The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (33 page)

Frydka used to go to the high school in Stryj on the train, Jack was saying. And she was a tall girl, I remember, you know, the girls—

He put a hand out and said, Wait, I’ll bring a bag.

As I looked on, bemused, he hurried out of his living room and returned a few seconds later with a battered old briefcase, so that he could do a proper impersonation of the long-dead Frydka hurrying off the train with her schoolbag.

You see, he now continued, Everyone carried their bags like that—he walked a few steps, holding the briefcase low at his side, as if it were loaded heavily—because they were loaded with books. But Frydka was a tall girl, an
energetic
girl, and she used to walk like
that
.

Thrusting the bookbag to his chest and bracing it with one arm, he strode purposefully forward, imitating Frydka.

He said, She was always one of the first to come down from the train each day, and she used to carry it like that.

But Frydka must wait. Now, I wanted to know about Ruchele, this girl who, however placid she may have been, nonetheless had a certain spirit, knew what kind of boy she wanted to go out with: an overachiever, maybe, like her father.

So how long did you go out with her? I asked Jack.

A year and a half, two years, he replied.

What do you remember of her parents? I asked. Did you see them often?

Jack made an amused face. Of course! Remember, you knew
everyone
. It was a little shtetl. I knew the parents, I knew the sisters. But I didn’t speak to them, didn’t talk to them…. Everyone had a nickname.

The day before he had been telling me about the nicknames of the towns; now he was telling me about the nicknames of the townspeople.

Jack suddenly said, The
król
! I had an aunt, my mother’s sister, she called Shmiel Jäger the
król
—the king. I think she must have been very fond of him.

It was difficult for me to think of Shmiel as someone people had emotions about other than grief.

Jack went on, smiling to himself, She talked about him. The king this, the king that. The
król
. It must have been—well, his appearance: he was the head of the butchers’ cartel, you know there was a butchers’ cartel, and he was the boss. It was kosher meat, of course, and every Jewish home had it that could afford it.

I thought to myself how happy my grandfather would have been, to hear this Bolechower boy talking about Shmiel like this.

You see, Jack told me, My father was very well-to-do, but he never dreamt of a car, even a horse and cart. But Shmiel Jäger…In Bolechow there were only two cars, and one of them belonged to Shmiel Jäger.

But I didn’t want to talk about Shmiel just yet, either; I had to finish, first, with Ruchele. I took out the picture of her that had belonged to my Aunt Sylvia, a picture I’d mailed to Jack long before I met him, after we’d talked on the phone; a photograph from his past, not mine, which I had sent to him without ever thinking what its impact on him could possibly be.

He picked it up tenderly and smiled.

Yes, you sent me. That’s how she looked, she was a beautiful girl. You can see the smile. Beautiful smile. That’s how she looked in ’thirty-nine. She had a beautiful fur coat—not a full fur, just the collar.

Unconsciously, he patted his lapel.

When was the last time you saw her? we asked.

The last time I saw her was Yom Kippur in 1941, he said. We were praying outside of the
shtiebl,
Jack went on.

Shtiebl
was a word I hadn’t heard in years: a little shul, a little prayer-house, usually in a basement, in part of another structure; perhaps in some disdain, my grandfather used to call the Lubavitch synagogue he attended at the end of his life a
shtiebl,
the little place on Eighth Street in Miami Beach, which he attended not because he liked Hasidim, which in fact he didn’t, but because it was the only shul within walking distance from his apartment building, the building where, eventually, he killed himself.

We were praying outside of the
shtiebl,
Jack was saying, and the backyard of the
shtiebl
bordered on the backyard of a girlfriend of hers, Durst. Yetta Durst. And I saw Ruchele there.

I thought, not for the first time, Every single name he mentions in passing was a person, a someone, a life. Maybe Yetta Durst had had a cousin, an uncle in New York. Maybe it would be possible for the child or grandchild of that person, a man or a woman of forty or so, to begin a search for the lost Yetta Durst, a search that would, eventually, take him or her to Australia, where he would talk to Jack Greene….

Yetta Durst, Jack repeated, remembering. As he pronounced the name again I detected the tiniest whiff of satisfaction: he was glad he had remembered her name.

And so I saw Ruchele there and I remember I was praying and she came,
it was outside, I prayed outside and she was playing in the backyard with that girl…or maybe she knew I’d be there.

Matthew asked, And what did you say to her?

Not much, Jack said, after a moment.

He was pensive.

I don’t remember…We hadn’t broken up but it had cooled off. I was still very keen, but she wasn’t. I personally think she felt that she needed someone more mature. That’s what girls are more interested in. That was Yom Kippur 1941. That was the last time I saw her. And then you know, four weeks later was the Aktion. She got killed four weeks later, Jack said.

I
T WAS, IN
a strange way, odd to be reminded of her death just then. I felt like I was just getting to know her.

I have often tried to imagine what might have happened to her, although every time I do, I realize how limited my resources are. How much can we know about the past, and those who disappeared from it? We can read the books and talk to those who were there. We can look at photographs. We can go to the places where these people lived, where these things happened. Someone can tell us, it happened on such-and-such a day, I think she went to meet some friends, she was a blonde.

But all this is, inevitably, approximate. I have been to Bolechow, but the town is now so physically transformed—many buildings vanished or altered beyond recognition, the bustle of the 1930s eroded to nothing after sixty years of Soviet stagnation and poverty—that the Bolechow I visited in 2001 bears only an imperfect resemblance to the place Ruchele had to walk through in the hours before her death. And even if (say) a photograph of the town existed today that had been taken on October 28, 1941, the day Ruchele was seized, could such a photo give me a precise sense of what she saw as she walked to the Dom Katolicki? Not really. (We don’t, of course, even know which route she took, whether she kept her head bowed or looked up trying to get one last glance; we don’t even know if she
knew
that this would be her last walk through the town.) So there is the problem of visualization. And what about the other senses? Bolechow, we know, had a particular smell, because of the chemicals used at the many tanneries—over a hundred in number, we are told. So as Ruchele walked to her death that day, did she smell the tangy smell of Bolechow? What is the smell of a thousand terrified people being herded to
their deaths? What is the smell of a room in which a thousand terrified people have been kept for a day and a half, deprived of toilets, a room in which the stove has been lighted, a room in which perhaps a few dozen people have been shot to death, a woman has gone into labor? I will never know. And what is the noise that they make? A witness might have written or said, People were screaming and crying, the piano was being played, but the worst screaming I have ever heard in my life was, I am fairly certain, the screaming of my younger brother Matt on a day nearly forty years ago when I broke his arm, and to be honest I can’t really remember the
sound
of it, I merely remember that he was screaming; and the worst crying I have ever heard was the weeping at a funeral of a friend who died too young, but my suspicion is that the quality of the sound of screaming made by young boys who have been injured, however severely, is not the quality of the sound of screaming made by (say) middle-aged men who have had their eyes cut out, or have been forced to sit on hot stoves; and, by the same token, the sound of perhaps sixty people weeping at a funeral is not the same as that of a thousand people weeping in fear for their lives. It is, indeed, likely that if you were to read a description of what went on during the two days of the first Aktion in Bolechow, the images and sounds you would supply to yourself, mentally, would be images and sounds you’ve acquired from films or television, which is to say images and sounds produced by people who have been paid to reconstruct, to the best of
their
ability—based on whatever reading, visiting, and looking they have done, extrapolated from whatever experiences they may have had—what such events might have looked or sounded like, although that, too, is just an approximation, ultimately.

So there is, too, the problem of the other senses.

You might say, Well, these details aren’t the important things. And it’s true that we know certain
kinds
of things that happened, and that these are important to know and remember. But part of my aim, since I first began to pursue what could be known about my lost relatives, had been to try to learn whatever scraps of details about them might still be knowable, what they looked like, what their personalities were like, and yes, how they died, if anyone could still tell me that; and yet the more I talked to people, the more I was aware of how much simply can’t be known, partly because the thing—the color of her dress, the exact path she took—was never witnessed and is, therefore, unknowable now, and partly because memory itself, of those things that were witnessed, can play tricks, can elide what is too painful or be trimmed to fit a pattern that we happen to like.

I think it is important to be aware of this even as we try to
envision
what happened to Ruchele and the others, which we really cannot do.

What might have happened, then, that day? Although things were tense and frightening by October 1941, there had been no organized mass killings yet. And so Ruchele had (possibly) made a plan, that Tuesday, to meet up with some of her girlfriends. She leaves the single-story, white-painted house, maybe promising Ester, her mother, a stout and friendly woman, that she wouldn’t be long. She goes down Dlugosa toward the Rynek. Perhaps she catches sight of her girlfriends and waves to them, walks toward them. And then, suddenly, the Ukrainians, the Germans, dogs barking, some strange-looking officers shouting to go that way, along with the others, to come this way. The three school friends are frightened, but at least they are together. Now they are walking with a big crowd, toward the Dom Katolicki, where they used to go on dates to the movies.

And yet the mind halts again, for it is useless to pretend that I can imagine the suffering of Ruchele Jäger during the next day and a half. Even if I have some idea of what happened, during those thirty-six hours, there is no way to reconstruct what she herself went through. For one thing, no one who survived saw her. (Decades earlier, my mother had been told that the girls had been
raped and killed by the Nazis
. Had Ruchele been raped in the Dom Katolicki? Impossible to know, now.) For another, too little remains of her personality to know, to even begin to imagine, what her state of mind might have been even for a second of those hours.

Still. Even if I assume that Ruchele herself was not beaten, raped, or killed during the thirty-six hours in which she and a thousand other people were held in the Dom Katolicki, certainly it is possible to have some broad notion of what it would have been like, as a sixteen-year-old, perhaps overly sheltered girl of a certain era, to witness other people being killed, tortured, raped, shot. To watch, for instance—an incident Jack mentioned to us when we talked to him alone—as the rabbi you have known since you were a young child has his eyes cut out, has a cross cut into his chest, and is then forced to dance naked with another terrified young woman…

H
OW DO WE
know what happened there?

Olga told us what she had heard, when we were in Bolechow: the human pyramid.

Jack told us about the cross that was cut into the rabbi’s chest, a thing he cannot have witnessed. (I had asked him, during that conversation, how he knew for sure that Ruchele had perished in this particular Aktion. Had he seen her being taken? I stupidly questioned. He laughed grimly.
If I would have seen her, I would have been dead too!
So how did he know? Because
afterwards
, he said, a little impatiently, she was
missing
.)

Bob Grunschlag later told me that, incredible as it sounds, on the day the first Aktion started, after his mother had been taken from her house and his older brother pulled from where he and Jack and Bob had been hiding in a hayloft—Bob and Jack weren’t discovered, although the searchers’ pitchfork came within inches of Bob’s face, he told me—he’d eventually emerged from the hiding place and sneaked under cover of darkness to the Dom Katolicki to see what was going on there. The D.K., he and the other called it, pronouncing it like this:
day-kah
.

The rumors, he said, were that they were taking the Jews who had been rounded up to some work place. And as it was the end of October it was already winter, so I thought we’d better take for Mother some woolen things, so the maid packed them up. We had heard by then where they were being held, in the D.K., the clubhouse. So I went there.

But Bob was spotted by some Ukrainian boys—there was a big crowd of Ukrainians hanging around outside the building, craning for a look inside (among them a boy who would grow up to be a man whom I interviewed two years after this conversation with Bob)—and ran back home.

The woolens, in any event, were unnecessary.

So Bob, although he had gone there to look, hadn’t actually seen what was going on. How, then, did they know—how did the stories leak out?