The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (13 page)

TEXT OF A LETTER FROM ABRAHAM JAEGER, DATED 25 SEPTEMBER 1973, FOUND BY THE AUTHOR IN A STACK OF OLD PAPERS ON 6 JUNE 2005:

I
N THE COMMUNITY HOUSE THERE WAS A PARCHMENT WITH A CHRONICLE ON IT, BUT THE FIRST PAGE WAS MISSING AND THE WRITING HAD FADED.

Isaac Bashevis Singer,

“The Gentleman from Cracow”

O
N
A
UGUST 12, 2001
, two of my brothers and my sister and I climbed out of a cramped blue Volkswagen Passat and our feet touched the wet earth of Bolechow. It was a Sunday, and the weather was bad. After six months of planning, we had finally arrived.

Or, I suppose, returned.

Almost exactly sixty years earlier—on August 1, 1941—the civil administration of what had once been the Habsburg district of Galicia, a region that included the town of Bolechow, was transferred to the German authorities, who, after breaking the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, had turned around and invaded eastern Poland two months before and were now, finally, putting things in order. Not long afterward—perhaps later that same August, certainly by September 1941—plans for the area’s first Aktion, or organized mass murder of Jews, began taking shape. These actions were scheduled for October. The Bolechow Aktion took place on October 28 and 29, 1941. In it there perished approximately a thousand Jews.

Of those thousand, there is one in particular who interests me.

On January 16, 1939, Shmiel Jäger sat down to write a desperate letter to a relative in New York. It was a Monday. There were other letters that Shmiel wrote to his family in the States, but it is this letter, I later realize, that contains all of the reasons we went back to Bolechow. More than anything else, it is what connects the other two dates: the plans that reached their fruition in August 2001, the plans that were set in motion in August 1941.

W
HEN
I
THINK
now about that Sunday when we finally reached Bolechow, the climax of a trip that required months of planning, many thousands of dollars, painstaking coordination among a large number of people on two continents, all for a journey lasting barely six days, of which only one, really, was spent doing what we had come to do, which was to talk to people in the crucial place, in Bolechow, the town about which I had been hearing, thinking, dreaming, and writing for nearly thirty years, a place that I thought (then) would be the only place I could go to find out what happened to them all—when I think about all this, I feel ashamed at how casual we were, how ill-prepared and naive.

We had come, after all, having no idea what we might find. Months earlier, in January, when the idea for this trip was first taking shape, I had e-mailed Alex Dunai in L’viv, asking if there might be anyone left in Bolechow old enough to
have known my family. Alex wrote me back to say he had talked to the mayor of the town, and the answer was Yes. The town was tiny, he said; if we came to visit, all we’d have to do was walk around and talk to a few people in order to find those who might have known Shmiel and his family, who might be able to tell us what really happened. Because I was determined to go anyway—because this had been my obsession from the beginning, simply to go there, as if the air and soil of the place could somehow tell us something concrete and true—this was enough for me. It was on this slimmest of possibilities—the possibility that we might, just might, stumble onto a chance encounter on a Sunday afternoon with a Ukrainian who was not merely old enough to have been an adult sixty years before, which was already asking a lot, but who actually knew them—that I committed myself, and my brothers and sister, although at the time I did not tell them just how slim the possibility was, to going there.

And so at the core of this trip, which seemed like a symbol, almost a cliché of family unity, there was a hidden deceit.

Still, we did end up finding out what happened to Uncle Shmiel and his family—by accident; and for that reason it’s perhaps unnecessary to feel guilty even now, as I sometimes do, for having led my brothers and sister on a trip that would very likely have been our sole and, basically, unsuccessful fact-finding journey if it hadn’t been for my mother’s first cousin Elkana in Israel…Elkana, the last male on earth to be born a Jäger of Bolechow, who had abandoned the family name, taking a Hebrew surname and thereby sealing the extinction, in a way, of a certain part of my mother’s family heritage, although of course the fact that there were Jägers in Israel at all, by whatever name, had ensured the survival of something more primitive, more biological, which is the family’s genes. Elkana, the fabulous, storied cousin who (we knew) was some kind of big
macher
in Israel, who had blown up bridges in the War of Independence and, on his rare trips to visit us on Long Island, would get the local police department to fly him over our house in a helicopter, much to our delirious glee and to the secret envy of other children on the block. Elkana, who had retained the family’s high sense of its own significance, its confidence in the appeal of its narratives and its dramas, and for that reason shared the news of our trip to Bolechow that summer with certain others, who told others, who told others…DNA is not the only thing that runs in families. But then, I am aware that the story of what happened to Shmiel would never have existed, would never have been worth telling, if that same innocuous self-aggrandizement had not led Shmiel to stay in Poland, led him to insist on being
a big fish in a small
pond
, as my grandfather once put it, and so to remain stubbornly, perhaps even resentfully behind after his three brothers had moved on.

Or at least, those are the emotions that I, who know something about tensions between siblings, attribute to him.

In August 1941, the fate of Bolechow’s Jews fell officially into the hands of the Germans.

In August and September of that year, most of the Jews of Bolechow, including my great-uncle and his wife and four daughters, were unlikely to have a clear idea of what was being planned for them. There were, to be sure, rumors of mass killings in cemeteries farther west, but few people credited them—protecting themselves, as people will, from knowledge of the worst. It is important to remember that many of the Jews of Bolechow, that early autumn, had already weathered the severe deprivations of two years of grim Soviet occupation; as difficult as it is to remember, for those who enjoy the benefit of hindsight, many Jews, as the Soviets fled before the Germans, were hoping that there would be some way to adapt to the harsh new status quo. And indeed, while drastically changed in certain respects, everyday life in the first few months of the German occupation rather surreally maintained certain features of everyday life from before. For instance, Jews were not prevented from attending synagogue on the Sabbath. A man I talked to sixty-two years after the German takeover remembered quite clearly attending Yom Kippur services in 1942. They knew they were going to kill us all anyway, he remarked. So why bother stopping us?

And so, in September 1941, the most pious Jews of the town maintained the traditions of their ancestors. As September melted away, so did the old Jewish year. In 1941 Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, was scheduled to fall in the middle of September, and some of the Jews of Bolechow prepared themselves. Among the things that happen when a new year begins, for Jews, is that the weekly cycle of rereading the Torah also begins again. The
parashah
for the first Sabbath of that new cycle is, naturally,
parashat Bereishit,
which begins with God’s formation of the heavens and earth and ends with his decision to exterminate humankind by means of the Flood. It is a portion, that is to say, that travels a magnificent and dreadful arc from inspired creation to utter annihilation.

In the year 1941, the reading of
parashat Bereishit
took place on Saturday, October 18. The following week, on October 25,
parashat Noach,
the account of the Flood itself and of the survival of a very few, would have been read. I have to wonder how many of Bolechow’s Jews went to shul the following week, since between Saturday, October 25, and Saturday, November 1, there occurred in Bolechow the first of the mass annihilations of which there would be so few survivors—the first Aktion, which began on Tues
day, the twenty-eighth, and ended the following day. So it is possible, perhaps even likely, that the last
parashah
that many of the town’s Jews ever heard was
Noach,
that tale of divinely ordained extermination, one among several that we find in the Torah. But even if certain Jews of Bolechow had stayed home on Saturday, the twenty-fifth, perhaps out of indifference, perhaps out of fear, even if the last reading from the Torah that they would ever hear in the grand old shul on the Ringplatz or in any of the town’s many smaller shuls and little prayer houses was the first of the year’s readings, they would have had cause to ponder. For
parashat Bereishit
not only includes themes that are of great interest in general—Creation to be sure but also expulsion and annihilation and, in particular, lies and deceptions, from the serpent’s seductive half-truths to the self-serving deceits that circulate among families, starting with the very first human family in Creation—but has as its very center the story of Cain and Abel, the Bible’s great narrative of original fratricidal sin, its most comprehensive attempt to explicate the origins of the tensions and violences that hover not only within families, but among and between the peoples of the earth.

Comprising the first sixteen verses of chapter 4 of Genesis, the tale is by now familiar: how Adam knew Eve, who became pregnant and gave birth to Cain, an event that prompted her to boast, “I have created a man with YHWH!”; how she then gave birth to the younger brother, Abel. How, curiously, it was the younger brother who had the more pleasant task of tending the flocks, while the older brother toiled as a worker of the ground, and how when the brothers made their offerings to God, the fruits of the earth and the firstborn of the flock, God acknowledged the offering of the younger, but not the offering of the older boy, and how this greatly upset Cain, “whose face was fallen.” How God chided Cain, warning him that sin “crouched in the threshold,” that he must “dominate” it; and how Cain did not, in the end, dominate his sinful urge, but called his brother out into a field, and killed him there. How all-knowing God demanded to know of Cain where his brother was, the question to which Cain made his famous answer, replete with the sullen cheekiness all too familiar to parents of guilty children: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” How God cries out, then, that Abel’s blood “is crying from the ground,” and curses Cain to be a roamer and rover on the earth. Then Cain’s anguish, the expulsion, the mark upon his brow.

Despite its archaic stiffness, it is a story that, to anyone who has a family—parents, or siblings, or both; which is to say everyone—will be eerily familiar. The young couple, the arrival of the first child; the arrival, entailing more complex and compromised emotions, of the first sibling; the seeds of an obscure competition; the parental disapproval, the shame, the lies, the deceits. The violence in a moment of—what?

The departure that is both an escape and an exile.

O
N A
M
ONDAY
in January 1939, Shmiel Jäger, who was then a forty-three-year-old businessman with a wife and four children, sat down to write the first of those letters. It is true that nearly every aspect of my grandfather’s relationship with his oldest brother must be a matter of conjecture, since Shmiel’s mind long ago became the molecules and atoms in the air above the little town of Belzec, while the matter that made my grandfather who he was has long since crumbled and gone back into the earth of that small portion of Mount Judah Cemetery in Queens that is reserved for the Jews who came from Bolechow. But there are certain aspects of this letter, concrete things, things the letter actually says and which, therefore, I do not have to surmise, that force me to think about family quarrels, about proximity and distance and “closeness” that are not temporal or spatial but emotional.

The letter begins with a date, which Shmiel has written as follows: 16/I 1939. January 16, 1939. I know that the sixteenth of January fell on a Monday in 1939. Naturally this fact is verifiable in all sorts of ways, since there are now Web sites that, within tenths of a second, are able to provide the most casual researcher with endless amounts of calendrical, geographical, topographical, and other kinds of data. For instance, there are a number of sites that tell you on what date in any year in the past century the ritual reading of a given
parashah
, or weekly Torah portion, took place, or can tell you in fractions of a second which
haftarah
, the selection from the Prophets, was read on which date.
In this context it seems worth noting that one explanation for the practice of reading the
haftarah
portion in addition to the Torah portion each week is that it evolved during a period of Greek oppression of the Jews during the second century B.C. as a kind of rabbinic subterfuge, since the Jews’ Greek overlords at the time had banned the reading of the Torah. In response to this interdiction, the rabbis of the Second Jewish Commonwealth replaced weekly reading of the
parashot
with readings from the Prophets—texts that were not forbidden. These excerpts, however, were carefully chosen so that the
haftarah
portion to be read on any given week had strong thematic connections with the unreadable
parashah
for that week. (For instance, a Torah portion about sacrifices made by the High Priest for the purposes of atonement—a
parashah
about ritual scapegoats—might be replaced by a
haftarah
portion about the purging and subsequent redemption of the people of Israel: my
parashah,
my
haftarah
.) In this way, the weekly reading on the Sabbath, during this very early period in the oppression of the Jews, created a kind of parallel narrative world, in which what was being read was being read precisely because it vividly called to mind that which was not being read, that which had, for the time, become unsayable.