Thirties—and had somehow created a kind of hiding place out of one of this truck’s huge fuel tanks, and in this hiding place he had smuggled Jews to safe spots, to other hiding places. (After I told her what I knew by then about Shmiel’s fate, she said it may well have been her father who’d taken him to the Polish schoolteacher’s house.) This, she added, had to have been before the day on which, during a roundup of Jews, her father had seen a German soldier brutally dragging a woman away from her child, and had gone up to this soldier and struck him in the face and said, Shame on you. For that, Stas was taken to a Gestapo cell and beaten for two days. When he finally came home, Lydia said, he was so unrecognizable that her mother fainted. Soon after that, fearing for his life, Stas Latyk had disappeared into the forest. Lydia and her mother and brother Mikhailo found out later that he’d joined up with the Russians at some point and returned after the war to Bolekhiv, but by then the rest of the family was in America, and for one reason or another, because of the way the world was then, because of other things, they never saw him again.

  I also called Michael Latyk, as Stas’s son Mikhailo is now called. He lives in Texas. He was very warm when I rang him out of the blue the day after I spoke to his sister, and said, yes, of course he’d be happy to share his memories of his father, the war, anything. He confirmed what Lydia had told me about his father’s close friendship with Shmiel, adding only that, as he recalled quite clearly, the two men had often engaged in impromptu wrestling matches.

  Wrestling matches? I couldn’t wait to tell my mother.

  What else did he remember? I asked. It was hard for him, he said: he was a boy, it was a very bad time, he saw terrible things. He was part of the crowd that gathered around the Dom Katolicki that night in October, he said: he had seen people being lined up against the wall and shot. There was the time one June day he’d been outside, picking and eating cherries off a tree, when suddenly he heard the sound of shooting and looked up to see a group of people being shot right there in the open. After that, he said, he hadn’t been able to eat for three days. He had seen other things. A woman, six or seven months pregnant, wounded, asking for a doctor, a doctor. And then there was the time when, after one of the big Aktionen, he’d seen a boy of about his own age who’d been shot in the the right shoulder during the roundup—No, wait, it was the left shoulder, he could see it in his mind’s eye—but had somehow survived. He remembered seeing this boy about four days later, sitting at the fence of a Lager. He was sitting under the fence, Michael recalled, all swollen with hunger, and he was taking—

  His voice grew ragged and he began to weep. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, he said. I can’t tell this.

  It’s OK, I said, the way I sometimes talk to my children. Just take your time, take a deep breath.

  He took a breath and said, He was taking.

  He broke down again. I could not imagine what the outcome of this story was going to be, but as I sat at my desk with the phone in my hand I realized that I was squeezing the receiver so hard my hands were wet.

  Finally Michael Latyk in Texas in August 2005 took a deep breath and said, He was sitting all swollen with hunger, sitting by the fence, and he was taking the lice off his own body and eating them.

  Then he said: I’m sorry, I can’t talk about these things anymore.

  I nodded and then remembered I was on the phone. Yes, I said quietly, OK, you’ve been so helpful, I appreciate so much what you’ve shared with me, I and my family appreciate it—

  Suddenly he interrupted me. But there’s one more thing I have to tell you, Michael said. You know that expression, “Eat a Balanced Diet”? Well, for the rest of my life, every time I hear that expression, I think of that.

  I had kept my promise to Mrs. Latyk, and had called her cousins in the States.

  WE FOUND THE old man Prokopiv just in time. As we pulled up in front of his house, he was walking briskly away from his front door toward town—on the way, as he later told us, to his job at the church, where he tidied up every day. The house was large and handsome, a generous wooden structure with a steeply pitched tin roof. It was painted brick red, and the frames of the windows were white. The impression it gave of being a barn was enhanced by the fact that it stood a little to the side of the street in the middle of a profusion of apple trees, and altogether it looked like something you might come across during a pleasant day of driving in the countryside. Prokopiv himself, whose first name was Vasyl, gave no hint of being ninety. His frame was tall and quite solid, and he had a handsome, oval head and a firm-fleshed face, almost completely unlined, except for two deep laugh lines on either side of his wide mouth. His puckish nose, like that of Mrs. Latyk, ended in a little ski jump, which gave him an incongruously boyish qua
lity. Like Josef Adler on the day I’d met him, he was wearing a tan shirt with epaulettes. He looked about seventy. His handshake was crushing.

  Because Prokopiv was clearly on his way to an appointment that he wanted to keep, Alex kept the introduction short. He said we were Americans, looking for people who may have known Jägers from Bolechow.

  Prokopiv brought his left hand to his face as if in contemplation and spoke for a minute in Ukrainian.

  He doesn’t remember Jägers, Alex said.

  What with the unexpected interviews with Stepan and Mrs. Latyk, and the hour we’d spent looking for Taniawa, it had been a long day by this point. The sun was hot. A little hastily, I said, No? OK.

  Prokopiv said something else to Alex, which from its intonation I knew was a question. I was pretty sure I heard the word zhid: Jew.

  Alex said Tak, Yes, and added a sentence, at which point Prokopiv threw back his handsome head and laughed, a laugh of recognition.

  Alex said, I told him about the trucks, then he remembered immediately. Tak tak. Yes yes. He remembers. Shmiel Jäger. He was living in Russki Bolechow. He doesn’t know where the street was. He knew the name, he didn’t know them himself.

  I said, OK, that’s nice. Then I asked him to ask Prokopiv, who I knew was eager to get to church, if he recognized some other names: Szymanski, Grünschlag, Ellenbogen. He and Alex talked for a minute, and Alex again said, Yes, he knew those names. It was a small town. Everyone knew who everybody was.

  OK, I said, so he remembers some names.

  Alex nodded and made the Let’s leave face, the We’re not going to get anything else from him face. Yes, he said. All right then.

  We thanked Prokopiv and he started on his way, and Alex and I turned toward the car.

  Wait, Froma said.

  We turned back.

  She said, Don’t you want to ask him something else?

  I thought, Here we go again: the pushing, the reluctance to let go, the insistence on going back for one last look, one more question. I felt a twinge of exasperation, and not merely because I didn’t want to turn back. At Taniawa, there had been a little scene between Froma and Alex. When we finally reached the site of the mass grave, idyllic and remote, Froma had commented that the Germans would never have found this spot without the help of local Ukrainians. Ever since she and I had been in Vilnius together, and had visited the mass grave in the Ponar forest, with its hundred thousand Jews sleeping their unquiet sleep beneath the picnicking grounds, we had returned almost obsessively to the issue of local collaboration. Many times since then we had discussed the mechanics of the killing, which so often would not have been possible without the help of local people, the people who knew who the Jews were, where they lived, where the fields in the forests were. Many people think of the Holocaust and think, Germans. Just recently, at a bat mitzvah I attended in New York (a ceremony of which my grandfather would have disapproved, but then, time changes even traditions), someone who had heard about my search for what happened to Shmiel, my many trips abroad, came up to me and said, Doesn’t it make you feel uncomfortable around Germans? and I asked, You mean Germans in general? and then I laughed and shook my head and said, No, of course not; and then I added, And anyway, if I were the kind of person who thought that way, I’d be more afraid of Ukrainians than of Germans. Froma was particularly preoccupied with this issue, and at Taniawa she’d said, They never could have found this place without the Ukrainians, and Alex, who was hot and tired, had bristled a little and snapped back at Froma that what she had said was impossible to know—bristled not because he was a Ukrainian, since as a historian he is interested in facts, and is therefore acquainted with the stories of Ukrainian atrocities, just as he can tell you the facts of the great forced starvation, the Soviet soldiers who surrounded the towns and villages, one after another, and simply took out all the food and let the people die, which eventually they did, after they had eaten the mice, and the rats, and finally one another. It was because Alex was interested in facts that he bristled and said, I’m sorry, but how do you know that, there’s just no evidence for that in this case, it was just an open field then, any place would have done, anybody driving down this road could have found a place like this or any other place, OK? It had been to quell this moment of tension that I’d spoken up, as we stood there in the green and leafy glade, and said, I think we just need to think for a moment about this girl, a sixteen-year-old girl. Her life.

  It was because I had this uneasy scene in mind, and because I was afraid that Froma was going to bring up something about Ukrainian collaboration, that I responded to her question about our wanting to ask Prokopiv something else by saying, firmly, No, that’s OK.

  Froma persisted. Don’t you want to ask him what he knows about when they took them?

  Hmmm? I said, not wanting to get into it. We knew what had happened, by now. And clearly this Prokopiv didn’t know my family. I thought it was time to finish up here, to take a few more pictures and leave.

  What you asked the others, Froma went on. What happened when they took the Jews away?

  Alex was perspiring heavily; a big man, he suffered more from the heat than we did. Even so, he repeated Froma’s question in Ukrainian. Prokopiv talked for a while and said, yes, he remembered one time when some Jews were taken to where the brick factory used to be and they themselves dug up pits in that place, and they killed them and buried them there. There was a memorial of some kind at that place. And others were killed in the cemetery.

  Where’s this memorial? Froma asked.

  He thinks it’s in the forest, Alex said after a brief exchange. The Germans took them to this club that there used to be here, they were taken to the movie theater and then they took them to that place and killed them.

  It was clear they were talking about the first Aktion, about Taniawa. This was a waste of time.

  OK, I said, let’s say thank you, and let’s go.

  But Froma said, Does he know of any that were hidden? What she was interested in was this: As we had stood in front of the Dom Katolicki that morning, we’d encountered a diminutive and very old woman who, after she’d stopped briefly to greet Stepan, had begun to talk to us, and while she talked had said that long ago she’d helped to hide a little Jewish girl named Rita. Then the woman had burst into tears and said, The Jews never did anything and they killed them all anyway. This had touched Froma, and it was clear that the story of Rita was much on her mind. So she said, now, Does he know of any that were hidden?

  Alex, standing a few yards away with Prokopiv, gestured as if he couldn’t hear. Loudly, I repeated the question. Does he know of any who were hidden?

  Alex relayed the question. Giving up, I moved away from the car and walked back to Prokopiv.

  Prokopiv gave a tight little smile of assent. Hidden, he said. Yes, I know.

  Motioning with his head in the direction of the next street over, the old man started talking again. I heard what I thought was the name Kopernika. Copernicus? My Ukrainian was clearly no better than my Polish.

  Alex listened and then translated.

  He said, In Kopernika Street there were two Polish women who were schoolteachers. One of them was hiding two Jews. The Jews were taken and the teachers were killed.

  STANDING THERE, IN the moment after old Prokopiv had said two Polish women who were schoolteachers, one of them was hiding two Jews, I understood for the first time in my life the expression rooted to the ground. I couldn’t move. My ears were ringing. I heard my voice echoing in my head when I finally spoke. It is only because my digital voice recorder continued to run as I stood there speechless that I know I said, But this is the—it’s the—

  I tried to collect my thoughts. I said, Ask him was it a Polish art teacher? Because that’s who was hiding my uncle and his daughter, an art teacher from the school, ask him—

  It occurred to me that I still hadn’t told Alex this part of the story. There was so much that we’d learned since I’d last seen him, so much for us
to catch up on, and I’d been saving it all for the big dinner that he and Natalie were going to be hosting the next night, Saturday, after Lane arrived. I hadn’t told him all of what I’d learned, hadn’t yet told him about Frydka and Shmiel and Ciszko and Szedlak, because I didn’t think it would matter, on this trip, today.

  Ask him, I had said, barely knowing what I was saying. Alex started talking to Prokopiv, and I cleared my throat and said, Does he remember the name of this teacher? There could have been two teachers, I thought, after all there had to have been more than one teacher in this town, maybe another one was also hiding Jews. Maybe it wasn’t the same one. Maybe it wasn’t them. I had to be sure.

  Alex asked the question. Prokopiv listened and then nodded twice, vigorously, and smiled broadly. His teeth were small and square.

  He said, Tak tak.

  He said, Szedlakowa.

  He said something else, one sentence.