The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  I listened to her and thought, Well. I thought of that afternoon in Israel, of the eerie coincidences that we’d experienced during this long search. The man in the Prague elevator. Yona. Shlomo flicking on the radio and the voice of Nehama Hendel singing “Sixteen Again I’ll Never Be.” Since I do not believe in the supernatural—when, a month later, a friend of mine said, I told your story to a psychic I know and she said, “The dead were leading you to them, they made sure that you found them,” I just rolled my eyes and made the kind of face my father would have made—since I don’t believe in the supernatural, I groped for an explanation, and what I concluded was this: That what we had achieved, what we had experienced, finally, during the course of all of our searching, was precisely what history is. On the one hand, there is always a vast series of random potentialities, the weather, the mood, the unknowable and infinite mass of things that go into the living of the life of a person or a people; and on the other hand, intersecting with this unimaginable and infinite universe of factors and possibilities, there is the irrevocable fact of individual personality and individual will, the fact that someone will do x but not y, the decision to do this rather than that, to make distinctions and thereby to create, to push a little bit harder; there is the hardwired impulse to go back for one last look; there is the thing that will make a person turn left rather than right, approach this woman in the street but not that man in order to ask a question about the location of a house or a road; there is the thing that makes you decide one night, as you are carrying a package of food to the hidden Jewish girl whom you love, that it is dark enough that you don’t have to conceal the package under your coat; there is the impulse that causes the neighbor who sees the youth carrying the package to wonder, for the first time, why this boy comes every night to this street, that house; there are the whole vast histories of temperament and psychology in all their incalculable but ultimately concrete and knowable minutiae, the tiny things that make you decide to pursue a conversation with an old Ukrainian woman for precisely thirty-two minutes rather than, say, forty-seven minutes, with the result that you arrive at the house of an old Ukrainian man just as he is leaving for his job at a church, rather than a quarter of an hour later, at which point, because of a whole vast series of other factors and considerations, hunger, the hot sun, exhaustion, you may have decided that enough was enough, genug is genug, and let’s just drive back to L’viv.

  So there is the vast mass of things in the world and the act of creation that cuts through them, divides the things that might have happened from those that did. I did not and do not believe that the dead, that the long dead and disintegrated Shmiel and Frydka somehow reached out from the ether and pointed us, that day, to Bolekhiv and then Stepan and then Prokopiv and then the house and then the women and then the hiding place, the hole in the ground, the awful box, where they had once cowered in the cold and failed, finally, at their bid for survival. But I do believe in some things. I, to whom a friend had listened, quietly and sometimes in tears, one night in September 2001, when I’d just returned from our first trip to Ukraine and was telling the story of what we’d found there after all that time; had listened to me weeping and finally said, I’m crying because my grandfather died two years ago and now it’s too late to ask him anything; I did and do believe, after all that I’ve seen and done, that if you project yourself into the mass of things, if you look for things, if you search, you will, by the very act of searching, make something happen that would not otherwise have happened, you will find something, even something small, something that will certainly be more than if you hadn’t gone looking in the first place, if you hadn’t asked your grandfather anything at all. I had finally learned the lesson taught me, years after they’d died, by Minnie Spieler and Herman the Barber. There are no miracles, no magical coincidences. There is only looking, and finally seeing, what was always there.

  For everything, in time, gets lost: the lives of peoples now remote, the tantalizing yet ultimately vanished and largely unknowable lives of virtually all of the Greeks and Romans and Ottomans and Malays and Goths and Bengals and Sudanese who ever lived, the peoples of Ur and Kush, the lives of the Hittites and Philistines that will never be known, the lives of people more recent than that, the African slaves and the slave traders, the Boers and the Belgians, those who were slaughtered and those who died in bed, the Polish counts and the Jewish shopkeepers, the blond hair and eyebrows and small white teeth that someone once loved or desired of this or that boy or girl or man or woman who was one of the five million (or six or seven) Ukrainians starved to death by Stalin, and indeed the intangible things beyond the hair and teeth and brows, the smiles and frustrations and laughter and terror and loves and hunger of every one of those millions of Ukrainians, just as the hair of a Jewish girl or boy or man or woman that someone once loved, and the teeth and the brows, the smiles and frustrations and laughter and terror of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust are now lost, or will soon be lost, because no number of books, however great, could ever document them all, even if they were to be written, which they won’t and can’t be; all that will be lost, too, their pretty legs and their deafness and the vigorous way they strode off a train with a pile of schoolbooks once, the secret family rituals and the recipes for cakes and stews and gołąki, the goodness and wickedness, the saviors and the betrayers, their saving and their betraying: most everything will be lost, eventually, as surely as most of what made up the lives of the Egyptians and Incas and Hittites has been lost. But for a little while some of that can be rescued, if only, faced with the vastness of all that there is and all that there ever was, somebody makes the decision to look back, to have one last look, to search for a while in the debris of the past and to see not only what was lost but what there is still to be found.

  IT WAS, AS it happened, of backward glances that my mother ended up speaking that night that I called from the hotel.

  Yes, I had said, echoing her words, It’s a good thing Froma was there. Thank God she’s always doing that thing that she does, that Wait! There’s one more thing! But we have to go back! I laughed and shook my head, mimicking Froma.

  My mother laughed, too, and said, suddenly serious, It’s just like what happened that day my mother died.

  (This is true.)

  I said, What do you mean?

  She said, Oh, Daniel, you remember, you loved her so much, you were there with me the whole day, the two of us.

  My heart quickened a little and I said, No, I’ve just always had these confused sort of images.

  I told her about the pattern of the waves on the tiles of the waiting room, the sound of her own voice saying something I couldn’t or wouldn’t remember, the sense of a yearning and a terror, the feeling of an obscure shame. The sound of water running.

  Daniel, she said again. I can’t believe you don’t remember.

  Then she started to tell me the whole story in order, the way I had just told her the story of our day in the place where her uncle had died. She told me that my grandmother had had some kind of abdominal blockage, and that when they’d done an exploratory surgery, a massive cancer was revealed in her colon. They closed her back up, my mother said, and said they’d have to do a colostomy, but before then she needed to get her strength back, needed to be nourished.

  My mother went on in a rush. She said that my frantic grandfather had called her from Miami to tell her this and that they’d agreed that in a few days she would fly down and take care of her mother. But then, that same day, my grandmother, as the doctors like to say, just crashed. She went into a coma, and the day after that first phone call the doctor had called my mother and said, If you want to see your mother alive again, you need to get down here today. And so my mother had frantically entrusted Andrew and the newborn Eric to the next-door neighbor, and, her hair still wet from the shower, she’d gotten me and Matt ready for the plane trip.

  You don’t remember that Uncle Nino came in his car and drove us that day to the airport
? she said.

  I said, no, I didn’t remember this.

  My mother went on. She said that she’d called the hospital just before we left the house for the airport, and that by some miracle her mother had briefly surfaced again, and my mother had said to her mother, Don’t worry, I’m coming. But by the time we got to Miami Beach, my grandmother had slipped into the sleep from which she would never awake, a coma that lasted over a week.

  A week, ten days, I don’t remember now. You don’t remember we went every day to the hospital? my mother asked me from Long Island as I sat in a high-ceilinged room in L’viv, staring out the window as blond Ukrainians strolled and laughed in streets down which no Jews now walk.

  No, I said.

  Well, we did. And then the day she died, you and I spent the whole day there by her bed just sitting there. Oh, she loved you so much. And then it was the end of the day and we walked down the steps to the lobby. And then—this is what reminded me of Froma—suddenly something in me, like a voice, a feeling I had, something, something said I should go back. And so I leaned down and said to you, Daniel, let’s go back and look at Nana one more time, and we went back up the steps. And when we got there, she was dead. The nurse was standing in the hall and she said, I’m sorry, your mother just passed. And I went in the room and I went on my knees by the bed and I said, Mama, Mama, don’t leave me, don’t leave me, I still need you.

  As my mother talked I thought—I remembered—that this is what had filled me with shame: that before that day I always wanted to see my grandmother again, because it would be sweet to rub her arm back and forth, as we did while she lay there with her blue eyes open. But on that day I was tired; and there was something, too, about the urgency in my mother’s voice when she leaned down and said let’s go back that frightened me, that convinced me, for some reason, that my grandmother was already dead. I longed to go back and I was terrified of what I would see, I was confused, I was ashamed of my confusion, and didn’t want to let my mother see either, the confusion or the shame.

  And we cried, my mother was saying, and then we went into the bathroom and I washed my face and hands and I washed your face and hands, because you’re always supposed to wash your hands when you’ve been with the dead.

  I remembered: the running water. I remembered my grandfather, when we would come back from the cemetery all those years ago, saying, Run children upstairs and wash your hands now, you’ve been in the cemetery. Vush your hents.

  You don’t remember any of this? my mother repeated.

  I said, Now I do.

  A few weeks later, when I described this conversation to my friend, the one who’d talked to the psychic, she listened for a long time and when I finally finished speaking she said, It’s so weird that you have this block about turning back and having one last look. Her voice isolated the words, made the phrase sound like an axiom, the final sentence of a fable.

  I said, Why? It’s not weird at all, that story explains it all! I was rather pleased with myself.

  Donna, who is a poet, laughed and said, Oh, Daniel, it’s so obvious. It’s weird because you’re a classicist, you’re a family historian. You’ve spent your whole life looking back.

  SO THERE WAS that.

  The second communication that came out of that afternoon in Bolekhiv was an e-mail I had from Alex about ten days after we flew back to New York, and it, too, changed the way I saw certain things.

  Before we’d left, I had had an idea: maybe, I told Alex, he could return to Bolekhiv after we’d left, maybe a week or so after—long enough to give Prokopiv’s memories time to steep, but not too long so that they’d fade once again—and ask him one more time if he could remember who the betrayer was. I thought—and because I felt completely comfortable with him, told Alex what I was thinking—that maybe if Prokopiv were keeping something back out of some desire to protect somebody, he might feel more comfortable talking just to Alex, Ukrainian to Ukrainian, without a cluster of anxious Jewish relatives hanging on to his every word. Alex said he’d been pretty sure that Prokopiv was being straight with us, but he agreed that now that the old man’s memories had been churned up, perhaps the name might come to him after a few days.

  And so, a week after we flew back to the States, he drove back down to Bolekhiv and found Prokopiv and talked to him. They talked for some time, he wrote me in a long e-mail after he got back home, and the old man still wasn’t able to remember the name of the betrayer. He had gone through the names of everyone who’d lived on the block—for he himself, as a comment he made soon afterward subsequently revealed, had always lived in that neighborhood, and indeed could remember the names of families who’d lived there before the Germans came, for instance, the family of Kessler, a Jewish carpenter—and none of them had seemed to be the name of the person who, long ago, everyone in town knew had betrayed Szedlakowa.

  In a sense, I was relieved: the hunt for the guilty party was, I felt by that point, almost a different story. We had gone looking for Shmiel and the others, for who they had been and how they had died, and we had come closer to concrete details than we’d ever dreamed possible. It was enough. If anything, I was less interested in the identity of the betrayer than I was, now, in the personality of this Mrs. Szedlak. For the saviors were, in their way, as inexplicable and mysterious to me as the betrayers. For some reason, perhaps because I knew she had been a schoolteacher, and—the force of mental habits and clichés being stronger than we like to admit, which is why, operating on unconscious assumptions about people, we often make serious mistakes in interpreting historical events unless we stay on our guard—I had, since the day in Anna Heller Stern’s living room when she’d said zey zent behalten bay a lererin, always imagined a middle-aged woman who’d lived alone, perhaps a tall, thin woman with gray hair pulled back. Now I had been in this woman’s house, and was more than a little curious about the person who had once lived there, this person who, whatever else we knew about her, had with her eyes wide open followed a rigorous morality, knowing it could cost her her life, which of course it had. They killed them all right there in the yard, Prokopiv had said. She had been Polish. I wondered if she had been a devout Catholic, as many saviors were. A devout spinster who divided her days between school and church.

  It was for this reason that what Alex had to report about the would-be savior of Uncle Shmiel and Frydka was so interesting.

  First, he wrote, Prokopiv had remembered one more detail about the day that the Szedlak hiding place had been discovered: he’d been walking home that day, in the neighborhood, and as he’d passed the schoolteacher’s house he’d seen the bodies lying in the street, waiting to be carted to the mass grave in the Jewish cemetery where the bodies of people who’d been discovered and killed in this way were taken.

  I read this and thought, At least they’re in the Jewish cemetery, somewhere.

  I kept reading the e-mail. I had asked him to ask Prokopiv whether he could recall hearing that one of the Jews who’d been discovered and killed that day had been pregnant. What Alex wrote next was this:

  Prokopiv didn’t know that somebody hiding was pregnant. However, he said that the teacher who was hiding the Jews had an illegitimate child by the director of the school, Paryliak (or Parylak).

  However, Prokopiv doesn’t know what happened to the child (a girl) when the mother was killed.

  So I had been wrong once again. Whoever she’d been, she was not, it seemed, a pious middle-aged woman with a gray bun. When I read Alex’s e-mail, I thought of Stepan’s story of the Medvid family, of the whole family hanged in the Rynek, of every Medvid in the county killed as well. These public executions had been carried out for a purpose, and as we know the purpose was to discourage other people, people like Szymanski and Szedlak and all the others, from doing what they’d done anyway, for whatever mysterious reasons they had had: love, goodness, religious conviction. Whoever she was, whatever else may have been true of her—and I don’t know at all whether I will ever find out more abo
ut her, although I have begun to search—whoever she was, this Szedlakowa woman was not a single woman with only one life at her disposal to risk for the sake of two Jews.

  More than any other parashah in Genesis, perhaps, parashat Vayeira is preoccupied with the implications of moral choices: in the Sodom and Gomorrah story we are meant to appreciate the consequences of the decision to follow wickedness, and in the tale with which this eventful parashah ends—the story of God’s demand that Abraham sacrifice his only legitimate child—we are meant, I think, to appreciate the consequences of the other choice, the choice to follow the good.

  God’s demand for human sacrifice, which as we are told at the very beginning of this remarkable passage is, at least for God, nothing more than a test of Abraham’s devotion, is so repellent to the civilized mind that commentators have spilled oceans of ink explicating, analyzing, interpreting, and justifying it over the millennia. Friedman, for instance, devotes three full pages to his commentary on the sacrifice—striking in itself, when you consider that earlier, the text of the Sodom and Gomorrah story flows by uninterrupted by any kind of comment at all on his part—and provides an admirably lucid summary of the classic answers to the questions raised by the sacrifice. Rightly, it seems to me (from a purely literary, structural point of view), the modern rabbi focuses on the clearly intentional contrast between, on the one hand, Abraham’s heated defense of the Sodomites, his attempt to bargain for the lives of the doomed cities, and, on the other, his utter silence in the face of God’s demand, even more appalling in its way, that the patriarch kill his own human child. One possible explanation for this striking contrast, Friedman says, is that the mark of Abraham’s personality throughout Genesis is obedience—the characterological explanation, which is satisfying as far as it goes, although it does not delve very deeply into the troubling question of whether Abraham’s seemingly innate predilection for unquestioningly following orders is, in cases when those orders are themselves clearly immoral, worth exploring more. (“Commands,” Friedman writes, “leave no room for discussion,” a peculiar thing, at least to my mind, for a rabbi writing in the late twentieth century to assert with no further comment, even in the context of explicating a biblical text.) Friedman goes on to provide what we may call the rhetorical argument: the patriarch, he writes, is able to argue more persuasively (indeed, at all) on behalf of the wicked Sodomites precisely because he has no relationship to them: he cannot argue the justice or the injustice of the demand for his son’s sacrifice precisely because he is so close to it. This, too, seems somehow unsatisfying at first glance, as if to be “biased” necessarily was the same thing as to be stupid. Third, Friedman suggests, intriguingly, that the outcome of the first of this parashah’s two important morality tales, the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, provides the key to Abraham’s silence. The futility of Abraham’s argument with God, he suggests, the fact that nothing came of his hard bargaining, that God always and already knew how bad the Sodomites were and how good Abraham is, are the reason Abraham knows not to argue when God requires a destruction that is infinitely more painful to Abraham than is the annihilation of the populations of several cities.