The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (75 page)

Yes, I said to my mother, that day when she sifted through the Israel pictures for me, I
really
do need to go.

Then, to appease her, I told her that I’d arranged to do a travel article about L’viv for a magazine I write for. This way, I said, the journey would be worth it, even if the Bolekhiv portion of it turned out to be a failure.

My mother made that sound again. I could hear the rustle of paper in the background, as she carefully folded the pictures and menus and passenger lists back into their envelopes, their plastic baggies, their cartons.

All right, she said, But after this trip,
genug is genug,
OK?

I know, I said. I
know
.

She said, Good. All right, darling, I’m hanging. Good-bye and good luck.

This had always been her and her father’s ritual telephonic valediction to each other, which now she used with us. But before she actually put down the receiver, she said something else, something that took me by surprise.

She said, My family ruined their
lives
by always looking at the past, and I don’t want you to
be
like that.

On the Fourth of July, I flew to Ukraine.

A
GAIN,
I
WAS
traveling with Froma. Of all the once-great cities of Jewish Eastern Europe, L’viv, Lwów, Lemberg was the one she hadn’t been to. I knew she wanted to see it (It’ll be
just like last time!
she cried when I called to ask
her if she wanted to come, and I grinned and thought,
Not very likely
); I knew, too, that I didn’t want to make this trip alone. It was the middle of the summer, and Matt was overwhelmed with weddings, with studio portrait work. There was no way he could accompany me.

I just don’t have any weekend free until September, he told me when I called to ask whether he wanted to get a few final photos of the town. These days, what with discussing the photos for the book and sharing news of the various Bolechowers, I talked to Matt more or less every day: a thing I’d never have predicted, five years before. It’s OK, I said, you already got the Bolechow pictures last time, we can use those. Don’t worry about it. But I hung up with a kind of pang. I’d gotten used to him being there on the long flights, always offering me the aisle seat, grinning over
New Yorker
cartoons, which he loved to describe out loud rather than let me look at them; secretly adoring his pea in-a-pod idol.

So this time, on the last of all the last trips, it would be me and Froma again.

There would also, eventually, be a third. My friend Lane, a photographer, was planning to join us in L’viv halfway through our week there. A vivid, dark-haired North Carolinian who had lived for years in New York, she had been working for several years on a photo essay about “sites of genocide.” Since I’d first met her, nearly five years earlier, I had been hearing about her trips to Rwanda, Darfur, Cambodia, Bosnia, an ever-lengthening list that suggested, as she liked to say, that
NEVER AGAIN
was an empty slogan. So Lane had been to all those places. Her problem, she told me, was that she hadn’t figured out her approach to the Holocaust yet. Auschwitz, she feared, had become a visual cliché—
It lets you off the hook,
was how she put it to me one night over supper at her place, as I leafed through the pictures she’d taken. I thought of the woman who’d said,
If I don’t get an Evian I’m going to
pass out, of the cattle car you can ride in the Holocaust Museum, of the
ARBEIT MACHT FREI
electronic postcards you can get at the online Terezín Museum. Yes, I said, I agree. I added, If I go back to Bolekhiv, you should come with me. If you’re interested in sites of genocide, there’s a lot to see around there. As I said this I thought of Taniawa, which by then was on the list of places whose locations I now knew.

So Lane would meet us in L’viv. Froma and I planned to arrive on a Tuesday and would spend the better part of our week there looking at the city, to gather information and experiences for the travel article I was going to be writing, and Lane would come on Saturday, at which point we’d drive to Bolekhiv,
take some pictures, and then drive to all the neighboring towns, to places that had once been called Dolina and Drohobycz and Stryj and Kalusz and Rozniatów and Halych and Rohatyn and Stanislawów, those places and all the others, each one of which had its own Taniawa, its own mass grave and monument. We’d spend Saturday and Sunday driving around and seeing the ruins of Jewish Galicia, and then I’d go home, once and for all.

Alex met us at the airport, beaming. He’d grown bigger, more affectionately bearlike, since the last time I’d seen him. By now, of course, we knew each other well, and this time, after he’d jostled his way to the front of the packed reception area at the tiny L’viv airport, he wasn’t standing with a piece of cardboard that said
MENDELSOHN
but threw his massive arms around me and gave me a hug that knocked the breath out of me. I grinned at him: I was glad to be seeing him again. One of the things that rescued this trip to L’viv from feeling like the kind of emotionally draining “going back” that I disliked was the prospect of spending a lot of time with Alex. I considered him to be a friend, and as such I thought I could talk frankly with him about certain issues that had arisen during the course of my research, not the least of these being the difficult issue of the nature of Jewish-Ukrainian relations, both before and after the war. When I’d written an article about our first trip to L’viv three years earlier, I had wanted to contrast the refrain I’d always heard from my grandfather—
the Germans were bad, the Poles were worse, the Ukrainians were the worst of all
(and how, anyway, did he know? what had
he
heard?)—with the reception we had received everywhere we’d gone in Ukraine, the unhesitating warmth and generosity and friendliness that every Ukrainian we’d encountered had shown us. It seemed to me that the discrepancy had something to do with specifics of history, and something to do more generally with time. No doubt because I stand wholly outside of the event, it is possible for me to think that certain things that some, even many, Ukrainians did during the war were the products of specific historical circumstances, and it is difficult for me to believe that Ukrainian atrocities against Jews in 1942 are any more a natural expression of the essential Ukrainian character than, say, Serbian atrocities against Bosnian Muslims in 1992 are a natural expression of some essential Serbian characteristic. So I am, perhaps naively, unwilling to condemn “Ukrainians” in general, although I know that many Ukrainians committed atrocities. I am, however, willing to believe in other generalizations, for instance that seething resentment by a class of people who both have been and perceive themselves to be an underclass, particularly when those people have recently suffered unspeakable oppression—one example of which would be,
say, Stalin’s intentional starvation of between five and seven million Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933, which for Ukrainians is the galvanizing national tragedy just as the Holocaust is the galvanizing national tragedy for Jews—that seething resentment of such a class of people will, under the right combination of circumstances, explode into bestial savagery against those whom they hold responsible for their suffering, however unjustly. And as I know, it is easiest to hold responsible those to whom you live in closest intimacy.

More generally, I thought that the difference between
and the Ukrainians were the worst
and what we found when my siblings and I went to Ukraine and were treated so well by Ukrainians who knew we were Jews was clearly related to the subject I was interested in, which was how much gets lost as a result of the passage of time. To me, it seemed obvious that cultural habits and attitudes are also eroded over time, and even if it was once true that a seething anti-Semitism had raged throughout the Ukrainian populations of places like Bolechow, I wanted to believe that this was no longer the case—that I had no more reason to be fearful while traveling in Ukraine than I have when I travel in Germany, although some of my survivors had warned me that I should.
Be very careful when you go back there,
Meg had told me as we were about to leave Australia. Why, I asked, you think they still hate Jews? She looked at me wearily and said,
That’s an understatement.

And indeed certain survivors to whom I’d described my friendship with Alex and, more generally, our pleasant reception by Ukrainians, had dismissed it all with a bitter laugh, or worse, saying the Ukrainians today had only been nice to us because we were Americans, because they thought we had money to give them.
You weren’t there, you didn’t see,
someone told me when I protested that the Ukrainians I’d met and talked to had been so warm, so welcoming, so nice to us; and what could I reply, I who believe it is impossible to draw facile analogies between the kinds of experience that I and others of my class and geography and generation are likely to have, and certain kinds of experiences that certain people had during the war? When certain of my survivors would shake their heads at me and tell me that I could know nothing of Ukrainians based on my experiences, it would occur to me that perhaps they were right: perhaps too many variables had changed, perhaps it was
impossible to know
, just as you can know nothing of what it was like to be on a transport to Belzec in the summer of 1942 by riding the cattle car ride at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington. I, more than most, knew too well the roots of this bitter, generalized animosity to Ukrainians—after all, the survivors I had spoken with had seen with their
own eyes the Jewish babies impaled on Ukrainian pitchforks and thrown out of windows and smashed against walls by Ukrainians and stomped underfoot by Ukrainians, as Mrs. Grynberg’s newborn had been stomped moments after she delivered it, the umbilical cord still hanging from between her legs; they, not I, had witnessed a sheer, almost animal savagery so ferocious that, as has been recorded, there were times when the Nazis themselves had to restrain the Ukrainians. They had seen this, and I had not seen, would never see, anything like it. Still, it must be said that this unwillingness to believe anything good of Ukrainians struck me as irrational, too, since every survivor I talked to had been saved by a Ukrainian. I did not say this to them at the time, but it seemed to me that Jews more than others should be wary of condemning entire populations out of hand.

So I talked about all this with Alex, during my visit, openly and frankly. Because he is a historian by training, as I am a classicist, he tries to see things in their complexity, and is leery of generalizations, just as I like to see things through the lens of Greek tragedy, which teaches us, among other things, that real tragedy is never a straightforward confrontation between Good and Evil, but is, rather, much more exquisitely and much more agonizingly, a conflict between two irreconcilable views of the world. The tragedy of certain areas of Eastern Europe between, say, 1939 and 1944 was, in this sense, a true tragedy, since—as I have mentioned earlier—the Jews of eastern Poland, who knew they would suffer unimaginably if they came under Nazi rule, viewed the Soviets as liberators in 1939, when eastern Poland was ceded, temporarily it turned out, to the Soviet Union; whereas the Ukrainians of eastern Poland, who had suffered unimaginably under Soviet oppression during the 1920s and 1930s, viewed the cession of eastern Poland to the Soviet Union in 1939 as a national disaster, and saw the Nazis as liberators in 1941, when the Germans invaded and took control. This is not, of course, a formula that can explain everything, the pitchforked babies or the umbilical cords: but it is at least more complex, and therefore more likely to be accurate, than the formula that simply dismisses all Ukrainians, always, as
the worst.
Alex and I talked about this kind of thing often during our visit, and in the end he shrugged and sighed and said, echoing other people I’d talked to over the past few years, Look, some people were good, and some people were bad.

But that came later. At the airport, on the day of my return to L’viv, I hugged Alex back and introduced him to Froma. I asked about his wife, Natalie, about his studious son, Andriy, whom Alex always refers to as Andrew in my presence, and his round-faced daughter, Natalie, both of whom would be
much bigger now than when I’d last seen them at the lavish farewell dinner Alex had held for my brothers and sister and me at their apartment. Everything was great! Alex said. Everyone is great! He refused to let us carry anything, even a computer bag, as we emerged from the bizarre little airport building into the bright sunlight. Sitting at the curb was the blue VW Passat. No! he said, when I made a theatrical gesture of recognition on seeing the car. This isn’t the same car you knew before, it’s the same kind but a different one, newer. Same, but different!

We sped off to the hotel. It was either then, or at some point later on, that he laughed his ringing laugh and said, You won’t believe it, but Andrew has taught himself to read Yiddish!