The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (82 page)

It was for this reason that what Alex had to report about the would-be savior of Uncle Shmiel and Frydka was so interesting.

First, he wrote, Prokopiv had remembered one more detail about the day that the Szedlak hiding place had been discovered: he’d been walking home that day, in the neighborhood, and as he’d passed the schoolteacher’s house he’d seen the bodies lying in the street, waiting to be carted to the mass grave in the Jew
ish cemetery where the bodies of people who’d been discovered and killed in this way were taken.

I read this and thought, At least they’re in the Jewish cemetery, somewhere.

I kept reading the e-mail. I had asked him to ask Prokopiv whether he could recall hearing that one of the Jews who’d been discovered and killed that day had been pregnant. What Alex wrote next was this:

So I had been wrong once again. Whoever she’d been, she was not, it seemed, a pious middle-aged woman with a gray bun. When I read Alex’s e-mail, I thought of Stepan’s story of the Medvid family, of the whole family hanged in the Rynek, of every Medvid in the county killed as well. These public executions had been carried out for a purpose, and as we know the purpose was to discourage other people, people like Szymanski and Szedlak and all the others, from doing what they’d done anyway, for whatever mysterious reasons they had had: love, goodness, religious conviction. Whoever she was, whatever else may have been true of her—and I don’t know at all whether I will ever find out more about her, although I have begun to search—whoever she was, this Szedlakowa woman was not a single woman with only one life at her disposal to risk for the sake of two Jews.

More than any other
parashah
in Genesis, perhaps,
parashat Vayeira
is preoccupied with the implications of moral choices: in the Sodom and Gomorrah story we are meant to appreciate the consequences of the decision to follow wickedness, and in the tale with which this eventful
parashah
ends—the story of God’s demand that Abraham sacrifice his only legitimate child—we are meant, I think, to appreciate the consequences of the other choice, the choice to follow the good.

God’s demand for human sacrifice, which as we are told at the very beginning of this remarkable passage is, at least for God, nothing more than a test of Abraham’s devotion, is so repellent to the civilized mind that commentators have spilled oceans of ink
explicating, analyzing, interpreting, and justifying it over the millennia. Friedman, for instance, devotes three full pages to his commentary on the sacrifice—striking in itself, when you consider that earlier, the text of the Sodom and Gomorrah story flows by uninterrupted by any kind of comment at all on his part—and provides an admirably lucid summary of the classic answers to the questions raised by the sacrifice. Rightly, it seems to me (from a purely literary, structural point of view), the modern rabbi focuses on the clearly intentional contrast between, on the one hand, Abraham’s heated defense of the Sodomites, his attempt to bargain for the lives of the doomed cities, and, on the other, his utter silence in the face of God’s demand, even more appalling in its way, that the patriarch kill his own human child. One possible explanation for this striking contrast, Friedman says, is that the mark of Abraham’s personality throughout Genesis is obedience—the characterological explanation, which is satisfying as far as it goes, although it does not delve very deeply into the troubling question of whether Abraham’s seemingly innate predilection for unquestioningly following orders is, in cases when those orders are themselves clearly immoral, worth exploring more. (“Commands,” Friedman writes, “leave no room for discussion,” a peculiar thing, at least to my mind, for a rabbi writing in the late twentieth century to assert with no further comment, even in the context of explicating a biblical text.) Friedman goes on to provide what we may call the rhetorical argument: the patriarch, he writes, is able to argue more persuasively (indeed, at all) on behalf of the wicked Sodomites precisely because he has no relationship to them: he cannot argue the justice or the injustice of the demand for his son’s sacrifice precisely because he is so close to it. This, too, seems somehow unsatisfying at first glance, as if to be “biased” necessarily was the same thing as to be stupid. Third, Friedman suggests, intriguingly, that the outcome of the first of this
parashah
’s two important morality tales, the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, provides the key to Abraham’s silence. The futility of Abraham’s argument with God, he suggests, the fact that nothing came of his hard bargaining, that God always and already knew how bad the Sodomites were and how good Abraham is, are the reason Abraham knows not to argue when God requires a destruction that is infinitely more painful to Abraham than is the annihilation of the populations of several cities.

Rashi, too, goes to no little trouble to suggest that God’s interest in having Abraham demonstrate (as of course we know he will do) that he is “God-fearing” has vast international and cosmic implications: it is necessary that Abraham’s righteous obedience be demonstrated, he writes, so that God has something to answer Satan and the nations of the unbelievers when they demand to know what the cause of God’s love for the tribe of Abraham could possibly be. “That they are God-fearing,” is the answer that Abraham’s willingness to cut the throat of his young son provides.

One of the interesting moral questions raised by the Sacrifice of Isaac—and, by
implication, by the
parashah
as a whole—is that the text’s presentation of what it means to be a good person (i.e., Abraham, who is obedient to God even in extreme and confusing circumstances) is, in its way, as flat and unsatisfying, as cagey, as is its presentation of what it means to be a wicked person (i.e., a Sodomite, whatever that precisely means). In fact, all that the text of this
parashah
indicates is that goodness is obedience to God and wickedness is disobedience, as if morality were a superficially coherent structure of behavior that had no actual content—although, to take the examples from this particular weekly Torah reading, on the face of it what the Sodomites do, which may be depraved but doesn’t, as far as we know, result in any dead bodies lying around, is a lot less awful than what God asks Abraham to do.

On the other hand, what does seem to me valid about this last
parashah
is that, whatever the validity of its larger moral investigation, it paints what I have finally come to see as an extremely accurate picture of the way that people behave in unimaginably extreme conditions. Which is to say, a picture of a blur, an image of something that remains, in the end, totally unknowable and completely mysterious: that some people simply choose to do evil and some choose to do good, even when, in both cases, they know that their choices will require dreadful sacrifices.

T
HERE IS ONE
final tale of returning, of going back for one last look, that I have to tell before I end this story.

The day after we discovered the hiding place was Saturday. Lane flew in to the L’viv airport that afternoon, and as Alex and I drove her back to the hotel,
where Froma was waiting, poring over maps of the area in preparation for our sites-of-genocide excursions with Lane, we excitedly told her about our great discovery.

Lane jerked her delicate head up in one of those quick gestures that always makes me think of the adjective
birdlike
when I’m around her.

But that’s
amazing,
she said. As the car careened around the opera house, where seventy years ago a young woman whose name was not yet
Frances
went to see the opera
Carmen,
Lane gestured expressively at one of her enormous, complicated-looking black canvas camera bags. But did you get
pictures
? she asked, good
pictures
for your
book
? When I told her that all we had was Froma’s little digital camera, she made a grimace that was half disapproval and half disbelief. She said, We have to go
back.
We can go back, and I’ll take good
pictures
for you.

Picshuhs,
she said.
Booh-uhk.

So on Sunday, we went back, and it was on this final visit—which really was the last trip that I took on Uncle Shmiel’s behalf—that I made our last discovery, and ended our search.

Once again, we drove down the little hill into the sleepy town, which this time was dozing under angry-looking rain clouds. Once again, we sped into the town and through streets that now indeed seemed very familiar to us. Once again, Alex pulled up in front of the nondescript little house, where once again the black dog and the brown lay eyeing us in the walkway. Once again, he knocked on the window, and once more the black-haired woman came out. We explained that we hoped she’d let us in once again, since this time we had a better camera to take the photos we needed. I noticed that she seemed slightly more animated that day than she had been two days earlier. She nodded a few times, a bit wearily perhaps but with a faint smile, and motioned to us to go inside. Once again, we walked around the tiny rooms, opened the trapdoor; once again, shutters clicked. The only difference was that this time, I did not go down into the hiding place, the
kestl.
It had been enough.

As we emerged from the house once more, we noticed that this time, something else was different, too: a vigorous-looking young man—not the bloodless zombie I’d seen standing motionless in the bedroom on Friday—was hanging around the place, apparently the son of one of the women. Alex and he had an animated conversation and the man started gesturing over the fence. Alex said, He says that this house is actually divided into two parts.

Froma and Lane and I all peered over the fence, and noticed this time, as we had not two days earlier, that the one house straddled two yards.

Alex said, He says that there in the other half an old Russian woman lives, she came soon after the war, maybe she can tell us some more information.

I looked dubiously at Froma and Lane. Did they mind? I asked. Of course not, they said. That’s what we came for!

We went back into the street and around the front of the house, down the street a ways, to the other side. Sure enough, there was an entrance here, too. Alex knocked and called out in Russian, and presently a rosy-cheeked woman with a bright child’s face and improbably dark curly hair bustled out. Her dress was bright blue with big white polka dots. Alex talked to her and she insisted, in a warmly enthusiastic and high-pitched voice, that we come inside. As in some children’s story, her half of the house was as immaculate and pretty as the other half was filthy and decrepit. The powerful aroma of baking peaches filled the little kitchen. We all sat down and, as she turned down the volume on the little portable cassette player that had been playing, at an astonishing volume, a tape of Russian church music, Alex explained why we had called on her. The rich,
shushing
sound of Russian filled the room. The woman was so lively, nodded so vigorously and spoke so ringingly, that it was hard not to want to embrace her. She was like a grandmother or a good witch in a folktale.

After a few moments of this back-and-forthing, Alex looked up at me. He was not smiling.

She says yes, she heard this story about the Jews being hidden, and the schoolteachers. She herself came in the 1950s, but she heard it. But she says she is pretty sure that these schoolteachers were both still alive after the war, and also that it was not in this house they lived, that it was in another house on this street.

We looked at each other blankly, in a kind of despair. I said, That can’t be, I don’t believe it.

I had been in that place, that cold place. It felt
right.

We talked some more but it became clear to me after a while, as I read Alex’s wide, fair face, that he wasn’t getting anything more from her than what she’d already said. But it had been enough. Everything was in ruins. We were back to square one.

We all got up to leave. Alex said, She told me which house it is that she thinks it was in. A very old man lives there. She says he is deaf. Do you want to go?

I knew what he meant. He meant, Maybe we should quit while we’re ahead.

I nodded grimly and said, Let’s talk to this old man.

The four of us trudged down the street. Alex turned to me at one point and said, I don’t want to hear this new story, I want this to have been over on Friday! and I gave a glum smile and said, That’s exactly how I always feel.

Yes, he said. Now I know!

The house that the old woman had directed us to really did look like something out of the Brothers Grimm: a ramshackle, once-grand wooden house with impossible steep gables, its eaves and timber darkened by time, set back from the street a little ways. Here, too, Russian church music was blaring; although the front windows were forbiddingly closed up, you could hear it pouring out from the direction of the backyard. As a little drizzle began, we stomped to the backyard. The door was open. Alex shouted; there was no response. He shouted again, and finally we all just walked through the back door into the old man’s house. The ceilings were cavernous, icons hung everywhere. We followed the sound of the music until we reached what had clearly once been the great room of the house, an enormous, once-elegant chamber in which, now, a deal table, on which an old-fashioned phonograph stood, was among the few furnishings. Next to the table the old man himself stood: a figure, appropriately enough for this place, out of a nineteenth-century woodcut, a gaunt, impossibly tall old man whose yellowed white hair hung limply down either side of his head. His deep eyes were ringed with black. He looked like Franz Liszt, I thought.