The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  There, in the tiny town, we found three people, each of whom brought us a little closer to them, to Shmiel and his family, even as each reminded us of how distant they really were.

  We found Nina first. Alex had parked the Passat wagon in the ragged, unpaved town square, a little ways down from the brightly painted, onion-domed Ukrainian church where services were going on, and just across the house that stood on the spot where my family’s house had once stood. (A few months earlier, Alex had found a nineteenth-century surveyor’s map of the town and had located “our” house, House 141.) On the same side of the square as the church was the old town hall, next to which my family’s store once stood. Opposite the town hall was the large synagogue where my grandfather had been bar mitzvahed; after the war ended and there were no more Jews to be bar mitzvahed, or anything else, it became a leatherworkers meeting hall. With everyone in church, as far as we could tell, it was a pretty desolate spot, although a peaceful one. As we strolled around, treading wetly on the damp grass and gravel, we could hear the sound of liturgical chanting from the church. A goat was wandering around, untethered.

  Suddenly a jolly-looking woman passed briskly by. Thickset in the way that is common among women of a certain Slavic provenance (as are the flowered print dresses, tightly stretched across their vast bosoms), she was, I guessed, around fifty. She looked at us standing awkwardly in front of this house, and with a mixture of small-town curiosity and something else, something lighter—the local person’s generalized amusement about out-of-towners—asked who were were and what we were doing. Alex explained at some length, and it occurred to me that he must be telling her that we were American Jews who had come back to this, the town of our origin; and while he went on and on in Ukrainian all I could hear was the phrase the Ukrainians were the worst.

  The woman’s face cracked into a huge smile, and some rapid-fire Ukrainian ensued.

  This is Nina, Alex explained. She is inviting us into her house. She herself was born after the war—

  (I thought to myself, This is going to go nowhere)

  —but her neighbor Maria is much older, and she thinks maybe this Maria will remember your family.

  Well, I thought; perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad. And so we walked the short distance to Nina’s flat, which was on the first floor of a drab block of concrete modern apartments, located in back of the old synagogue. The apartment block reminded me of the dormitories of certain American universities. The approach to the apartments was from the back, and as we went around the building I was surprised to see, in stark contrast to the dinginess of the building itself, that the back of the lot was filled with quite elaborate, obviously well tended flower gardens, which at that time of year were abloom with roses, daisies, hollyhocks.

  We went up the few concrete steps to Nina’s front door. Outside the door, on a mat, several pairs of shoes were lined up. Matt gave me a sidelong, mischievous look.

  So this is where Mom got it! he said. I knew what he was talking about: When we were growing up, we always had to remove our shoes at the door, a rule that infuriated and embarrassed us at the time; it was, among other things, humiliating to ask our friends to take off their shoes whenever we’d have someone over. There were, to be sure, other things that made us seem a little foreign to our school friends and neighbors. When I was about eleven or so, I had a friend who lived down the block who used to like to come call for me to play very early on weekend mornings. One summer morning when my grandfather was up from Miami Beach, the doorbell rang at around eight in the morning. I knew at once that it was Lonnie, and I raced down the stairs of my parents’ house to get the door before the noise of the doorbell irritated my grandfather, who was davening, murmuring the Hebrew words and pacing slowly back and forth in my mother’s spotless living room, enfolded in his vast, old-fashioned tallis, his leather tfillin wrapped around his arm and his forehead. It was not at all unusual for my grandfather to be able to have rudimentary conversations while he was davening: you could ask him, for instance, if he wanted Cream of Wheat for breakfast and some prune juice, and he would look at you and give an assenting glance while raising the volume of his murmuring in a way that suggested yes. I mention this because when I opened the door to Lonnie, my grandfather made his way over to the banister and, never abandoning his Hebrew text, raised a leather-encircled arm in a gesture that was partly incredulous and partly threatening, and simultaneously he raised his voice in a way that suggested that no one in his right mind paid social calls at eight in the morning. Then he turned his back and walked back into the living room, my eyes following him with secret delight: my exotic, funny grandpa. When I turned back around to whisper with Lonnie, he’d already fled down the front steps and disappeared.

  And that, my grandfather would say later on, telling this story, was the last we ever saw of that one!

  So we had these strange family habits, among which were my grandfather’s davening, and my mother’s insistence that shoes were to be lined up on a mat just inside the front door of the house. I thought of this, as Matt obviously had, too, as we stood at the threshold of Nina’s apartment, and it occurred to me that perhaps my mother as a girl had absorbed this rule from her father, who had had to follow it a half century earlier, because he had lived, as Nina lived a century later, in a country town where simply walking a hundred yards was likely to cover your shoes with real filth—dirt, mud, or worse.

  The apartment was tiny. Much of the small living room was taken up by a large sofa, on which nearly all of us—the four Mendelsohns and Alex—somehow managed to squeeze, our legs tucked out of the way of the little coffee table in front of us. Off the living room were a small kitchen and a bedroom of some kind, which was occupied, as far as I could see, by a piano. As we sat on the sofa, Nina, who was banging around the kitchen, chattered loudly in Ukrainian with Alex, who looked amused, and also pleased that perhaps we had found what we were looking for. Finally Nina came back from the kitchen, a small plate in her hand. On it were slices of local sausage. She then went to the credenza and took down a dusty bottle of what she described as Soviet-era champagne—how odd to think of the Soviets making champagne, we said, but she countered that it had once been a big business farther east, in one of the indecipherable “-stans”—and, after uncorking it, poured us each a little celebratory glass. Then she made each of us a cup of Nescafé, which was clearly considered something of a treat.

  It is a big honor, Alex told us, giving us a warning look.

  Matt, sitting next to me, muttered that he didn’t like Nescafé.

  Andrew and I gritted our teeth and said, simultaneously, Drink the fucking coffee, Matt.

  I wondered what Alex himself was thinking. Alex is a heavyset, gregarious blond in his mid-thirties with a broad, ready smile cushioned among pink dimples. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he’d made a career of taking American Jews around the old shtetls of Eastern Europe, near his home town of L’viv, where he proudly showed us around. (During that tour he’d assured me that there was no castle near Bolechow that had once belonged to a Polish aristocrat.) During the past ten years he’d come to know more about the history of Jews in Galicia than most Jews do. He was the first Ukrainian I’d ever had extensive dealings with, and when we finally met, at the Kraków airport the day we first arrived, we were all taken with his warmth and natural expansiveness, which easily carried us through the inevitable awkwardnesses. It was during the long drive from Kraków to L’viv, the day after our trip to Auschwitz, that we’d asked him how a young Ukrainian, formerly of the Soviet army, had come to this career escorting American Jews around their ancestral shtetls, and he had replied, a shade guardedly, I don’t tell most people what it is I do, I don’t think they’d understand.

  Now, Alex was clearly delighted that Nina was rolling out the red carpet. As she fluttered and bustled away, my brothers and sister and I gave one another sidelong glances, and it was clear we were all thinking the same thing: some Ukrainians aren’t so bad. As w
e did so, Nina’s husband, a thin, affable man who was wearing a bathing suit and flip-flops, banged out tunes on the decrepit piano in the closet that, we were told, was his study. “Feelings” was followed swiftly by—presumably in our honor, and certainly to show us his multicultural goodwill—“Hava Nagilah.” We looked at each other again. Then he played “Yesterday.”

  IT WAS ONLY after we had drunk the Soviet champagne, sipped the Nescafé, and eaten the local sausage—which was quite good, and which seemed appropriate since, after all, we had come from a long line of Bolechow butchers and meat-merchants—that Maria appeared at Nina’s doorstep, smiling shyly. Again, there was a long introduction: who we were, what we were looking for. Maria was a beautiful woman in her seventies, soft white hair, a broad face with high, slanted bones; the characteristic look of the area, as I’d come to realize. She looked pensive when we mentioned the name Jäger, and nodded. I hoped that finally, this would be it—the explosion out of generalities into something specific, some hard piece of knowledge, the start of a story.

  Yes, yes, Alex told us, translating, she knows the name. She knows it.

  I felt, right then, very close to them. This woman would have been a teenager during the war; she could indeed have known them. My siblings and I exchanged glances.

  Then Alex said, But she didn’t really know them.

  Still hoping for something—and feeling, suddenly, how absurd this whole expedition was, how mightily time and space and history were against us, how unlikely it was that anything of them could still remain—I took out the sheaf of photographs I’d brought with me and showed them to her. Photographs of Shmiel in his thirties and early forties, wearing a fur-collared overcoat, taken in the photography studio in Stryj that his wife’s brother owned; pictures of three of the girls (which three? impossible to know) as children, in lace dresses; a studio head shot of one of the girls as a teenager, with a broad smile and, I can’t help noticing, the same kinky Mittelmark hair that I had as a teenager. Maria looked at them, shuffling the old prints slowly. Then she shook her head with an apologetic little smile, the kind of smile you can fashion with your lips framing a frown, as my mother’s mother used to do. She said something to Alex.

  She doesn’t remember them, Alex told us. She says she was young, just a child, during the war. She didn’t know them herself. It’s too bad, she says, because her husband was much older, he would have known, but he died three years ago.

  As I looked at the ground, Alex exchanged a few more words with Maria. Ah, he said. He told us that Maria had just said that her husband’s sister, Olga, was still alive; she lived just down the road. Perhaps this Olga would be able to tell us something.

  We all got up, with Nina bossily leading the way—she had clearly adopted both us and our search—and marched down the road to Olga’s.

  The road we walked down to get from Nina’s apartment to Olga’s house was, we later found out, the road that leads from the center of town to the cemetery, past the old lumber mill. Now we walked down this road, and before Maria left us, we asked her how the Jews and Ukrainians had gotten along, before the war. We had, of course, done our research, and so we already knew about the centuries of economic and social competition between the Jews and the Ukrainians: the Jews, nationless, politically vulnerable, dependent on the Polish aristocrats who owned these towns, and for whom so many of the Jews inevitably worked as stewards and moneylenders, for their security; and the Ukrainians, who for the most part were workers of the land, who occupied the lowest rung of the economic totem pole, a people whose history, ironically, in so many ways was like a mirror image, or perhaps a negative image, of that of the Jews: a people without a nation-state, vulnerable, oppressed by cruel masters of one description or another—Polish counts, Soviet commissars. It was because of this strangely precise mirroring, in fact, that in the middle of the twentieth century it evolved, with the precise, terrible logic of a Greek tragedy, that whatever was good for one of these two groups, who lived side by side for centuries in these tiny towns, was bad for the other. When, in 1939, the Germans ceded the eastern portion of Poland (which they had just conquered) to the Soviet Union as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Jews of the region rejoiced, knowing they had been delivered from the Germans; but the Ukrainians, a fiercely nationalistic and proud people, suffered under the Soviets, who then as always were determined to stamp out Ukrainian independence—and Ukrainians. Talk to Ukrainians about the twentieth century, as we did so often on that trip, and they will tell you about their own holocaust, the deaths, in the 1930s, of those five to seven million Ukrainian peasants, starved out by Stalin’s forced collectivization…. So the miraculous good luck of the Jews of eastern Poland, in 1939, was a disaster for the Ukrainians of eastern Poland. Conversely, when Hitler betrayed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact two years later and invaded the very portion of eastern Poland that he’d given to Stalin, it was, of course, a disaster for the Jews but a blessing for the Ukrainians, who rejoiced when the Nazis arrived, having been freed from their Soviet oppressors. It is remarkable to think that two groups inhabiting such close quarters for so many years could be so different, suffer and exult over such different, indeed opposite, reversals of fortune.

  It was knowing all this that we asked Alex to ask Maria how the Jews and Ukrainians had once treated each other.

  Everyone got along, for the most part, he replied after speaking for a moment with Maria. She says the children often played together in the square, Ukrainians and Jews together.

  It was because I knew well what playing together can lead to—how beneath the closeness, the knowing each other, can be a knowing too well—that I asked what seemed to me to be the next logical question. Were there Ukrainians who were happy when the Jews were taken away? I asked.

  They talked for another moment. Yes, Alex said after a pause. There were some, sure. But there were some who tried to help, and for that they were killed. She repeats that this was a small town. Everyone knew each other. The Jews and the Poles and the Ukrainians, it was many people in one small place.

  Maria smiled her beatific, translucent, hopeful smile, and murmured something else to Alex. He turned to us and said, She says that it was like a big family.

  All commentators try to wrestle with the bizarre problem of what, if anything, Cain said to get Abel to go out into the field with him, the field where Cain planned to kill his brother. The strict translation of the Hebrew of verse 8, vayomer Qayin el-Hevel ahchiyv vay’hiy…, yields what seems, at first, like nonsense: “And Cain said to Abel. And when they were in the field…” Which is to say that the Hebrew text tells us merely that Cain said something to Abel, and that in the field Cain rose up and killed Abel; but we are never actually told what one brother said to the other. The authoritative Hebrew text remains silent; it is only the Septuagint, an Alexandrian Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible made in the first century A.D., and the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Hebrew and Aramaic Bible made by Jerome (later Saint Jerome) between A.D. 382 and A.D. 405, that tweaks the text to give it more ostensible sense, and it is their translations, inaccurate but more satisfying, that most of us know: “And Cain said to Abel, ‘Let us go into the field…’” Naturally, the impulse to maneuver the text so that it tells us what we want it to say is nothing new, either—as we have already seen—in biblical scholarship, or anywhere else.

  Friedman, the modern commentator, seems less perturbed by this than Rashi is, and in keeping the brisk, good-natured twentieth-century practicality that characterizes his approach, supplies a perfectly reasonable explanation for the odd syntax of the text here: “Cain’s words,” he writes, “appear to have been skipped in the Masoretic Text”—the Hebrew texts represented by copies dating as far back as the 900s—“by a scribe whose eye jumped from the first phrase containing the word ‘field’ to the second.” To anyone familiar with the study of manuscript traditions, this seems a likely enough explanation: some ancient scribe, as he sat before a venerable and now-l
ost manuscript of the Torah that he was dutifully copying, and as he was about to write the now-lost phrase, “Let us go out into the field,” the remark made by one brother to another, shut his eye in a moment of weariness; so that, when he moved his tired hand to write once more, the tired eye, now reopened, was already focused on what was, in fact, the second occurrence of the word “field”—that is, the word as it appeared in the line that we do have, the line that was not lost: “And when they were in the field…” And because he was tired, because he was, after all, only human (and we know what lapses human memory is prey to), this is the line he actually wrote, having never actually written the line that said “Let us go out into the field” (or something very much like that); and because of this tiny lapse, that one line, which if it actually existed would eliminate a troublesome reading from this most authoritative of all texts, was irretrievably lost. And yet the loss of this line does not seem to bother Rashi that much; or at least, he has an equally cogent explanation at hand—although his explanation is psychological rather than mechanical. His comment on the ostensible half-sentence that we translate as “And Cain said to his brother Abel” goes as follows: “He entered with him into words of quarrel and contention to find a pretext against him, to kill him.” To Rashi it is quite clear that the actual words that Cain said are immaterial, since they were false, merely a pretext; the commentary here indicates that Rashi knows well that, between brothers, there are darker forces lurking that need the barest excuse to rise to the surface and erupt into violence. What is of interest are the forces, not the pretext.