The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (80 page)

Alex knocked on the window. In a moment, a haggard-looking woman emerged from the courtyard: squashed Slavic features, dyed black hair sticking up in tufts, a garish purple robe of some thin stuff wrapped hastily around her solid midriff. She could have been sixty, she could have been forty. The dogs started barking furiously. Froma and I waited by the gate in the street while Alex stood talking to the woman.

She says we can come into the courtyard, he said. But she don’t know nothing, she came here in the seventies from Russia.

It’s OK, I said, we just want to look at the courtyard. Prokopiv had said, They killed them in the yard. I wanted to see the place, stand in it, and leave.

We walked up the little walkway, the dogs scrambling round our feet and barking loudly. He said something to the woman and she yelled at the dogs, who retreated.

We walked around the little cement-paved area. The yard, Prokopiv had said. They killed them all right there. I handed the video camera to Alex and said, I can’t deal with this now, do you mind doing the video? He nodded, expressively, and took it. The three of us walked around the tiny area for a bit. This is where they died, I thought. It didn’t seem quite real. I said to Froma, I don’t even know what to think. It’s amazing to think it was here. I stood there shaking my head as I looked at the decrepit house, the tiny concrete courtyard, the sagging shed.

Whatever it was, it was not the
kessle
of a Polish count.

I looked at the shed again and a thought occurred to me. I said to Alex, Can we ask these people if we can just go in there? I wanted to see the inside of the house. Here, somewhere in this square footage of broken concrete, they had died. But somewhere inside the house, in there, they had been hiding, had been alive. Thirty years before, Aunt Miriam had written me a letter.
Onkel Schmil and 1 daughter Fridka the Germans killed them 1944 in Bolechow, so say me one man from Bolechow nobody know what is true.
Now we knew the truth. They had been here, somewhere right
here.
I wanted to see it.

Three other women, just as haggard as the first, their bare feet filthy, had gathered just inside the door. Alex said, I don’t think we should stay long because they are alcohol addicts—very strong addicts.

We nodded. We navigated the narrow door. Two pairs of bony cats were copulating on a sofa. The place had the musty smell of stale alcohol and, I thought, urine. Inside there were a few small rooms: a little kitchen just past the door, beyond that a little living room with two sofas—on one of which, I realized after a moment, the inert body of a woman lay wrapped in blankets—and beyond that a dining room with a table and a few chairs. The walls of the dining room were painted bright yellow; a pretty stencil of green ivy leaves ran around the perimeter, just beneath the ceiling. Lace curtains hung at each window, and the walls were hung with inexpensive carpets in oriental patterns. Here and there you could see an icon, an old portrait photograph that had been tinted with pastels, and, bizarrely, some ancient posters of languid 1940s models in slinky lingerie. There was one more room off the dining room, and when I opened the double door to it I saw inside an enormously tall teenaged boy with severe and beautiful Slavic features. His hair was jet black and his skin was almost a pure white, as if he had no circulation. He looked at me with glazed and unseeing eyes. I shut the door and turned around. Alex had been standing behind me.

Not just alcohol, he said. Maybe drugs, too.

So this was the house. One story. Minus a poster or two, it was possible to imagine it as it had been then, neat as a pin, the lace curtains parted rather than drawn, the tiled stove near the kitchen, now cold, giving off the rich aromas of cooking food. I walked back and forth, reluctant to leave. My mind was racing.
Where could you hide someone, here
?

I said to Alex, OK, well.

Then I literally smacked my forehead with my hand.
Ask her,
I said, Ask her if there’s a
basement
, any kind of
cellar.

The woman had been following us as we paced the small rooms. I supposed she was worried that we would find her stash of booze and God knew what else. Alex spoke to her. Yes, he said, there is a room underneath.

The black-haired woman sighed heavily and gave a resigned little frown, as if she were long used to the impositions of strangers more powerful than she. She walked the few paces from the dining room back into the little living room. The three of us crowded behind her. The two sofas were about a yard apart from each other, a round woven rug between them. With a weary gesture, she dragged the rug away with her foot and jerked her head.

There, cut out of the floorboards, was a trapdoor. It was about two feet square, and had been cut out in such a way that the edges of two of its sides were flush with the edges of the boards.
Good camouflage,
I thought. A little metal ring that served as a handle was attached to one end. We all stood, staring at it, thinking the same thing.

I pointed to the square outline cut into the floorboards and turned to Alex and said, I can go in there?

Before Alex had a chance to translate, the woman nodded. She said something to Alex, who told me that this cellar was there when they moved here from southern Russia. Now they stored jars there: pickles, things like that. I bent over and pulled on the little ring and raised the door. It was surprisingly thick and heavy. I swung it upward and a smell escaped, the dank smell of earth and something else, the failed odor of disuse. One of the other women, sitting on the sofa opposite the one on which the inert woman lay, helpfully extended a hand in order to keep the door open. We all peered inside. For a moment all we could see was a pitch-black square. After a second or two, the outline of some shelves emerged, lined with bottles and jars. I walked around the opening and stood next to the raised door. Some new pine steps had been nailed into one side.

I looked up and said, I have to go down there. Alex, holding the video camera, nodded.

I crouched down and lowered my legs into the hole, searching for the step with my foot. I found it and started to descend, looking upward toward the light the whole time. As I’ve mentioned, I have a deathly fear of enclosed places, but couldn’t and wouldn’t bring myself to mention it now, under these circumstances. I thought of the cattle car at the Holocaust Museum. Maybe Shmiel had been as claustrophobic as I, I thought. Maybe it’s genetic, who knows? At least I was going to climb back out of here and walk out of this place in broad daylight.

The hole was just that: a hole. I had descended maybe eight or nine feet and was at the bottom. Down here, there was no light, and even though the trapdoor above my head was open, the space itself was steeped in a profound, inky black: I had to stretch out my hands to locate the walls, which turned out to be very close. I figured the space measured three feet on a side. Because I was deep underground, it was very cold, surprisingly cold. I fought back the panic and thought, This is horrible, it’s like being in a—

Oh my God I am so
stupid
, I said to myself at that moment. A
kestl,
a
kestl,
not a
castle.
In the end, we get so much wrong not because we aren’t paying attention but because time passes, things change, a grandson cannot be his grandfather, for all that he may try; because we can never be other than ourselves, imprisoned by our time and place and circumstances. However much we want to learn, to know, we can only ever see things with our own eyes and hear with our own ears, and how we interpret what we see and hear depends, ultimately, on who we are and what we already think we know, or want to know.
Kestl
is the Yiddish word for
box.
All those years ago I had listened to my grandfather talk, the one time he had offered me information about Shmiel’s death, and I, listening to those plush vowels and thickened consonants, had heard what I’d wanted to hear, a story like a fairy tale, a tragic drama complete with a nobleman and a castle. But he hadn’t, after all, been telling one of his own stories, a story based half on facts and half on fantasy, a story about Jews in a faraway land hiding in a castle. They had been hiding in some kind of
box.
He had, after all, known
something
all along, had heard some story whose details are now vanished; a story not so far from the truth, as it turned out. It had taken me all this, the years and the miles, had required that I come back and see the place with my own eyes before the fact, the material reality, allowed me to understand the words at last. They’d been hiding in a terribly small and enclosed space, a space that someone, somewhere, must have once described as being like a kind of box, a
kestl,
and now I was standing in the box, and now I knew it all.

Shivering, I groped in my pocket for the camera Froma had given to me and blindly took a picture. The picture shows nothing, really: a blank wall garishly illuminated by a flashbulb. They had been here, hiding for weeks, months, nobody knew. But it had been
here.
I had always wanted specifics. Now I had found them.

I stayed there for a moment, because I thought it proper to pause and I wanted to collect my thoughts, which were racing in a million directions, and then I climbed out hastily. We stood there for a minute and took some pictures of the rooms, the rugs, the trapdoor, the sofas, the hiding place. Then there was nothing more to do. We thanked the women and left.

T
HERE ARE TWO
further and extremely important pieces of information that came out of that return trip to Bolekhiv.

After we walked out of the house I asked Alex and Froma if they wouldn’t mind if I called my parents on my cell phone: I had to tell them right then what had happened. Of course, they said, and I walked a little distance away from the Passat and punched in the number. Seven hours earlier in time, my father picked up the phone. I know exactly what I said to him that day, because I’d forgotten to turn off the voice recorder when we left the Szedlak house, and weeks later, after I’d returned home and was transcribing all of the voice files, I was startled when, at what I thought was the end of the
HIDING HOUSE!
file, I heard the sound of my own excited voice talking, although the recorded conversation is, like certain other family communications that have become part
of this story, one-sided, since it is impossible in this record of the exchange to know what one of the parties is saying.

Dad? It’s Dan, get Mom on the line.

[pause]

Momma

(I have no idea why I said this, it’s a name I hadn’t called her since I was four years old)

—it’s Daniel, I’m in Bolechow. I’m in Bolechow. Wait, you can’t believe what just happened, you can’t believe. What happened. We met an old man, and he took us to the house where Shmiel was hidden…. And I went in the house and I went in the hiding place, it’s still there, it’s like an underground…cellar and it’s all there. And he remembered the whole thing, they were in the cellar and they denounced them and they took them out into the yard and they shot them…. Yes it’s unbelievable, I was just in it. I just never thought in my
life
I would find the place. Yes, I took pictures, I took pictures. Anyway, it’s just very…emotional and strange. I’m fine, I’m fine, we’re going to go back to Lwów now. I just never even thought I would find this place, I just thought I was going here to get pictures. Anyway, call my brothers and sister and tell them this, I found the house, I found a person who took us to the house where they were hidden, and I went to the place where they actually died. OK, yes, I’ll call again later, OK, I love you too, bye, bye.

So that is how I described what we’d found to my parents. But the phone conversation in which I learned something from them came later, after we’d driven back to L’viv and had had a chance to talk about what had happened, to dissect the extraordinary emotions of the day. More composed than I’d been when I called on the cell phone, I rang my parents later that night from my hotel room. My father was out. Slowly, step by step, I recounted again the day’s events to my mother.

It’s a good thing Froma was there again! she exclaimed, Or you wouldn’t have found it! It’s just like how she got you to find Yona in Israel!

I smiled and said, Yes, it was. I had already considered the similarity between this remarkable discovery and that one. My mother said something else and I rolled my eyes and said, Yes, I had been sure to tell Froma thank you. In fact what Froma had replied, when I’d said
it was all because of
YOU
,
was interesting. For all of her intense energy, for all that she’s unafraid to insert herself into situations, to push
harder,
as she likes to say, Froma, I’ve always observed, hates being the object of a certain kind of compliment, the center of a certain kind of adulatory fuss; and so, when I said
it was all because of
YOU
,
she’d made a face and said, Well, yes and no. I mean, what if it had been raining, what if nobody
had been on the street when we started looking for the house, what if Stepan hadn’t been there or old Prokopiv had left for the church ten minutes earlier? So it was me, but it was everything.