The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (9 page)

But the terror Ber describes in this passage, while not unknown in Bolechow and other Austro-Hungarian towns, was not the rule.
The Memoirs of Ber of Bolechow
is not especially literary, and the minutiae of business deals and court cases, to say nothing of the esoterica of early modern publishing, are unlikely to win many readers; but the very ordinariness of the life that this strange, forgotten book records is, it now seems, knowing what we know, quite precious.

After all, the only other book, to my knowledge, that had ever been written about Bolechow and its Jews until very recently is a book titled
Sefer HaZikaron LeKedoshei Bolechow,
or “Memorial Book of the Martyrs of Bolechow,” edited by Y. Eshel and published in 1957 by a group calling itself the Association of Former Residents of Bolechow. It is, in other words, what’s called a Yizkor book: one of the hundreds of books compiled after World War II, filled with the reminiscences of people who’d left before the war and the witness statements of those who hadn’t, in order to memorialize the communities—little towns, big cities—that were destroyed, and of course to commemorate, inasmuch as was possible, a way of life that had been lost. I own a copy of this book, which my grandfather used to own; it’s bound in blue cloth, now very faded, and the text is in Hebrew and Yiddish. I used to wonder, when I was a boy and my grandfather would, very rarely, let me handle this precious object, why they published it in a language that (as I then thought) only the
victims could understand. My grandfather would show me the photographs in the book, and on a piece of stationery from the company he used to own—my grandfather also had a great impulse to save things, to preserve—which he later placed between the pages separating the Hebrew and Yiddish sections, he wrote the numbers of all the pages on which his family were mentioned. This is what he wrote, sometimes in block capitals, sometimes in his loping script, very occasionally letting slip an error in spelling:

44—
BARON HIRSH JEWISH SCHOOL

67—
BOTTON CITY HALL
right

67—
Bottom our store Left

110—
THE CENTER OF TOWN HAD A FIRE

282—
ISAK
and
SHMIEL
my two brothers

189—
The public School I attendet

The underlining is, uncharacteristically, the only emphasis. It is, indeed, odd to see my grandfather’s writing, which I knew so well—to hear his voice, as it were—describing something so laconically, so devoid of the snaking cadences and the ornate enhancements and additions that once made all those stories about his world, his childhood, this town, so memorable to me. At the bottom of this piece of paper is the printed motto of his company:
TRIMMINGS ALWAYS MAKE IT LOOK BETTER
.

And there is something else I see: I notice, now, the way that my grandfather, who when talking to me always called his older sister Ruchele “Ray” and his younger sister Neche “Jeanette” and his brother Yidl “Julius,” always referred, as he did while writing this list, to the lost brother as Shmiel. Which is to say, not by the public, “official” name,
Sam
(which is, I learned much later, the way he referred to himself), the name that corresponded to the Rays and Jeanettes and Juliuses, but only by the Yiddish name:
Shmiel
. I think this is because for him, the others had two identities, the one that belonged to a lost childhood in an empire that no longer existed, a time when you spoke Yiddish, and the other that belonged to his adulthood, when the names of so many things had shifted. But of course the last time my grandfather saw his older brother was in 1920, when he, an adventurous eighteen-year-old, left Bolechow forever, and his failure to think of this brother as anything but Shmiel, his consistent use of that Yiddish name, suggests to me how truly lost this murdered brother must really have been, like an unsmiling face in a picture that has lost its caption.

The interesting thing, for the present, is the answer to the question first raised by my grandfather’s bold statement that his family had lived in Bolechow since
before there was a Bolechow to live in
. How long was that, then? Between them, our two books give us the answer. From the first book, the memoirs of Ber Birkenthal, the sage of Bolechow, we learn when it all started; from the last book, of course, we know when it ended. The Jägers lived in Bolechow for the entirety of the three and a half centuries during which it existed as its founders had intended, a community in which Jews, Poles, and Ruthenians would live in relative harmony. Which is to say, from the year 1612, when the fair-minded Count Giedsinski laid the foundations, until 1941, when the Germans came from the west, and the Ruthenians descended again.

A
ND SO, FOR
a long time, the sum total of our knowledge was this:

We knew a great deal about my Jäger relatives, going back to the names of my great-great-grandparents, Hersh and Feige Mittelmark and Isak and Neche Jäger. We knew about the businesses they ran, the kind of town they lived in, the names of their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and, in the cases of many of these, their dates of birth and death and marriage. We knew about the history of Bolechow, where it was on the map. We knew what the faces of many of these people looked like from the old photographs carefully tended in my mother’s album. We knew a great many stories.

And about the lost we knew, at least, this:

We knew that Shmiel Jäger and his wife, Ester, and their four daughters, who I then thought were called Lorca, Friedka, Ruchatz, and Bronia, lived in a house somewhere in Bolechow, as Jägers had been doing for three hundred years. Their address, I learned from a copy of a 1929 Polish business directory, was 9a Dlugosa Street.

We knew that in September 1939 the Nazis invaded Poland, but the Jews of eastern Poland were given a reprieve in the form of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which assigned the region that contained Bolechow to the Soviet Union. What Shmiel and his family endured under the Soviets, nobody knew.

We knew that the Nazis broke the pact in the summer of 1941, and soon after, at the beginning of the summer, they invaded eastern Poland. Soon after that, they arrived in Bolechow.

We knew that Shmiel owned a truck. (Trucks?) We’d heard that the Nazis wanted the trucks.

We’d heard that he was one of the first on the list. (List?)

We’d heard that at some point they went into some kind of hiding place. Perhaps it was the old castle belonging to the Polish counts, the Giedsinskis who had once owned the town when it was a private holding. My grandfather had, after all, said that
they were hiding in a kessel
.

Anyway, they were hiding. Or some of them were hiding.

We’d heard that the neighbor betrayed them and turned them in,

(or)

that the Polish maid, the
shiksa,
betrayed them and turned them in. Which was it? Impossible to know.

We’d read in Aunt Miriam’s letter that in 1942 the Germans killed Ester and two of the daughters. This must have been Ruchatz and Bronia. Were they in the same hiding place as the others? Impossible to know.

Aunt Miriam had said that Lorca somehow escaped and fought in the hills with the partisans, with whom she was later killed. Which hills? Which partisans? When? How? Had she been hiding, too? Impossible to know.

She’d written that Uncle Shmiel and Frydka were killed by the Germans in 1944. Were they in a different hiding place? How and why had they been separated? Impossible to know.

And for a long time, that’s what we knew. It wasn’t a great deal, but it was a great deal more than
Killed by the Nazis
. For a long time, it was as much as we ever thought we’d know; and given the extent of annihilation, given how many years had passed, given that there was, now, no one left to ask, it seemed like a lot.

The beginning chapters of
Bereishit
, the part that begins with the creation of the cosmos and narrows, over time, to the story of Adam and Eve and their fatal expulsion from Paradise (which is, too, the beginning of all of human history) tells us much about the pleasure to be had from the Tree of Knowledge: We know that it was good, it was a delight to the eyes, it was something “desirable for comprehension”—in other words, necessary for making distinctions, for, ultimately, creating. (For it is only after eating of the Tree that Adam and Eve go on to procreate.)

And yet we all know, too, that the Tree confers pain as well as pleasure. For the pleasurable knowledge that comes from eating the fruit of the tree is conjoined with great pain—expulsion from Paradise, labor, childbirth—and leads, indeed, to the greatest pain of all, which is death.

In my ongoing search for the helpful meanings that may be found in
parashat Bere
ishit
, which is after all the beginning of Torah’s vast explication of the meanings of Jewish history, I have yet to discover an answer to a question I have had since I was a small child, when I first read this story in Sunday school. Why, I used to wonder, should Knowledge come from a tree? Why not from a rock, a cloud, a river—a book, even? The trees I was familiar with, then, offered no answers. The front of our house was guarded by a horizontal line of tall pin oaks, which didn’t seem particularly wise, while in the back there stood, for a while, enormous, sulky willows, one quite close to the house—its farthest fronds used to brush, creepily, against the windows of my brothers’ and my bedrooms during storms—and the other at the far edge of our property, in a corner next to the compost heap, which my industrious father hoped, each year, would become “established.” Under one of these, years after I stopped attending Sunday school, I would overhear my parents and their parents reveal a secret about my father’s father that startled me, and which drew me more passionately into a study of his family than I had ever thought likely. Another of these would come crashing down during a hurricane that improbably hit the New York area in August 1976, the tops of its (luckily) tender upper branches squashed softly against the big window of my mother’s kitchen, so that when she walked into the kitchen the morning after hearing something go “crash” in the night, she screamed on seeing this monstrous mass looming in the window, looking for all the world as though it was about to devour the window, on the broad sill of which she would meticulously display some favorite tchotchkes: blue and white Delft candlesticks, vaguely modernistic Israeli utensils made of aromatic olive wood, brightly colored Italian ceramic jugs and vases filled with the plants that flourished so exuberantly in her care. It was on the day before this storm felled our willow tree, in fact, that the wife of my grandfather’s brother Julius, the one who never seemed quite to fit into the family, the one who had no
Feinheit
, refinement, had to be buried, having dropped dead suddenly the night before, in an elevator in their apartment building in the Bronx. Dutifully, my parents assembled us children and we all drove out, in the day of obliterating rain that preceded the hurricane itself, to Mount Judah, where poor Roslyn, dead at only fifty-eight, would be buried where all the other Jaegers, Yaegers, Jagers, and Jägers of Bolechow were patiently waiting. And of that sodden funeral, my mother tells one of her favorite stories: the story of how, as we Mendelsohns waited for the rest of the funeral party to arrive, in a downpour so furious that it punched holes in our umbrellas and half filled the open grave with muddy water in a way that made me, for the first time, wonder just what happened after the grave was sealed, she suddenly had the idea that we should all wait in the relative comfort of a nearby mausoleum, and how when one of us, terrified, resisted, my mother said, “Oh, come on, how bad could it be? It’s just nice old Jewish people in there!”

So the willow tree didn’t seem particularly wise, since it couldn’t even save itself. There was one more tree on our property that I liked to look at, when I was growing up and wondered, briefly, about what a “Tree of Knowledge” could possibly be. This was the great, twisted apple tree that stood in the corner of our backyard opposite the corner that was, for a time, occupied by the weeping willow. This tree had a claim to distinction that I didn’t know about until I was, I think, in high school: on its trunk, when it was young, there had been grafted the branches of seven kinds of apples, so that in its maturity it produced seven kinds of fruit—fruit that we, being suburban and not trusting anything edible that didn’t come from supermarkets, never ate, and which instead fell on the ground and rotted until someone, either we boys or the gardeners my parents eventually hired once we’d grown up, raked them away. The only person I ever saw eating from this tree was my uncle Nino—not a blood uncle, of course, since he was Italian, but rather my father’s close friend from work, a man who had considerable glamour for me, when I was a child, since he drove a sports car, served foods we never laid eyes on elsewhere, and talked about faraway places he’d been, and who for all those reasons reminded me, pleasantly, of my grandfather; although the wordly confidence with which Uncle Nino plucked green apples off this tree and ate them had, in my eyes, something distinctly un-Jewish about it, and for this reason, I now realize, was obscurely connected to my later desire to study the culture and language not of the Jews, the people to whom I belonged, but of the Greeks and Romans, the Mediterraneans of whom Nino himself was so obviously one…. It was my grandfather, I should say in this context, who under that same tree chased me in circles one day, when I was perhaps ten, threatening to beat me black and blue—if I remember correctly, he was holding an empty milk bottle as he did so—because I had been setting model cars afire under the tree, and as he chased me he kept saying,
A fire you’re lighting, a fire? Do you want to kill us all?
At that time, I had not yet learned the story of how his childhood home in Bolechow had been hit and set afire by a Russian shell in World War I, or indeed the one about how he had watched, during another shelling in the same war, as a school friend of his had been burned, or perhaps the better word is boiled, to death when the river that ran through Bolechow was set afire.