The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

Alex looked at me. He said to me, He says she was killed right in the yard of her house.

  I stood there and said to the old man, as if the force of my emotion at that moment could transcend the language barrier:

  That was my uncle and his daughter. It was.

  In the months that have passed since that afternoon, Froma has told me that when she tells the story of what we found during that trip, tells it to other people, she describes me, at the moment when Prokopiv uttered the name Szedlakowa, as having melted. And it’s true that something snapped in me at that moment. I simply sank down and squatted there in the dust of the street and started to cry.

  Partly it was this: the bizarre coincidence that of all the stories of people who were hidden, this man, whom we’d almost missed that day, whom we would never have talked to if we’d come five minutes later, whom we’d never have asked the right question if Froma hadn’t once again pushed, demanded one more look, this man knew only one story of Jews who’d been hidden, which turned out to be the one story I was interested in, the story I’d spent the past four years tracking down and piecing together.

  And partly it was this: that for a long time it seemed that there could never be real confirmation of that story, because everyone who’d told it to me, in all the various versions that they had heard, had been absent when it happened. Now I was talking to a Ukrainian, not a Jew, which is to say, someone who was there when it happened. Suddenly, it seemed less like a story than a fact. I had hit bedrock.

  I crouched on the quiet street with my hand over my wet eyes, and when I finally looked up Prokopiv had come closer and was looking at me with an expression of deep, almost fatherly sympathy, the way a man might look at a child who had hurt himself.

  Aiiiii, he said with a deep sigh. Tak tak. Yes yes. It felt like, There there.

  Froma and Alex were silent for a while. After a while Froma asked softly, Everyone knew of it? Everyone knew this story?

  Prokopiv gave a firm nod. Yes, yes, Alex said. Everybody knew. He says everyone was talking about it right when it happened.

  Right when it happened. Not in 1946 in Katowice, not in 1950 in Israel, not in 2003 in Australia. It was this thought that reminded me that I had work to do, that I needed to get information now. My mind cleared, and I got to my feet.

  I said, So he says there were two teachers? This was news to me.

  The two Ukrainians talked for a while, the old man of ninety who had seen so much and the bearlike young man in his thirties who, for whatever mysterious reasons, taste or temperament or accident, had ended up devoting his working life to tracking the history of the Jews of Galicia. Alex said, Yes, these two teachers were two sisters, they were living together. And he thinks both of them were killed.

  I asked, Does he remember what part of town these ladies lived in?

  Alex talked to Prokopiv and then gave me an intense, private look.

  He said, Sure he remembers. He will take us to the house, if we want.

  The street was quiet. A little breeze ruffled the leaves of the apple trees.

  I said, Yes. We want.

  THE HOUSE THAT had once belonged to the Szedlak sisters, a low, single-story bungalow not unlike many of the houses you see in Bolekhiv, looked deserted when Prokopiv pointed it out to us as we drove him to the church. We dropped him there with effusive thanks.

  During the ride, Froma had told Alex to ask the old man if he remembered the name of the betrayer. I myself was feeling so overwhelmed with the discovery of the Szedlak house that it hadn’t occurred to me to ask. I couldn’t imagine discovering anything else; it had felt like enough. But Alex, who was, I could tell, deeply affected emotionally by what was happening, was as eager to pursue this tack as Froma was. He talked for a while with Prokopiv, who shook his head sadly.

  He doesn’t know who betrayed them, Alex said as we drove the short way from the neighborhood of the Dom Katolicki to the Rynek, where the little gold-domed Ukrainian church stood, fifty paces from the house where my grandfather was born. Alex added, He says maybe then he knew. Yes, back then, people knew…. But it’s such a long time.

  The thought that perhaps Prokopiv was protecting someone flashed briefly through my mind, and when Froma spoke I knew she was thinking the same thing. She said, Everything that happened, happened because someone, an individual, made a decision. She and I had talked about this a great deal over the years. In Ponar she had expounded on a thought she’d framed before and would frame again: that the Holocaust is so big, the scale of it is so gigantic, so enormous, that it becomes easy to think of it as something mechanical. Anonymous. But everything that happened, happened because someone made a decision. To pull a trigger, to flip a switch, to close a cattle car door, to hide, to betray. It was with this consideration in mind—which to the record of historical facts, to the catalog of things that happened and could be witnessed, adds the invisible dimension of morality, of judging what happened—that she had asked Who was the betrayer? and had wondered, as I briefly had, whether Prokopiv’s inability to come up with a name that everyone had once known was the result of a moral decision of his own just then, perhaps a decision not to bring judgment down today on some ill and ancient neighbor, rather than the inevitable consequence of the passage of so many years.

  We drove back to the Szedlak house. Prokopiv had told us that there had once been a nice veranda at the front. There was no veranda now. The house presented its long side to the quiet street, a blank stucco expanse punctuated by three modest windows. It looked inscrutable. The door, it seemed, was on the far side, which you reached by going through a chain-link gate and up a little walkway into a courtyard. Toward the back of the courtyard was a little outbuilding, its sloping roof made of the same corrugated metal that the house was covered with. It had a door and a little window. I looked at it and thought, Too obvious. In the walkway that led from the street to the courtyard, two dogs, a little black terrier and a big German shepherd, lay looking up at us. They did not look particularly friendly.

  Alex knocked on the window. In a moment, a haggard-looking woman emerged from the courtyard: squashed Slavic features, dyed black hair sticking up in tufts, a garish purple robe of some thin stuff wrapped hastily around her solid midriff. She could have been sixty, she could have been forty. The dogs started barking furiously. Froma and I waited by the gate in the street while Alex stood talking to the woman.

  She says we can come into the courtyard, he said. But she don’t know nothing, she came here in the seventies from Russia.

  It’s OK, I said, we just want to look at the courtyard. Prokopiv had said, They killed them in the yard. I wanted to see the place, stand in it, and leave.

  We walked up the little walkway, the dogs scrambling round our feet and barking loudly. He said something to the woman and she yelled at the dogs, who retreated.

  We walked around the little cement-paved area. The yard, Prokopiv had said. They killed them all right there. I handed the video camera to Alex and said, I can’t deal with this now, do you mind doing the video? He nodded, expressively, and took it. The three of us walked around the tiny area for a bit. This is where they died, I thought. It didn’t seem quite real. I said to Froma, I don’t even know what to think. It’s amazing to think it was here. I stood there shaking my head as I looked at the decrepit house, the tiny concrete courtyard, the sagging shed.

  Whatever it was, it was not the kessle of a Polish count.

  I looked at the shed again and a thought occurred to me. I said to Alex, Can we ask these people if we can just go in there? I wanted to see the inside of the house. Here, somewhere in this square footage of broken concrete, they had died. But somewhere inside the house, in there, they had been hiding, had been alive. Thirty years before, Aunt Miriam had written me a letter. Onkel Schmil and 1 daughter Fridka the Germans killed them 1944 in Bolechow, so say me one man from Bolechow nobody know what is true. Now we knew the truth. They had been here, somewhere right here. I wanted to see it.

  Three
other women, just as haggard as the first, their bare feet filthy, had gathered just inside the door. Alex said, I don’t think we should stay long because they are alcohol addicts—very strong addicts.

  We nodded. We navigated the narrow door. Two pairs of bony cats were copulating on a sofa. The place had the musty smell of stale alcohol and, I thought, urine. Inside there were a few small rooms: a little kitchen just past the door, beyond that a little living room with two sofas—on one of which, I realized after a moment, the inert body of a woman lay wrapped in blankets—and beyond that a dining room with a table and a few chairs. The walls of the dining room were painted bright yellow; a pretty stencil of green ivy leaves ran around the perimeter, just beneath the ceiling. Lace curtains hung at each window, and the walls were hung with inexpensive carpets in oriental patterns. Here and there you could see an icon, an old portrait photograph that had been tinted with pastels, and, bizarrely, some ancient posters of languid 1940s models in slinky lingerie. There was one more room off the dining room, and when I opened the double door to it I saw inside an enormously tall teenaged boy with severe and beautiful Slavic features. His hair was jet black and his skin was almost a pure white, as if he had no circulation. He looked at me with glazed and unseeing eyes. I shut the door and turned around. Alex had been standing behind me.

  Not just alcohol, he said. Maybe drugs, too.

  So this was the house. One story. Minus a poster or two, it was possible to imagine it as it had been then, neat as a pin, the lace curtains parted rather than drawn, the tiled stove near the kitchen, now cold, giving off the rich aromas of cooking food. I walked back and forth, reluctant to leave. My mind was racing. Where could you hide someone, here?

  I said to Alex, OK, well.

  Then I literally smacked my forehead with my hand. Ask her, I said, Ask her if there’s a basement, any kind of cellar.

  The woman had been following us as we paced the small rooms. I supposed she was worried that we would find her stash of booze and God knew what else. Alex spoke to her. Yes, he said, there is a room underneath.

  The black-haired woman sighed heavily and gave a resigned little frown, as if she were long used to the impositions of strangers more powerful than she. She walked the few paces from the dining room back into the little living room. The three of us crowded behind her. The two sofas were about a yard apart from each other, a round woven rug between them. With a weary gesture, she dragged the rug away with her foot and jerked her head.

  There, cut out of the floorboards, was a trapdoor. It was about two feet square, and had been cut out in such a way that the edges of two of its sides were flush with the edges of the boards. Good camouflage, I thought. A little metal ring that served as a handle was attached to one end. We all stood, staring at it, thinking the same thing.

  I pointed to the square outline cut into the floorboards and turned to Alex and said, I can go in there?

  Before Alex had a chance to translate, the woman nodded. She said something to Alex, who told me that this cellar was there when they moved here from southern Russia. Now they stored jars there: pickles, things like that. I bent over and pulled on the little ring and raised the door. It was surprisingly thick and heavy. I swung it upward and a smell escaped, the dank smell of earth and something else, the failed odor of disuse. One of the other women, sitting on the sofa opposite the one on which the inert woman lay, helpfully extended a hand in order to keep the door open. We all peered inside. For a moment all we could see was a pitch-black square. After a second or two, the outline of some shelves emerged, lined with bottles and jars. I walked around the opening and stood next to the raised door. Some new pine steps had been nailed into one side.

  I looked up and said, I have to go down there. Alex, holding the video camera, nodded.

  I crouched down and lowered my legs into the hole, searching for the step with my foot. I found it and started to descend, looking upward toward the light the whole time. As I’ve mentioned, I have a deathly fear of enclosed places, but couldn’t and wouldn’t bring myself to mention it now, under these circumstances. I thought of the cattle car at the Holocaust Museum. Maybe Shmiel had been as claustrophobic as I, I thought. Maybe it’s genetic, who knows? At least I was going to climb back out of here and walk out of this place in broad daylight.

  The hole was just that: a hole. I had descended maybe eight or nine feet and was at the bottom. Down here, there was no light, and even though the trapdoor above my head was open, the space itself was steeped in a profound, inky black: I had to stretch out my hands to locate the walls, which turned out to be very close. I figured the space measured three feet on a side. Because I was deep underground, it was very cold, surprisingly cold. I fought back the panic and thought, This is horrible, it’s like being in a—

  Oh my God I am so stupid, I said to myself at that moment. A kestl, a kestl, not a castle. In the end, we get so much wrong not because we aren’t paying attention but because time passes, things change, a grandson cannot be his grandfather, for all that he may try; because we can never be other than ourselves, imprisoned by our time and place and circumstances. However much we want to learn, to know, we can only ever see things with our own eyes and hear with our own ears, and how we interpret what we see and hear depends, ultimately, on who we are and what we already think we know, or want to know. Kestl is the Yiddish word for box. All those years ago I had listened to my grandfather talk, the one time he had offered me information about Shmiel’s death, and I, listening to those plush vowels and thickened consonants, had heard what I’d wanted to hear, a story like a fairy tale, a tragic drama complete with a nobleman and a castle. But he hadn’t, after all, been telling one of his own stories, a story based half on facts and half on fantasy, a story about Jews in a faraway land hiding in a castle. They had been hiding in some kind of box. He had, after all, known something all along, had heard some story whose details are now vanished; a story not so far from the truth, as it turned out. It had taken me all this, the years and the miles, had required that I come back and see the place with my own eyes before the fact, the material reality, allowed me to understand the words at last. They’d been hiding in a terribly small and enclosed space, a space that someone, somewhere, must have once described as being like a kind of box, a kestl, and now I was standing in the box, and now I knew it all.

  Shivering, I groped in my pocket for the camera Froma had given to me and blindly took a picture. The picture shows nothing, really: a blank wall garishly illuminated by a flashbulb. They had been here, hiding for weeks, months, nobody knew. But it had been here. I had always wanted specifics. Now I had found them.

  I stayed there for a moment, because I thought it proper to pause and I wanted to collect my thoughts, which were racing in a million directions, and then I climbed out hastily. We stood there for a minute and took some pictures of the rooms, the rugs, the trapdoor, the sofas, the hiding place. Then there was nothing more to do. We thanked the women and left.

  THERE ARE TWO further and extremely important pieces of information that came out of that return trip to Bolekhiv.

  After we walked out of the house I asked Alex and Froma if they wouldn’t mind if I called my parents on my cell phone: I had to tell them right then what had happened. Of course, they said, and I walked a little distance away from the Passat and punched in the number. Seven hours earlier in time, my father picked up the phone. I know exactly what I said to him that day, because I’d forgotten to turn off the voice recorder when we left the Szedlak house, and weeks later, after I’d returned home and was transcribing all of the voice files, I was startled when, at what I thought was the end of the HIDING HOUSE! file, I heard the sound of my own excited voice talking, although the recorded conversation is, like certain other family communications that have become part of this story, one-sided, since it is impossible in this record of the exchange to know what one of the parties is saying.

  Dad? It’s Dan, get Mom on the line.

  [pause]
/>   Momma

  (I have no idea why I said this, it’s a name I hadn’t called her since I was four years old)

  —it’s Daniel, I’m in Bolechow. I’m in Bolechow. Wait, you can’t believe what just happened, you can’t believe. What happened. We met an old man, and he took us to the house where Shmiel was hidden…. And I went in the house and I went in the hiding place, it’s still there, it’s like an underground…cellar and it’s all there. And he remembered the whole thing, they were in the cellar and they denounced them and they took them out into the yard and they shot them…. Yes it’s unbelievable, I was just in it. I just never thought in my life I would find the place. Yes, I took pictures, I took pictures. Anyway, it’s just very…emotional and strange. I’m fine, I’m fine, we’re going to go back to Lwów now. I just never even thought I would find this place, I just thought I was going here to get pictures. Anyway, call my brothers and sister and tell them this, I found the house, I found a person who took us to the house where they were hidden, and I went to the place where they actually died. OK, yes, I’ll call again later, OK, I love you too, bye, bye.

  So that is how I described what we’d found to my parents. But the phone conversation in which I learned something from them came later, after we’d driven back to L’viv and had had a chance to talk about what had happened, to dissect the extraordinary emotions of the day. More composed than I’d been when I called on the cell phone, I rang my parents later that night from my hotel room. My father was out. Slowly, step by step, I recounted again the day’s events to my mother.

  It’s a good thing Froma was there again! she exclaimed, Or you wouldn’t have found it! It’s just like how she got you to find Yona in Israel!

  I smiled and said, Yes, it was. I had already considered the similarity between this remarkable discovery and that one. My mother said something else and I rolled my eyes and said, Yes, I had been sure to tell Froma thank you. In fact what Froma had replied, when I’d said it was all because of YOU, was interesting. For all of her intense energy, for all that she’s unafraid to insert herself into situations, to push harder, as she likes to say, Froma, I’ve always observed, hates being the object of a certain kind of compliment, the center of a certain kind of adulatory fuss; and so, when I said it was all because of YOU, she’d made a face and said, Well, yes and no. I mean, what if it had been raining, what if nobody had been on the street when we started looking for the house, what if Stepan hadn’t been there or old Prokopiv had left for the church ten minutes earlier? So it was me, but it was everything.