The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (21 page)

S
O 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.

They spoke a perfect Yiddish? I asked, bemused. This man in Australia nodded and explained to me that sure, many of Bolechow’s Gentiles, Polish as well as Ukrainians, spoke perfect Yiddish: that’s how close they all had been.

With a rueful grin he said, We were the first multiculturals.

It seemed to me that behind the rue, the bitter disbelief of the people I talked to, to say nothing of the incredulity with which most people confront the fact that near neighbors can easily murder one another, given the right combination of circumstances—a thing that we have seen, of course, more recently than 1941—that behind the bitterness and disbelief there is an assumption, rather generic and perhaps optimistic, that it is harder to kill those to whom you are close than it would be to kill total strangers. But I am not so sure. The crook and the flail, the broken arm, the iron leg braces, the terrible forced marriage,
I write to you saying that you’re out of your mind
. The only time I ever had the boldness to ask my father why he’d stopped speaking to his brother, an annihilating silence that lasted the better part of my entire life, he replied, Sometimes it’s easier to deal with strangers.

In, interior, intimus
. Closeness can lead to emotions other than love. It’s the ones who have been too intimate with you, lived in too close quarters, seen too much of your pain or envy or, perhaps more than anything, your shame,
who, at the crucial moment, can be too easy to cut out, to exile, to expel, to kill off.

It is perhaps worth noting that our medieval commentator, Rashi, is more interested in explicating God’s famous question, “Where is Abel your brother?” whereas our modern commentator focuses on Cain’s equally famous reply, which he translates as “Am I my brother’s watchman?” Rashi wonders why the all-knowing God bothered to ask Cain a question the answer to which God must have known. Here once again, his primary interest is psychological rather than literary. Why does God question Cain? “To enter [into a conversation],” Rashi says, “with words of calm” as an inducement to the guilty brother: “Perhaps he would repent and say, ‘I killed him and sinned against You.’” For the French commentator of the Middle Ages, God’s question has nothing to do with curiosity—how could it?—but instead reflects a touching psychological nuance: God’s desire to give Cain a chance to admit his guilt. When I read this I am reminded that apart from being a great sage, Rashi was a parent.

Friedman rightly refuses to render Cain’s words in their best-known form:“Am I my brother’s keeper?” He does so because the English word “watchman” nicely recapitulates a repeated motif in the Hebrew, which is an ongoing play in Genesis on the root of the word “watch,”
sh-m-r
. Thus man is placed in the Garden of Eden to work it and “watch over” it,
ul’
sham’r
ahu;
after man’s fall, the cherubim are assigned to “watch over”
(li
sh’m
’o
r
)
the way to the Tree of Life; and later on, God promises to uphold his word to Abraham and his descendants because Abraham “kept my watch”
(wayyi
sh’m
o
r
).
So the phrase is associated with loyalty—and, of course, disloyalty. It is in this context, Friedman argues, that we must understand Cain’s reply to God: “Now the first human to murder another questions cynically his responsibility to watch out for his brother.” It is only in the context of Genesis’s ongoing preoccupation with the idea of “watching over,” in other words, that we can fully appreciate the extent of Cain’s failure as a brother.

A
FTER WE TALKED
to Olga and Pyotr, we left Bolechow and returned to L’viv. Because I felt we had gotten something concrete, something specific, and hence was satisfied, and because we were all feeling somewhat drained, I was almost afraid when, as we were getting into the car, a group of old Ukrainian women ambled past through the square and Alex, trying to be helpful, shouted across the grass to them, asking whether they’d known a family called Jäger. The women looked small, framed against a large, two-story house that,
Alex told us, had undoubtedly once belonged to some Jews, as had most of the houses that fronted the Ringplatz. The three of them talked rapidly among themselves, and even from perhaps a dozen yards off we could see their silver dental crowns flashing. One of them, after consulting with the others, finally turned and shouted back at Alex, shrugging her arms in the universal gesture of innocent ignorance. She talked for a minute or so. Then Alex nodded to them and turned to us.

They knew no one called Jäger, he said. They only remember one Jewish family called Zimmerman. It means something to you?

No, I told him, I who knew the entire family history, the intricate genealogical trees; it meant nothing to us. We all got in the car, obscurely relieved, and started the drive back to L’viv.

On the drive back we were all quiet, trying to absorb what we’d heard—the details that, at last, we had about what happened, even if they weren’t the specifics of what happened to our relatives—which, it must be said, suddenly seemed less vital to have, now that we knew what we knew. But once we returned to our hotel a reactive volubility set in, and we all sat in the hotel lounge and talked late into the night about what we had seen and heard. Then we went back to our rooms. The conversation I had that night with Andrew, after we returned to our room, was very different from the one we’d had the night before, when we were still anxious and irritated and worried that we’d find absolutely nothing once we actually got to Bolechow. The night before, we had lain in the narrow twin beds of our hotel room, venting our minor irritations with each other and with the other siblings, something Jen had said that annoyed me, Matt’s glum irritation with Andrew, and at some point Andrew had said, Maybe you just can’t have a relationship with siblings.

Now, something indefinable had changed, and the air had cleared. Now we were excited. The trip to the town, the ebullience and hospitality of Nina, the translucent politeness of Maria, trying so hard to place a photograph of a face that, if she’d ever seen it, had disappeared off the earth two lifetimes ago, the cautious effusiveness of Olga and Pyotr—we had, after all, found something here; not exactly what we’d come for, perhaps, not
that
detailed: but we had made contact.

And so, filled with renewed energy at last, we all decided that we’d go back the next day, too—not to do more interviews, since we doubted we’d find anyone else, but to see the cemetery, to make at least a token visit to the place where members of my family had been buried for three hundred years.
We had no hope of finding specific graves. The headstones, we knew, would all be in Hebrew, eroded, and difficult to decipher; and besides, we knew that in these old Jewish cemeteries, family names were rarely used, since the custom was still the biblical one: here lies so-and-so, son or daughter of so-and so. And we knew, too, from an earlier visit Alex had made, that there were hundreds and hundreds of them. Another haystack; more needles. Still, we went.

The hour-and-a-half drive from L’viv to Bolechow seemed shorter the next day; we were all in high spirits, still talking about our discoveries of the day before. Our luck had changed. And indeed, as we pulled up alongside the little creek that runs along one side of the ancient cemetery, Matt started shouting.

Stop! Stop! Sima Jäger! Sima Jäger! he said, over and over, pointing off to the right.

Over where he was pointing there was one solitary headstone, there at the top of the hill. It had Roman rather than Hebrew characters, and what they said was:
SIMA JAGER
. Because I had been studying these people since I was thirteen, I knew right away that this was my grandfather’s great-aunt. We parked the car and scrambled up the weedy hill. We spent a great deal of time there, photographing headstones, videotaping them, and as we left, I did what Jews do when they visit cemeteries, which is to put a rock on top of the tombstone. I found a rock and placed it on Sima’s headstone, and took some other rocks from that place, too, to put on my grandfather’s grave once we returned to New York. Off in the distance, over by the edge of the cemetery where the procession of listing stones came suddenly to a halt, blond Ukrainian children were swinging in an old rubber tire from the arm of a great old oak. They were beautiful children, and Matt, who more than anything loves photographing children—although because of this trip, and the many others he and I would take together, for a long time he did nothing but photograph the very old—couldn’t resist pausing to take pictures of the towheaded, slender-faced boys and girls as they played among the graves of forgotten Jews. In one of these photographs, one of the boys has clambered atop a particularly large and solid-looking stone—clearly the monument of someone of no little stature. Long after we returned home, I noticed for the first time that the name on the stone was
KORNBLUH
. The inscription elaborates: it’s the grave of a girl who died before she could be wed…

We stood there, watching Matthew take his pictures. The largish patch of
earth over which the tire arced back and forth with its cargo of squealing children was subtly discolored and very hard, as if it had been tamped down on purpose, long ago.

A notorious problem of translation arises in the Cain and Abel story. What the Hebrew actually says at one point is “the voice/sound your brother’s bloods are crying to me from the ground.” Because
kol
, “voice” or “sound,” is singular yet both the word for “blood,”
d’mây
, and the form of the verb “to cry out,”
tso’akiym
, are plural, a way must be found to resolve the two when translating God’s statement. One way, followed by most translators, is simply to ignore the grammar and to translate the sentence like this: “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying…” But this is clearly incorrect, since a singular noun, “voice,” cannot have a plural verb, “are crying.” The editors of Rashi’s commentary, in their own translation of this passage, convey the odd syntax while making sense of it: “the sound of your brother’s bloods, they cry out to Me from the ground!” In other words, the phrase “The sound of your brother’s bloods” becomes, essentially, a slightly jagged interjection, but still, strictly speaking, syntactically disconnected from the actual statement, which is that there are things that are crying from the ground. (Rashi, incidentally, explains the strange plural “bloods” in two ways, one rather figurative and the other quite lit
eral. Rashi first thinks poetically: he imagines that the plurals refer to “his blood and the blood of his offspring.” He then thinks practically, the way a man would think who meant to do murder: “Alternatively, because [Cain] made in [Abel] many wounds, because he did not know from where his soul would depart.”)