The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (71 page)

Finally, Bumo heard the news that he’d been longing for: some local people told him that they knew where he could apply to join the Polish regiment. He applied. Two weeks later, he was on a train from Tashkent to Moscow to a place called Divovo on the Oka River, where the unit was being trained, and where he happened to run into Amir Sapirstein, a famous thief from Bolechow. The young recruits lived in a vast forest. Their heads were shaved. Discipline was severe. Late in 1943, at which point Shumek and Malcia Reinharz and Jack Greene and his brother and father and Anna Heller Stern and Klara and Yankel Freilich and Josef and Shlomo Adler and Dyzia Lew were all sealed tightly and silently into their hiding places, Bumo Kulberg, in a for
est by the Oka River, watched as three other young men who, like him, had thought that they wanted to become fighters against the Germans, but unlike him had tried to desert, were executed in a clearing in the wood. One was a Jew from Warsaw. It was so cold that the faces of the three bound men, who begged the commander for their lives at that point and promised they would fight for Poland, were, Adam remembered, the color of violets.

In December Bumo was heading west toward the front. They stopped in Kiev. Berdetsov. They kept going west. They entered Polish territory. The weeks went by. He was in Lublin where, unbeknownst to him, his former neighbor Chaya Heller was pretending each day to be a Catholic girl called Anna Kucharuk; he was in Majdanek. A mere four kilometers from the center of Lublin, Majdanek was a camp that had begun life as an SS-run POW camp at around the time the first Aktion was taking place in Bolechow, but six months later became the site of killing operations that lasted until July 1944, by which time three hundred sixty thousand Jews, Poles, and prisoners of war had been gassed there. In Majdanek, Bumo found, everything had been burned; the Germans were covering their tracks. When he and the others got there, the crematoria were still hot. Bumo walked through the camp and saw, he said,
mountains of suitcases, mountains of photographs
that had once been keepsakes of the lives of Jews and were now indecipherable rubbish. For reasons he couldn’t quite explain, he took a few photographs and saved them.

He kept going. From September 1944 until January 1945 he sat with his army across the Vistula from Warsaw doing nothing, although the Soviet army, with its little Polish regiments, was supposed to be the ally of the Poles of Warsaw who were attempting to rise against the Germans; doing nothing because Stalin, who was already considering the postwar picture, wasn’t interested in having a brave and active Polish resistance around after Germany had been crushed. It was at this time that Bumo Kulberg became an officer. After the Warsaw Uprising had been stomped to nothing, his army ground ahead into German territory. From April 15 to 16, 1945, Bumo fought in the offensive against Berlin. In some tiny part because Bumo Kulberg, a boy from Bolechow, was fighting there, Berlin fell.

And so the war in Europe was over, and with it the Holocaust. What had begun the night of November 9, 1938, on
Kristallnacht
, had finally come to an end. Bumo Kulberg was not quite twenty-four years old. In Bolechow, the number of Jews who had emerged from their attics and cellars and chicken coops and forest bunkers was precisely forty-eight.

Nearly sixty years later, the old man who young Bumo would become fin
ished telling this story by saying, I am not the only one, there were thousands of Jews fighting in all the armies of the world.

He paused and added, So I do not feel that I am something exceptional.

D
URING ALL THIS
time, during all these adventures, Bumo had no idea what had become of his family. He had traveled and traveled, had walked across a good part of Asia, always thinking about his mother and father and Chana and Perla and Sala, but never knowing what had happened. As he sat with the Soviet army outside of Warsaw through the late months of 1944, this thought possessed him. He wrote a letter to a Polish family he knew well in Bolechow, called Kendelski, who had been his neighbors before he’d left town and begun his journey. He addressed the letter to Bronia Kendelska, but it was from her sister Maria that he finally received a reply, as Berlin fell.

Adam Kulberg has this letter still, and that evening in Copenhagen he took it carefully in his hands and read it aloud to me and Matt. He would read a sentence or a phrase, and then Alena would translate, occasionally offering commentary at points where she thought it necessary.

The letter sounded like this:

(Alena stopped for a moment and said, This Kubrychtowa woman claimed that the house was the property of her parents! Then she went on reading.)

(“
Israelites
,” Alena interrupted, I must say to you that in Polish when you say “Israelites,” it sounds very curious, like you don’t want to mention the word
Jews.
So you say Israelites)—

That was the end of the letter. Adam stopped reading and Alena stopped translating. There was a little silence. Then she said, It’s the letter that changed my father’s life, you know?

We remained silent. Adam said something to Alena, who then said to us, He says that in first years after the war, whenever he was going somewhere by train, he would always watch all the faces because he always thought, Maybe I will recognize somebody, somebody from my family.

Adam watched her translate this and said after a moment, I always look at the few pictures of them, and every night I say good night to the family, the Bolechow family.

Alena paused and then said to me,
I
am saying this to you: my father is living with those people every day, they are very real and very alive for him. Looking at the pictures, every night, saying good-bye to them.

I, who had spent three years searching for people I could never know, said nothing. Matt said, Let me take his picture holding the letter.

Adam got up slowly, and they went over to the window. Once again I heard the
k-shonck
of the shutter of his Hasselblad. Then they returned to the table, and it was time for us to go. We’d spent far more time talking about Adam’s adventures than about Uncle Shmiel; but in the end it didn’t seem to matter. There were no more stories to tell.

As we were getting up from the table and gathering our things, I had the feeling that there was something I wasn’t remembering. Just as we got to the door, I thought of what it was.

Ask your father, I turned and told Alena, if he wanted someone who was reading my book to know something about Bolechow, one thing that should be remembered, what would it be?

She relayed the question to her father, and after she stopped speaking a faint smile played on his lips. Then he said something slowly, three cadenced phrases in Polish that he recited in an almost ecclesiastical rhythm. Alena listened to her father and then looked up at me and translated the answer, an answer, I thought, that was worthy of someone who had seen more of the vast world than any Homeric hero.

She said, He says, There were the Egyptians with their pyramids. There were the Incas of Peru. And there was the Jews of Bolechow.

We flew home the next day. As it happened, it was February 29: a day that mostly doesn’t exist, a day that, like a ghost ship in a story, materializes out of nothingness only to disappear again before you’ve had a chance to grasp what it is; a day outside of time itself.

Lech Lecha,
the
parashah
that relates in great detail the exhausting and depleting travels that Abram, later Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, had to undertake in order to reach the land that God has promised to him—travels that, we learn, include harrowing and violent encounters with the battling chieftains of the territories among which Abraham and his kin must one day dwell, places like Sodom and Gomorrah, places where terrible wickedness dwells—this
parashah
, so filled with movement and turmoil and violence, ends on an uncharacteristic note of stillness. One day, when Abraham is ninety-nine years old and has still not fathered a son by his wife, Sarah, God appears to him and announces two important pieces of news. First, God declares that he has decided to establish a convenant with Abraham and his descendants, to whom God promises vast tracts of land in an eternal possession. And second, he announces to the old man, who thus far has only produced a son by his Egyptian serving-woman Hagar, that Sarah will bear a child in the next year. The boy, as we know, is born, and the name that God gives him is, as we also know, Yitzhak, “He laughed.”

In the context of these promises, which must indeed have seemed incredible, it is worth pausing to consider a detail of God’s speech to Abraham. When God first speaks to his prophet, he says, “I am El Shaddai”—the first time that this peculiar epithet appears in the Torah. For some scholars—although not for Friedman, who, seeing a connection
between the Hebrew
shaddai
and the Akkadian
sadu,
“mountains,” dismisses the epithet as meaning nothing more than “the One of the Mountain”—the name has considerable symbolic meaning. Rashi explains the words at some length, for instance. For the medieval Frenchman, “I am El Shaddai” means “I am he that there is in My Divinity enough for every creature”: which is to say, the name contains an implicit guarantee that the Deity can keep the promises he makes. One further gloss on this passage—Be’er BaSadeh, taking a leaf from the midrashic commentator Bereishit Rabbah—explains further the reason that such a guarantee is necessary: Abraham feared that circumcision, which God will demand as a sign of his new people’s commitment to him, would dangerously isolate him from the rest of humankind, and hence God had to reassure him. In Bereishit Rabbah 46:3, we are told that Abram said, “Before I entered into this
bris
people came to me. Will they really continue to come to me after I enter the
bris
?” This is why God, at the moment he makes his promises and, as we shall see, demands the establishment of the ritual of
bris
in return, declares himself to be “enough.” This “enough” is, therefore, what we may call a “positive” use of the word, and therefore quite different in sense from the rather wry way in which another Abraham, my grandfather, liked to use it. For instance: whenever he would hear that So-and-So, typically an aged cousin of the branch of the family he shunned, had died at some vast old age, he would nod his handsome head a little and say,
Nu? Genug is genug
! Enough is enough! He would make this grim little joke often as he took me around the family plot at Mount Judah and pointedly recite the ages at which his sisters had died—twenty-six, thirty-five—and then steer me a few steps away to the bronze footstones of his first cousins Elsie Mittelmark, who died at eighty-four in 1973, and her sister Bertha, who died at ninety-two in 1982, more than three times as old as her cousin Ray, Ruchele, had been when she had died a week before her wedding.
Genug is genug!