Rashi, too, goes to no little trouble to suggest that God’s interest in having Abraham demonstrate (as of course we know he will do) that he is “God-fearing” has vast international and cosmic implications: it is necessary that Abraham’s righteous obedience be demonstrated, he writes, so that God has something to answer Satan and the nations of the unbelievers when they demand to know what the cause of God’s love for the tribe of Abraham could possibly be. “That they are God-fearing,” is the answer that Abraham’s willingness to cut the throat of his young son provides.
One of the interesting moral questions raised by the Sacrifice of Isaac—and, by implication, by the parashah as a whole—is that the text’s presentation of what it means to be a good person (i.e., Abraham, who is obedient to God even in extreme and confusing circumstances) is, in its way, as flat and unsatisfying, as cagey, as is its presentation of what it means to be a wicked person (i.e., a Sodomite, whatever that precisely means). In fact, all that the text of this parashah indicates is that goodness is obedience to God and wickedness is disobedience, as if morality were a superficially coherent structure of behavior that had no actual content—although, to take the examples from this particular weekly Torah reading, on the face of it what the Sodomites do, which may be depraved but doesn’t, as far as we know, result in any dead bodies lying around, is a lot less awful than what God asks Abraham to do.
On the other hand, what does seem to me valid about this last parashah is that, whatever the validity of its larger moral investigation, it paints what I have finally come to see as an extremely accurate picture of the way that people behave in unimaginably extreme conditions. Which is to say, a picture of a blur, an image of something that remains, in the end, totally unknowable and completely mysterious: that some people simply choose to do evil and some choose to do good, even when, in both cases, they know that their choices will require dreadful sacrifices.
THERE IS ONE final tale of returning, of going back for one last look, that I have to tell before I end this story.
The day after we discovered the hiding place was Saturday. Lane flew in to the L’viv airport that afternoon, and as Alex and I drove her back to the hotel, where Froma was waiting, poring over maps of the area in preparation for our sites-of-genocide excursions with Lane, we excitedly told her about our great discovery.
Lane jerked her delicate head up in one of those quick gestures that always makes me think of the adjective birdlike when I’m around her.
But that’s amazing, she said. As the car careened around the opera house, where seventy years ago a young woman whose name was not yet Frances went to see the opera Carmen, Lane gestured expressively at one of her enormous, complicated-looking black canvas camera bags. But did you get pictures? she asked, good pictures for your book? When I told her that all we had was Froma’s little digital camera, she made a grimace that was half disapproval and half disbelief. She said, We have to go back. We can go back, and I’ll take good pictures for you.
Picshuhs, she said. Booh-uhk.
So on Sunday, we went back, and it was on this final visit—which really was the last trip that I took on Uncle Shmiel’s behalf—that I made our last discovery, and ended our search.
Once again, we drove down the little hill into the sleepy town, which this time was dozing under angry-looking rain clouds. Once again, we sped into the town and through streets that now indeed seemed very familiar to us. Once again, Alex pulled up in front of the nondescript little house, where once again the black dog and the brown lay eyeing us in the walkway. Once again, he knocked on the window, and once more the black-haired woman came out. We explained that we hoped she’d let us in once again, since this time we had a better camera to take the photos we needed. I noticed that she seemed slightly more animated that day than she had been two days earlier. She nodded a few times, a bit wearily perhaps but with a faint smile, and motioned to us to go inside. Once again, we walked around the tiny rooms, opened the trapdoor; once again, shutters clicked. The only difference was that this time, I did not go down into the hiding place, the kestl. It had been enough.
As we emerged from the house once more, we noticed that this time, something else was different, too: a vigorous-looking young man—not the bloodless zombie I’d seen standing motionless in the bedroom on Friday—was hanging around the place, apparently the son of one of the women. Alex and he had an animated conversation and the man started gesturing over the fence. Alex said, He says that this house is actually divided into two parts.
Froma and Lane and I all peered over the fence, and noticed this time, as we had not two days earlier, that the one house straddled two yards.
Alex said, He says that there in the other half an old Russian woman lives, she came soon after the war, maybe she can tell us some more information.
I looked dubiously at Froma and Lane. Did they mind? I asked. Of course not, they said. That’s what we came for!
We went back into the street and around the front of the house, down the street a ways, to the other side. Sure enough, there was an entrance here, too. Alex knocked and called out in Russian, and presently a rosy-cheeked woman with a bright child’s face and improbably dark curly hair bustled out. Her dress was bright blue with big white polka dots. Alex talked to her and she insisted, in a warmly enthusiastic and high-pitched voice, that we come inside. As in some children’s story, her half of the house was as immaculate and pretty as the other half was filthy and decrepit. The powerful aroma of baking peaches filled the little kitchen. We all sat down and, as she turned down the volume on the little portable cassette player that had been playing, at an astonishing volume, a tape of Russian church music, Alex explained why we had called on her. The rich, shushing sound of Russian filled the room. The woman was so lively, nodded so vigorously and spoke so ringingly, that it was hard not to want to embrace her. She was like a grandmother or a good witch in a folktale.
After a few moments of this back-and-forthing, Alex looked up at me. He was not smiling.
She says yes, she heard this story about the Jews being hidden, and the schoolteachers. She herself came in the 1950s, but she heard it. But she says she is pretty sure that these schoolteachers were both still alive after the war, and also that it was not in this house they lived, that it was in another house on this street.
We looked at each other blankly, in a kind of despair. I said, That can’t be, I don’t believe it.
I had been in that place, that cold place. It felt right.
We talked some more but it became clear to me after a while, as I read Alex’s wide, fair face, that he wasn’t getting anything more from her than what she’d already said. But it had been enough. Everything was in ruins. We were back to square one.
We all got up to leave. Alex said, She told me which house it is that she thinks it was in. A very old man lives there. She says he is deaf. Do you want to go?
I knew what he meant. He meant, Maybe we should quit while we’re ahead.
I nodded grimly and said, Let’s talk to this old man.
The four of us trudged down the street. Alex turned to me at one point and said, I don’t want to hear this new story, I want this to have been over on Friday! and I gave a glum smile and said, That’s exactly how I always feel.
Yes, he said. Now I know!
The house that the old woman had directed us to really did look like something out of the Brothers Grimm: a ramshackle, once-grand wooden house with impossible steep gables, its eaves and timber darkened by time, set back from the street a little ways. Here, too, Russian church music was blaring; although the front windows were forbiddingly closed up, you could hear it pouring out from the direction of the backyard. As a little drizzle began, we stomped to the backyard. The door was open. Alex shouted; there was no response. He shouted again, and finally we all just walked through the back door into the old man’s house. The ceilings were cavernous, icons hung everywhere. We followed the sound of the music until we reached what had clearly once been th
e great room of the house, an enormous, once-elegant chamber in which, now, a deal table, on which an old-fashioned phonograph stood, was among the few furnishings. Next to the table the old man himself stood: a figure, appropriately enough for this place, out of a nineteenth-century woodcut, a gaunt, impossibly tall old man whose yellowed white hair hung limply down either side of his head. His deep eyes were ringed with black. He looked like Franz Liszt, I thought.
Alex approached the man and, heeding the old Russian woman’s words, shouted directly into the man’s face for a few minutes. Between the shouting, the icons, the smell of incense, and the music—and, now, the wild emotional let down of the information we’d just received—the whole thing started to feel like a farce, and Froma and Lane and I tried to repress an incredulous giggle. After a few minutes of shouting, Alex turned to me with his let’s-get-out-of-here expression. When we got outside into the relative quiet of the backyard, he said, This guy moved here in the 1970s, he doesn’t know nothing.
So that was that. We started to walk toward the car. I was devastated: not two days ago I’d thought that I’d found the end of our story at last, and now it had vanished into smoke: the teacher’s house, the hiding place, the courtyard where they’d been shot. Once there was a veranda in front, but now it’s gone. It seemed that old Prokopiv wasn’t as clear in his mind as we’d thought.
And then, just as we were getting into the car, Froma said, Wait, he wants us. We turned around and looked toward the other house, and the young man was waving his arms and beckoning for us to come back. We walked back to the house and he started talking to Alex. After a rapid exchange Alex brightened and said to us, He says that across the street on the other side is an old Polish woman, she has lived here all her life, she will know for sure the story, and which is the right house. She will know. He talked a little while longer to the young man, who pointed down the street and gave the address. The woman’s name was Latyk—a common name in these parts; she was no relation of the other Mrs. Latyk.
Again, the knocking on the window; again, the tentative shouted greeting. The house was large, white, and immaculate. Peering around the fence we could see a generous yard. Out of this yard, in a few moments, a small, solid-looking woman with thick white hair and a canny, round face appeared. She was wearing a thin gray robe that she clutched tight with one hand, and I think now that it was the fact that she wasn’t dressed for company that made her seem so wary as Alex explained what we were looking for. Almost immediately after he stopped talking her face relaxed and she nodded and smiled broadly.
She said, Tak, tak! Tak. Tak, tak, tak!
She spoke rapidly to Alex in Polish. Alex said to us, She knows the story! She knows the story, she knows that there were two teachers who were hiding Jews. She said the names of these two sisters were—
He listened, and she said, Pani Emilia i Pani…mmm…
She couldn’t remember the name of the other woman, it was clear. Emilia and who? While she frowned, trying to remember, Alex went on. One escaped, the other was killed.
This Mrs. Latyk suddenly said, Hela! Emilia i Hela! She said something quickly to Alex.
Hela was killed. Emilia escaped.
For the second time in three days I said, Does she remember their family name?
Alex asked, and Mrs. Latyk said, emphatically, Szedlakowa.
Does she know the house? I asked. At least, I thought, we’ll know either way.
Alex said, She will show us precisely where it is, sure.
Froma and Lane and I said, Thank you!
It was at that point that Alex made all the introductions. Pani Janina Latyk. Pan Daniel Mendelsohn. Pani Froma Zeitlin. Pani Lane Montgomery.
The woman, now smiling and relaxed, started speaking again.
I heard her say, Szymanski.
Wait, I said. Everybody was talking and I wanted quiet. Until now I had wanted simply to know which, finally, was the right house. Now she had said Szymanski. It was clear that she could tell us more.
Wait, wait, wait, I shouted.
Everyone stopped talking and I said to Alex, What was she saying just now?
They talked again for a minute and Alex said, There was this guy who was helping Jews to find places to be hidden.
I said, And his name was?
Mrs. Latyk said, Czesław.
My heart started thudding. Old Prokopiv had told us about the house, had known that a teacher named Szedlak was hiding Jews there. Long ago, I had heard this story for the first time in a living room in Kfar Saba, and had wondered ever since how all the versions could possible be reconciled. Ciszko was hiding her in his house. A Polish schoolteacher was hiding them both in her house. Now we would see.
I said, Czesław who?
Mrs. Latyk said, Czesław—Ciszko, Ciszko!
The nickname. We all looked at one another. Again, Froma and Lane and Alex all started talking and asking questions at the same time. By now, they knew the stories as well as I did. It was exciting.
Wait, I said. I was suddenly perspiring, and again I heard that faint echo in my ears. I said, more calmly, Look, I have to conduct this interview in a very specific way. We cannot feed her any information, we cannot tell her what we want to hear, we cannot tell her what we already know. This is the last time any of us will ever be in this place, and after what we just went through I want to leave here with something definite. So let’s just ask her what she knows and hear it out of her mouth. I want it to be pure.
I turned to Alex and said, OK, she said Czesław, she said Ciszko, before that she said Szymanski. What does she know about him, why does she mention the name?
They talked for a minute. Alex said, Because he found the place for them to hide. And he was bringing food to them also.
Froma and I stared at each other. Another woman, middle-aged and pleasant-faced, appeared out of the house: Mrs. Latyk’s sister. The two women talked to Alex. He turned to me with a dubious expression. They are inviting you to the house, but I say that I’m sure we don’t want to bother them…
I gave him a severe look and said, I want to go. I think that if we were sitting down, it would be better. Tell her this is extremely important to me and my family.
Alex talked and the woman nodded and we all went in the house.
For the next forty-five minutes, she told us the story as she knew it, and it’s a story I can now tell although there’s no point telling it again here, since it’s a story the bits and pieces of which are already familiar to anyone who has read these pages. The difference is that as we listened to it coming from the lips of Mrs. Janina Latyk, a lifelong resident of Bolechow, a lifelong resident of Kopernika Street, a onetime neighbor of the sisters Szedlakowa, we all of us heard it for the first time from someone who was there, and who, because she was there, could tell us a story that accounted for all the bits and pieces that, until that day in July 2005, hadn’t quite been able to gel into a coherent narrative, a story with a beginning and a middle and an end.
What she told us was this: that she’d been born in Bolechow in 1928, which is why she was about fifteen on the day in 1943 when she came home from doing errands in the town center and everybody on the street was talking. What they were saying was this: their neighbor Hela had been discovered hiding Jews in her house. Everybody was talking! Mrs. Latyk said. Yes, there had been the two Szedlakowa sisters, but one of them, Emilia, had become afraid and had left town—gone, somebody said at the time, to Boryslaw. So when they were betrayed, it was Hela who was killed. She was hiding the Jews in a basement somewhere in her house, a place under the ground. And the boy Ciszko Szymanski, who had found for them this hiding place to begin with, was bringing them food every night from his father’s shop, he had a tannery but also a kind of shop in his house, people came there to buy meat, sausages. He loved this girl, this Jew, people said, so he found a hiding place for her and her father. But somebody saw him bringing the food every night to Szedlakowa’s place, and got suspicious, and this person—a neigh
bor, probably, she couldn’t remember—denounced him and Szedlakowa to the Gestapo. The Germans came and took the Jews to a spot by the end of the garden and shot them right there.
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