The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (76 page)

T
HAT WAS ON
Tuesday. On Friday, we would drive to Bolekhiv.

It was good to spend some time in L’viv. The first time I’d gone to this city, I’d been so anxious about what we’d find in Bolekhiv that I hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to the sightseeing we did before and after we went to my family’s town. This time, I like to think we saw everything.

Many places of historical interest with respect to the city’s now-vanished Jewish life have not, I should point out, vanished, but are simply what you might call
the same, but different.
A good example of this is a plump and pleasant if somewhat eccentric building—it has little turrets—that stands at Number 27, T. Shevchenko Prospekt, and is now called the Desertniy Bar. To certain people it is far better known, however, as the Szkocka Café, the Scottish Café, which in its previous life stood on an avenue called Akademichna—an appropriate enough name, given that the café was the meeting place for a famous and influential group of mathematicians known as the Lwów School. The Lwów School was dominated by the Polish mathematician Stefan Banach, who did seminal work in an area called functional analysis, and who, with another Lwów mathematician, Hugo Steinhaus, founded in 1929 the journal
Studia Mathematica,
“Mathematical Studies,” which along with the Warsaw-based
Fundamenta Mathematicae
(“Foundations of Mathematics”) became one of the premier journals of the lively and important Polish mathematical scene during the interwar period. It is the liveliness of the Lwów School that brings us back to the Scottish Café, since the café was a favorite meeting place of the members of that group. It was Banach who bought the large notebook, later an object of legend, in which, over the course of animated conversation accompanied by many coffees, thorny problems were written down, and
answers eventually entered as well. At the end of each gathering this notebook would be left with the headwaiter who, when the group returned on another night, would bring it out of the secret hiding place to which it would be returned as soon as they’d left once again.

The Lwów School and that lively and important Polish mathematical scene would never recover from the devastating effects of the Nazi occupation, which decimated the ranks of the Polish professoriat, Catholics and Jews alike. As it happens, both Banach and Steinhaus survived the war, although each suffered horrible deprivations. Banach, a Pole who was born not far from Kraków in 1892 and was, therefore, of the same generation as Uncle Shmiel, and who, because he was an illegitimate child, bore the surname of his mother rather than his father (a thing that as we know could happen even to legitimate children), was arrested by the Nazis at one point, and, stripped of the august standing he had enjoyed before the war, was put to work in an infectious diseases laboratory where, for the duration of the Occupation, the great mathematician spent his days feeding the lice that were to be used in experiments. He outlived the war by three weeks, dying of lung cancer in August 1945. Steinhaus, born a few years earlier than his colleague, was Jewish, which meant that when the Nazis came he had more to worry about than lice. He went into hiding and suffered severe privations, hunger not being the least of them, although it is said of him that, as one biographer has put it,
even then his sharp restless mind was at work on a multitude of ideas and projects
—in which he was not unlike Klara Freilich, who as we know was also thinking about mathematics while she huddled under the ground with the rats. In any event, when the war was over Steinhaus moved, as Ciszko Szymanski’s family had, to Wrocław, and died there at the age of eighty-five in 1972, having managed, I should add, to rescue and preserve the Scottish Café notebook, which was subsequently published. The rescue of the book may be thought of as a symbol, since Steinhaus is in fact often credited with helping Polish mathematics to rise from its ashes after the devastation wreaked by the war on Polish university and intellectual life.

It happens that I have just had the chance to handle a curious artifact of this particular aspect of the wartime devastation. I originally went to the Scottish Café—or rather, the Desertniy Bar—because my father is a mathematician, and when we all went to L’viv the first time he was eager for us to visit this famous place, which is in its way a shrine for mathematicians, a group of people not necessarily known for the intensity of their devotion to shrines. But most of what I know about the Lwów School I owe to my godfather, my father’s close Ital
ian friend whose real name is Edward but whom we have always called by the affectionate nickname
Nino,
who for many years was a professor of mathematics at a university on Long Island, the man who was the only person we knew who would reach up and pluck apples from the tree in my parents’ yard and eat them, back when I was a child and wondering why the Tree of Knowledge was a
tree.
By a curious coincidence, one of Nino’s areas of expertise is functional analysis, the area opened up long ago by the Lwów School, and it was Nino who tried to explain to me, when I was visiting him after my final trip to Ukraine and telling him of what we’d found there, what exactly functional analysis is. A lot of what he told me was too difficult for me to understand. But I was fascinated to hear him say that he himself had used functional analysis to study problems in something called optimization theory. Since I had liked the name
optimization theory,
I asked him in an e-mail I wrote after I got back home to try to explain what that was, and he immediately replied:

Reading this, I was moved to see that a name familiar to me from Latin literature had, strangely, become the symbol of a famous mathematical problem. In Vergil’s
Aeneid,
we are told a certain story relating to the queen of Carthage, Dido—the woman with whom Aeneas falls in love, only to abandon her later on, an act that eventually brings about her suicide. The story has to do with how Dido came to found her city, Carthage. Exiled from her native land, Dido wandered far and wide seeking a place to settle. After she landed in North Africa, a local king struck a strange bargain with her: he agreed to grant her and her followers just as much territory as could be enclosed by the hide of an ox. Dido’s ingenious response to this cruelly stingy offer was to cut an oxhide into thin strips and, making these strips into one long cord, to make that cord into the perimeter of an enormous circle: the territory of the future Carthage, which eventually became a great city, the city in which Aeneas would later so unexpectedly come across a painting of his own life, causing him to burst into tears.
This is why, when mathematicians refer to “Dido’s problem,” they are worrying about this: how to find the maximum area for a figure with a given perimeter; although when classicists refer to Dido’s problem they are probably more concerned with the fact that after she was forced from her home and had to flee for her life, after she had built for herself a new and prosperous existence, she still ended up—for all her cleverness, for all she’d done to survive—a suicide, a woman whose new life was no life because her heart had been broken.

In any case, when I first read Nino’s e-mail I wasn’t sure what all of it meant, but—since I had just returned from that particular trip—the problems of how to get closed surfaces to enclose maximum volumes, and of how to minimize the time it takes to reach rendezvous points, had been much in my thoughts, although of course in a different context, and I suppose that’s why Nino’s answer pricked my interest.

It was while I was at Nino’s house that, in talking about the Lwów School, he mentioned that he had several volumes of both
Studia Mathematica
and
Fundamenta Mathematicae,
and it was in one of the latter that he pointed out to me the memorial issue of 1945, which began with a black-bordered list of the dozens of former contributors to that publication who had been killed in the war, a list that went a long way toward suggesting to me just how difficult Hugo Steinhaus’s project of reanimating Polish mathematics had been. When we think about great devastations, about what gets lost as a result of the decimation of entire populations of people, the million and a half Armenians slaughtered by the Turks in 1916, the five to seven million Ukrainians starved to death by Stalin between 1932 and 1933, the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, the two million Cambodians killed by Pol Pot’s regime in the 1970s, and so forth, we tend, naturally, to think first of the people themselves, the families that will cease existing, the children that will never be born; and then of the homely things with which most of us are familiar, the houses and mementoes and photographs that, because those people no longer exist, will stop having any meaning at all. But there is this, too: the thoughts that will never be thought, the discoveries that will never be made, the art that will never be created. The problems, written in a book somewhere, a book that will outlive the people who wrote down the problems, that will never be solved.

Anyway, I’ve been to the Scottish Café in L’viv. It is, you could say, the same, but different; which is also one way of describing L’viv today, which, with its renovations and new construction and rising tourism, may be said to be old and new at the same time, to be
rising out of its ashes,
at least in certain respects, at least in cases when there are ashes still left to rise out of.

B
OLEKHIV, TOO, WAS
the same, but different.

Once again, Alex had stopped the car at the crest of the hill beyond which it was possible to see the little town nestled in its valley, the hill where four years earlier Matt had paused to take a picture. Here we are in Bolechow again, I announced, a shade ruefully, to Alex and Froma. But this time, when we drove down into the town, over the little stone bridge that squats over the thin and insignificant trickle that the Sukiel River has become, past what used to be Bruckenstein’s Restaurant, the place seemed transformed. Before, on the overcast, drizzly afternoon of our first visit, the town had seemed deserted; the gray sense of desolation that hung in the wet air that Sunday had seemed, somehow, like another piece of damning evidence, as if the place itself were perpetually on trial and the weather and mood were witnesses for the prosecution. Now, on a brilliant and cloudless late morning, Bolekhiv was alive with activity: cars buzzed noisily around the square, construction sites clanged and buzzed and sputtered, mothers were pushing strollers, and the place was alive with the colors of many newly painted buildings. Meg Grossbard’s house, of which she’d given me a photo, and which she had asked me to take a look at—this was in the afternoon after the lunch at her brother-in-law’s, when, as Matt and I stood outside the apartment building waiting for a cab, Meg had insisted that if we were foolish enough ever to return to Ukraine (
cannibals!
), we must not tell anyone that she was living in Australia; and, reacting to my amazed expression, went on,
they killed the rest of my family, why wouldn’t they want to kill me too?
—Meg Grossbard’s house, I saw, had been painted a bubble-gum pink.

When we got out of the Passat, Froma looked around and said, I wonder whether all these people are curious about us.

This time, too, I realized that the last time we’d come, we’d only really seen half of the Rynek. Armed with the map Jack had faxed me the week before I left, I started navigating as Froma and Alex trailed behind. There was the house where my grandfather had been born, the plum trees sagging with fruit; there was the Little Park with its lime trees. We stopped at the Magistrat, and I now pointed to the exact location where Shmiel’s store had stood. I took out a Xerox of the photograph from the Bolechow Yizkor book, the one that my grandfather had long ago captioned
OUR STORE
, and showed it to Froma and Alex for comparison. They nodded and smiled. We found the Dom Katolicki, now a meetinghouse for Jehovah’s Witnesses, a solid-looking, ugly,
two-story box of a building with square windows and a corrugated tin roof, which sits in the middle of a residential block down the street from what I now knew used to be called the Polish Church. Once again, as is so often the case when I’ve finally stood in front of buildings the physical appearance of which does not—and couldn’t possibly—suggest the saturated histories of the events that have occurred within them, I felt a vague disappointment, a sense of flatness. It was difficult for me to connect this stolid little structure in front of me with the many and vivid and terrible stories I had heard about it. It wasn’t until several weeks later, when I was back home in New York looking at the photos from this trip, that I noticed that large metal letters of a distinctly contemporary design had been affixed to the front of this decrepit structure, just under the undulating tin roofline. KIHO, the Cyrillic letters said on the left side of the building; TEATP, they said on the right.
Cinema. Theater.