The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (11 page)

Hinde

Moses

Eisig (his father)

Mindel

Ester

Saul

Abraham

I listened, and when he said the name
Ester
I actually gasped. She had seemed to belong so utterly to the remote and untouchable part of our family’s past, my uncle Shmiel’s wife had, that to be talking to someone who had a closer connection to her than I did—to her nephew, in fact, to the first cousin of the girls whom I’d grown to think of as being wholly “our” cousins—talking to someone who might have knowledge of the lost gleaned because of a relationship that I hadn’t dreamed even existed (how could I, knowing so little about her, not even knowing if she’d had brothers or sisters?)—to be talking to this person was both thrilling and, in a way, startling. I started to wonder, then, how many other traces she had left behind, how many other clues might be out there, floating in Internet postings and buried in archives that I wouldn’t even know were relevant because I had so little to go on, that I wouldn’t even know were relevant even when I saw them.

Still, maybe I was jumping to conclusions: after all, there might have been more than one Ester Schneelicht born in the 1890s, from Stryj. But as I was thinking this, the man on the other end of the line said something else. He was telling me that certain of these brothers and sisters of his father’s, who for all I knew were the brothers and sisters of my great-aunt Ester, had had nicknames, which of course was something I knew well from my own family history: his father
Eisig
, for instance, he told me, was also known as
Emil
. I was taking notes while he was speaking, and on the piece of paper I had in my hand I wrote E
ISIG
= E
MIL
. Then he said that one of the aunts, Mindel, or Mina, had not, in fact, perished in the Holocaust, but had come long before to the States and lived in New York with her husband. He was a photographer.

Mina, this voice on the other end of the line repeated. They also called her Minnie.

I was starting to write M
INDEL
= M
INA
= M
INNIE
, when my hands grew sweaty and my heart started thudding.

Wait, I said. Wait.

I cleared my throat, and then said, She was married to a photographer, and her name was Minnie?

Yeah, the man said. Her husband was Spieler. Jack or Jake. Spieler. They were my aunt and uncle. Jack and Minnie Spieler.

Listen:

S
OON AFTER
I began to use the jewishgen.org site regularly, I made contact with a woman who, like me, had a family connection to Bolechow. This woman, who, after I finally met her, turned out to be as lively, outgoing, and generous as her e-mails at first suggested, and whose opulent masses of reddish ringlets, when I finally went down to Greenwich Village to meet her one March morning in 2001, somehow seemed to express these qualities, had volunteered for the Web site’s Yizkor Book Project. (Many of the Yizkor books, including the
Sefer HaZikaron LeKedoshei Bolechow,
are in Yiddish or Hebrew or both, and jewishgen.org has sponsored a project to translate them into English and post the texts on the site.) The woman, whose name was Susannah, had also made a trip to Bolechow—even though, as she would later tell me, none of her immediate family, no one she’d actually known, was from there, a detail that moved and impressed me—and had posted photographs of the town on ShtetlLinks. I’d e-mailed her to say how much I’d enjoyed her postings, and we began a correspondence, during which she gave me two crucial pieces of information.

First, she put me in touch with a young Ukrainian researcher named Alex Dunai, who’d been her guide in Bolechow—or, as it must now be called, Bolekhiv—and who, she told me, also did archival research in the various local offices. As a result of this tip, I e-mailed Alex and asked him to explore the Jewish archives of Bolechow, which, miraculously, had not been destroyed during the war, and about two months after I’d first contacted him I received a bulging package from Ukraine containing over a hundred documents: photocopies of the originals, along with Alex’s painstaking, typed translations. Of these I will say, for the present, that the earliest surviving records of the Jewish community of Bolechow, now stored in the L’viv Municipal Archives, date from the beginning of the nineteenth century, and that among these ear
liest records is a death certificate, dated the twenty-sixth of November 1835, that records the death at the age of eighty-nine of a certain Sheindel Jäger, on the twenty-fourth of that month. This Sheindel, the widow of the late Juda Jäger, had died (the certificate perhaps unnecessarily notes) of “old age,” at an address given as House 141; for administrative purposes, all the houses in the village were numbered, and these numbers, rather than the names of streets, were used for official documents, although I can tell you, since a woman who knows told me a few years later as we were having lunch in Tel Aviv, that the street was called
Schustergasse
, Shoemaker’s Way. She was, we may therefore deduce, born in 1746 or, possibly, 1745, which makes her my family’s oldest known ancestor, for she was the mother of Abraham Jäger (1790–1845), who was the father of Isak Jäger (ca. 1825–before 1900, which was the year my grandfather’s Zionist brother, Itzhak, who was named for him, was born), who was the father of Elkune Jäger (1867–1912), my great-grandfather who dropped dead at a spa, thereby setting in motion a string of events that would, at its farthest, least imaginable reaches, result in the deaths, by shooting, beating, and gassing, of his son, daughter-in-law, and four granddaughters; and who in turn was the father of Abraham Jaeger (1902–1980: Grandpa); who was the father of Marlene Jaeger Mendelsohn (born 1931), who is my mother.

It is not without a certain bitter irony, I am aware, that the reason I know all of this was, ultimately, that there exists something called the
Sefer HaZikaron LeKedoshei Bolechow,
or “Memorial Book of the Martyrs of Bolechow.” For it was because of this book that I found Susannah, and it was Susannah who put me in touch with Alex, a gregarious young Ukrainian whom I would eventually meet myself, and it was this Ukrainian, who makes his living now by taking American Jews to the blighted settings of their own family stories, who found for me the documents that chart the path of my Jäger relatives beginning with an unimaginable eighteenth-century woman—a woman who could very well have known, and is almost certain to have laid her (blue?) eyes on, Ber Birkenthal of Bolechow, a woman who, like every one of her descendants, from her son to her great-great-grandson, my grandfather, was born and lived in the same house, house number 141 of a town called Bolechow in the vicinity of Lemberg (later Lwów, later L’vov, presently L’viv) in the province of Galicia in the Imperial and Royal Empire of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary.

That was the first thing that Susannah did for me. The second was something I hadn’t imagined possible, once.

We’d been corresponding about her trip to Bolechow in 1999, since by now I was considering going there myself. I thought, then, that I might write an article about what it was like to return to an ancestral shtetl, two generations later, and to talk to the people who now lived there: to find out what, if any, faint traces still remained of the life that had been. On a Thursday in January 2001 I wrote Susannah an e-mail asking her whether, based on her experience of the place, she thought there was anyone now living in Bolechow, in Bolekhiv, who had clear memories of the pre–World War II period—people I might interview for the article I thought I might write. Perhaps, I wrote, I should get Alex to help me put ads in the local papers.

She replied on Tuesday the thirtieth, providing, almost as an aside, some information that was astounding to me. Apropos of old Bolechowers who might be of interest to me, she wrote, there was a very elderly Jew who’d only recently moved, with his equally elderly wife, from Bolechow to New York City: an eighty-nine-year-old man called Eli Rosenberg. He was, as Susannah put it, “the last Jew of Bolekhov,” who had once been the town’s hatmaker. (In the years that followed this exchange, I would meet the last Jew of Stryj, too, and the last Jew of a tiny town outside Riga. His name was Mendelsohn.) This Bolechower Jew, she explained, had survived the war years because in the summer of 1941, when the Germans arrived, he’d fled east into Russia with the retreating Soviet army. On returning to the town after it was liberated in 1944, he found that none of his original family had survived, but had decided to stay. Except for that last detail, it was a story I would hear again, later.

I looked at my computer screen, at the cursor blinking on the word
returned
in the sentence
Returned home after the war to find no one left from his family or from the entire Jewish community
. I’d grown so used to thinking of Bolechow as a mythical place (because it had existed for me only in my grandfather’s stories), and had grown so used to thinking of the present-day Bolechow, Bolekhiv, as hopelessly distant from its wartime past (because six decades had passed and because almost none of the original population, whether Jewish, Polish, or Ukrainian, remained there), that the existence of an old Jew of Bolechow, alive today in New York City, a person who could bridge the distance between the place I’d always heard about and the place that existed on the map, between Bolechow and Bolekhiv, seemed to me as improbable as the existence of extraterrestrials.

At the end of her e-mail Susannah asked whether I lived in the New York area, and, if so, whether I wanted someday to go with her to meet the Rosenbergs, who lived in Brooklyn. They spoke only Russian and Yiddish, she
explained, but she herself had been studying Yiddish seriously for some time and could act as an interpreter. I enthusiastically wrote back to accept her invitation. My enthusiasm was, I should say, motivated only in part by my desire to discover whether this Eli Rosenberg could shed any light on Shmiel and his family. The last Jew from Bolechow who’d spoken Yiddish in my presence had been my grandfather, dead now for twenty years. I wanted to hear it again.

Susannah replied soon after. The “great news!!!” was that she had called Mr. Rosenberg, or rather had spoken with his son, and they’d arranged a date for our meeting—my first and, I then thought, probably my last meeting with a Jew from Bolechow who could tell me something, anything, about what had happened there before, or during, or after the war. The date was set for Sunday, March 11. I was to meet Susannah at her apartment downtown and then she’d drive us to Brooklyn. She warned me that Eli spoke very softly, was quite weak physically, and that the death of his wife, Feyge—which Susannah hadn’t known about until her recent communication with Eli’s son—had been a serious blow.

By the time we drove to Brooklyn, I was extremely tense. Once again, as had been the case with Mrs. Begley at that reception two years earlier, the idea of proximity to someone from the place and time I was interested in was almost too tantalizing, too powerful, to bear: my leg was shaking as I sat in Susannah’s car and watched Manhattan drop behind us. As we navigated the unfamiliar streets, Susannah peering at the street signs and I scrutinizing an oversized road atlas, I was, once again, prey to fantasies so intense, at once so vivid and so embarrassing in the mundaneness of the information this meeting could yield—
had Shmiel once bought a hat from this man
?—that, after we parked and found the tiny, dark apartment in an enormous, rather Soviet-looking stone-and-brick complex, I didn’t trust myself to speak. I was lucky, I thought, that Susannah was going to do the talking.

But in the end there wasn’t that much talking to be done. As we sat in the Rosenberg apartment, which was sparsely furnished and quite dark, listening to the thumping of basketballs resounding in the little courtyard of the housing project, it became clear that Mr. Rosenberg’s condition had deteriorated quite seriously since the last time he and Susannah had been in touch. Susannah introduced me in Yiddish, and I told her to tell him that I was hoping he might have known my grandfather’s brother, Shmiel Jäger.

Shmiel Jäger, Shmiel Jäger,
Eli Rosenberg said in a soft, rather high-pitched voice, his mouth open. But nothing followed, except that he raised his hand
high above his head, as if to indicate a tall person. Susannah said something to him and he nodded vigorously and said something back to her, and she turned to me.

He says he was a very tall man, Susannah said.

A very tall man,
I thought to myself, my heart sinking. He didn’t look very tall in the photographs I’d seen; no one in my family was very tall, to tell the truth.

Then Eli Rosenberg looked at Susannah and asked her who I was. His son, a very dark, rather Slavic-looking man in his forties, offered us tea and cookies. A game show was playing very loudly on the TV set. Susannah explained to Eli, again, that I was the grandson of the brother of Shmiel Jäger, who had the butcher shop in Bolechow. She told him again that I wanted to know if he had known Shmiel.

Shmiel Jäger, Shmiel Jäger,
Eli said again, nodding in a way that seemed, for all that this impression was completely misleading, endearingly sage. Then he looked up—at me, not at Susannah—and said,
Toip,
and then nodded again, as if pleased with himself. I had no idea what he was talking about. Susannah talked to him some more, as it to make sure she’d heard correctly, and then turned to me.

He says Shmiel Jäger was deaf.
Toip.

I looked from Susannah to Eli Rosenberg, who was nodding and cupping a hand to one ear, miming deafness. Then he asked Susannah, again, who I was and what I wanted.

My heart sank again. If Shmiel had been deaf, I’m sure my grandfather, or someone, would have mentioned it. It was the kind of detail salient enough, and harmless enough, to have escaped the unofficial censorship that my grandfather had imposed on any stories having to do with Shmiel. I began to wonder what other neighbor from two lifetimes ago, some tall deaf person wholly unrelated to me, this Eli Rosenberg was conflating my lost great-uncle with, and suddenly I felt defeated. All the energy, all the secret anticipation that had carried me through the agonizing slowness of these exchanges in a language I hadn’t heard in two decades, all the stoked fervor of my hopes that he might say something big, something important, something about how they had died, about the last day he’d seen them,
something
—all this had, I realized, somehow exhausted me, left me empty. At that moment I wanted only to leave this dark, depressing apartment, and go home to look at my photographs, which at least I knew to be of them, knew to be authentic.