This, I suspect, is at least part of why my brothers and sister and I haven’t spent more time vacationing together. As I write this I think of the bitter if suggestive joke my youngest brother once made—the one who didn’t come with us, perhaps because of an excess of intimacy—about how we relate to one another. We’re close in the way that people who were in the same concentration camp were close, he cracked.
We are told that Abel changed his life and became a herder of flocks while Cain remained a tiller of the ground—the commentator Emes LeYa’akov has much to say about the different verbs “to be” used of each of the brothers—and Rashi thinks we should ask ourselves why. Why? Because, Rashi says, the earth had been cursed by God, and hence the younger brother “separated himself from its work.” There is, in fact, an ongoing tension throughout the Torah between those who work the earth and those who tend flocks—just as there is, famously, an ongoing motif, even more striking, of murderous conflict between older and younger siblings. In light of the latter, it is worth noting that it is always the younger sibling who manages to endear himself to the father- or authority-figure, and subsequently to find himself the more prestigious line of work (shepherding, say, or advising Pharaoh), a phenomenon that, we cannot help thinking, is part of the resentment on the part of the older brother that fuels his fatal rage. (Even here, in Genesis, so early in our narrative, certain readers will be struck by Abel’s fastidious choice of a job that—as Rashi’s comment suggests—he cannot help knowing will win him the approval of God, with whom, to me at least, it seems clear Abel is trying to ingratiate himself.) Indeed Rashi also remarks that Cain’s offering to God was “from the poorest”—a deduction based, in fact, on what is not in the text, i.e., any description whatsoever of Cain’s offering; whereas Abel’s offering is described as being the choicest. Perceptively, Rashi goes on to note that God not only reacted to these offerings, one agricultural, the other ovicultural (“He turned…He did not turn”), but must have registered His reaction, somehow, to the two brothers, since it is clear that Cain knew that God had rejected his offering.
But what’s striking here is the tension between the workers who are tied to the accursed ground—the farmers—and those whose livelihood derives from movable chattels, like flocks of sheep. I think of how resentful Cain is—of how envious certain farmers must be of those others who, although born of the same soil, the same country, seem to be luckier, because they enjoy the luxury of being able to go far afield, and because their wealth seems to increase of its own accord, and because this wealth is movable, too. I think of how the natural tensions between siblings, between those who grow up in close quarters and know one another too well, can be exacerbated by these economic resentments and envies. I think of certain brothers who stay put, trying to make a living off the resisting ground, and of other brothers who take their chances far away.
And I think of other kinds of siblings, too, those who grew up in close quarters and know one another too well, some forced to work the land, the others, seemingly luckier, more blessed, able to wander here and there with their (seemingly) ever-increasing wealth. I think, naturally, of Ukrainians and Jews.
AS I HAVE said, it had been raining from the start of our Eastern European trip—a cold, steady, wet drizzle, enough water to be irritating without ever providing the giddy relief of a downpour. After the months of anticipation about this dramatic family trip—the return to the ancestral shtetl was by now so cliché that we half-mocked ourselves even as we made the elaborate plans necessary to get four adults with careers onto the same plane at the same time—the unrelentingly miserable weather, since the Thursday morning when we had landed in Warsaw and then transferred to the short flight to the Kraków airport, where the big, blond Alex Dunai was waiting, beaming, at the arrivals area holding a small cardboard sign that said, forlornly, MENDELSOHN, seemed to be mocking the whole enterprise: the idea of the family return to its roots, the enforced family togetherness necessary to make it happen, and most of all the expectations of what we would find.
The latter in particular had, even before the trip had really begun, started to feel oppressive. There was a good deal of bickering. We had no idea what, if anything, we were going to find here, and the unspoken but oppressive sense, as persistent and irritating as the constant drizzle, that we might well have made this difficult and expensive trip to this sodden and impoverished place all for nothing made us irritable. Because I had organized it all, because I was the one who had always wanted to come back, because it was I who had the notion, a deeply sentimental one I admit, that the return to the ancestral village should be a family affair involving as many of the siblings as possible, because I thought that one day I might write about this trip—because of all of this, I felt not only a grim responsibility to my siblings, but, even more, a terrible pressure to find someone who could tell us what happened, who could tell us the dramatic tale we were all hoping for. And so those first three days, during which we visited Auschwitz, toured what was left of the old Jewish quarter in Kraków, drove the five hours east to L’viv, spent a day in L’viv touring what was left of the old Jewish life there, too, were gloomy. Every decision—where to eat, what time to leave the hotel, where to go and what to see first—somehow became an argument. I just don’t understand why he’s always so pissed off at me, Andrew fumed one night, back at our hotel, about Matt. Since Matt had always been an enigma to me, too—we are closest in age, but during family get-togethers didn’t, for a long time, have much to say to each other—I had nothing to say in response.
We started in Poland rather than going directly to Ukraine, to Bolechow, partly because of something I wanted, and partly because of something Andrew wanted. I had wanted to begin this way because I was eager to travel through what had been Galicia, the province from which so many American Jews come. If we started in Kraków, the westernmost city in Galicia and the city where my father’s mother, my grandmother Kay, was born (a woman who, like my mother, raised four sons, certain of whom do not speak to certain others), and then drove east to L’viv, we’d traverse the whole province. I was, as I kept reminding myself, interested in the life of the Old Country, not merely its death, and I wanted to see what Galicia looked like, what the topography was, what kinds of trees and animals and people lived there. What kind of place my family had come from.
But we had also come here first because from Kraków it is only an hour or so to Auschwitz, and Andrew in particular wanted to see Auschwitz. Although he hadn’t always been interested in family history, as I had been, Andrew had enthusiastically signed on for this trip, and before our departure had spent months immersing himself in the literature of the Holocaust, books about the Jews of Eastern Europe and about Polish and Ukrainian history. This was not surprising. His interests have always been many; more, I think, than those of any of the rest of us. Perhaps because he has the firstborn’s sense of limitless possibility, he has thrown himself into everything, from raising species rhododendrons to building furniture to collecting Japanese prints, with unlimited enthusiasm. He is tall, dark-haired, fair-skinned, and has a face not unlike the one described on an old family passport, dated 1920: face: oval, complexion: fair, nose: straight. He plays, at a high level, the piano, the harpsichord, the recorder, tennis. As often happens in large families, we children early on adopted, or were given, what I thought of for a long time as “labels.” I, with my kinked dark hair and blue eyes above their dark circles, was Bad at Math but Good at English and French; Matt, blond, yellow-eyed, with a wide grin usually reserved, during his combative adolescence, for people outside our family, and already something of a hero in high school for the photos he took of the soccer team, the students, the teachers, was Secretly Sensitive Rebel; Eric, with his mop of brown hair and watchful brown eyes, the sheafs of macabre and delicate drawings that he was already producing at the age of twelve and thirteen, with their unsettling captions (“Stop Following Me Or I’ll Have My Maid Strangle You”), was, as everyone knew, The Ar
tistic One, although he also happened to be The Funniest Person in the Family. And Jen, the youngest, the long-awaited only girl, vivid, dark, and petite, with her eyes like (the old Jewish relatives would say) black cherries, the valedictorian, the cellist, the writer, was The Star. But to me, who spent the first fifteen years of my life sleeping two feet away from him, listening to him listen to his hockey games, wondering how anyone could be that good in math, science, English, and sports, Andrew was simply Good at Everything. So it was no surprise that he knew as much about Bolechow as I did by the time we left for L’viv; it was he, after all, who gave me the precious gift of The Memoirs of Ber of Bolechow. During the months that led up to the trip, that August, he was constantly e-mailing me with the names of books he’d read and thought I should acquire: Bitter Harvest: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule, say, or Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust. Of course I bought them.
And so, because Andrew wanted to go, and because Andrew rarely asks for anything; and because Matt thought he could get some interesting pictures; and because Jennifer, who had, lately, been making her own private study of Jewish life and religion, and who would soon be the only one of my siblings to marry a Jew, was interested also: because of these things, which were important to my siblings, we went to Auschwitz, that first day we were in Poland.
I alone hadn’t wanted to come. I was leery. To me Auschwitz represented the opposite of what I was interested in, and—as I started to realize on the day I actually did go to Auschwitz—of why I had made this trip. Auschwitz, by now, has become the gigantic, one-word symbol, the gross generalization, the shorthand, for what happened to Europe’s Jews—although what happened at Auschwitz did not, in fact, happen to millions of Jews from places like Bolechow, Jews who were lined up and shot at the edges of open pits or, failing that, were shipped to camps that, unlike Auschwitz, had one purpose only, camps that are less well known to the public mind precisely because they offered no alternative to death and hence produced no survivors, no memoirs, no stories. But even if we accept Auschwitz as the symbol, I thought as I walked its strangely peaceful and manicured grounds, there are problems. It had been to rescue my relatives from generalities, symbols, abbreviations, to restore to them their particularity and distinctiveness, that I had come on this strange and arduous trip. Killed by the Nazis—yes, but by whom, exactly? The dreadful irony of Auschwitz, I realized as we walked through the famous rooms full of human hair, of artificial limbs, of spectacles, of luggage destined to go nowhere, is that the extent of what it shows you is so gigantic that the corporate and anonymous, the sheer scope of the crime, are constantly, paradoxically asserted at the expense of any sense of individual life. Naturally this is useful, since even now, even while the survivors live and tell their stories to people like me, there are, as we know, those who want to minimize the extent of what happened, even to deny that it happened at all, and when you walk around a place like Auschwitz, wander the enormous, vertiginously broad plain where the barracks once stood, and trudge over the great distance to the place where the crematoria were, and from there to the place where the many, many memorial stones wait for you, representing the countless dead of scores of countries, it begins to be possible to understand how many people could have passed through there. But for me, who had come to learn about only six of six million, I couldn’t help thinking that the vastness, the scope, the size, was an impediment to, rather than vehicle for, illumination of the very narrow scrap of the story in which I was interested.
There was, too (I thought as we walked, on a humid morning whose air was filled with aggressive mosquitoes, through the yawning entrance of the guardhouse past a group of Scandinavian tourists), the problem of overexposure. As we walked around, we remarked that everything looked so familiar: the gatehouse, the siding, the barracks, the electrified barbed wire with its warnings signs in German still intact, and most famous of all, the sign—surprisingly small, as is curiously the case with so many famous monuments when you finally see them up close—that reads ARBEIT MACHT FREI, which although a deception of the sardonic sort so beloved of the Nazis, proved at Auschwitz to be potentially more accurate than similar signs at, say, Belzec, a place where there was only one destination after you got off the cattle car. All of this has been reproduced, photographed, filmed, broadcast, and published so often that by the time you go there, you find yourself looking for what it is difficult not to think of as the “attractions,” for the displays of the artificial limbs or glasses or hair, more or less as you’d look for the newly reconstructed apatosaurus at the Natural History Museum.
And so as I walked around Auschwitz I struggled with the question of why one goes as a tourist to places like this. Not, in a general way at least, to learn what happened there; for anyone who comes to Auschwitz and the many other sites like it already knows what happened. And certainly not to get a better idea of “what it was like,” as if by beholding the architecture or feeling the dimensions of the place, knowing how long it took to walk from point A to point B, one could understand significantly better the experience of those who came to this place not in air-conditioned tour vans but in cattle cars. No. Perhaps it’s because I am the child of a father who was a scientist and mother who was the product of an emotional and nostalgic family, but it seems to me that there are two reasons to go to a place like Auschwitz. The first of these is scientific and juridical: one reason to go to Auschwitz is that the entire site is a gigantic piece of evidence, and in this respect seeing the piles of eyeglasses or shoes themselves, as opposed to merely knowing about them or seeing photographs or videos of the piles of eyeglasses or shoes or luggage, is more useful in conveying what happened. The second is sentimental. For the other reason you go to Auschwitz is the reason you go to a cemetery, which is something that Auschwitz also happens to be: to acknowledge the claims of the dead.
This is what I was worrying about after I left the indoor museum of hair and shoes and artificial limbs and stood in a fine drizzle waiting for my siblings. A gaggle of tall blonds—Swedes? Norwegians?—all with backpacks that had little bottles of water sticking out of them, was approaching the spot where I was standing, just outside the women’s barracks, and it was then—as I was reading a plaque that told of the summary shootings that used to take place in what now seems like a not particularly menacing courtyard that wouldn’t look out of place on the grounds of most American elementary schools—it was then that a young woman next to me muttered, If I don’t get a bottle of water, I’m going to pass out!
So Auschwitz was, for me, always just the prelude. We knew, as we looked that first afternoon at the famous barbed wire, of which it is possible to make beautiful artistic compositions, and at the famous vista of the railway sidings that disappear, in those famous images, with the same reasonable inevitability of space and distance that you find in the perspectives in Renaissance paintings—The School of Athens, say—through a roofed, openmouthed gatehouse toward a vanishing point that was indeed a vanishing point; at those piles of shoes and eyeglasses and artificial limbs, all carefully preserved behind their glass panels; and then, as we looked the next morning at the empty synagogues of the Kazimiersz quarter in Kraków, the old Jewish quarter where my father’s mother was born in another, unimaginably teeming world and where today the politely attentive German and American and Swedish tourists, wandering among life-size cardboard cutouts of Jews propped up in attitudes of rigidly pious devotion while recordings of Hebrew prayers droned in the background, reminded me of childhood trips to see the dioramas of dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History; and then, as we looked on the third day at the self-satisfied if somewhat dilapidated residential architecture of the city I still can’t help thinking of as Lwów, and even sometimes Lemberg, but never L’viv, the solid blocks of Habsburg-era apartment buildings, indistinguishable from comparable blocks of apartment buildings in Vienna or Budapest or Prague, their Neoclassical windows, some topped by pediments and others by
shallow arcs, looking across at their neighbors from above heavy ground-floor rustication that, if my memories of an architectural history course are correct, were intended to make their owners feel safe—we knew, as we looked at all these things, at the whole history of European Jewry crammed into two and a half days, the teeming ghetto, the failed assimilation, the successful annihilation, that as interesting or poignant or boring as all this may be, we were just biding our time. The whole point of this six-day trip, we knew, was Bolechow: everything—the planning, the expense, the effort, the bickering, the article—everything depended on whether, would be justified if, we could only find something there, find someone who knew them, who could tell us what happened, or who could tell us, at very least, a story good enough to be true, to repeat. This was the whole point of the trip, this Sunday when we would finally go to Bolechow.
And so it was on the fourth day that we finally drove to Bolechow. When our car pulled up in the tiny, unkempt square, there wasn’t a single person there.
FROM THE LITTLE crest in the road that you go over just before entering the town, Bolechow doesn’t look like much: a cluster of fat, steep-gabled houses grouped among a tangle of streets so dense that the little open square in the middle feels like a sigh of relief, the whole thing nestled in a depression among some hills. As I looked down from where we’d stopped to take pictures—Matt, who had been sniping back and forth with Andrew in the car, wanted to get out and photograph a horse standing next to the ugly sign bearing the name of the town in Ukrainian, Bolekhiv—I thought of course of how vulnerable it looked: how easy to enter, how isolated. We got back in the car and went down.
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million Page 14
