The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  IT WASN’T FAR to the house of Maria’s sister-in-law, Olga, from the point at which Maria had turned back, in the middle of the road, leaving us in Nina’s broad and energetic hands: just a couple of hundred yards farther away from the town square on the narrow unpaved road that was lined with the steep-gabled wooden houses typical of the region, houses of one story, with a few large windows, that were not at all unlike those that my grandfather would draw, with his blue Parker pen with the nib that he would lick before writing, when I would ask him to show me what his house had been like, in the Old Country. We reached an isolated, very pretty old house standing on the bend of the road where it curves suddenly to the right, toward the cemetery. Alex knocked—not on the door but, as he likes to do, on a side window. A small dog barked from somewhere inside. Outside, there was a big yard with chickens and more dogs bustling about; there were plum trees in bloom. Alex knocked again. Finally, a tiny, solid old woman opened the door. She peered over Alex’s shoulder and then looked at us; then she looked back at Alex. This Olga was very old, plump but with the cool, translucent skin of extreme old age, and for some reason everything about her made me think about food: her face was as round as a loaf of bread, her two bright blue eyes peering out between fat cheeks, like raisins baked into a cake. Alex started his little speech, and she suddenly seemed to relax—without, however, smiling—and motioned us in.

  Again we filed into a strange living room. The house was a comfortable one, with several airy rooms whose large windows were hung with exquisite lace curtains; on every available wall elaborate rugs, weavings, and tapestries were hung. Dishes and glasses glistened in substantial-looking, glass-fronted cupboards. Again chairs were fetched, again we sat down; but this time something was different. (For one thing, I noticed that no food was being offered, and this struck me as numinous.) Alex was talking, and once again I heard the name Jäger, and she said something twice, and before Alex even translated, I knew it would be different, because she was saying, very emphatically, Znayu, znayu, making an impatient little gesture with both hands, as if it were plain what she was saying.

  I know, I know.

  That much Ukrainian I had picked up, in the days since we’d arrived, the days of disappointment and bickering and rain. Olga nodded vigorously and said it again, and then started talking animatedly to Alex, who was trying to keep up as best he could.

  She knew these Jägers very well, he said. It’s not just that she’s heard the last name, but she knew this family very well. They had a…butchery?

  I nodded and said, hoarsely, butcher shop. At this point Alex interrupted himself to assure us that he hadn’t provided her with that detail, the information about what kind of business they had had. He knew how frustrated we’d been, and wanted to guarantee the authenticity of this particular memory of them and their lives.

  She knows, he went on. She remembers.

  It was the sudden and vertiginous sense of proximity to them, at that moment, that made my sister and me start crying. This is how close you can come to the dead: you can be sitting in a living room on a fine summer afternoon, sixty years after these dead have died, and talk to a plump old woman who is gesturing vigorously, who, you realize, is exactly as old now as Shmiel’s eldest daughter would have been, and this old woman can be this far away from you, a yard away; that’s how close she can be. In that moment, the sixty years and the millions of dead didn’t seem bigger than the three feet that separated me from the fat arm of the old woman. I was crying, too, because it was a moment that brought me closer to others of my dead. I felt intensely the presence of my grandfather, who before this moment had been the last living person I’d talked to who had known them, and suddenly the twenty years since he had died seemed to shrink, too. And so I sat there, the tears bathing my eyes, thankful that Jennifer was crying as well, and listened to Olga talk. She said the name again, and looked at my pictures, and kept nodding. Alex went on.

  She said that they were very nice, very cultural people, very nice people.

  Even through my emotion I smiled to myself, because I knew that my mother, with her family’s vanity, the Jäger self-importance, would love the fact that Olga has remembered this one quality above all. Nothing too specific, but something just specific enough, if you are the kind of person who believes the stories you hear, to ring true.

  But here again, as close as we’ve gotten, there was the inevitable distance.

  She doesn’t know what happened to them, Alex went on after a brief exchange with Olga. Not to this particular family. She knows that they, like others, other Jews, they suffered very much.

  IT IS OF course possible to learn about the sufferings of the Jews of Bolechow without having to go to a town that is now called Bolekhiv and track down elderly ladies who witnessed certain of those sufferings. You can, for instance, check in the Holocaust encyclopedia and learn there that the Germans entered the town on July 2, 1941, and that the first Aktion, the first mass liquidation, took place in October of that year, when approximately one thousand Jews were rounded up, confined in the Dom Katolicki, the Catholic community center house, and, after being tortured there for a day in various ways, they were brought to a mass grave and shot. You can read that the Jewish population of the town, which had been about three thousand at the beginning of the decade, swelled by thousands who were brought in from small neighboring villages. You will learn, further, that the second Aktion took place about a year later, when, after a three-day manhunt, a few thousand were herded into the town square outside of the city hall building—the place where we’d parked our car when we got to Bolechow, the place where the goat had been wandering around—and that there five hundred people were murdered on the spot, with the remaining two thousand deported on freight trains to the camp at Belzec. According to the Holocaust encyclopedia, moreover, most of the remaining Jews were killed in December 1942, leaving only about a thousand by 1943, of whom most were eventually murdered, with “only a few” escaping into the nearby forests to join the partisans.

  But the information that you’ll get from the Holocaust encyclopedia is, for all its detail, impersonal, and if you’re a person who grew up listening to elaborately detailed stories, it won’t satisfy your hunger for the particulars of what happened to your relatives, which is of course what I was hoping for when, in my senior year of high school, I’d written to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Israel, to find out what information they had on the Jews of Bolechow, and they sent me back a photocopy of the “BOLEKHOV” entry in the Holocaust encyclopedia, which is one place you can get the details I’ve just mentioned. For instance, that photocopy will not be able to tell you what Olga told us that day—particulars not of the deaths of my relatives, it’s true, but other particulars, details that make you think about things differently. A quarter century after I’d heard back from Yad Vashem, I sat in this old woman’s living room and listened to her give this generic story a new specificity. I had wondered, when I was eighteen, what “being tortured for twenty-four hours” might mean. She told us that the Jews had been herded into that Catholic community center at the northern edge of the town, and that there the Germans had forced the captive Jews to stand on each other’s shoulders, and had placed the old rabbi on the top; then knocked him down. Apparently this went on for a good many hours. (It was much later, in Australia and then Israel and then Scandinavia, that I learned the rest, the kinds of details you would know about only if you’d been inside.)

  “Brought to a mass grave and shot”? The thousand or so Jews who perished in the Dom Katolicki Aktion of October 1941 were shot in the Taniawa forest, a couple of kilometers outside of town. But during one of the “small” Aktions that took place in 1943—by which time there were only about nine hundred Jews alive in Bolechow, working in improvised labor camps—groups of Jews, a hundred or so here, a couple of hundred there, were taken to the cemetery and shot there in mass graves, although these mass graves could not compete in size with the one in Taniawa whe
re, we were told two years after we talked with Olga, the earth continued to move for days after the shootings, because not all of the victims were actually dead when the grave was filled in. Still, a certain detail that Olga gave us about one of the “small” Aktions has stayed in my mind ever since, perhaps because of the way it marries the utterly mundane and accessible with the absolutely horrible and unimaginable, and because of that improbable link permits me, in some very small way, to imagine the scene. Olga told us that the sound of the machine-gun fire coming from the cemetery (which was, after all, just up the road from her house) was so terrible that her mother, then a woman in her forties, took down a decrepit old sewing machine and ran the treadle, so that the creaky noise would cover the gunfire. The gunfire, the sewing machine. Whenever Olga described some particularly horrible incident, like this one, she would squeeze her eyes shut and make a downward-thrusting motion with her fat hands—an eloquent gesture of literal repulsion. It was the kind of gesture my grandmother or mother might have made, while clucking her tongue and saying nebuch.

  It strikes me as strange that Friedman, the modern, the product of the century of Freud, shows no psychological interest in the missing (or immaterial) words that Cain said to Abel, and is instead deeply preoccupied with a detail that might strike us as unworthy of extended analysis: “it was while they were in the field.” “What,” Friedman asks, “is the significance of informing us that they are in a field at the time?” In order to arrive at a satisfactory explanation, Friedman rehearses the extensive history of violent sibling conflict that runs throughout the Torah, from Cain’s murder of Abel to Solomon’s execution of his brother Adonijah, of internecine rivalry between brothers both real and metaphorical: between Jacob and Esau, between Joseph and his brothers, between Abimelek and his (“killing seventy of his brothers,” Friedman remarks), the wars between the tribes that made up the people Israel—Benjamin against all the others; Israel against Judah—the conflict between David’s sons Absalom and Amnon. Friedman goes on to make a fascinating observation: that the word “field” recurs repeatedly, as a kind of leitmotif, in these stories of sibling violence. Esau is a “man of the field”; Joseph begins the story of the dream that so offends his brothers with the detail that they were binding sheaves “in the field”; a woman attempts to persuade King David to pardon Absalom for his act of fratricide by inventing a story about one of her own sons’ murder of the other—a crime that took place “in the field”; the story of the conflict between Benjamin and the other tribes (narrated in Judges 20 and 21) twice refers to “field.”

  What Friedman deduces from all this is surely correct: that “the recurring word, therefore, appears to be a means of connecting the many instances of brother killing brother.” And yet there is, to me, something about this that is, once again, unsatisfyingly concrete. Indeed, even though he does go on to speculate about the psychological implications of the well-known fratricide motif—“it recognizes that sibling rivalry is felt by nearly all humans, and it warns us to be sensitive to keep our hostile feelings in check—and to be sensitive to our siblings’ feelings as well”—it seems, to me at least, that there is not merely a literary but a psychological resonance to the detail of all that violence taking place in the field; and Friedman’s failure to speculate about it leads me to wonder whether the commentator has any siblings. For it strikes me as psychologically natural (and we know that it is historically true) that if you are going to do something terrible to your sibling, to vent your rage for the resentment that has smoldered so long, you plan carefully to do it outside, someplace where you think nobody can see you.

  TWENTY MINUTES INTO our talk, Olga’s husband, Pyotr, arrived home from church. A small, surprisingly fit and muscular man of nearly ninety wearing thick glasses and a worker’s cap, he was dressed in an old suit of indeterminate color and a tight vest: a peasant in his Sunday best. He, too, immediately recognized the family name, and he told us things, too. That anyone who tried to help the Jews would be shot, for instance, which of course we knew—Nina had told us, and Maria had, too, and Nina had made sure to remind Olga as well, apparently, as we began talking to her. “Some Jews were employed in the local tanneries,” the encyclopedia had said. “Later, Jews were employed in lumber work at a special labor camp.” What Pyotr told us was that when, as a worker at the lumber mill, he tried to use some Jews to fill a workers’ quota, the Germans had threatened him. Do you really need Jews? he remembered them saying. Do you really want trouble? And as he said this I was torn between wanting to believe him, wanting to believe that the openness and friendliness that every Ukrainian we’d met on this trip had shown us, knowing that we were Jews, knowing what we were looking for, would have been shown in the past as well; and trying to be dispassionate—trying to remember, as these two and everyone else said how much the Ukrainians had tried, or at least wanted, to help the Jews, even as we sat across from these people, as we’d sat across from others who’d welcomed us so generously, even lavishly into their houses, as we’d sat across from Maria and Nina, that nobody has ever told a story without having some kind of agenda.

  We sat and listened to Olga and Pyotr, and for the first time I was glad not to have specific information about my relatives, because now that I was there I wasn’t sure I wanted to know which of these things they had endured. I thought of those people in the Dom Katolicki, forced to form a terrible human pyramid. Who were they? Whoever they were, they were not nameless supernumeraries; each was a someone, a person—a teenage girl, say—with a family, a story, a cousin, maybe, in America whose children might one day return and find out just what happened to her and try to restore her identity to her, if not for her sake then certainly for their own peace of mind…

  And then, as our conversation came to a close, and I realized that we’d get no closer to knowing anything specific about Shmiel and his family, that by being here in person we still hadn’t come any nearer to some fact, some detail that could either prove or disprove the stories we’d always heard (was there a castle nearby? I’d asked everyone we met, remembering what I’d overheard my grandfather saying, ages ago; and the inevitable answer came again, as I always knew it would, that there was no castle, no place to hide)—as our conversation came to a close we heard a final detail. Brought to a mass grave and shot. Pyotr recalled the final Aktion, when the Jews were marched to the cemetery and shot in a mass grave.

  Where was the road they walked on? my brother had asked.

  Olga hoisted herself up vigorously, pointed out the window, and said, Here! and Nina clapped a hand to her mouth in astonishment, apparently having never heard this story before, as if she couldn’t believe that something at once so enormous and so remote had happened right there. But it was, in fact, still that close. It was the same road we had walked to get to this house, the road where Maria had left us.

  Pyotr remembered further that in the last of the Aktions, as their neighbors the Jews of Bolechow were being marched, nearly naked, on this road—the few remaining Freilichs and Ellenbogens and Kornblühs and Grünschlags and Adlers, or whoever they may have been, the last of those generations of Bolechower Jews, the butchers and rag-and-bone men and timber merchants whose presence there, so completely unimaginable now, is nonetheless attested in the meticulously inked entries in long-forgotten censuses and business directories and now, however improbably, however bizarrely, available to anyone who owns a computer—that as the last of the Jews of Bolechow walked naked, two by two, to the deaths whose date and precise location appears on no official record, they called out in Polish to their neighbors—that is, to Olga, who was still standing and pointing out the window, and to the others—“Stay well,” “So long, we will not see each other anymore,” “We’ll not meet anymore.”

  As Alex translated Pyotr’s description of the death march of his neighbors, I remembered the exact timbre of my grandfather’s voice on the telephone when he would say “So long”: those opulent liquid l’s of the Polish Jews, a pronunciatio
n that has, now, nearly vanished from the earth. But this wasn’t why the anguished farewells stuck in my mind, and were the most terrible of all the details we heard that day. It was only later, after I’d returned to the States, that I realized that that single detail connected what we had heard, that one day in Bolechow, the day on which everything depended, to something I’d remembered from Shmiel’s letters: the self-conscious leave-taking, the unthinkable good-bye. I bid you farewell and kiss you from the bottom of my heart.

  SO LONG, WE will not see each other anymore.

  It is a matter of recorded fact that many of the most violent savageries carried out against the Jews of Eastern Europe were perpetrated not by the Germans themselves, but by the local populations of Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians; the neighbors, the intimates, with whom the Jews had lived side by side for centuries, until some delicate mechanism shifted and they turned on their neighbors. Some people find this strange—not least, the Jews themselves. More than one survivor I interviewed, in the years following that first trip to Bolechow, expressed bemusement, or anger, or rage that the people they had considered to be neighbors could, in the next moment, become killers.

  Cannibals, a women in Sydney would spit. I call them cannibals. We lived next door to them for years—and then this.

  Another of the Australians I later came to know consistently and rather casually referred to the Ukrainian collaborators as butchers, the way you might say that so-and-so is a real operator or someone else a real go-getter. One afternoon he said to me, Strutinski was a well-known butcher, he killed many people. And there was a butcher, Matwiejecki, who boasted that he personally killed four hundred Jews himself. There was also a family known as Manjuk—a family of Ukrainians, they spoke a perfect Yiddish, and two of the brothers turned against the Jews in the Holocaust and they killed many Jews, too.