The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  What exactly happened to Szymanski and Szedlakowa? we all asked. Jack Greene, ages ago by now, it seemed, had said he’d heard that they took him to a place in a field, there, and killed him. Now, Mrs. Latyk, who’d been there the day that it happened, said, He was killed in Stryj. And Hela was also taken to Stryj and they were hanged there together. But the Jews were shot on the spot.

  Stryj, I thought: Mrs. Begley’s little provincial city. This small detail, which I’d never heard before, seemed to me to be the absolute proof of authenticity. Jews were outside the law, you could just kill them, shoot them, anywhere. But disobedient Poles could be made examples of. They likely took them to Stryj to make some terrifying show of them there before the executions that were a foregone conclusion.

  And that was the story. Now, all the pieces fit: Ciszko and Szedlak, the Szymanski house and the Polish schoolteacher’s house. It all made sense, now, and it was finally possible to see how what had really happened had, corrupted by distances both geographical and temporal—they weren’t right there, they’d heard it two or three or ten years later—metamorphosed into the stories, the many stories, that we had heard by now.

  We sat and talked for a while more: about the war years, the terror people felt, the anguish at seeing longtime neighbors disappear; and, too, the brutality of the years after the Soviets took over in 1945, the conditions of near starvation, the petty oppressions. Mrs. Latyk reminisced warmly about the years before the war, the years of a girlhood spent with Jewish and Ukrainian and Polish friends, years when there were, as far as she could say, no tensions, no hatreds, no animosities. It was a busy, happy town, she said, smiling faintly. I sat quietly and listened, partly because I was moved to hear a Polish woman born in 1928 utter the same words my grandfather, a Jewish man born in the same town in 1902, had repeated over and over to me ages ago, and partly because it was the least I could do for this kindly-faced woman whom we’d almost never met, whom we would have missed if we hadn’t turned back that one last time when we thought that all was lost, and who had, finally, told me the story I had wanted to hear, from the beginning to the end, for a long time now.

  ONE THING REMAINED now to be revealed to us by Janina Latyk, and I was nervous as I said, at the end of our long chat, Now can she show us what house it was?

  She nodded. Before we left her house, I said to Alex, Please tell her my family lived in this town for three hundred years, and I’m honored and grateful to have her as a neighbor.

  He translated my sentence and she smiled at me and brought a hand to her heart, then brought it back toward me. Same to you, Alex said.

  We all left the house and walked slowly down the street. Mrs. Latyk stopped in front of the first house, the house we’d gone inside the first day we’d been here, the house with the trapdoor and the hiding place, and pointed.

  I knew it, I thought. I had been inside, had been in the cold, cold place.

  This is the house, Alex said. She says, If you want, she can show you the place where they killed them. The neighbor saw the whole thing, people knew about it.

  I said, Yes.

  THE DOOR TO the back garden was in the back of the Russian woman’s half of the house, and she bustled and burbled as Alex told her why we’d come back. Beaming, she opened the gate for me. I stood at the fence and looked back toward the end of the garden, a long, long garden densely planted with rows of vegetables and vines that extended all the way back to the distant end of the property. Mrs. Latyk, standing next to me at the fence, pointed. At the end of the garden there was an ancient apple tree with a double trunk. She said something to Alex. He said to me, That is the place.

  Slowly, I started walking back to the tree. The vegetables and vines and raspberry bushes grew so thickly along the barely visible furrows that it was sometimes hard to find a secure footing. After a few minutes, I reached the tree. Its bark was thick, and the place where the two thick trunks diverged was about as high as my shoulder. Every now and then a tiny drop of rain, little more than condensed mist, would splatter on a leaf. But I stayed dry.

  I was standing in the place.

  For a while I stood there, thinking. It is one thing to stand before a spot you have long thought about, a building or shrine or monument that you’ve seen in paintings or books or magazines, a place where, you think, you are expected to have certain kinds of feelings that, when the time comes to stand there, you either will or will not have: awe, rapture, terror, sorrow. It is another thing to be standing in a place of a different sort, a place that for a long time you thought was hypothetical, a place of which you might say the place where it happened and think, it was in a field, it was in a house, it was in a gas chamber, against a wall or on the street, but when you said those words to yourself it was not so much the place that seemed to matter as the it, the terrible thing that had been done, because you weren’t really thinking of the place as anything but a kind of envelope, disposable, unimportant. Now I was standing in the place itself, and I had had no time to prepare. I confronted the place itself, the thing and not the idea of it.

  For a long time I had thirsted after specifics, after details, had pushed the people I’d gone all over the world to talk to to remember more, to think harder, to give me the concrete thing that would make the story come alive. But that, I now saw, was the problem. I had wanted the details and the specifics for the story, and had not—as how could I not, I who never knew them, who had never had anything but stories?—really understood until now what it meant to be a detail, a specific. The word specific comes, as I well know, from the Latin word species, which means “appearance” or “form,” and it is because each kind of thing has its own appearance or form that the word species is the word we used to describe consistent types of living things, the animals and plants that constitute Creation; it is because each type of living thing has its own appearance or form that, over numberless centuries, the word species gave birth to specific, which means, among other things, “particular to a given individual.” As I stood in this most specific place of all, more specific even than the hiding place, that place in which Shmiel and Frydka experienced things, physical and emotional things I will never begin to understand, precisely because their experience was specific to them and not me, as I stood in this most specific of places I knew that I was standing in the place where they had died, where the life that I would never know had gone out of the bodies I had never seen, and precisely because I had never known or seen them I was reminded the more forcefully that they had been specific people with specific deaths, and those lives and deaths belonged to them, not me, no matter how gripping the story that may be told about them. There is so much that will always be impossible to know, but we do know that they were, once, themselves, specific, the subjects of their own lives and deaths, and not simply puppets to be manipulated for the purposes of a good story, for the memoirs and magical-realist novels and movies. There will be time enough for that, once I and everyone who ever knew everyone who ever knew them dies; since as we know, everything, in the end, gets lost.

  So, in a way, at the very moment I had found them most specifically, I felt that I had to give them up again, let them be themselves, whatever that had been. It was bitter and it was sweet; and indeed, when, later, I would describe this moment to Jack Greene, to whom in a way I owed everything, he said to me, making an analogy to his own emotion on emerging from his hiding place so many years before, Yes, I know how it feels, it is a feeling of accomplishment but not a happy feeling. I had traveled far, had circled the planet and studied my Torah, and at the very end of my search I was standing, finally, in the place where everything begins: the tree in the garden, the tree of knowledge that, as I long ago learned, is something divided, something that because growth occurs only through the medium of time, brings both pleasure and, finally, sorrow.

  I suppose it was concrete facts, specifics, that I was somehow trying to grasp when, out of some instinct that even today I can’t quite identify, I reached down and thrust
my hands into the earth at the base of the tree and filled my pockets with it. Then—since this is the tradition of the strange tribe to which, although parts of that tradition make no sense to me, I know I belong, because my grandfather once belonged to it—I groped around in the earth for a large stone, and when I found one, I put it in the crook where the branches of the tree met. This is their only monument, I thought, and so I’ll leave a stone here. Then I turned and walked out of the garden, and soon after that we said good bye and got into the car and left.

  It was while we were driving away that I made the last of my many mistakes. I had promised myself that this time, when we left Bolekhiv, I would do something I’d meant to do years earlier, on our first trip to the town, because back then I’d thought that it would also be our last trip to this place, this little town, this bustling shtetl, this happy place, a place that was and will never be again: I had promised myself that as we drove out of the town and back up the little hill toward L’viv, I would turn around, as I somehow knew my grandfather had done on an October day eighty years before, turn around for the reason we always turn around to stare at what lies behind us, which is to make an impossible wish, a wish that nothing will be left behind, that we will carry the imprint of what is over and done with into the present and future. I told myself that I’d look through the back window and stare at the little town as it receded, because I wanted to be able to remember not only what the place looked like when you were arriving there, but what it looked like when you were leaving it forever.

  But as Alex maneuvered the blue Passat out of the complicated little streets that an epoch ago had given the inhabitants of that place, very few of whom are left now, none of whom will be alive when I am Jack Greene’s age, the nickname that nobody knows or cares about anymore, Bolechower crawlers!—as Alex navigated those twisty streets, we all started talking at once, telling the remarkable story of what we had found and where we had walked, and by the time I remembered to turn around and take that one last look, we had traveled too far, and Bolechow had slipped out of sight.

  IN MEMORIAM

  Frances BEGLEY, née HAUSER

  Rzeszów 1910—New York 2004

  Elkana EFRATI, né JÄGER

  Bolechow 1928—Kfar Saba 2006

  Josef FEUER

  Bolechow 1920—Striy 2002

  Boris GOLDSMITH

  Bolechow 1913—Sydney 2005

  Salamon GROSSBARD

  Bolechow 1908—Sydney 2004

  Bob GRUNSCHLAG

  Bolechow 1929—Sydney 2005

  Dyzia RYBAK, née LEW

  Bolechow 1923—Minsk 2004

  Solomon (Shumek) REINHARZ

  Bolechow 1914—Beer Sheva 2005

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE EVENTS RECORDED in this book are true. All formal interviews were recorded on videotape, and nearly all other conversations, including telephone conversations, were either recorded by the author or reconstructed on the basis of notes taken by the author during those conversations. Some but by no means most of the dialogue recorded in these pages was edited for the sake of coherence and in order to avoid repetitions; occasionally, this editing has necessitated the chronological rearrangement of some remarks. Several names have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals, at their request.

  Because this book is, among other things, the story of distant travels across many countries and continents where I was often speaking with people who themselves had migrated from country to country, a word about the use of language is in order. In cases where English was the language used in my interviews, I have reproduced the spoken English of my subjects, however awkward, since the habits of speech, accents, and forms of expression of the people I spoke with during my research are part of the culture, now almost vanished, that was to some extent the object of my search; I’ve treated the English of the translators I occasionally employed in the same way. I have generally transliterated Yiddish according to YIVO standards, except when those standards are at odds with my memory of certain pronunciations. Quotations from witness statements in Polish obtained from Yad Vashem are given here in an English translation commissioned for the purposes of this book.

  With respect to place-names, for the most part I use present-day Polish and Ukrainian spellings when referring to towns and cities I visited, but—partly for the sake of historical accuracy, and partly to suggest the flavor of a lost era—I have resorted to older spellings in passages describing events that took place in the past. Hence, for example, I write about my trips to L’viv in 2001 and 2005, but refer at times to the Lwów School of mathematicians that flourished between the two world wars, since the Ukrainian city now known as L’viv was properly known during that period as Lwów, a Polish city. The one more or less consistent exception to this norm—a forgivable one, I hope—is my use of the old German spelling for the name of the town that atlases today give in its Ukrainian form, Bolekhiv, and which most of the people I interviewed referred to by its Polish name, Bolechów; but to which my family, who dwelled there for well over three centuries, has always referred as Bolechow—a habit I have found impossible to break.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NO BOOK THAT has been five years—indeed, more—in the making can have been written without the support and encouragement of many people, and it is a pleasure to mark here my gratitude to those who so richly deserve it.

  This book is a book about family, and my greatest debt in every way is, and has always been, to mine: first and foremost to my parents, Marlene and Jay Mendelsohn, who encouraged my odd childhood enthusiasms (“Athena’s table”; photography excursions to the cemetery) and who since then have unstintingly lavished their time, memories, and much else on me; and then to my siblings and in-laws, who, as these pages will have shown, were not only enthusiastic supporters of but active and ongoing participants in the Bolechow Project: Andrew Mendelsohn and Virginia Shea; Matt Mendelsohn and Maya Vastardis; Eric Mendelsohn; Jennifer Mendelsohn and Greg Abel.

  It would be an injustice, however, not to mark especially my deepest gratitude to Matt above all, since he has been a full collaborator in this project from start to finish; the tale told in this book owes as much to him as it does to me, and not simply because so many of its pages give evidence of his extraordinary talent. If I say that he has a beautiful way of seeing things, I am referring to more than his professional eye; in the end, his profound humaneness made itself felt in the words as much as the pictures. Of all that I found during my search, he is the greatest treasure.

  The Bolechowers whom I met and talked with over the course of two years are not, technically speaking, family, but by now it is very difficult not to think of them as such; there is no need to repeat their names here, since this entire book is a record of my gratitude to them for their superb and abundant hospitality, for their generosity with their time and with memories the sharing of which was not, I know, always a happy task. I do, however, want to mention here the names of certain other friends and relatives connected to the Bolechower group to whom I owe a debt of hospitality or friendship or both: Susannah Juni; Malka Lewenwirth; Debbie Greene in Sydney; and in Stockholm, our Mittelmark cousin, Renate Hallerby, and her husband, Nils, whose warmth and generosity were all too plain despite the brevity of the time we had together. Friends and relatives in Israel were constant and treasured sources of hospitality, encouragement, and enthusiasm, and I’m profoundly grateful to them. To Linda Zisquit in Jerusalem I owe a particular debt of thanks for her loving persistence in helping me find something small but crucial. At home, Allan and Karen Rechtschaffen and Marilyn Mittelmark Tepper shared many vital memories over a long and delightful “cousins” weekend, and Edward (“Nino”) Beltrami guided me to an important insight.

  It will be clear to anyone who has read this book that I have been the beneficiary of extraordinary hospitality in Bolekhiv, Ukraine, for which I am as grateful as I am for that shown me everywhere else. Of all the Ukrainians who have helped me, however, none
has been as generous, eager, and, finally, as instrumental as Alex Dunai in L’viv, who for nearly ten years now has been my right-hand man in the project of which this book is the culmination. For his tireless efforts on our behalf, I am more grateful than I can say. He began as a valued colleague, and together with his family has become a valued friend.

  Invaluable archival and technical assistance came, too, from a group of talented young people whose contribution I’m happy to note: Nicky Gottlieb, for his calendrical wizardry; Henryk Jaronowski, to whom I owe some crucial photographs; Arthur Dudney, without whose Polish translations I would have been lost; and my benjamins, Morris Doueck and Zack Woolfe: “from your students you will learn.”

  I am also deeply grateful to Ariel Kaminer at The New York Times Magazine for seeing my first writing on Bolechow so successfully into print.

  A small circle of cherished friends close to home were crucial in seeing me through to the end of this long project: Chris Andersen, Glen Bowersock and Christopher Jones, István and Gloria Deák, Diane Feldman, Lise Funderburg and John Howard, Bob Gottlieb and Maria Tucci, Renée Guest, Jake Hurley, Lily Knezevich, Laura Miller, and Stephen Simcock. Donna Masini has been everything anyone could want in a best friend; Patti Hart was an invaluable support. Myrna and Ralph Langer, together with their extended family, have always provided a bedrock of affection and encouragement to me and mine, especially valued by me during this project; I’m particularly happy to have Karen Isaac as a supportive and loving IM correspondent. My debt to Froma Zeitlin, one that I am happy to continue acknowledging whenever possible, should be evident in these pages; this book quite literally couldn’t have been written without her—and indeed without her husband, George, a generous host from days of old and, more recently, an indefatigable travel companion in Vienna, Israel, and Lithuania. My travels with Lane Montgomery have, it is safe to say, run the gamut of the comfort spectrum; I’m so grateful to her for her contribution to the second and very emotional journey that we took together. From the start of this project, Nancy Novogrod and her husband, John—who have listened to my tales of Galician travel (if not leisure) with a uniquely sympathetic ear—have been the sources of treasured friendship and encouragement. I am grateful to Nancy as well, wearing her editor’s hat, for her forbearance and patience in letting me take time off from my obligations to her in order to complete this book; Bob Silvers at The New York Review of Books has also been enormously generous to me in this respect, as indeed he always has been in many others.