The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (68 page)

He lived in Shmiel’s house?

Adam gestured with his hands, sketching a floor plan. Alena said, To the house of Shmiel they built an extension. So he was living, the brother of his father was living in the extension. And he brought his wife from Lwów, and he rented this room from Shmiel, and lived there with his wife and daughter.

It seemed clear to me at this point that this was the family connection between the Jägers and the Kulbergs that Adam had remembered from his childhood; this would explain why he’d spent time around Shmiel’s house, as a boy, and had consequently known them so well: Shmiel the big fish in the small pond, pretty Ester, the daughters—not two, not three, but
four
—of whom he remembered Lorka and Frydka so clearly. The one fair, the other dark.

Adam seemed to be reading my thoughts, and said something to Alena. She said, But if we’re connected to the Jägers, he says it’s not this, it’s because they are
family
, the Jägers and the Kulbergs.

Her father corrected her and she listened for a moment and then said, No, not Kulbergs—Kornblühs.

Adam looked at me and said,
Kornblüh!

Kornblühs! I repeated excitedly. We’re related to them!

No! Alena said, incredulous. He also! His grandmother was a Kornblüh. Ryfka Kornblüh was the mother of his father.

I said, Well that’s how we’re related. My grandfather’s grandmother was a Kornblüh. Neche Kornblüh. She came from a family of butchers, too.

Adam and Zofia watched this exchange, smiling tentatively. Now Alena translated it for her parents, and as she spoke they beamed. Adam talked for a while to his daughter, who nodded occasionally and then told me a story. Ryfka Kornblüh, she said, she lived…well,
there
was the Magistrat and
then
the Russian church, and
just
in the neighborhood of the Russian church she was living. He talks about her
very
often. They had a place in the market, with vegetables. And she had sixteen—no,
seventeen
grandchildren! So the grandchildren, when they met, would always make jokes that when they visited her they got the spoiled vegetables—the leftovers. Not that it was true! She died before the war, but her husband died very young. My father is named after him, his name was Abraham Kulberg.

Adam said something. Alena said, But he says that his grandfather when he was born was registered as an illegitimate child, with the mother’s, not the father’s, name—Abraham Kornblüh, not Abraham Kulberg.

Of course I thought, at that moment, of another document I was familiar with from long ago: the 1847 birth certificate of my grandfather’s uncle Ire Jäger.
Der Zuname der unehel. Kindes Mutter ist Kornblüh. The surname of the illegitimate child’s mother is Kornblüh.
I asked Alena to tell her father that, by a curious coincidence, in our family, too, there had been this business with “illegitimate” children; and in our case, too, the mother had been a Kornblüh.

So we are related! Alena said, smiling.

I looked at her, at her father, the room, the book-lined walls, not so different from my own apartment. I thought, If you were making this up, it would seem too pat: the man we nearly missed hearing about, the trip we nearly didn’t make, the instant sense of connection that we had felt with this family, a university professor and a musician, a family with whom my own family in the States, a family of writers and journalists and filmmakers, of pianists and harpsichordists and, long ago, of violinmakers, had so much in common. And then the discovery, also almost accidental, that this family
were
our family.

I looked at Alena and her father.

We’re cousins! I replied.

O
N THAT SAME
night, after we’d moved from the sitting room to the dining-room table, on which the roast duck that Alena had prepared was now waiting, Adam told us what he knew about Frydka and Ciszko.

He said he knew the Szymanskis very well, that they’d lived in the same neighborhood as the Jägers. Alena paused, and Adam then related an anecdote I’d heard before: that the Szymanskis, who had always been known for having friendly relations with the town’s Jews, were known for the excellent Polish sausage they made. Now, as Adam put it, To eat not kosher, or ham, it was a terrible thing!—

(Oh, yes, I thought, we knew)

—a terrible thing. But in the Szymanski shop there was a special room where the Jews would come and, in secret, try a piece of bread with ham.

Adam laughed as he told the story, and Matt said, A secret place!

Szymanskis, a secret place. I asked, What did Ciszko look like?

Adam said that Ciszko had been very big, quite strong. Not tall, but not small either. He had a very good relationship with the Jewish kids in town, Adam said. He didn’t wonder that it was Ciszko who’d tried to save Frydka.

I asked Alena to ask her father exactly which story he’d heard. Then I said, No, ask him first
how
he heard it.

Immediately after the war, Adam said, at the very beginning, everybody was hungry for information. So people searched for information, for stories. He said that somebody from Bolechow had made an appointment for the Bolechowers to meet in Katowice after the war, at the beginning of 1946.

It was there, Adam said, that everybody was talking about what had happened to the people they’d known, swapping the stories they’d heard, and this is when he’d first heard the story about Frydka and Shmiel and Ciszko. With an apologetic smile, he added that he didn’t remember who he’d heard it from.

But Meg Grossbard had been at that meeting, he added.

I said to Alena, Tell him that Meg isn’t telling the story.

Alena gave me a puzzled look and said, She doesn’t remember?

I explained to her about Meg, how in Australia she’d refused to talk about it.

I told her something that had happened more recently, only last month, two weeks after I’d returned from Israel…

T
HE PHONE HAD
rung late one evening in my apartment in New York: it was Meg. The connection wasn’t terribly good, but even so I could hear the tightness in her voice.

I have to come to Frydka’s defense, she announced after we’d said hello. She went on, There is nobody to defend her now.

I immediately saw what was going on. Somehow she’d found out that I’d heard the story that Frydka was pregnant.

They’re only stories, Meg said. They can’t be proved. Just write the
facts
.

I told her that I, too, was interested in facts, of course, that we had started out on this long series of journeys because we wanted to find the facts. But I said that because of what we’d heard on our trips, I’d also become extremely interested in stories, in the way that the stories multiplied and gave birth to other stories, and that even if these stories weren’t true, they were interesting because of what they revealed about the people who told them. What they revealed about the people who told them, I said, was also part of the facts, the historical record.

I said, Some stories aren’t the
whole story.

Meg said, And what is behind these stories? I can tell you lots of stories of what is behind these stories. There are personal grudges. If someone didn’t like your family, they told a story.

It was as if she were reading my thoughts, which at that moment had nothing to do with the information that she claimed to find so scandalous: that Frydka had been pregnant with Ciszko’s child. But of course I didn’t say anything.

She said, And how did they know she was pregnant? Who saw her? Who
saw
her? If somebody knew about it, she knew it, and Ciszko knew it, and that would be all.

In Anna Heller Stern’s apartment, Shlomo had told me a story about a man he’d known from another town who’d been a member of the Jewish police in that town. He did not behave nicely (Shlomo had said) but had started his life over, had joined the Polish army. Apparently during the time this former Jewish policeman was in hiding, after he’d run away from the Jewish police, run away from this town to save himself, he’d written down an account of everything he’d seen.

He wrote them when he was hiding in a cellar, Shlomo had said. Very, very strong words!
Very
. It says only things that
he
saw, things that
they
saw that nobody else saw, nobody was able to see. He described some things that were
horrible
.

I thought of this and wanted to say to Meg that a Jewish policeman could have seen that Frydka was pregnant, on the day she was dragged from her hiding place in the house of the art teacher, Mrs. Szedlak (or, as Adam also referred to her, Szedlakowa); but of course I couldn’t, now, bring up the subject of Jewish police. So I said nothing.

Meg said, If people talk, it’s just orally. But when you see the written word, it’s different.

I said, I know.

…S
O
M
EG WASN’T
going to share the story, I now told Alena with a wry smile, as we sat in her dining room in Copenhagen.

Matt said, But what was the story he heard?

Adam and Alena talked for a while. She said, He heard that Ciszko tried to help her. And the idea was that Frydka and her papa should hide by Szedlakowa.

“Her papa” had a strong effect on me, for some reason, and for a moment I couldn’t say anything. It’s all he’d been, in the end, all and everything: somebody’s papa, a dad. I thought this, and then I registered her use of the word
by
. “By Szedlakowa.”
Zey zent behalten bay a lererin.

Alena said, She was a teacher. Then she said, disconcertingly, I’m so sorry, it’s a cliché!—

I had no idea what she was talking about.

It’s a cliché, but I have to go check the oven! I grinned with relief and Alena got out of her chair and darted off to check on the dessert. While she was gone, her mother spoke up, and in halting but forceful English finished translating what Adam had said.

And they was together, Frydka with Ciszko, by the teacher Szedlakowa. Somebody say this to the Germans, and Germany killed both Frydka and Ciszko. He hear, but if the story is true or not he cannot say.

Germany, she had said, although I knew she meant
Germans.
Well, I thought: either way.

She was hiding in the house of this teacher?

Yes, in the house, Zofia said.

I nodded and said, So the story is that this woman had Frydka in her house, and also Ciszko?

Alena took her seat again and said, Yes. No. He said Ciszko was only visiting Frydka, and bringing her things, food, whatever, but he was not staying there, he hid her there. What happened to that Szedlakowa, my father does not know. He only knows that they killed her and Ciszko.

Alena passed me a platter and, leaning toward me, said, It’s a heroic story!

As we all started eating dessert, she turned to me and said, But how will
you tell it? Before I had a chance to answer, she told me about some friends she had in New York, people her age, whose family had stories—
terrible stories,
she said—about the war. Now these people had a child, Alena went on, a daughter in her early twenties, who’d just taken her degree in literature, and who had written her thesis about her grandmother, the one who’d suffered those terrible things. Alena said that this young woman had given her the thesis to read, and while reading it she had been struck by something.

She said, It was like what she was interested in was not so much the story of her grandmother but how to
tell
the story of her grandmother—how to be the storyteller.

I thought of my grandfather and said that, yes, it was a very interesting problem.

She described how caught up in the thesis she’d become, against her initial expectations. With great animation she said, I felt that when I was reading it, like in the end, it got closer and closer to the important things, the things about the war. At first it was as if she was telling a common story, a story everybody could tell, but it got narrower and narrower.

After a moment I said yes, that’s how my grandfather used to tell stories. The long windup, all that background, all those Chinese boxes; and then, suddenly, the swift and expert slide into the finale, the finish line where the connections between all the details you’d learned along the way, the seemingly irrelevant facts and subsidiary anecdotes he’d lingered over at the beginning, suddenly became clear.

I said to Alena, I know, I know. This girl she knows, I thought, must be very clever. So many people know these horrible stories by now, after all; what more was there to say? How to tell them? One way, I supposed, was to get narrower and narrower toward the end, the way my grandfather did.

At that moment Alena said, Narrower, yes. It’s always the small things. It makes it like life. The most interesting thing is always the details.

I said to Alena, It’s a very tricky, a tricky problem. But, I went on, the story we learned on this trip was a far more dramatic story than anything we could have dreamed of, when we first started looking for information. It’s a story that would, as we say in English, tell itself.

To myself I thought that this was a bit of a lie: here we were at the end of all our travels, and still I had no definitive story to tell. The finale was still lacking, the one thing that would lock it into place, account for all the discrepant versions: Ciszko hid her, a schoolteacher hid her, she was pregnant, she was pregnant by someone but not by Ciszko. I know nussink, I see nussink. But
even as I thought this I also thought, For whose benefit, exactly, is the wholeness that I want so desperately? The dead need no stories: that is the fantasy of the living, who unlike the dead feel guilt. Even if they did need stories, surely
my
dead, Shmiel and Ester and the girls, had much more of a story now, and far, far more details, than anyone could have dreamed of even two years ago; surely that counted for something, if as some people think the dead need to be appeased. But of course I don’t believe this: the dead lie in their graves, in the cemeteries or the forests or roadside ditches, and all this is of no interest to them, since they have, now, no interests of any kind at all. It is we, the living, who need the details, the stories, because what the dead no longer care about, mere fragments, a picture that will never be whole, will drive the living mad. Literally mad. My grandfather had a nervous breakdown in middle age, not too long after that day in 1946 when my mother came home from school and found him sobbing with his head in his arms at the kitchen table of their apartment in the Bronx, a letter like none other he had received from Bolechow in all those years of writing back and forth to Shmiel—a correspondence of which we have, after all, only one half, and of which the other half could have consisted of letters saying
Dear Brother, We have tried everything but cannot come up with the money, but we will not give up
, or then again
Why don’t you ask Ester’s brothers first?:
an incompleteness that, while I would never claim that it’s driven me mad, has kept me up on certain nights. My grandfather had a nervous breakdown when he was not much older than I am now, and I’m not so sure anymore that it was about business pressures, as I have heard, just as I am no longer completely certain that when he killed himself, that Friday the thirteenth in Miami Beach, it was only a cancer that was eating away at him.