The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (4 page)

At some point I heard someone saying, It wasn’t the neighbor, it was their own maid, the
shiksa
. This I found confusing and upsetting, since we ourselves had a cleaning lady who was—I knew this was what
shiksa
meant—a Gentile woman; a Polish woman, in fact. For thirty-five years, my mother’s Polish cleaning lady, a tall, heavy-hipped woman whom we eventually considered to be, and acted like, a third grandmother, a woman who, as the 1960s turned into the 1970s, and the 1970s into the 1980s, came to have the same body type that (as it is possible to see from the few photographs of her) Shmiel’s wife, Ester, once had, came each week to our house and vacuumed and dusted and mopped and slopped and, in time, advised my mother about which bric-a-brac to put where. (
Iss the junks!
she’d scold about this or that bit of porcelain or crystal.
Throw him in garbage!
) After Mrs. Wilk and
my mother had become friends, and the weekly visits to the house devolved, over time, into increasingly long lunches of hard-boiled eggs and bread and cheese and tea at the kitchen table, at which the two women, whose worlds were less far apart than might at first seem likely (it was Mrs. Wilk to whom my grandfather, when he’d come to visit us, would tell his scandalous off-color jokes in Polish); after the years of Tuesdays when they would sit for hours and complain and share certain stories—for instance, the one that Mrs. Wilk eventually confided to my mother about how, yes, she and the other Polish girls of her town, Rzeszów, had been taught to hate the Jews, but they didn’t know any better—and also would gossip about the
pani,
the rich neighbor ladies who did not share their meals with their cleaning ladies; after this time, during which the two women became friends, Mrs. Wilk started to bring to my mother jars filled with Polish delicacies she’d cooked, of which the most famous, as much for the amusing sound of its name as for the sublime aroma they exuded, were something she pronounced “gawumpkees”: spiced ground meat wrapped in cabbage leaves, swimming in a rich red sauce…

This, and I suppose the fact that I did not grow up in Poland, is why I found it painful to think that Shmiel and his family had been betrayed by the
shiksa
maid.

Another time, years later, in a phone conversation, my mother’s first cousin Elkana in Israel, the son of the Zionist brother who had had the good sense to leave Poland in the Thirties, and a man who, more than anyone else alive, reminds me now of his uncle, my grandfather—with his air of omniscient authority and sly sense of humor, his largesse with family stories and family feeling, a man who, if he hadn’t changed his family name to conform with Ben-Gurion’s Hebraizing policies in the Fifties, would today be known still as Elkana Jäger, the name he’d been given at birth and, with minor variations in spelling, the same name that had once been borne by a homburg-wearing forty-five-year-old who fell over dead one morning in a spa in a province of an empire that no longer exists—my cousin Elkana said,
He had some trucks, and the Nazis wanted the trucks
.

Once I heard someone saying,
He was one of the first on the list
.

So I would hear these things, when I was a child. Over time, these scraps of whispers, fragments of conversations that I knew I wasn’t supposed to hear, eventually coalesced into the thin outlines of the story that, for a long time, we thought we knew.

Once, when I was a little bit older, I had the boldness to ask. I was about twelve, and my mother and I were walking up a flight of broad, shallow concrete steps toward the synagogue we attended. It was autumn, the High Holy Days: we were going to the Yizkor, the memorial, service. At that time, my mother was obliged to say Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, only for her mother, who had died so unexpectedly after entrusting a twenty-dollar bill to her (and she has it still: the bill is safely tucked in the red leather purse at the bottom of a drawer in her house on Long Island, and sometimes she will take it out and show it to me, along with my grandfather’s glasses and hearing aid, as if they were relics)—“only for her mother,” since everyone else was still alive: her father, his sisters and brothers, all of those who had come over from Europe, fifty years before, all of them except Shmiel. We were slowly ascending those shallow steps that evening so my mother could mourn her mother. Perhaps it was because I had blue eyes, like her and her mother, that she took me that day. The sun was setting and it had grown suddenly cool, and it was for this reason that my mother decided to turn back to the parking lot in order to get a sweater out of the car, and during that brief extra time before the (I thought) scary prayer began she started talking about her family, her dead relatives, and I brought up the ones who had been killed.

Yes,
yes,
my mother said. At that time she was at the acme of her good looks: the high cheekbones, the strong jaw, the wide, photogenic movie-star smile with its sexy prominent incisors. Her hair, darkened over time into a rich chestnut that retained some blond highlights that were the only sign, now, that she had been a towheaded girl, as her mother and grandmother had been, as my brother Matthew once was (Matthew, Matt, who had the slender, high-boned, somewhat elongated face of an icon of the Orthodox Church, oddly feline amber eyes, and a shock of platinum blond hair of which I, with my mass of kinky, unmanageably wavy dark hair, was secretly jealous)—my mother’s hair flicked in the stiffening autumn wind. She sighed and said, Uncle Shmiel and his wife, they had four beautiful daughters.

At the moment she said this a small plane passed loudly overhead and for a moment I thought she’d said not
daughters
but
dogs,
which threw me into a small turmoil since, although we knew so little, I’d always thought that at least we knew this: that they had four daughters.

My confusion lasted only a moment, however, since a few seconds later my mother added, in a slightly different voice, almost as if to herself, They raped them and they killed them all.

I stood there stock-still. I was twelve years old, and a bit backward for my age, sexually. What I felt, when I heard this shocking story—the more shocking, it seemed, for the almost matter-of-fact way in which my mother let this information slip, as if she were talking not to me, her child, but to an adult who had ingrained knowledge of the world and its cruelties—what I felt was, more than anything, embarrassment. Not embarrassment about the sexual aspect of the information I’d just been made privy to, but rather embarrassment that any eagerness to question her more about this rare and surprising detail might be misinterpreted by my mother as sexual prurience. And so, strangled by my own shame, I let the comment pass; which, of course, must have struck my mother as even odder than if I had asked her to tell me more. These things raced through my head as we once again climbed the steps to our synagogue, and by the time I was able to frame, elaborately, a question about what she had said, framed it in a way that didn’t seem inappropriate, we were at the door and then inside and then it was time to say the prayers for the dead.

I
T IS IMPOSSIBLE
to pray for the dead if you do not know their names.

Of course we knew
Shmiel
: apart from everything else, it was my brother Andrew’s Hebrew name. And, we knew, there had been
Ester
—not “Esther,” as
I later found out—the wife. Of her I knew virtually nothing at all for a long time besides her name, and, later, her maiden name,
Schneelicht
, which, when I was studying German in college, I was obscurely pleased to know meant “Snow-light.”

Shmiel,
then; and
Ester
and
Schneelicht
. But of the four beautiful daughters, my grandfather, in all the years I knew him, all the years I interviewed him and wrote him letters filled with numbered questions about the
mishpuchah,
the family, never uttered a single name. Until my grandfather died, we knew the name of only one of the girls, and that was because Shmiel himself had written it on the back of one of those photos, in the forceful, sloping handwriting that I would later become only too familiar with, after my grandfather had died. On the back of a snapshot of himself and his stout wife and a little girl in a dark dress, my grandfather’s brother had written a short inscription in German,
Zur Errinerung;
then the date,
25
/
7 1939
; and then the names
Sam, Ester, Bronia,
and so we knew that this daughter’s name was Bronia. The names are underscored in a blue felt-tip pen, the kind my grandfather preferred, in his old age, to write letters with. (He liked to decorate his letters with illustrations: a favorite was a sailor smoking a pipe.) This underscoring interests me. Why, I now wonder, did he feel it necessary to underline their names, which clearly he knew? Was it something he did for himself, as he sat in the nights of his old age, who knows when and for how long, contemplating these photos; or was it something he meant us to see?

This German formula,
Zur Erinnerung,
“as a remembrance of,” appears, sometimes misspelled, always written in Shmiel’s energetic hand, on nearly all of the photographs that Shmiel sent to his siblings in America. It is there again,
for example, on the back of the snapshot in which Shmiel is posing with his drivers next to one of his trucks, the image of the prosperous merchant, a cigar in his right hand, his left hand thrust into his trouser pocket, pulling the jacket away just enough so that you can see his gold watch-chain gleaming, his small, prematurely white mustache, in the toothbrush style made famous by someone else, neatly trimmed. On the back of this picture Shmiel wrote
Zur Errinerung an dein Bruder,
“to remember your brother by,” and then a slightly longer inscription that features the date: the 19th of April 1939. To his siblings Shmiel wrote only in German, although it was never the language they used to speak to one another, which was Yiddish, nor was it the one they used to speak to the Gentiles of their or other towns, which was Polish or Ukrainian. For them, German always remained the high, official language, the language of the government and of primary school, a language they learned in a large single schoolroom where once (I have learned) there had hung a large portrait of the Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Josef I, which was replaced, eventually, by one of Adam Mickiewicz, the great Polish poet, and then by one of Stalin, and then of Hitler, and then of Stalin, and then—well, by that point there were no Jägers left to go to the school and see whose picture might be hanging there. But it was German they learned, Shmiel and his brothers and sisters, in the Baron Hirsch school, and it was German that remained in their minds as the language in which to write of serious things. For instance (four decades after those siblings first learned their
Du
’s and
Sie
’s and
der
’s and
dem
’s and
eins-zwei-drei
’s),
What you read in the papers is barely ten percent of what is going on here;
or, still later,
I for my part will write a letter addressed to President Roosevelt and will explain to him that all my siblings are already in the States, and that my parents are even buried there, and perhaps that will work
.

German, the language for weighty things, was a tongue in which they read and wrote with only rare errors in spelling or grammar, perhaps only a few lapses into Yiddish or, even more rarely, Hebrew, which they also learned by rote when they were boys and girls during the reign of the emperor whose empire was so soon to be lost. Lapses such as one in the letter in which Shmiel wrote,
Do what you can to get me out of this
Gehenim.
Gehenim
in Hebrew means “Hell,” and when I read this letter for the first time, in a year as far distant from Shmiel’s writing of it as his writing of it was from his own birth, I caught a sudden vivid whiff of something so tenuous as to have been almost completely lost: a fleeting but intense moment, perhaps, from his and my grandfather’s childhoods, the way, maybe, their father might have lapsed half angrily, half humorously into Hebrew when he was scolding his children or complaining about what a
Gehenim
they’d made his life, little guessing in 1911 what kind of Hell his little town would become.