So for a long time, possessing just the photocopy of the front of that picture, I could only scrutinize Shmiel’s face, and maybe as I looked at it—I am sure, in fact, that this happened—it would occur to me how easy it is for someone to become lost, forever unknown. There, after all, was Shmiel, with that face, with a name that people still uttered, however infrequently, with some kind of history and a family whose names we knew, or thought we knew; and yet just next to him was this other man about whom nothing could ever be known, as good, it seemed to me as I looked at the picture, as if he’d never been born.
And then, many years after I’d been pinched and petted in the living rooms of long-dead Miamians, many years after I first photocopied that picture, when I’d only been interested in completing my classroom assignment; many years after I first felt that I had to know whatever it was possible to know about Shmiel, about the man with whom I shared a certain curve of brow and line of jaw, and for that reason had once made people cry, and because I had to know would spend an entire year, decades later, traveling—I the writer traveling with my younger brother the photographer, the one with his words to write and inscriptions to decipher, and the other, who had unwittingly gone into the family business, with his photographs to pose and to print, the two of us, two brothers, the writer and the photographer, traveling to Australia and Prague and Vienna and Tel Aviv and Kfar Saba and Beer Sheva and Vilnius and Riga, and then Tel Aviv again and Kfar Saba again and Beer Sheva again, to Haifa and Jerusalem and Stockholm and, finally, those two days in Copenhagen with the man who had once traveled even farther than we had, and who had a secret waiting for us; spent a year, summer and fall and winter and a spring that was also a fall, time itself seeming to fall out of joint as the past rose out of its ashes and its dirt and its old paper and powder and whiskey and violet salts, and surfaced once more like the almost illegibly faint script on the back of an old photograph, rising to compete with and confuse the present; spent a year tracking down people who are now far older than the old people who’d pinched my cheeks and offered me pencils in Miami Beach had been at the time, tracking down people who knew Shmiel only as the grand, impressive, and somewhat remote father of their schoolmates, those four daughters, all lost; flew across the Atlantic and the Pacific to talk to them and glean whatever bits still remained, whatever weightless puffs of information they might have to tell me—: then, many years after all that, when I was getting ready to sit down and write this book, the book of all those travels and all those years, and had persuaded my mother to let me see the original photograph once more, the obverse that I knew so well, yes, but also the reverse; then, only then, was I able at last to read, now in its entirety, the original inscription, read the words that my grandfather had written on the back, telling me something that, I now realize, like so much else that he had underscored for me, he thought was crucial, wanted me to know and think about. (But how could I see that then, when all I needed was a picture to go with a classroom presentation? In the end, we see what we want to see and the rest falls away.) What he had actually written, as I can now tell you since I’ve looked very recently, was this, in blue ink, in capital letters: HERMAN EHRLICH AND SAMUEL JAEGER IN THE AUSTRIAN ARMY, 1916. It was in red Magic Marker that he had added the words that I’d always remembered: KILLED BY THE NAZIS IN WORLD WAR 2.
Ehrlich? I asked my mother, when we were going through the boxes that day, stumped by a name that I had never seen before, despite all my research.
She seemed impatient. You know, she said. He was married to Ethel, they were my father’s cousins. His sister was that Yetta Katz, she was big and fat and pretty and was the most marvelous cook.
But still I was confused. I turned over the picture and again looked at the two figures, the one so utterly familiar, the other so hopelessly unknown. Then, to be helpful, my mother added something.
Oh, Daniel, she said, You knew him! Herman Ehrlich. Herman the Barber!
AT NIGHT, I think about these things. I’m pleased with what I know, but now I think much more about everything I could have known, which was so much more than anything I can learn now and which now is gone forever. What I do know now is this: there’s so much you don’t really see, preoccupied as you are with the business of living; so much you never notice, until suddenly, for whatever reason—you happen to look like someone long dead; you decide, suddenly, that it’s important to let your children know where they came from—you need the information that people you once knew always had to give you, if only you’d asked. But by the time you think to ask, it’s too late.
About the rest of the family, I had of course long known everything there was to know; for a long time I had thought that I knew everything there was to know about the six who’d been lost, too. For in my mind, the word lost referred not only to the fact that they’d been killed, but to their relation to the rest of history and memory: hopelessly remote, irretrievable. At the moment when my mother said Herman the Barber I realized I could be wrong, that traces of those six might still remain in the world, somewhere.
So it was a kind of guilt, as much as any curiosity; guilt, as much as a desire to know what had really happened to them in whatever detail still remained to be known, that ultimately moved me to go back. To leave my computer, to leave the safety of books and documents, their descriptions of events so clipped that you’d never guess that the events were happening to real people (for instance, the document that recorded this fact: During the march to the train station in Bolechów for the transport to Belzec, they were forced to sing, particularly the song “My Little Town of Belz”); to forego the coziness of the records office and the comfort of the Internet, and to go out into the world, to make whatever effort I could, however slight the results might be, to see what and who might still remain, and instead of reading the books and learning that way, to talk to them all, as I’d once talked to my grandfather. To discover if, even at this impossibly late date, there might still be other clues, other facts and details as valuable as the ones I had allowed to slip away because, while the people who knew them still lived, the time wasn’t ripe for me to ask my questions, for me to want to know.
And so, eighty-one years after my grandfather left his home in a bustling town nestled among pine and spruce forests in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, and twenty-one years after he died in a swimming pool surrounded by palm trees; three-hundred and eighty-nine years after the Jägers arrived in Bolechow, and sixty years after they finally disappeared from it, I went back.
This was the beginning.
TEXT OF A LETTER FROM ABRAHAM JAEGER, DATED 25 SEPTEMBER 1973, FOUND BY THE AUTHOR IN A STACK OF OLD PAPERS ON 6 JUNE 2005:
Dearest Children and Elkana and Ruhtie and Grandchildren
It is almost Yom Tov so we wish you all a Happy and Healthy New Year please give this picture to Daniel for the family album. Standing is Herman the Barber, and sitting down is my Dear Brother SHMIEL in the Austrian Army, this picture was taking in 1916.
Ethel gave me this picture.
Happy New Year
Love
Daddy—Grandpa
Ray sends her Best
PART TWO
Cain and Abel,
or,
Siblings
(1939/2001)
IN THE COMMUNITY HOUSE THERE WAS A PARCHMENT WITH A CHRONICLE ON IT, BUT THE FIRST PAGE WAS MISSING AND THE WRITING HAD FADED.
Isaac Bashevis Singer,
“The Gentleman from Cracow”
1
THE SIN BETWEEN BROTHERS
ON AUGUST 12, 2001, two of my brothers and my sister and I climbed out of a cramped blue Volkswagen Passat and our feet touched the wet earth of Bolechow. It was a Sunday, and the weather was bad. After six months of planning, we had finally arrived.
Or, I suppose, returned.
Almost exactly sixty years earlier—on August 1, 1941—the civil administration of what had once been the Habsburg district of Galicia, a region that included the town of Bolecho
w, was transferred to the German authorities, who, after breaking the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, had turned around and invaded eastern Poland two months before and were now, finally, putting things in order. Not long afterward—perhaps later that same August, certainly by September 1941—plans for the area’s first Aktion, or organized mass murder of Jews, began taking shape. These actions were scheduled for October. The Bolechow Aktion took place on October 28 and 29, 1941. In it there perished approximately a thousand Jews.
Of those thousand, there is one in particular who interests me.
On January 16, 1939, Shmiel Jäger sat down to write a desperate letter to a relative in New York. It was a Monday. There were other letters that Shmiel wrote to his family in the States, but it is this letter, I later realize, that contains all of the reasons we went back to Bolechow. More than anything else, it is what connects the other two dates: the plans that reached their fruition in August 2001, the plans that were set in motion in August 1941.
WHEN I THINK now about that Sunday when we finally reached Bolechow, the climax of a trip that required months of planning, many thousands of dollars, painstaking coordination among a large number of people on two continents, all for a journey lasting barely six days, of which only one, really, was spent doing what we had come to do, which was to talk to people in the crucial place, in Bolechow, the town about which I had been hearing, thinking, dreaming, and writing for nearly thirty years, a place that I thought (then) would be the only place I could go to find out what happened to them all—when I think about all this, I feel ashamed at how casual we were, how ill-prepared and naive.
We had come, after all, having no idea what we might find. Months earlier, in January, when the idea for this trip was first taking shape, I had e-mailed Alex Dunai in L’viv, asking if there might be anyone left in Bolechow old enough to have known my family. Alex wrote me back to say he had talked to the mayor of the town, and the answer was Yes. The town was tiny, he said; if we came to visit, all we’d have to do was walk around and talk to a few people in order to find those who might have known Shmiel and his family, who might be able to tell us what really happened. Because I was determined to go anyway—because this had been my obsession from the beginning, simply to go there, as if the air and soil of the place could somehow tell us something concrete and true—this was enough for me. It was on this slimmest of possibilities—the possibility that we might, just might, stumble onto a chance encounter on a Sunday afternoon with a Ukrainian who was not merely old enough to have been an adult sixty years before, which was already asking a lot, but who actually knew them—that I committed myself, and my brothers and sister, although at the time I did not tell them just how slim the possibility was, to going there.
And so at the core of this trip, which seemed like a symbol, almost a cliché of family unity, there was a hidden deceit.
Still, we did end up finding out what happened to Uncle Shmiel and his family—by accident; and for that reason it’s perhaps unnecessary to feel guilty even now, as I sometimes do, for having led my brothers and sister on a trip that would very likely have been our sole and, basically, unsuccessful fact-finding journey if it hadn’t been for my mother’s first cousin Elkana in Israel…Elkana, the last male on earth to be born a Jäger of Bolechow, who had abandoned the family name, taking a Hebrew surname and thereby sealing the extinction, in a way, of a certain part of my mother’s family heritage, although of course the fact that there were Jägers in Israel at all, by whatever name, had ensured the survival of something more primitive, more biological, which is the family’s genes. Elkana, the fabulous, storied cousin who (we knew) was some kind of big macher in Israel, who had blown up bridges in the War of Independence and, on his rare trips to visit us on Long Island, would get the local police department to fly him over our house in a helicopter, much to our delirious glee and to the secret envy of other children on the block. Elkana, who had retained the family’s high sense of its own significance, its confidence in the appeal of its narratives and its dramas, and for that reason shared the news of our trip to Bolechow that summer with certain others, who told others, who told others…DNA is not the only thing that runs in families. But then, I am aware that the story of what happened to Shmiel would never have existed, would never have been worth telling, if that same innocuous self-aggrandizement had not led Shmiel to stay in Poland, led him to insist on being a big fish in a small pond, as my grandfather once put it, and so to remain stubbornly, perhaps even resentfully behind after his three brothers had moved on.
Or at least, those are the emotions that I, who know something about tensions between siblings, attribute to him.
In August 1941, the fate of Bolechow’s Jews fell officially into the hands of the Germans.
In August and September of that year, most of the Jews of Bolechow, including my great-uncle and his wife and four daughters, were unlikely to have a clear idea of what was being planned for them. There were, to be sure, rumors of mass killings in cemeteries farther west, but few people credited them—protecting themselves, as people will, from knowledge of the worst. It is important to remember that many of the Jews of Bolechow, that early autumn, had already weathered the severe deprivations of two years of grim Soviet occupation; as difficult as it is to remember, for those who enjoy the benefit of hindsight, many Jews, as the Soviets fled before the Germans, were hoping that there would be some way to adapt to the harsh new status quo. And indeed, while drastically changed in certain respects, everyday life in the first few months of the German occupation rather surreally maintained certain features of everyday life from before. For instance, Jews were not prevented from attending synagogue on the Sabbath. A man I talked to sixty-two years after the German takeover remembered quite clearly attending Yom Kippur services in 1942. They knew they were going to kill us all anyway, he remarked. So why bother stopping us?
And so, in September 1941, the most pious Jews of the town maintained the traditions of their ancestors. As September melted away, so did the old Jewish year. In 1941 Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, was scheduled to fall in the middle of September, and some of the Jews of Bolechow prepared themselves. Among the things that happen when a new year begins, for Jews, is that the weekly cycle of rereading the Torah also begins again. The parashah for the first Sabbath of that new cycle is, naturally, parashat Bereishit, which begins with God’s formation of the heavens and earth and ends with his decision to exterminate humankind by means of the Flood. It is a portion, that is to say, that travels a magnificent and dreadful arc from inspired creation to utter annihilation.
In the year 1941, the reading of parashat Bereishit took place on Saturday, October 18. The following week, on October 25, parashat Noach, the account of the Flood itself and of the survival of a very few, would have been read. I have to wonder how many of Bolechow’s Jews went to shul the following week, since between Saturday, October 25, and Saturday, November 1, there occurred in Bolechow the first of the mass annihilations of which there would be so few survivors—the first Aktion, which began on Tuesday, the twenty-eighth, and ended the following day. So it is possible, perhaps even likely, that the last parashah that many of the town’s Jews ever heard was Noach, that tale of divinely ordained extermination, one among several that we find in the Torah. But even if certain Jews of Bolechow had stayed home on Saturday, the twenty-fifth, perhaps out of indifference, perhaps out of fear, even if the last reading from the Torah that they would ever hear in the grand old shul on the Ringplatz or in any of the town’s many smaller shuls and little prayer houses was the first of the year’s readings, they would have had cause to ponder. For parashat Bereishit not only includes themes that are of great interest in general—Creation to be sure but also expulsion and annihilation and, in particular, lies and deceptions, from the serpent’s seductive half-truths to the self-serving deceits that circulate among families, starting with the very first human family in Creation—but has as its very center the story of Cain and Abel, the Bible’s great nar
rative of original fratricidal sin, its most comprehensive attempt to explicate the origins of the tensions and violences that hover not only within families, but among and between the peoples of the earth.
Comprising the first sixteen verses of chapter 4 of Genesis, the tale is by now familiar: how Adam knew Eve, who became pregnant and gave birth to Cain, an event that prompted her to boast, “I have created a man with YHWH!”; how she then gave birth to the younger brother, Abel. How, curiously, it was the younger brother who had the more pleasant task of tending the flocks, while the older brother toiled as a worker of the ground, and how when the brothers made their offerings to God, the fruits of the earth and the firstborn of the flock, God acknowledged the offering of the younger, but not the offering of the older boy, and how this greatly upset Cain, “whose face was fallen.” How God chided Cain, warning him that sin “crouched in the threshold,” that he must “dominate” it; and how Cain did not, in the end, dominate his sinful urge, but called his brother out into a field, and killed him there. How all-knowing God demanded to know of Cain where his brother was, the question to which Cain made his famous answer, replete with the sullen cheekiness all too familiar to parents of guilty children: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” How God cries out, then, that Abel’s blood “is crying from the ground,” and curses Cain to be a roamer and rover on the earth. Then Cain’s anguish, the expulsion, the mark upon his brow.
Despite its archaic stiffness, it is a story that, to anyone who has a family—parents, or siblings, or both; which is to say everyone—will be eerily familiar. The young couple, the arrival of the first child; the arrival, entailing more complex and compromised emotions, of the first sibling; the seeds of an obscure competition; the parental disapproval, the shame, the lies, the deceits. The violence in a moment of—what?
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million Page 10
