The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (31 page)

So she had a boyfriend, I thought.

As Meg lingered over this story, which she would tell me again a few days later, when I finally got to visit with her and old Mr. Grossbard—not, as it turned out, without some difficulty—I tried to think of why the name
Zimmerman
was ringing a bell. And then I remembered: on our last day in Bolechow a year and a half earlier, some old women had told us that they didn’t know anyone called Jäger but they’d known a family called Zimmerman; but I hadn’t wanted to stop and talk to them because people called Zimmerman had nothing to do with us.

I
ASKED
M
EG,
So you knew her since you were a small girl? Meaning Frydka.

Oh yes, we grew up together.

So did you know the other sisters at all?

She made a face. Of course, she said. The little one I didn’t know so much because she was small, but the others…

Her voice trailed off and she smiled sadly. I was very often at their place, she said after a moment. They were lovely, they were friendly. It was a very lovely home. Very warm, very friendly.

After a moment she added, It was one story, but spacious. It was painted white, I recall.

Again I was bewildered and frustrated—angry with myself, in a way. She had known them so well, and I couldn’t begin to think what kinds of questions might tease, from out of her memory, a living sense of what this vanished fam
ily had been like. I asked Mrs. Grossbard about Ester. We knew nothing whatsoever about her, I told her.

I mean—she shrugged—how would you like me to describe her? She was hospitable, she was friendly, and…I mean…I can’t tell you any more, because life…

Everyone was silent for a moment, and then Sarah Greene intervened with a laugh. She said, She was probably like all the other Jewish mothers!

Meg reacted. I had noticed, by now, that she didn’t like other people to have the last word; like everyone—like me, too, of course—she wanted control of her own story.

No, no, no, no, she said. She was very friendly, she had a cheerful personality. The father I haven’t seen very much because he was seldom at home, but the mother, she was always at home.

Like all the other Jewish mothers
gave me an idea. What if I started thinking about them as if they were just ordinary people instead of sepia icons? I decided to try to provoke Mrs. Grossbard.

You know, I said to her, you knew these girls when they were girls but also when they were teenagers. So did they have good relationships with the parents, did they complain about them?

She seemed confused, as if she couldn’t quite grasp what I was after.

Look, she said to me, slowly, we were very young when the war broke out…

Yes, I thought, I know. The Polish State Archives had sent me a copy of Frydka’s birth certificate. October 22, 1922. She was not quite seventeen when the war started, not quite nineteen when the Soviets retreated and the Germans came. Twenty-one, probably, when she died—if it was true that she had gone into the forest to join the Babij partisans in 1943, which of course there was no way of knowing with any certainty. I knew they had all been young when the war broke out, these girls, but I had a very faint sense, the instant when Meg retreated from talking about Frydka as a teenager, that she was doing so because the subject of Frydka as a teenager might lead to another subject that she was even less willing to discuss.

As it turned out, I was right.

Just then Bob Grunschlag interrupted. Who would dare to complain against their parents?! he said, grinning.

Everyone laughed. As people chuckled, I overheard Meg talking across the table to Jack in a low voice. She was saying: I don’t recall exactly when Frydka—she was with Tadzio Szymanski? She was with Tadzio?

Between my ignorance of Polish personal names, at that point, and the way she pronounced those last four words, which to my ear sounded like
she wass wiss stadziu,
it was impossible for me to tell exactly what the name was.

I asked who was this Stadzio or Tadzio Szymanski.

No, no, no, no, Meg immediately said. Her voice was firm; she must have been a formidable young woman, I thought. Then she adjusted her tone, lightening her voice to make it seem that this was someone of no great significance.

Frydka was friendly with someone, you wouldn’t know, but Jack would know. Meg looked, at that moment, right past Bob, to whom she said,
You
know nothing.

Then Jack turned to Meg and said, correcting her,
Ciszko
Szymanski.

Meg nodded Yes. Ciszko, she repeated.

To my ear it sounded like
Chissko
. Again I asked what they were talking about.

No, no, no, no. Nothing.

Nothing?

Jack said, I was trying to remember some boy, some non-Jewish boy.

Meg looked irritated.

Somebody was going out with a non-Jewish boy? I asked.

Now wait, Meg said. No, no, no, no. This is not to be in the records.

Jack laughed and pointed at me. See, he said, you’re learning some things here!

Everyone laughed except Meg. I had the feeling, which was, as often happens with these intuitions, at once vague but unmistakable, that I had tripped onto an old, controversial piece of gossip.

Meg looked at me and said, You know that American comedy, where he says “I know NUSSSSink”? Of course I knew:
Hogan’s Heroes,
the jolly Nazi POW-camp sitcom from the Sixties, one of whose characters was the obese Corporal Schultz, who although he invariably was a party to the adorable antics of the American POWs, would always insist to his
Kommandant
that he was innocent, that he hadn’t seen anything.
I know NUSS-ink!
he would cry, a line always played for laughs.

Well, Meg went on, when I’d nodded that yes, I knew that American comedy, I know
nussss-ink
!

But this wasn’t television. This wasn’t a comedy. The story that she wanted to keep from me was the whole reason I’d flown nine thousand miles to talk to her.

So Frydka liked this boy and he wasn’t Jewish, I persisted.

I don’t know, I wasn’t there, Meg said.

It would have been a big deal, no? I said.

Bob, gleeful at having an opportunity to tease her, leaned in again. It would have been a
very
big deal, he said. This drew a sour smile from Meg.

That’s an understatement. The understatement of the year, she murmured. But still she refused to confirm, in so many words, that Frydka Jäger had liked this Polish Catholic boy a lifetime ago, when such a romance would have been a very big deal; although now who really cared? My brother Andrew’s wife isn’t Jewish; Matt’s wife is Greek Orthodox. I wondered, for a split second during this exchange, what he was thinking about this revelation.

Meg stonewalled. I don’t know, I didn’t witness it.

I’m not asking you to
witness
it, I said, half joking. But she was your best friend, she must have been confiding in you?

Meg sighed. No, no, this was happening during the war. Not before. Heavens forbid!

I made a mental note of how she said
Heavens,
plural.

Nothing like this could have happened before the war, she explained.

This, of course, was as good as an admission. At that moment, Frydka, who until now had been a child’s face on a photograph or two, began to assume an emotional form, to have a story. So she had liked some Polish boy, I thought to myself with a smile, and he had liked her back.

And thinking that this was the story, a story that even as I heard it there, for the first time, I was preparing in my mind for subsequent retellings to my mother, her cousins, my siblings, when I got home, I leaned back in my chair and decided to change the subject for a while before I really alienated Mrs. Grossbard, who was looking unhappy. It was just then that Jack, leaning in from the end of the table and raising his voice, said, Let me tell you something. That boy lost his life because of Frydka.

Wait, I said. I’m sorry?

Jack lowered his voice. Everyone else at the table had stopped talking and turned to him. He looked at me and started talking again. Pausing for emphasis between each word, he went on, and what he said was this:

The. Boy. Lost. His. Life. Because. Of. Her.

There was a moment’s silence.

What do you mean? I said.

Well, you see, he began, these three girls were in Babij, the partisan group, because three Polish boys befriended them. Three Bolechower girls. Frydka, the other one was Dunka Schwartz, and the third one was…the sister of the two boys who survived with the Babijs, Ratenbach.

I had no idea who these people were, but I didn’t interrupt. I wanted him to go on.

These three boys befriended the girls, he went on, they helped the girls to get to the forest where were the Babij. It was a forest near Dolina, there were about four hundred Jews who were part of the partisans.

I nodded: he’d begun to tell me this story a year ago, on the phone.

Then of course we went to the forest ourselves, he went on, Bob and my father and I. So we lost track. When we came back, we were told that these three boys were—

He gestured vigorously with the flat of his right hand toward the side of the table, as if to demarcate a certain geographical area over
there
.

—were brought out in a field in Bolechow, he went on, and were shot.

Because they helped the girls, I said.

Because they helped the girls, he repeated.

And I thought, Now this is a story.

A
S IT TURNED
out, I wouldn’t get the rest of the story of Frydka and Ciszko until I had traveled further: to Israel, to Stockholm, to Copenhagen. That afternoon, in Sydney, we didn’t return to the subject of Frydka and Ciszko Szymanski, because it was clear that Mrs. Grossbard wasn’t going to talk anymore if we pressed the subject. So instead I asked them all to clarify the chronology of the Nazi occupation.

What was the day the Germans arrived? I said.

People were making indecisive noises when Meg said, more to herself than to any of us, The first of July, ’forty-one. I saw the first patrols, I saw them coming.

She added that three weeks later Hungarian fascist units arrived and stayed perhaps two months.

No, Jack interrupted; it was just a few weeks and then the Slovaks came.

Bob said he didn’t remember any Germans until September. Jack replied that “officially” the Germans entered on July 1 but they were preceded by the Hungarian units, who came through the mountains and stayed “a few weeks.”

The dates were relatively unimportant to me. What was the first thing that happened? I asked. I was trying to paint a mental picture of the onset of the horrors, in order to be able to place Shmiel in it, somewhere. What had they seen, what had it been like?

The first thing that happened, Jack said, was that the Ukrainians came and they started to kill Jews. Whoever had, you know, an account to settle—

Bob cut in. You know, if you had something with the Jews, you killed them. I’ll give you an example. After the Soviets retreated, that summer of ’forty-one, a lot of Jewish boys who’d been conscripted by the Russians had made their way home to Bolechow—they’d been drafted into the Russian army and were returning home. So the Ukrainians were standing on the bridge looking into the returning soldiers’ eyes as they came back, and if they thought someone was a Jew, they threw him down from the bridge into the river. And as it was a river with big boulders and so forth, you can imagine what happened.

I nodded, although of course I couldn’t really imagine, having never witnessed anything like what he was describing.

The reference to the river, the river beside which Frydka, at least, had frolicked—for by now, Meg had taken out and shown me all the snapshots from Pepci Diamant’s album, the snapshots of the girls on skis, the girls lined up in front of someone’s house, the girls in their swimming suits, peering comically out from behind the bushes at the water’s edge, staring into the camera as they snacked, their hair tied up in kerchiefs—triggered a long-forgotten memory. Once before, I knew, the Sukiel River, which flowed through Bolechow and in which my grandfather, as a boy, had fished for mountain trout, had become a place of terror. When I was growing up my grandfather used to tell a story about Bolechow during the First World War. Because the town was right on the front between the Austrian and Russian armies, he would begin, it was constantly being bombarded, and at the onset of these bombardments
he and his brothers and sisters—all except Shmiel, who was already away at the front, fighting for his emperor—would run into the woods outside of town for safety. Since, he would go on, sometimes these bombardments took place, terrifyingly, at night, his mother would make the children tie the laces of their shoes together and hang their shoes around their necks before they went to bed, so that if they had to run, they’d know where their shoes were. One night (he would say) the bombing began, but because my grandfather hadn’t listened to his mother—and this, naturally, was the point of my grandfather’s story; that you should always listen to your mother—because he hadn’t tied his shoes around his neck, he couldn’t find them when the bombs started going off, and as he and Ruchel and Susha and Itzhak and Yidl and Neche and their mother dashed out of the house and down the road toward the cover of the trees, they had to cross a branch of this river, the Sukiel; and because the bombs were going off in the water, the water was scalding and he burned his feet.