The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (16 page)

To Matthew, whose arm I snapped in two, I was, I now realize, less cruel. Perhaps that is why it was Matthew who would, against all odds, become my companion and partner in the search for Shmiel: for all of the many hundreds of photographs of our trips, first to Bolechow and then to Australia, Israel, and Scandinavia, and finally Ukraine one last time were, first, images that passed through his tawny eyes, eyes set in a face like that of one of the icons to which, for generations, the members of his wife’s Greek Orthodox family prayed. And perhaps that’s why Eric, the brother whom I, in my vanity and arrogance, my self-centered belief that what interested me must interest him, my desire to make him a moon circling the planet of myself, I had thought my companion, was the brother who, after years of this heedlessness on my part, I had estranged.

Those murderous silences between brothers run through my family as surely as do certain genes. I think of my father, who for thirty-five years didn’t speak a word to his older brother, to whom I knew he had once been close, my Uncle Bobby whom my father, as a child growing up in the Bronx, had (I learned only after Bobby died) watched silently each morning as Bobby strapped the cumbersome braces to his pencil-thin legs. Bobby, whose polio, as so often happens, returned late in his life to kill him, and at whose funeral, a few months before I and four of my five siblings went in search of my grandfather’s unknown brother, my father read a eulogy of such poignancy and naked emotion that I realized only then that the reason he hadn’t spoken to him all those years was that the feelings were too strong, rather than too weak. I think of how, as in some bizarre zero-sum equation, as soon as my father had resumed talking to Bobby, he lost touch with his other brother, a gentle man, tall and bearing well into his adulthood and even old age the now almost-invisible traces of a terrible acne, who shared my brother Matt’s birthday, and who, an accomplished amateur photographer himself, was the first person to encourage Matt in the hobby that would eventually become his career.

I think, too, of my grandfather, of how imperious and condescending he’d been to Uncle Julius, who’d committed no greater sin than to be unattractive and coarse in his manners, to lack
Feinheit
. I think of my grandfather and Shmiel, and wondered yet again what might have passed between them, what upsurge of unacknowledged and unknowable emotion that, in me, had led me one day to break my brother’s arm, might have led my grandfather to do something far more terrible, something I began to worry about only when Shmiel’s letters were discovered.

F
OR WHEN, ON
that January Monday in 1939, Shmiel sat down to write his letter, he needed money to save his truck; by the end of the year, he would be begging for money to save his life. Between January 1939 and December 1939, when the last letter got through, my grandfather’s brother wrote again and again, asking for money from my grandfather, from their younger sister, Jeanette, money this time not for trucks or repairs but for papers, affidavits, emigration papers for (at first) the four daughters, for (a little later on) two daughters, perhaps (finally) for one daughter, “the dear Lorka,” as he playfully called his eldest girl, whose given name, I know from a birth record sent to me a few years ago by the Polish State Archives, was Leah.

I realize, on rereading these letters, that what makes them so uncannily moving is the second person address. Every letter, after all, is addressed to a “you”—“I bid you farewell and kiss you from the bottom of my heart,” is Shmiel’s favorite valediction—and because of this it is difficult, when reading letters, even letters addressed to other people, not to feel implicated, not to feel vaguely responsible. Reading Shmiel’s letters, after we found them, was to be my first experience of the strange proximity of the dead, who yet manage always to remain out of reach.

As the requests for money get more strident, so too the references to the “troubles” Shmiel keeps mentioning. In the early spring, he writes my grandfather a bitter letter that begins “I turned 44 years old on 19th April of this year, and so far haven’t had a single good day, each time it’s something different.” He goes on:

A little later on, though, in a letter to his sister Jeanette, it’s plain that the “time of crisis” refers to more than business headaches:

Here, then, is an escalation: the physical violence from which the Polish government liked to think itself aloof was clearly a reality for the already economically oppressed Jewish merchants of Galicia. And indeed we know, from contemporary newspaper accounts, that in the late 1930s in Poland, the number of violent attacks against Jews rose sharply: in 150 towns, between 1935 and 1937, nearly thirteen hundred Jews were injured and hundreds were killed by…well, by their neighbors: the Poles, the Ukrainians with whom they’d lived side by side more or less peacefully, “like a family” (as an old woman in Bolechow put it to
me, later) for so many years…until something was unleashed and the bonds dissolved.
The Germans were bad
, my grandfather used to tell me, describing—from what authority, from what sources, from what hearsay I do not and cannot know—what happened to Bolechow’s Jews during World War II.
The Poles were worse. But the Ukrainians were the worst of all
. A month before I went to Ukraine with my own siblings, I stood in the stifling lobby of the Ukrainian consulate on East Forty-ninth Street in New York, waiting for a visa, and as I stood there I would look around at the people standing next to me, who were all talking animatedly and often exasperatedly in Ukrainian to each other, yelling at the solitary officer behind the bulletproof glass, and the line
the Ukrainians were the worst
would go through my head, over and over, acquiring its own kind of rhythm.

It is in these later letters that Shmiel’s tone becomes panicked. In a letter to my grandfather, written probably in the fall of 1939—in it, he asks my grandfather how he spent his summer—he talks about the possibility of sending even one of his four daughters abroad, once again hinting at his difficult financial situation:

It is difficult to miss the tone of reproof in that last line.

It is clear that, by late in 1939, Shmiel was obsessed by the idea of getting his family out of Poland. In that last letter to his sister Jeanette and his brother-in-law, Sam Mittlemark, his mind is racing:

Shmiel has been a businessman all his life; this is why, at first, he’s all business, all facts and figures. But soon a note of desperation creeps in. What follows is the part I always find hard to read:

(here he is referring, of course, to the disastrous visit that he made, as an eighteen-year-old boy, to his uncle Abe’s apartment, the trip that convinced him that going back to Poland was his ticket to success)

My sister-in-law Mina:
Minnie Spieler, whom I used to make fun of and ignore.

Shmiel spells the president’s name
Rosiwelt,
and spells the name of the capital city
Waschington,
and for some reason this has the effect of dissolving the scholarly calm with which I try, whenever I read these texts, to decipher Shmiel’s train of thought. I think of this man. I think of him writing that letter of pleading and cajoling, that letter to “President Rosiwelt” in “Waschington,” and then I think of everything Shmiel was, and of what he thought of himself in the world; I think, indeed, of how he closes this particular letter with a reassertion of his native pride—

—I think of all this, and I can’t help wondering whether, as some clerk in Washington, D.C., opened a certain letter with a strange postmark, sometime in 1939, a letter written in stilted, high school English, he bothered to read it, or simply dismissed what was, after all, just another indecipherable missive from some little Jew in Poland.

I
N ALL OF
the stories I used to hear about how Shmiel and his family died, there was the terrible crime, the terrible betrayal: maybe the wicked neighbor, maybe the unfaithful Polish maid. But none of these betrayals worried me as much as did the possibility of one that was far worse.

Because Shmiel’s home, and his belongings, and eventually his life were all taken from him, the only letters that survived are the ones from, not to, Poland. And so we have no way of knowing how, or whether, the others who were close to Shmiel—not the Polish maid or the Jewish (or Polish, or Ukrainian) neighbors, but the cousin, the brother, the sister, the brother-in-law to whom he’d written so frantically—ever responded. Or if they did respond, how fervently? I have read these letters many times, and I worry now whether enough had been done for them. Really done, I mean. It’s true that in one letter, which was addressed to my grandfather, Shmiel refers to some money he’d received—eighty dollars; so there was some response. But what about the affidavit? Why, given the frequency and intensity of Shmiel’s letters to his siblings in New York, is he always complaining that he doesn’t hear from anyone? In the fall of 1939:

or: