Read The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million Online
Authors: Daniel Mendelsohn
Bob explained to me that a neighbor of theirs, Mrs. Friedmann, had miraculously survived, after a Ukrainian woman persuaded the Germans to free her. She got out and she came to our place twenty-four or thirty-six hours later, Bob said, and she told us what happened. She saw my mother inside, she saw my brother. You see, they took my mother first, so she didn’t know my brother was there also, until Mrs. Friedmann pointed out to her that her oldest boy was there, too.
He stopped talking, and I didn’t speak for a moment. I was thinking, as he must have been, too, how much happier his mother would have been not to know that her eldest son, Gedalje—who was surely named for his father’s father, the same Gedalje Grunschlag whose name proudly appears in the 1891 Galicia Business Directory—was also waiting to die in the D.K.
After a moment, Jack added, It was the hall I went to with Ruchele maybe eight months earlier to see the movies.
A
BOUT SOME THINGS,
then, we learned from Mrs. Friedmann. And it might seem to be enough, in order to at least suggest the horror that my cousin Ruchele Jäger experienced during the last thirty-six hours of her life, to know what Mrs. Friedmann told the Grünschlags and what the Grünschlags later remembered and subsequently told me and certain others. The rabbi with the cross cut into his chest, the obscenity of the blinded rabbi forced to dance onstage with the naked girl as someone played the piano, this same blinded, mutilated rabbi immersed, finally, in the sewage of the D.K. outhouse.
But it is possible to learn in still greater detail what went on in the Catholic community center. The following is a translation of a document that I obtained from Yad Vashem in the summer of 2003, a few months after I visited Australia, when I went to Israel to interview certain other “ex-Bolechowers” (as they like to call themselves) whom I’d found out about from my Australians. The document, in Polish, is a transcription of the testimony of a certain Rebeka Mondschein, which was given on the twentieth of August 1946, in Katowice, Poland, where Mrs. Mondschein had moved after the war. On that date, when the stories were still fresh, still rich with all the details that time has since stripped away, she was twenty-seven years old. What she said about the first Aktion was this:
On Tuesday 28 October 1941 at 10 am, two cars arrived from Stanisławów, they drove up to the town hall. In one car were Gestapo men in black shirts. In the other were Ukrainians in yellow shirts and berets with shovels on them. The latter immediately drove to Taniawa to dig one large grave. From the city hall in a half hour a Ukrainian was assigned to each Gestapo man and these pairs went with a list set by city hall for the town.
The list consisted of the wealthiest and most intelligent Jews. The Gestapo men were wearing battle uniforms. The people thought that they were collecting for a workers’ brigade. After two hours they were indeed taken according to the list. On the list were: Rabbis Landau and Horowitz; Dr Blumental; Landes, Isaak; Feder, Ajzyk; Frydman, Markus; Dr Leon Frydman; Chief Dogilewski, his daughter jumped out a moving car though four months pregnant and escaped. It was 160 people in all.
The director of the Gestapo, the notorious Krüger, arrived from Stanisławów. He played around in the town hall for half an hour and then left. The action was coordinated by Gestapo Officer Schindler. The militia was also taken. At
12 o’clock, they started taking people from their houses and the streets. Near houses where a Gestapo man left, a crowd of Ukrainians arrived, who poured into the house to rob it after the Jews were led to the town square. The Gestapo men, Ukrainian militia members and innumerable young Ukrainian civilians, among them ten year old boys, chased them through the town. They sent the Jews to the Dom Katolicki on Wołoski Field. They all had to fall to their knees and keep their faces to the ground. Jews who thought they were being taken away for work took a few warm things with them, rucksacks and valuable things. At the entrance to the Dom Katolicki, a Gestapo man ordered them to give up all valuable things and money on pain of death. Money was found on the wife of Abeg Zimerman, who had to undress like everybody else in the hall. She was shot right there. There were more such incidents. After an escape attempt through a window, indeed the only such attempt, Ajzyk Feder was shot.
Nine hundred people were packed into the hall. People were stacked on one another. Many suffocated. They were killed in the hall, shot or simply hit over the head with clubs and sticks, right there in the hall.
Isaac Landes had such a completely crushed head, that later, when 29 corpses murdered in the Dom Katolicki were taken to the cemetery and his son, Dr David Landes, examined all of them, he didn’t recognise him. People were beaten without any reason; for example, Gestapo man Schindler threw a chair in the face of Cyli Blumental and shattered her face, for amusement, in excess. The rabbis were especially targeted. Rabbi Horowitz’s body was literally chopped and shredded. Rabbi Landau was ordered by one of the Gestapo men to stand naked on a chair and declaim a speech in praise of Germany. When he said that Germany is great, the Gestapo man beat him with a rubber stick, shouting “You’re lying!” After that he shouted, “Where is your God?” In the hall in the centre of the crowd the wife of Beni Halpern started to give birth and at the same time she was bewildered and started shouting. A Gestapo man shot at her, but only injured her, so he got her with a second. She lay there until 30 October. The chemist Kimmelman also died there in the hall. Completely naked, Szancia Reisler, the wife of Friedmann the lawyer, had to dance naked on naked bodies. At midday, the Rabbis were led out from the hall and there is no trace of them. It is said that they were thrown into the sewer.
The people were kept in this way from 28 to 29 October without food or water until 16.00. At 16.00, they were all taken by car to the woods in Taniawa, 8– 10 km from Bolechów. About 800 people were shot there. There was a board over a ditch onto which people were forced and they were shot and fell into the grave; some were badly injured others only just slightly. Ducio Schindler escaped from there in the evening. He climbed a tree and waited out the whole execution and
filling in of the grave. He told us everything. On the next day, 30 October 1941, Commissioner Köhler ordered the Judenrat [the all-Jewish governing council, appointed by the Nazi authorities to act as intermediaries between the Germans and the Jewish community and to carry out their orders] to clean up the hall of the Dom Katolicki, to take the 29 bodies to the cemetery.
The Gestapo demanded payment for the ammunition expended. The Judenrat had to pay. Beyond that, they forced them to pay 3 kg. of granular coffee for labour expenses.
So now it is possible to know what happened, even if it is difficult to reconstruct with any certainty what happened to Ruchele. She was picked up, most likely, sometime after noon on Tuesday, the twenty-eighth of October, as she walked the streets of her hometown with her girlfriends. She was then herded toward the Dom Katolicki, and there probably witnessed certain of the events described above—although we must keep in mind that the Jews who were forced onto the floor of the D.K. that afternoon were told to keep their heads down, and that those who got up off the floor were often shot dead on the spot, so maybe it’s better, instead of saying that Ruchele
witnessed
some of what happened, to say that she mostly
heard
shots, screams, shouts, taunts, the piano playing, the footfalls of the awkwardly dancing feet on the stage.
It is possible (to go on) that the sixteen-year-old Ruchele was killed there, as we know some people were. It is, indeed, possible that she was the naked girl on the stage, with whom the rabbi, his eyes running blood, was forced to dance, or forced to lie on top of. I prefer not to think so. Then again, if she survived those thirty-six hours, as some did not, we know that at around four o’clock on the afternoon of October 29, a Wednesday, after spending the previous day, night, and morning in a state of terror that it would be foolish to try to imagine; after weeping with thirst and hunger and, undoubtedly, soiling herself with her own urine, for nobody can go a day and a half without relieving herself, she was then taken, exhausted, hungry, terrified, filthy with her own bodily fluids, something it is hard, perhaps even embarrassing to think about, a disgusting, deeply shaming experience for any adult, but a possibility I must consider, as I try to imagine what happened to her; she was taken to Taniawa—whether she walked the few kilometers or was put in a truck, it is impossible to know—and there, after waiting in even greater terror while watching group after group of her neighbors, people she’d seen around the little town her whole life long (well: sixteen years) line up on a
plank and fall into the pit: after watching this, she took her inevitable turn, walked naked onto the plank—with what thoughts it is impossible to know, although it would be difficult not to imagine that she was thinking, in those last moments, of her mother and father and sisters, of home; but perhaps (
you’re a sentimental person,
Mrs. Begley had once told me, in part dismissively and in part indulgently), perhaps for the most fleeting moment, she thought of Jakob Grünschlag, the boy whom she’d dated for a year and a half, his dark hair and eager smile—and standing on the plank, or perhaps at the edge of the freshly dug pit, with the bodies beneath her and the cold October air above, waited. The cold October air: we know that she was naked by this point, and between the weather and the terror, surely she was shivering. Again and again, as she waited her turn—unless she was the first?—the sounds of machine-gun fire rang out. (This was not the death that people came, in time, to hope for, if it was their bad luck to be caught.
The shot to the back of the neck, what did they call it in German—the “mercy shot”
? Mrs. Grossbard had asked no one in particular, the day all the Bolechowers gathered. She made a gun with her hand and pointed to the back of her own neck.
I can’t think of it. When I am upset I can’t remember things
.)
So: the rattling bursts of gunfire, the cold, the shivering. At some point it was her turn, she walked with the others onto the plank. Likely this plank had some give, perhaps it bounced a little as they lined up: an incongruously playful motion. Then another burst of fire. Did she hear it? Was the fervent activity of her mind at this moment such that she didn’t really hear; or, by contrast, were her ears exquisitely attuned, waiting? We cannot know. We know only that her soft, sixteen-year-old body—which with any luck was lifeless at this point, although we know that some were still alive when they fell with a wet thud onto the warm and bleeding, excrement-smeared bodies of their fellow townsfolk—fell into the grave, and that is the last we see of her; although we have, of course, not really seen her at all.
A
ND ALL THIS
happened most likely because she had left her house and gone for a walk to meet her little group, the three school friends, late the previous morning.
Only one-sixth of the Jewish population perished that day, Jack told us. (Only.) But three-quarters of those four girls perished that day.
I noticed, not for the first time, that the verb Jack invariably uses of those who were killed is
perish,
which, to my ear, lent a slightly elevated, perhaps
biblical flavor to his conversation when he would discuss those who did not survive the war.
Kill
and
dead
are Germanic words; the clipped finality of those brief monosyllables—in German as in English,
Tod
as well as
dead
—leaves, as it were, no room for argument.
Perish,
on the other hand, from the Latin verb
pereo
, the literal meaning of which is “to pass through,” feels more ample; it always suggests to me a realm of possibilities far beyond the mere fact of death—a feeling that’s confirmed by a glance at the entry in the rather old Latin dictionary I own:
To pass away, come to nothing, vanish, disappear, be lost; To pass away, be destroyed, perish; To perish, lose life, die…To be lost, fail, be wasted, be spent in vain; To be lost, be ruined, be undone
. Given what I know, now, after talking to all the Bolechowers now alive, I have come, myself, to prefer
perish
over all other verbs, when I speak of those who died.
Three-quarters of those four girls perished that day
, Jack had said.
And so you knew, I said.
He paused for a moment.
Well, he said,
they
knew…I remember. Father was in Judenrat—my father was a member of the Judenrat, so I asked him what happened to the Jäger family, so he told me, One girl perished. And then I found out it was Ruchele.
This he told me when all of the Bolechowers were gathered at his dining table. The next day, when Matt and I returned to Jack’s home to interview him alone, he told me a slightly different version of this story.
The Aktion took place on the Tuesday, he said. And Tuesday night my father arrived home. He was in the Judenrat. They had taken away Mother from home, but my father was away in the Judenrat. He thought they’d take him, so he ran away and arrived that night to our home. So you know, I don’t know whether that evening or the next morning, I started to ask him, Whom did they take? I asked, What about the Jägers? And he said, One of the Jägers’ girls. So I asked, Which one? And he didn’t know, he didn’t know or he wouldn’t tell me—I don’t even know if they knew I was dating her. And two or three days later they sent me to my aunt’s house—you know, I took it bad, losing my mother and my brother.
I couldn’t think of anything to say.
So I went to stay with my aunt for a few days. So I remember in the evening—maybe in the afternoon, maybe in the evening, at night—I came to ask, One of the Jäger girls they took—which one? And they said, Ruchele. So it hit me again. I didn’t sleep that night, I remember my aunt didn’t know why, she thought that I was still…after the death of my mother…