The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (18 page)

There was, too (I thought as we walked, on a humid morning whose air was filled with aggressive mosquitoes, through the yawning entrance of the guardhouse past a group of Scandinavian tourists), the problem of overex
posure. As we walked around, we remarked that everything looked so familiar: the gatehouse, the siding, the barracks, the electrified barbed wire with its warnings signs in German still intact, and most famous of all, the sign—surprisingly small, as is curiously the case with so many famous monuments when you finally see them up close—that reads
ARBEIT MACHT FREI
, which although a deception of the sardonic sort so beloved of the Nazis, proved at Auschwitz to be potentially more accurate than similar signs at, say, Belzec, a place where there was only one destination after you got off the cattle car. All of this has been reproduced, photographed, filmed, broadcast, and published so often that by the time you go there, you find yourself looking for what it is difficult not to think of as the “attractions,” for the displays of the artificial limbs or glasses or hair, more or less as you’d look for the newly reconstructed apatosaurus at the Natural History Museum.

And so as I walked around Auschwitz I struggled with the question of why one goes as a tourist to places like this. Not, in a general way at least, to learn what happened there; for anyone who comes to Auschwitz and the many other sites like it already knows what happened. And certainly not to get a better idea of “what it was like,” as if by beholding the architecture or feeling the dimensions of the place, knowing how long it took to walk from point A to point B, one could understand significantly better the experience of those who came to this place not in air-conditioned tour vans but in cattle cars. No. Perhaps it’s because I am the child of a father who was a scientist and mother who was the product of an emotional and nostalgic family, but it seems to me that there are two reasons to go to a place like Auschwitz. The first of these is scientific and juridical: one reason to go to Auschwitz is that the entire site is a gigantic piece of evidence, and in this respect seeing the piles of eyeglasses or shoes themselves, as opposed to merely knowing about them or seeing photographs or videos of the piles of eyeglasses or shoes or luggage, is more useful in conveying what happened. The second is sentimental. For the other reason you go to Auschwitz is the reason you go to a cemetery, which is something that Auschwitz also happens to be: to acknowledge the claims of the dead.

This is what I was worrying about after I left the indoor museum of hair and shoes and artificial limbs and stood in a fine drizzle waiting for my siblings. A gaggle of tall blonds—Swedes? Norwegians?—all with backpacks that had little bottles of water sticking out of them, was approaching the spot where I was standing, just outside the women’s barracks, and it was then—as I was reading a plaque that told of the summary shootings that used to take place in what now seems like a not particularly menacing courtyard that wouldn’t
look out of place on the grounds of most American elementary schools—it was then that a young woman next to me muttered, If I don’t get a bottle of water, I’m going to
pass out
!

So Auschwitz was, for me, always just the prelude. We knew, as we looked that first afternoon at the famous barbed wire, of which it is possible to make beautiful artistic compositions, and at the famous vista of the railway sidings that disappear, in those famous images, with the same reasonable inevitability of space and distance that you find in the perspectives in Renaissance paintings—
The School of Athens,
say—through a roofed, openmouthed gatehouse toward a vanishing point that was indeed a vanishing point; at those piles of shoes and eyeglasses and artificial limbs, all carefully preserved behind their glass panels; and then, as we looked the next morning at the empty synagogues of the Kazimiersz quarter in Kraków, the old Jewish quarter where my father’s mother was born in another, unimaginably teeming world and where today the politely attentive German and American and Swedish tourists, wandering among life-size cardboard cutouts of Jews propped up in attitudes of rigidly pious devotion while recordings of Hebrew prayers droned in the background, reminded me of childhood trips to see the dioramas of dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History; and then, as we looked on the third day at the self-satisfied if somewhat dilapidated residential architecture of the city I still can’t help thinking of as Lwów, and even sometimes Lemberg, but never L’viv, the solid blocks of Habsburg-era apartment buildings, indistinguishable from comparable blocks of apartment buildings in Vienna or Budapest or Prague, their Neoclassical windows, some topped by pediments and others by shallow arcs, looking across at their neighbors from above heavy ground-floor rustication that, if my memories of an architectural history course are correct, were intended to make their owners feel safe—we knew, as we looked at all these things, at the whole history of European Jewry crammed into two and a half days, the teeming ghetto, the failed assimilation, the successful annihilation, that as interesting or poignant or boring as all this may be, we were just biding our time. The whole point of this six-day trip, we knew, was Bolechow: everything—the planning, the expense, the effort, the bickering, the article—everything depended on whether, would be justified if, we could only find something there, find someone who knew them, who could tell us what happened, or who could tell us, at very least, a story good enough to be true, to repeat. This was the whole point of the trip, this Sunday when we would finally go to Bolechow.

And so it was on the fourth day that we finally drove to Bolechow. When our car pulled up in the tiny, unkempt square, there wasn’t a single person there.

F
ROM THE LITTLE
crest in the road that you go over just before entering the town, Bolechow doesn’t look like much: a cluster of fat, steep-gabled houses grouped among a tangle of streets so dense that the little open square in the middle feels like a sigh of relief, the whole thing nestled in a depression among some hills. As I looked down from where we’d stopped to take pictures—Matt, who had been sniping back and forth with Andrew in the car, wanted to get out and photograph a horse standing next to the ugly sign bearing the name of the town in Ukrainian,
Bolekhiv
—I thought of course of how vulnerable it looked: how easy to enter, how isolated. We got back in the car and went down.

There, in the tiny town, we found three people, each of whom brought us a little closer to them, to Shmiel and his family, even as each reminded us of how distant they really were.

We found Nina first. Alex had parked the Passat wagon in the ragged, unpaved town square, a little ways down from the brightly painted, onion-domed Ukrainian church where services were going on, and just across the house that stood on the spot where my family’s house had once stood. (A few months earlier, Alex had found a nineteenth-century surveyor’s map of the town and had located “our” house, House 141.) On the same side of the square as the church was the old town hall, next to which my family’s store once stood. Opposite the town hall was the large synagogue where my grandfather had been bar mitzvahed; after the war ended and there were no more Jews to be bar mitzvahed, or anything else, it became a leatherworkers meeting hall. With everyone in church, as far as we could tell, it was a pretty desolate spot, although a peaceful one. As we strolled around, treading wetly on the damp grass and gravel, we could hear the sound of liturgical chanting from the church. A goat was wandering around, untethered.

Suddenly a jolly-looking woman passed briskly by. Thickset in the way that is common among women of a certain Slavic provenance (as are the flowered print dresses, tightly stretched across their vast bosoms), she was, I guessed, around fifty. She looked at us standing awkwardly in front of this house, and with a mixture of small-town curiosity and something else, something
lighter—the local person’s generalized amusement about out-of-towners—asked who were were and what we were doing. Alex explained at some length, and it occurred to me that he must be telling her that we were American Jews who had come back to this, the town of our origin; and while he went on and on in Ukrainian all I could hear was the phrase
the Ukrainians were the worst
.

The woman’s face cracked into a huge smile, and some rapid-fire Ukrainian ensued.

This is Nina, Alex explained. She is inviting us into her house. She herself was born after the war—

(I thought to myself, This is going to go nowhere)

—but her neighbor Maria is much older, and she thinks maybe this Maria will remember your family.

Well, I thought; perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad. And so we walked the short distance to Nina’s flat, which was on the first floor of a drab block of concrete modern apartments, located in back of the old synagogue. The apartment block reminded me of the dormitories of certain American universities. The approach to the apartments was from the back, and as we went around the building I was surprised to see, in stark contrast to the dinginess of the building itself, that the back of the lot was filled with quite elaborate, obviously well tended flower gardens, which at that time of year were abloom with roses, daisies, hollyhocks.

We went up the few concrete steps to Nina’s front door. Outside the door, on a mat, several pairs of shoes were lined up. Matt gave me a sidelong, mischievous look.

So this is where Mom got it! he said. I knew what he was talking about: When we were growing up, we always had to remove our shoes at the door, a rule that infuriated and embarrassed us at the time; it was, among other things, humiliating to ask our friends to take off their shoes whenever we’d have someone over. There were, to be sure, other things that made us seem a little foreign to our school friends and neighbors. When I was about eleven or so, I had a friend who lived down the block who used to like to come call for me to play very early on weekend mornings. One summer morning when my grandfather was up from Miami Beach, the doorbell rang at around eight in the morning. I knew at once that it was Lonnie, and I raced down the stairs of my parents’ house to get the door before the noise of the doorbell irritated my grandfather, who was
davening,
murmuring the Hebrew words and pacing slowly back and forth in my mother’s spotless living room, enfolded in
his vast, old-fashioned tallis, his leather
tfillin
wrapped around his arm and his forehead. It was not at all unusual for my grandfather to be able to have rudimentary conversations
while
he was davening: you could ask him, for instance, if he wanted Cream of Wheat for breakfast and some prune juice, and he would look at you and give an assenting glance while raising the volume of his murmuring in a way that suggested
yes
. I mention this because when I opened the door to Lonnie, my grandfather made his way over to the banister and, never abandoning his Hebrew text, raised a leather-encircled arm in a gesture that was partly incredulous and partly threatening, and simultaneously he raised his voice in a way that suggested that no one in his right mind paid social calls at eight in the morning. Then he turned his back and walked back into the living room, my eyes following him with secret delight: my exotic, funny grandpa. When I turned back around to whisper with Lonnie, he’d already fled down the front steps and disappeared.

And
that,
my grandfather would say later on, telling this story, was the last we ever saw of
that
one!

So we had these strange family habits, among which were my grandfather’s davening, and my mother’s insistence that shoes were to be lined up on a mat just inside the front door of the house. I thought of this, as Matt obviously had, too, as we stood at the threshold of Nina’s apartment, and it occurred to me that perhaps my mother as a girl had absorbed this rule from her father, who had had to follow it a half century earlier, because he had lived, as Nina lived a century later, in a country town where simply walking a hundred yards was likely to cover your shoes with real filth—dirt, mud, or worse.

The apartment was tiny. Much of the small living room was taken up by a large sofa, on which nearly all of us—the four Mendelsohns and Alex—somehow managed to squeeze, our legs tucked out of the way of the little coffee table in front of us. Off the living room were a small kitchen and a bedroom of some kind, which was occupied, as far as I could see, by a piano. As we sat on the sofa, Nina, who was banging around the kitchen, chattered loudly in Ukrainian with Alex, who looked amused, and also pleased that perhaps we had found what we were looking for. Finally Nina came back from the kitchen, a small plate in her hand. On it were slices of local sausage. She then went to the credenza and took down a dusty bottle of what she described as Soviet-era champagne—how odd to think of the Soviets making champagne, we said, but she countered that it had once been a big business farther east, in one of the indecipherable “-stans”—
and, after uncorking it, poured us each a little celebratory glass. Then she made each of us a cup of Nescafé, which was clearly considered something of a treat.

It is a big honor, Alex told us, giving us a warning look.

Matt, sitting next to me, muttered that he didn’t like Nescafé.

Andrew and I gritted our teeth and said, simultaneously, Drink the fucking coffee, Matt.

I wondered what Alex himself was thinking. Alex is a heavyset, gregarious blond in his mid-thirties with a broad, ready smile cushioned among pink dimples. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he’d made a career of taking American Jews around the old shtetls of Eastern Europe, near his home town of L’viv, where he proudly showed us around. (During that tour he’d assured me that there was no castle near Bolechow that had once belonged to a Polish aristocrat.) During the past ten years he’d come to know more about the history of Jews in Galicia than most Jews do. He was the first Ukrainian I’d ever had extensive dealings with, and when we finally met, at the Kraków airport the day we first arrived, we were all taken with his warmth and natural expansiveness, which easily carried us through the inevitable awkwardnesses. It was during the long drive from Kraków to L’viv, the day after our trip to Auschwitz, that we’d asked him how a young Ukrainian, formerly of the Soviet army, had come to this career escorting American Jews around their ancestral shtetls, and he had replied, a shade guardedly, I don’t tell most people what it is I do, I don’t think they’d understand.