The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (36 page)

That left only Shmiel, who, whatever had happened to him by 1944, was by then what must have seemed eons apart from the world of 1939, when he wrote the letters through which, I strongly felt, his voice could still be heard: proud, desperate, hectoring, bitter, hopeful, exhausted, confused. What, I tried to figure out as I listened to the Australians, had happened to Uncle Shmiel?

Jack said that he thought he’d been taken in the second Aktion, since no one had seen him afterward. But then, as Meg had reminded me, you couldn’t walk the streets after the second Aktion: many people hadn’t been seen after the second Aktion, but that didn’t necessarily mean they weren’t still alive. And yet if Shmiel had survived the second Aktion, then Frydka, whom Jack saw regularly after that—since she would often visit his house, which had been converted into one of the
Lager,
the group living spaces for forced laborers—would surely have said as much at some point, and he likely would have remembered. But Jack’s impression, even after seeing a lot of Frydka as late as November 1942, when everyone was in one
Lager
or another—because if you weren’t you were either dead or in hiding or had been transferred to the ghetto in Stryj—was that Shmiel had perished in September 1942, along with his wife and youngest daughter. So maybe Aunt Miriam’s information had been wrong. Perhaps it had been wishful thinking. (And indeed, as Bob would remind me when I met with him privately a few days after the group meeting, all throughout the occupation people simply disappeared, not necessarily during one of the organized Aktionen.
There were random people imprisoned, taken away
, he told me,
for instance the father of Shlomo Adler was taken away,
and because his mother chased after him, they took her as well, with his uncle
.) So perhaps Shmiel did go in the second Aktion, or perhaps he simply disappeared one day. Perhaps that elderly partisan in Washington, D.C., had been deluded. Perhaps he had taken the name of another Shmiel Jäger.

The more Jack and the other Bolechowers in Sydney talked, that afternoon, the more convinced I was that Shmiel had indeed gone with Ester and Bronia, in the second Aktion, which was the worst of all.

W
HEN DID THE
second Aktion start? I asked them.

Bob said, In August ’forty-two.

Meg said, slowly and emphatically,
September
. September the fourth, the fifth, and the sixth.

That’s right, Jack said.

Sorry! Bob said.

So Shmiel and Ester and Bronia went in that Aktion, I repeated.

It must have been the second Aktion, everybody said, because after that nobody had seen any of the Jägers except for Frydka and Lorka, who had already been working at one of the industrial camps in town, which is likely why they survived past the second Aktion.

They were in the
Fassfabrik
, the barrel factory, Jack said, together with the Adlers.

Of these Adlers, I knew, two had survived, two cousins: Shlomo and Josef Adler, both now living in Israel. Shlomo, I knew by now, was the self-appointed leader of the ex-Bolechowers, writing e-mails, organizing annual reunions in Israel of the town’s survivors. He was the youngest of all the survivors; after the murders of his parents he’d gone into hiding with Josef, when he was just thirteen. The other Bolechowers, I would learn, made affectionate jokes about Shlomo’s intense emotional investment in the dwindling little circle of Bolechow survivors, but to me it made a certain kind of sense: it was surely a way of staying connected to his parents, whom he’d lost so young. Shlomo, at any rate, had become in a way the official voice of what remained of Jewish Bolechow; it was he who had written my older brother, Andrew, after he’d seen the videotape of our trip to Bolechow, which Elkana, my cousin in Israel, had shown around; it was Shlomo who’d told us not to bother putting up some kind of monument because, he insisted, the Ukrainians would steal the bricks, the stone.

That was in the fall of 2001. In the summer of 2002, the summer that Bob Grunschlag had passed through New York City and stopped to meet me over
iced tea in my apartment, I got a call from Shlomo Adler, who said he was going to be in New York, too, and that he wanted very much to meet. One hot afternoon, he came to my place, where my parents had also come, eager to meet this man, a man of their own generation, who had known my mother’s relatives in Bolechow. We met, introductions were made; Shlomo loudly, proudly, recited a line of Latin poetry—of Vergil, I think it was—when he was told I was a classicist, something he’d learned in a Bolechow schoolroom a lifetime ago. He no longer knew what it meant. We all sat down. While I was showing him pictures from our 2001 trip to Bolechow, he paused before the picture of the town hall, the
ratusz
, the Magistrat.
This is where the second Akcja happened
, he said, pointing at the picture, using the Polish word for Aktion. Shlomo is a big-seeming man, with the solid build of a truck driver; he has a keen, hawkish face and talks with tremendous animation, the kind of person who will thrust a forefinger in the direction of your face when he wants to make a point. He is not someone whose bad side you’d want to be on, I thought that afternoon when we met. So I was surprised, that same afternoon, when, as he let his finger rest on the picture of the town hall, the place beside which the Jäger family butcher store stood for many generations until there were no Jägers left, the place where half of Bolechower Jews still living after the first Aktion, some twenty-five hundred people in all, were forced to gather during the first few days of September 1942, and from which, after much random killing in the courtyard of the
ratusz
had decreased that number by perhaps five hundred people, were forced to the train station and loaded onto the cars to Belzec—I was surprised, as this big, burly man pointed to Matt’s picture of the quaint-looking building, when his finger and then his whole hand, then his entire arm, began to shake so violently that my mother said, It’s all right, I’m going to get you a glass of water, which she did, and after a few minutes Shlomo quieted down and said, I’m sorry, bad things happened there…

So Frydka and Lorka had been in the
Fassfabrik
together with the Adlers, Jack was saying. But that was after the second Aktion. By then, they were likely the only surviving members of my family in Bolechow.

W
HENEVER IT HAPPENED,
everyone in Jack’s dining room agreed that the second Aktion was by far the most horrific and devastating thing that would happen to the Jews of Bolechow.

Why was this so? Because between the late summer and early autumn of
1941, when the first Aktion had taken place, soon after the Nazis invaded eastern Poland, and the late summer of 1942, when the second Aktion took place, the aims and methods of the German overlords of the occupied territories, the so-called
Generalgouvernement,
had shifted. Throughout the occupied eastern territories, in the late summer and autumn of 1941, the special SS formations, known as
Einsatzgruppen
, that had been detailed to kill the Jews of the occupied towns and cities did so more or less in the way that the Germans and their Ukrainian helpers had killed the thousand or so Jews who had perished in the first Aktion in Bolechow: they took them to forests and ravines or cemeteries, remote places where pits had been obligingly dug by, often, the locals, and they shot them there. But this method of eliminating Jews was proving to be too traumatic to the members of the
Einsatzgruppen,
it turned out. In what is considered to be the authoritative volume on the extermination camps of eastern Poland—the so-called Operation Reinhard death camps, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec—the author, Yitzhak Arad, explains that “the prolonged exposure of members of the
Einsatzgruppen
to the murder of women, children, and the elderly produced a cumulative psychological effect upon some of them and even caused mental breakdowns.” In support of this contention, which after all is well known by now, he cites an eyewitness report concerning a visit by Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler to Minsk in the late summer of 1941, where Himmler got to witness the shootings of a hundred or so Jews—a tenth of the number, it’s perhaps worth remembering, of those killed in the first Aktion in Bolechow:

Arad notes, in quoting this passage, that the word he translates as “finished” is
fertig,
which as we know can also mean “ready,” as when my grandfather would say, looking at his fourth wife, the one who had been in Auschwitz, as they packed for another summer’s visit to Bad Gastein, the Austrian spa she would so mysteriously insist on visiting each year,
Also, fertig
? So, ready?

Because the unfortunate SS men were
fertig,
finished, by the grueling demands of their tasks late in the summer of 1941, another method of solving the Jewish question had to be found. This turned out to be the gas chambers.
Arad cites the evidence given by Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, at his Nuremberg trial:

Out of consideration for the nerves of the SS, it was decided at the Wannsee conference, held on January 20, 1942, that the Jews of the
Generalgouvernement,
numbering (according to German estimates) some 2,284,000 people, were to be liquidated first, by gassing in specially designed death camps: Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor. This operation was eventually christened Operation Reinhard, to honor the memory of Reinhard Heydrich, who had been appointed Protector of Bohemia and Moravia by Hitler and who was assassinated in Prague in May 1942. Heydrich, we are told, had a passion for the violin.

All this is a matter of historical record. I only mention these few documentary details in order to explain why the second Aktion in Bolechow, the Aktion in which Shmiel, Ester, and Bronia were taken, according to the Sydney Bolechowers, was so different from, so much bigger and more violent than, the first.

The second Aktion in Bolechow was so different because it was part of Operation Reinhard.

T
HE SECOND
A
KTION
was the biggest Aktion, Bob said. It was over two thousand people.

Next to him, not looking at him but intoning the words slowly and distinctly, Meg said, Two and a half.

They took them to Belzec, Bob went on.

Yes, Meg said.

They were taken out to Belzec, which was an extermination camp, Bob said.

I knew this, of course.
My Little Town of Belz
.

Fairly nearby, no? I asked, prompting.

Well, Bob said, you know, a hundred fifty, a hundred sixty kilometers. It was just past Lwów, you know.

And this was in September ’forty-two?

They remember September, I remember August, Bob said, slyly.

Bob! Jack interjected. It was in the book that the German historian has written.

I can only tell you what I remember, Bob replied mildly. I don’t know what the historian says.

I secretly enjoyed Bob Grunschlag’s tenacity in the face of his older brother’s insistence—and, even more, in the face of Meg’s opposition; something about it underscored a quality I thought I’d perceived in Bob himself, something feisty, something sunburned and leathery after years on Bondi Beach. The younger sibling’s contentiousness, maybe. Although I was fairly sure, in fact, that he was wrong in this instance, his refusal to trust blindly in the historian’s printed words was something I shared, knowing as I did how easily it is to make even innocent mistakes—the eye that travels down to the wrong line when transcribing an entry from a faded piece of paper—let alone the more compromised kinds of errors we so often make, the mind that misremembers even fresh information because of the need to make certain random scraps of data into part of the stories we have been brought up to tell ourselves about the world, and which for that reason we cherish.

It is, of course, important to distinguish between kinds of errors—to agree on the important things, as Bob would later put it. But even so, small errors, when we become aware of them, have the effect of unsettling us, however easily they are explained away, forgiven; inevitably, they make us wonder what other mistakes, however well we can envision the circumstances in which they came to be made, however insignificant they are, really, might lurk in the stories and, even more, in the texts on which we so often blindly rely for the “facts.” Yitzhak Arad’s book, for instance, contains an appendix, labeled appendix A, which provides, county by county, the details of the deportations to Belzec of Polish Jews in Operation Reinhard during the late summer and autumn of 1942. When I first added this book to my library of books about
the Holocaust, the library that owed much, in the beginning, to my brother Andrew’s recommendations (
Masters of Death
is a must-read, he’d told me, and so I got it, because I am after all a younger sibling, too), I leafed through this lengthy and rigorously organized appendix, searching for the name
Bolechow
. There I read that in the county of Stryj, in the town of Bolechow, two thousand Jews had been deported, which of course I knew, for this information tallies with the various reports of survivors of and witnesses to the second Aktion. But Arad’s table also gives the dates of the mass deportations as August 3–6, 1942. This, naturally, is what Bob remembered, although Meg emphatically stated that the second Aktion occurred on the fourth, fifth, and sixth of
September
; and as we shall see in a moment, another survivor had recorded, just four years after the Aktion took place, that it had taken place on the third, fourth, and fifth of September. To my mind, the preponderance of the evidence suggests that the big Aktion took place during those early September days, and I suppose that Arad’s “August” was merely an error (easy enough to make, given the vast number of entries he was recording for “September”). Because I grew up hearing stories, because I’ve spent so many years searching in archives and know (for instance) that an entry that says “Kornbuch” must really have designated a woman called Kornblüh, because I have talked to so many survivors, as I’ve said, I’m not uneasy about this disparity between oral and written testimonies, between the date someone might give you when you’re conducting an interview and the information listed on a table in the authoritative book. After all, if you were to go online right now to the Yad Vashem Web site and search the central database of Shoah Victims’ Names for “Jäger” from Bolechow, you would learn—or, rather, think that you were learning—that there had been a young woman named Lorka Jejger about whom the following statement was true: