The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (12 page)

Then the son said he thought his father was getting tired. I was relieved. We all got up and shook hands—Eli’s was surprisingly firm—and Susannah and I began to turn in the direction of the door. Looking at no one in particular, Eli said, again,
Shmiel Jäger, Shmiel Jäger
. A shiver of embarrassment coursed through the room, and the son, apologetically, explained that his father hadn’t been doing so well since his mother died last year.

It’s too bad you didn’t come a couple of years ago, he said. He could have told you a lot.

Since then, I’ve heard those words, or variations on them, many times; but at the time, because it was fresh, the phrase hurt me. It was painful to think of how much more it would have been possible to know, if only I’d started two years, even a year, earlier.

I was thinking this, nodding at the son and making a sympathetic face, when suddenly Eli Rosenberg looked straight at me and said one more thing, one single word that had, somehow, in that final moment, been able to get past the ruined axons and blasted synapses and rise to the surface before sinking back forever, and what he said was:

Frydka
.

Listen:

T
HE EARLIEST KNOWN
photograph of Shmiel is the picture in which he is sitting in his Austrian army uniform next to that other man, the standing figure whose identity seemed destined to remain a mystery. In this picture Shmiel is remarkably handsome, as we have all been told he was: ripe jaw, full lips, even features, the beautiful hollows of his eyes, deep-set, blue…well, I know they were blue, even if this picture can’t tell us that. Shmiel came of age at a time when, if you were this handsome (and often if you weren’t), people would say,
You could be in pictures!
or
You should be an actor!
and that’s what we always heard about him: that he was a prince, that he looked like a movie star. This picture is much more studied and, despite the wear of nine decades, of a much finer quality than the others we have, and indeed it’s obvious that it was taken in a photographer’s studio—perhaps the one that belonged to the family of the girl he would marry, once the war ended and the empire he’d fought to defend had vanished, the nation whose emperor, Franz Josef, people always said, was good to the Jews, and hence was rewarded by those
grateful, grateful Jews, who always had their official names and their Yiddish names, Jeanette and Neche, Julius and Yidl, Sam and Shmiel—was rewarded with Yiddish nicknames of his own:
untzer Franzele,
“our little Franz,” or
Yossele,
“Joey.”

In this photograph, Shmiel is seated, stiffly posed on a chair, wearing the uniform of the Austro-Hungarian army, the artificiality of the setting and the pose made immaterial by the softness, even sensuality, of his looks. Dreamily, as if distracted during the long and tedious process of making this picture, he’s looking off to the left, while at his right is standing the other soldier. This man is much older, plain-looking, stolid but not unpleasant-looking, wearing a mustache (Shmiel hasn’t got his yet). Although when I first looked at this picture a long time ago I knew that this other soldier must have had a life, a family, a history, it seemed to me then, as it does even now, that he is in that picture to serve an almost aesthetic purpose, the way a commercial photographer today might wittily place a diamond on a piece of coal in a jewelry advertisement: I feel that he is there to make Shmiel look more beautiful, and therefore to conform more perfectly to the legend of his own good looks. Still, this other man, while not attractive, while clearly older than Shmiel, seems kindly: his thick arm rests in a friendly way on his younger companion’s right shoulder.

For years I knew this picture through a photocopy I had made in high school: my mother kept the original, which had come from her father’s precious album, along with others like it, in a sealed plastic baggie in a carton stored in a closed cabinet in our basement. On the carton she had written, in Magic Marker, the following:

FAMILY:
ALBUMS

Jaeger

Jäger

Cushman

Stanger

Cushman was the maiden name of my mother’s mother; Stanger was the maiden name of my father’s mother, Kay, and of her sisters Sarah, the one with the long red nails, and Pauly, the writer of so many letters.

The original of the wartime picture of Shmiel was in these boxes, but I myself kept only the copy of the obverse, of the image itself. It was that photocopy that I subsequently took and pasted into an album of old family pictures
that formed the basis of what would become a rather large archive relative to my family history. This is why, for a long time, I had in my possession only the image of the two men itself, but not the inscription that I knew had been written on the back.

I know, however, that I must have looked at that inscription at some point, for the following reason:

The only time I can remember being allowed to handle the original was when I was doing a presentation for my tenth-grade history class, in a unit devoted to European wars. I can’t remember now whether it was World War I or World War II we were studying, but either way the picture would have been appropriate to bring into that class. I know for a fact that I must have brought the original photograph into class to display, this stately picture of my youthful great-uncle in his Austro-Hungarian uniform from World War I, because for a long time afterward my mind’s eye retained an image of what had been written on the
back
of the photograph by my grandfather, in his looping cursive hand, in red felt-tip pen. I remembered what had been written because I so clearly remembered the reaction to those words of my high school history teacher, who when she read what my grandfather had written clapped a hand to her handsome, humorous face, when I brought the original into class that day thirty years ago, and exclaimed, “Oh, no!” What my grandfather had written on the back—or at least, what I long remembered of what he had written—was this:

That much, at any rate, I would remember, not least because I was a little shocked by Mrs. Munisteri’s reaction, so used was I to knowing about what had eventually become of the beautiful young man in the picture, so inured had I become to the phrase
killed by the Nazis
. And that is what subsequently lodged in my memory, after my mother swiftly replaced the photograph in the labeled boxes of family documents and photographs from which it was briefly allowed to escape, for the purpose of making a strong and necessary point in a high school class.

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
!

A
T 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.