The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (28 page)

Really!?
I would say, when I was thirteen or fourteen. The first time I said this, I was really amazed; thereafter I was, once more, merely doing my job, prompting him, being the straight man. You must have really known Hungarian fluently! I would exclaim. So say something to me in Hungarian!

At which point he would smile his special punch-line smile and say,
You know, I can’t remember a single word!
And I would marvel, then—truly, not as a pretense, and indeed even today I marvel—that you could know an entire language well enough to translate it, and subsequently forget every single word. How could you forget so much, I wondered then, when I was eleven and twelve and thirteen, when I had nothing, really, to remember yet; how could you forget something so utterly?

Anyway, it was in March 2003 that we made our long and remarkable trip to Australia, another family saga of long voyages, to find out what five Jews, every one of them far older than my grandfather was when he started telling me the stories of his epic travels, could remember about my relatives who had disappeared from history sixty years before.

Rashi’s analysis of the text of
parashat Noach
suggests that the noun that God uses to describe what he’s planned for men and animals, which we generally translate as “Flood”—the Hebrew
mabool
—is a word with subtleties far greater than the English translation can convey. Alert as ever to the nuances of etymology and diction, the great scholar toys with the components of the Hebrew—the letters
m-b-l
—and muses on three possible verbs, all containing the
b-l
cluster, each of which adds to our understanding of the shades of meaning that
mabool
could have (apart from “flood”). These are
n-b-l
, “to decay”;
b-l-l
, “to confuse”; and
y-b-l
, “to bring.” Rashi then remarks that all three of these words associated with mabool, “flood,” are apposite “because,” he writes, “it decayed everything, because it confused everything, because it transported everything.”

It is worth pausing here to note that Rashi’s linguistically subtle interpretation is enthusiastically seconded by the great sixteenth-century Bohemian scholar and mystic Judah Loew ben Bezalel (1525–1609), for many years the chief rabbi of Prague, who wrote that the Torah deliberately uses the resonant word
mabool
to describe God’s annihilation of mankind in order to convey simultaneously all three of the meanings that Rashi detected in those related verbs. This remark may be found in Rabbi Judah’s learned commentary on Rashi’s commentary on the Torah—a “supercommentary,” as scholars call it; the work is known to scholars by a title that puns on the rabbi’s German surname, which means “Lion”:
Gur Aryeh al HaTorah
, “The Lion’s Cub on the Torah.” It should be said, however, that Rabbi Judah owes his considerable fame, both within and outside Jewish circles, to another by-product of his intimacy with
Jewish scripture:
the Golem, the Frankenstein-like creature that the rabbi is said to have created from the mud of the Vltava River, using powers gleaned from his knowledge of the Creation story. This creature, meant to protect the embattled Jews of Prague from attacks fomented by hostile courtiers of the Habsburg monarch Rudolf II, ultimately ran amok, and in the end the rabbi had to destroy his own creation by removing from its mouth the
shem
, a tablet covered with mystical inscriptions. He is said to have then buried the lifeless clay in the attic of the Prague synagogue.

In any event, it is clear that both Rashi and his distinguished early modern commentator, who knew a thing or two about creating and destroying himself, agreed that the result of God’s dissolution of his Creation in
parashat Noach
was this: Decay, confusion, and vast movements over watery spaces. These, it would seem, are necessary for life to begin anew.

I
T TOOK
M
ATT
and me a full day to get over the immense change in time and season, once we arrived in Sydney. We spent most of the day after we landed in bed, although occasionally we’d leave the hotel and walk on the sunny waterfront promenade, across from which, as if to confirm that we were, indeed, in Australia, stood the famous Sydney Opera House. Like many iconic monuments I’ve seen in photographs before ever laying eyes on them in person—San Marco in Venice, Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain, the gate at Auschwitz, the little Habsburg-era townhall or
Magistrat
in Bolechow, across the street from which my family’s store had once stood—the Opera House was much smaller, much more human-scaled, than I’d imagined. As it happened, the little balcony of our hotel room looked right across a patch of clear water at the Opera House, and as Matt and I rather dazedly walked around that Saturday, trying our land legs after so many hours in the plane, after so many time zones, we’d go out onto the balcony every now and then and check to make sure that the Sydney Opera House was there, that we had really made it all the way here. We would stumble across the carpet of our hotel room, and gratefully we would look at the landmark: small, indifferent,
there
.

That was Saturday, a lost day. It was on Sunday that we met the people we’d come all this way to talk to.

In the weeks before we arrived, Jack reminded me that he wasn’t the only Bolechower who’d ended up in Australia. Apart from his younger brother, Bob, with whom he’d survived the war, there were some others “of interest,” he told me, whom I would want to meet: a woman who had been a friend of Frydka’s; a very elderly relative of hers who, amazingly, was old enough
to have known my grandfather when he still lived in the town; a man who had been Shmiel’s neighbor. And so Jack had invited everyone to his place in Bellevue Hills, near Bondi Beach—about a twenty-five-minute drive from our hotel in downtown Sydney.
Bondi Beach
meant nothing to me, but Matt repeated the name, clearly impressed, when I first forwarded him the fax Jack had sent me with information about local hotels and driving directions.

Bondi Beach!
Matt said. It’s incredibly famous for its surfers! People come from all over the
world
to surf there!

Well, I retorted, we’ve come from all over the world to talk to the Bolechowers there. I had a sudden dread that he’d want us to go surfing; he had been on the track team in high school, had jumped out of airplanes. But no, he was just amused: he loved the fact that a bunch of old Polish Jews had come to settle near a surfer paradise.

So on Sunday, we went to Bondi Beach. A taxi left us in front of Jack’s luxurious-looking apartment complex, and we took an elevator up to his floor. Look, Matt said with a sly grin, pointing out a metal plate affixed into the floor of the elevator on which the name of the manufacturer,
SCHINDLER
, could be read, We’re in Schindler’s Lift!

I rolled my eyes and said, Oy
vey
.

Jack greeted us at the door when we rang. He was a smallish, wiry man with a long face that was at once kindly and, maybe, a little sad: a prominent chin was offset by wary, melancholy eyes. A thatch of thinning gray hair was carefully combed across the sides of his head. He motioned with his right hand for us to come in. The apartment was attractive and comfortable, filled with sunlight that came in through floor-to-ceiling windows that opened onto a flower-filled balcony. The living room was all cream and blue; off to one side some glass-and-brass tables gleamed. There was a kind of careful neutrality about the pleasant taste of this home, something I had noticed, too, in Mrs. Begley’s apartment, with its spotless 1950s and 1960s china and blond-wood furnishings, the sleekly “contemporary” metal menorah. I had wondered about this, during my increasingly frequent visits to Mrs. Begley’s house, and only now, standing in the entrance to Jack Greene’s comfortable apartment on the other side of the world, did it occur to me that of course their homes bore no traces of the heirloom pieces you can see, for instance, in my mother’s house, the heavily framed old family photographs and antique marble inkwells and ancient brass menorahs (such as the one, with rampant Lions of Judah, that my grandfather left to my mother), the tiny paper bride and bridegroom that had stood atop my mother’s parents’ wedding cake in
1928. Of course there were no traces of the European past, of family history. They had all been destroyed.

We shook Jack’s hand and went inside. Waiting there were his wife, Sarah, a pretty, sweet-faced blonde with a gentle manner, and his daughter, Debbie, who I guessed was about my age or so, and who had Sarah’s open, pleasant, and pretty face with what I imagined had once been Jack’s dark coloring. I was struck by the fact that she had come to hear us interview her father and his friends, although she had, I guessed, heard their stories many, many times. But then, this I could understand: I too had been happy to hear certain stories over and over again, once.

Debbie told me that her husband and daughter would come later.
Lighter
, it sounded like to my American ear. I was just getting used to Australian accents—or rather, still getting used to the idea of Jews with Australian accents. Of course we knew that there wasn’t a country on earth that didn’t have its Jews, but that abstract knowledge was somehow different from being confronted by the reality of other people. Where I grew up, Jews had either Old Country accents—Polish, German, Russian, Yiddish—or rather pronounced New York accents. But now we were in Australia, where the Jews of my generation had Australian accents, just as they have English accents in England and French accents in France and Italian accents in Italy. The world is so much bigger than you can possibly imagine, if you grow up in a provincial place: a New York suburb, a Galician shtetl, it doesn’t really matter. Then you start to travel. My grandfather had known that. Now I knew it, too.

Also waiting for us in Jack and Sarah’s apartment, already seated at the dining room table, which had been laid with a white lace cloth, and on which Matt and I started, rather awkwardly, to unload all of our recording and photographic equipment, was Jack’s brother Bob. Bob I had already met. The previous summer, he’d been in New York and had looked me up, and over an iced tea at my place he had given me some details about how he, Jack, and their late father, Moses, had survived, by hiding in an underground, foliage-covered bunker in a forest just outside of Bolechow. Bob told me that they had escaped to this place, aided by a Ukrainian peasant, just before the final liquidations in 1943. It was a story, I knew, that they had told often, first in a book that had been written by a German journalist named Anatol Regnier (who was, more than one of the Australians would point out at various times, not without a certain incredulity,
married to a popular Israeli singer!
), and then in a documentary that had been made by a German television station on the occasion of Jack and Bob’s return to Bolechow in 1996.

Like Jack, Bob was of medium height, but he had a wiry, sporty presence. He struck me as a person who spent a lot of time outside, and I wasn’t surprised to hear, later, that he took brisk daily walks on the beach. I had spoken to Jack on the phone several times by the time I met Bob, and what struck me was the fact that whereas Jack, who was born in 1925 and hence was nineteen when the Nazi occupation ended in Bolechow, speaks with a pronounced Polish-Jewish accent, Bob, who was born in 1929 and was therefore barely a teenager when the war ended for him, sounds almost completely Australian. This difference in the way they speak took on, for me, greater resonance as my visit went on. Jack struck me as, maybe, more a citizen of the former world, maybe more Jewish; he liked to sprinkle his conversation with Yiddish and sometimes Hebrew expressions. Bob, by contrast, came to strike me over the next few days as someone determined to be free of the past. Perhaps the erosion of the accent, of the patterns and sounds that had once characterized his speech, hadn’t been an entirely natural process. He was clearly not very religious.

But then, Bob had retaind the family name, Grunschlag, whereas Jack had anglicized it. Things can be strange, between brothers.

So there were Jack, Sarah, Debbie, and Bob, waiting there for the Americans to come interview them. When we had made our way into the apartment, we saw that an elderly man was already sitting at the table, too. Jack had told me about him: Boris Goldsmith, who was eighty-nine, and who had lived across the street from Shmiel and his family. Jack had warned me that Boris was rather hard of hearing—throughout the afternoon he would keep reaching up to his ear to adjust his hearing aid—but when I met him he seemed clear and robust, and had a humorous, solid presence. He was wearing a tan and-black houndstooth check sport coat, and when he said hello and shook our hands, I noticed his mouth gleamed with metal. It was a look that I had, by then, come to associate with Eastern Europe.

Matt and I set up for the interview while we all waited for the appearance of the final guest, Meg Grossbard, who like Jack, like Bob, like the others, had made the improbable journey from Bolechow to New South Wales after the war. (You see, Jack had told me on the phone a year earlier, when he first called me, a lot of us had thought about fleeing to Australia before the war. So we kept the idea even afterward and ended up here eventually.) I would later learn that of Meg’s family—twenty-six people in Bolechow alone—only Meg, her husband, and his much older brother had survived the war. Meg and her husband had settled in Melbourne, where, as in Sydney, there was a sub
stantial population of survivors; her brother-in-law, Salamon Grossbard, had settled in Sydney. He had never remarried after his wife and child were killed. Now ninety-six, he was, Jack told me, too frail to attend the reunion in Jack’s apartment that day. But Meg had flown in from Melbourne for the occasion, and was staying at her brother-in-law’s apartment.

She will be here shortly, Jack told me.

I hope she won’t be too late, I said.

With an opaque expression Jack said, She’s very much her own person.

I was particularly anxious to meet this Mrs. Grossbard. This was only partly because Jack had reported to me that Meg (who had taken this English-sounding first name on arriving in Australia) had been Frydka’s best girlfriend; if I wanted to know about Frydka, he said, I should talk to her, since he himself could tell me only about Ruchele. But as interesting and crucial as this was to me, I was even more eager to get to Mr. Grossbard, even though Jack had told me that he was one of those who’d been taken east by the retreating Soviet troops that summer in 1941, and would therefore be unable to tell me anything about what may have happened to my family during the war: he had been deep in the Soviet Union the whole time that Bolechow was suffering under the Germans. It was during this time, indeed, that his wife and small son had been killed.

But I had my reasons for wanting so badly to meet this Mr. Grossbard. Born in 1908, he belonged to an earlier generation than that of Jack and Bob and Meg, who were, after all, the friends and schoolmates of Shmiel’s children, my mother’s lost first cousins. Nineteen-hundred and eight was the year in which my grandfather’s youngest sister, Neche, Jeanette, the doomed bride of their first cousin, had been born: and yet she’d been dead so long, seemed to belong so totally to the past, to the world of stories and family legends, that it was impossible for me to think of her, when I heard about Mr. Grossbard, as someone who could, conceivably, still be alive. This ancient man was the last Bolechower alive of my
grandfather’s
generation. Just as I had fantasized, when I first heard about Mrs. Begley, that she might once have known or even just met one of those lost Jägers, now I fantasized that perhaps this old, old man had, as a child, known one of the Jäger children, perhaps in the Baron Hirsch school, perhaps at
cheder
, Hebrew school, perhaps at play in the unpaved streets of the town; and if he even just remembered the name of one of them—my grandfather, perhaps, or hopeless Uncle Julius or maybe Jeanette—he would not only restore them, if only for a moment, to the present, but would, in a way, restore to me something even more precious. If I
had begun to think of my travels in search of Shmiel’s family as a kind of rescue mission, to salvage from the past some shards of their lives, their personalities, then I also thought of this particular trip, with its possibility that I could talk to this old, old Mr. Grossbard, as a mission to rescue something of my grandfather.

So I secretly hoped. If things went well with this Mrs. Grossbard, I thought to myself, I would find a way to persuade her to let me talk to her brother-in-law.

A
S WE WAITED
for Meg’s arrival, we all sat down at Jack and Sarah’s dining table, laid with its lacy cloth. On it Sarah had placed many cups and plates, ready for coffee and cake; when Meg arrived, we would begin to eat, and to talk. In the meantime Jack looked through the photographs I’d brought, both old family pictures and pictures of our trip to Bolechow.

You know, he said, we used to have Yiddish nicknames for every town in the area.

Nicknames? I repeated.

Sure,
Jack said. (He used the word emphatically and often, as he also used
That’s right,
a phrase he tended to utter with a slight Polish inflection,
det’s rhight,
while giving an emphatic downward nod of his head.)

For instance, Jack went on, you would say someone was a
Bolechower krikher,
it meant
crawler
.

Krowler
.

Why? I asked.

Because you had to crawl around—there were so many streets and neighborhoods! He smiled, amused by this memory.

So many neighborhoods? I repeated. I was confused, since I’ve always thought of Bolechow as tiny. When we had been there, my brothers and sister and I, it seemed to consist of little more than the Rynek, the big square; the road leading in from Striy to the north; and the road leading out toward the cemetery. As is would turn out, we had seen very little of the town. There was in fact much more.