The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (14 page)

So there are many ways to ascertain specific, concrete kinds of information on the Internet, information that will tell you when certain things happened. And yet the method I use to ascertain certain kinds of dates is, oddly enough, although as infallible as the vast archival data that go into creating those online databases, based on a single human memory.

I have a young friend who has the odd ability to tell you instantly the precise day of the week on which any date over the past two millennia that you care to name happened to fall. This is most useful for people who, like me, are interested in histories that vastly predate the era of newspapers or wall calendars. My young friend can, for instance, tell you that July 18, 1290—the day on which the entire Jewish population of England was, by an edict of King Edward I, given until the first of November that year (a Wednesday) to leave the country, on pain of execution—was a Tuesday (this Tuesday coinciding with the observance, that year, of the fast of the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Ab, a ritual that commemorates a variety of disasters for the Jewish people, including the destruction of the Temple); and despite the fact that one group of fleeing Jews was, infamously, left to drown by the captain of the ship they had engaged (
Cry to Moses,
he told them as he sailed away,
by whose conduct your fathers passed through the Red Sea:
a cruel deceit for which the evil captain was hanged on order of the king, who was
shocked by this crime against innocent men, women, and children), England’s Jews did indeed depart, most of them making their way to safe haven across the Channel in France…. But then, Nicky can also tell you that the respite of these English Jews lasted only until a Friday sixteen years later, since on July 22, 1306, by edict of King Philip the Fair (whose treasuries had grown perilously depleted), all of the Jews of France, numbering perhaps some hundred thousand men, women, and children, were expelled from that country, after which their houses, lands, and movable goods were sold at auction, and Philip the Fair, undeterred, apparently, by scriptural sensitivities against usury, brought himself to assume title of the loans still owed by Christian Frenchmen to the now-absent Jewish moneylenders. (Six centuries later, France was still uneasy about its Jews. On October 15, 1894—a Monday—a Jewish officer of the French army, Alfred Dreyfus, was arrested on fabricated charges of betraying secrets to the Germans; the ensuing trial, to say nothing of subsequent revelations of a high-level governmental cover-up intended to protect anti-Semitic officials, was one of the most explosively divisive scandals of French and indeed European modern history, its confrontational and internecine mood summed up in the famous two-word challenge—
J’accuse!,
“I Accuse!”—offered by the novelist Émile Zola to the president of the Republic on the front page of a literary newspaper called
L’Aurore
in its issue of January 13, 1898, which was a Thursday. Newpaper coverage of the affair was, in fact, extensive throughout Europe, a fact perhaps worth mentioning here because among the foreign reporters covering the trial was a young Austrian journalist called Theodor Herzl, who went on to become the founder of the modern Zionist movement and who indeed later claimed that it was his experience of the Dreyfus case, his exposure to the official anti-Semitism that was made evident in the proceedings, that had galvanized his conviction that the only solution to the problem of European anti-Semitism was for the Jews to have a homeland of their own—a place, that is to say, from which they could not be expelled.)

Still (to return to the fourteenth century), there were other places to go, and it is entirely possible that some of the Jews who were expelled first by the English and then by the French decided to make their way across the Pyrenees to, say, Spain. And it is entirely possible that they would have flourished there, although it must be said that this respite did not last, and indeed there are two more dates of interest in this regard, which is to say March 30 and July 30, 1492, the former being the Friday on which the edict of expulsion signed by Ferdinand and Isabella, well known to American schoolchildren as the patrons of Columbus but less well known, I suspect, as the authors of this partic
ular legal document, was issued, the latter being the Monday on which it took effect, thereby condemning some two hundred thousand Jews to exile—although it should be said that tens of thousands were murdered as they tried to leave, some by greedy Spanish ship captains who threw them overboard after collecting exorbitant sums for safe passage, others by greedy Spaniards who, having heard that the Jews had swallowed gold and jewels, murdered the Jews on the road. Still, we know that many of the fleeing Spanish Jews eventually fared well, having been invited by the canny and tolerant Ottoman sultan, Bajazet, to enhance his kingdom. (
How can you call Ferdinand of Aragon a wise king, this same Ferdinand who impoverished his own land and enriched ours
? he is reported to have said.) And indeed, many of those who stopped short of Istanbul fared just as well. Yet one must note that nearly all of the descendants of the fleeing Sephardim who eventually settled in Thessalonica, the great Byzantine and later Ottoman city in what is now northern Greece—nearly all of the sixty thousand who were the direct descendants of those particular Jewish refugees, and who were alive at the beginning of the 1940s—perished, inevitably, as the direct result of the entry of the German armed columns into that city on April 9, 1941, a Wednesday. (The first transport of about twenty-five hundred, which was a fairly modest number as these things went, left the railway sidings in Salonica on the morning of March 14, 1943. A Sunday.) And my friend can tell you that the twenty-ninth of October in that same deadly year of 1941, which, as we would learn after we went to Bolechow, was the date on which was killed one of the Jägers who, at least in part because of Shmiel’s desire to be
a big fish in a small pond
, were still living in Bolechow after the Second World War began, was a Wednesday.

So it is remarkable how certain human memories will be fallible, while others seem as reliable as machines. Still, my friend once admitted that
it gets a little harder when it’s B.C.
, and when he said this I smiled wryly, since I remember all too well how odd it can be getting used to B.C. dates. How bizarre, that is, to get used to reconciling our intuitive sense of events and lives as things that progress and go forward in time, our sense of dates and years as moving forward, increasing numerically, with the counterintuitive backward movement, the numerical dwindling as time accrues, of dates and years when you are dealing with the period before the birth of Christ, which is the all-important moment toward which you’re always counting down, when you study ancient history. But eventually you do get used to counting backward, and so (for example) it seems perfectly natural that (say) Alexander the Great lived backward, from 356 to 323, whereas (say) Adolf Hitler lived, far less
counterintuitively, from 1889 to 1945. Or, to take less exalted examples, that a young Jewish man belonging to the band of about three thousand Jewish guerrilla partisans who participated in the Maccabee rebellion, an uprising against the anti-Jewish policies of the Hellenistic Greek monarch Antiochus IV (who in 167 B.C. issued the decrees that outlawed circumcision and observance of Sabbath and festivals, and, as we know, prohibited studying, owning, or making copies the Torah) might well have lived from, say, 187 to 164 B.C.; whereas my mother’s first cousin Lorka Jäger, who was a partisan fighting against the Nazi occupation in the Dolina forest in eastern Poland in the mid-1940s, lived from May 21, 1920 (a Friday), to, most likely, although it is absolutely impossible to know for sure, 1943, which was the year in which the Germans finally crushed that particular partisan operation.

So you can get used to counting backward—to measuring increasing closeness to your own position in time by means of decreasing numeric values. Of course, this seems only natural when you spend time studying what happened in eastern Poland between 1941 and 1944, since the higher the numeric value of a given year, the lower the quantity of living human beings in a given town: in Bolechow, say. Or, to put it spatially, the closer the year is to the present, the farther away are the moments, the seconds and hours and afternoons, in which certain people (Lorka Jäger, for instance) were actually alive. In this way, by an ironic machination of history, time and space, distance and proximity, become confounded.

S
O IT WAS
on a Monday that Shmiel sat down to write the letter.

It’s clear from the first line that this letter cannot have been easy to write. This was not because Shmiel had a hard time expressing himself in writing: he was, after all, fluent in four languages and competent in two more, and his letters suggest that he was not a little vain about his expressive powers, as he was about many things, his fine house, his wife, his four good-looking daughters, his high status in the small town where his family has lived for hundreds of years, his flourishing business. The German that he has chosen to write in flows fairly easily from the nib of his pen. It is not his native tongue, nor,
indeed, that of the recipient, but as we know it was the written lingua franca of the family. The problem was that he barely knew the man to whom he was writing and from whom he now had to ask for a substantial loan.

This fact alone suggests, rather poignantly, the extent to which, still early in a year that would prove terrible, Shmiel was worried about his business, the flourishing meat-shipping concern that he proudly built up after inheriting the butcher shop that had been in his family for centuries, carefully husbanded by generations of Jägers who, as it is now possible to see by shrewd examination of the surprisingly numerous surviving vital records of Bolechow Jewry, enhanced whatever business acumen they may have had (a quality to which birth or marriage or death certificates cannot, naturally, attest) with strategic marriages to other families in either the same or related businesses…

F
OR INSTANCE:

In the birth register entry for my grandfather’s uncle Ire Jäger, who was born in house number 141 in Bolechow on August 22, 1847, a fact that is attested to by a document known as birth record number 446 for the year 1847 for the town of Bolechow, the following notation is made in the “comments” section, in German, in a fine, cobwebby hand:
Der Zuname der unehel: [ichen] Kindes Mutter is Kornblüh [Kornbuch?]:
“The surname of the illegitimate child’s mother is Kornblüh [Kornbuch?].” What excited my attention, on seeing this piece of paper for the first time—it was one of the hundred or so documents that Alex Dunai had unearthed for me from Ukraine—was not, as someone might think, the adjective
unehelich,
“illegitimate”—the offspring of all Jewish marriages were considered to be illegitimate by the State authorities who kept these records, since the marriages had not taken place in the Catholic Church and the Jews, as often as not, didn’t bother paying the exorbitant fees necessary to legitimize their children’s births—but the name Kornblüh, a name that, on reading it here, seemed somehow familiar, a name I had vaguely remembered my grandfather using although in what context I couldn’t, any longer, remember. But now, when I saw that forgotten name reappearing on this document, I realized that at some point he must have told me that it was his own grandmother’s maiden name. With this in mind I went online to www.jewishgen.org and called up the online database known as the 1891 Galicia Business Registry, which is a searchable transcription of a musty tome, of impossibly small interest to the vast majority of people in the world, titled
Kaufmannisches Adressbuch für Industrie, Handel und
Gewerbe, XIV: Galicia
, first published in Vienna by L. Bergmann & Comp., in 1925, and existing, now, as a photocopy in the British Library: which is to say, a printed version of the official 1891 directory of all business owners in Galicia, the Austro-Hungarian province of which Bolechow was then considered a part. I had searched this database before, and so I already knew that there were Jägers from Bolechow here—their names are given as Alter, Ichel, and Jacob—although for reasons that are, simply, impossible to know now, my great-grandfather Elkune Jäger does not appear in this index, although on the 1890 birth certificate of his first child by his first wife he is certainly listed as being a
Fleischer
, a butcher. (First wife, first child: I only recently and quite accidentally found out, during a search of some records made newly available online, that my great-grandmother Taube was Elkune’s second wife; that Elkune had had another, first wife, who along with their two infant daughters had died early in the 1890s. Her name was Ester Silberszlag. I started tracing the Silberszlag family tree online, had added many Silberszlags to my family tree file, the fruit of many hours online, until I realized that I was wasting days on documenting a branch of my family that was, like certain first marriages you can read about in the Torah—Abraham’s, or Isaac’s—a dead end.) On a hunch I entered the name
KORNBLUH
and, after the computer whirred for a few moments, the search result, expressed in five columns—FAMILY NAME; GIVEN NAME; TOWN; OCCUPATION; OCCUPATION IN ENGLISH—was exactly what I had expected: