The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (19 page)

Now, Alex was clearly delighted that Nina was rolling out the red carpet. As she fluttered and bustled away, my brothers and sister and I gave one another sidelong glances, and it was clear we were all thinking the same thing:
some Ukrainians aren’t so bad
. As we did so, Nina’s husband, a thin, affable man who was wearing a bathing suit and flip-flops, banged out tunes on the decrepit piano in the closet that, we were told, was his study. “Feelings” was followed swiftly by—presumably in our honor, and certainly to show us his multicultural goodwill—“Hava Nagilah.” We looked at each other again. Then he played “Yesterday.”

I
T WAS ONLY
after we had drunk the Soviet champagne, sipped the Nescafé, and eaten the local sausage—which was quite good, and which seemed appropriate since, after all, we had come from a long line of Bolechow butchers and meat-merchants—that Maria appeared at Nina’s doorstep, smiling
shyly. Again, there was a long introduction: who we were, what we were looking for. Maria was a beautiful woman in her seventies, soft white hair, a broad face with high, slanted bones; the characteristic look of the area, as I’d come to realize. She looked pensive when we mentioned the name Jäger, and nodded. I hoped that finally, this would be it—the explosion out of generalities into something specific, some hard piece of knowledge, the start of a story.

Yes, yes, Alex told us, translating, she knows the name. She knows it.

I felt, right then, very close to them. This woman would have been a teenager during the war; she could indeed have known them. My siblings and I exchanged glances.

Then Alex said, But she didn’t really know them.

Still hoping for something—and feeling, suddenly, how absurd this whole expedition was, how mightily time and space and history were against us, how unlikely it was that anything of them could still remain—I took out the sheaf of photographs I’d brought with me and showed them to her. Photographs of Shmiel in his thirties and early forties, wearing a fur-collared overcoat, taken in the photography studio in Stryj that his wife’s brother owned; pictures of three of the girls (which three? impossible to know) as children, in lace dresses; a studio head shot of one of the girls as a teenager, with a broad smile and, I can’t help noticing, the same kinky Mittelmark hair that I had as a teenager. Maria looked at them, shuffling the old prints slowly. Then she shook her head with an apologetic little smile, the kind of smile you can fashion with your lips framing a frown, as my mother’s mother used to do. She said something to Alex.

She doesn’t remember them, Alex told us. She says she was young, just a child, during the war. She didn’t know them herself. It’s too bad, she says, because her husband was much older, he would have known, but he died three years ago.

As I looked at the ground, Alex exchanged a few more words with Maria. Ah, he said. He told us that Maria had just said that her husband’s sister, Olga, was still alive; she lived just down the road. Perhaps this Olga would be able to tell us something.

We all got up, with Nina bossily leading the way—she had clearly adopted both us and our search—and marched down the road to Olga’s.

The road we walked down to get from Nina’s apartment to Olga’s house was, we later found out, the road that leads from the center of town to the cemetery, past the old lumber mill. Now we walked down this road, and before Maria left us, we asked her how the Jews and Ukrainians had gotten along,
before the war. We had, of course, done our research, and so we already knew about the centuries of economic and social competition between the Jews and the Ukrainians: the Jews, nationless, politically vulnerable, dependent on the Polish aristocrats who owned these towns, and for whom so many of the Jews inevitably worked as stewards and moneylenders, for their security; and the Ukrainians, who for the most part were workers of the land, who occupied the lowest rung of the economic totem pole, a people whose history, ironically, in so many ways was like a mirror image, or perhaps a negative image, of that of the Jews: a people without a nation-state, vulnerable, oppressed by cruel masters of one description or another—Polish counts, Soviet commissars. It was because of this strangely precise mirroring, in fact, that in the middle of the twentieth century it evolved, with the precise, terrible logic of a Greek tragedy, that whatever was good for one of these two groups, who lived side by side for centuries in these tiny towns, was bad for the other. When, in 1939, the Germans ceded the eastern portion of Poland (which they had just conquered) to the Soviet Union as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Jews of the region rejoiced, knowing they had been delivered from the Germans; but the Ukrainians, a fiercely nationalistic and proud people, suffered under the Soviets, who then as always were determined to stamp out Ukrainian independence—and Ukrainians. Talk to Ukrainians about the twentieth century, as we did so often on that trip, and they will tell you about their own holocaust, the deaths, in the 1930s, of those five to seven million Ukrainian peasants, starved out by Stalin’s forced collectivization…. So the miraculous good luck of the Jews of eastern Poland, in 1939, was a disaster for the Ukrainians of eastern Poland. Conversely, when Hitler betrayed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact two years later and invaded the very portion of eastern Poland that he’d given to Stalin, it was, of course, a disaster for the Jews but a blessing for the Ukrainians, who rejoiced when the Nazis arrived, having been freed from their Soviet oppressors. It is remarkable to think that two groups inhabiting such close quarters for so many years could be so different, suffer and exult over such different, indeed opposite, reversals of fortune.

It was knowing all this that we asked Alex to ask Maria how the Jews and Ukrainians had once treated each other.

Everyone got along, for the most part, he replied after speaking for a moment with Maria. She says the children often played together in the square, Ukrainians and Jews together.

It was because I knew well what playing together can lead to—how beneath the closeness, the knowing each other, can be a knowing too well—that I
asked what seemed to me to be the next logical question. Were there Ukrainians who were happy when the Jews were taken away? I asked.

They talked for another moment. Yes, Alex said after a pause. There were some, sure. But there were some who tried to help, and for that they were killed. She repeats that this was a small town. Everyone knew each other. The Jews and the Poles and the Ukrainians, it was many people in one small place.

Maria smiled her beatific, translucent, hopeful smile, and murmured something else to Alex. He turned to us and said, She says that it was like a big family.

All commentators try to wrestle with the bizarre problem of what, if anything, Cain said to get Abel to go out into the field with him, the field where Cain planned to kill his brother. The strict translation of the Hebrew of verse 8,
vayomer Qayin el-Hevel ahchiyv vay’hiy…,
yields what seems, at first, like nonsense: “And Cain said to Abel. And when they were in the field…” Which is to say that the Hebrew text tells us merely that Cain said something to Abel, and that in the field Cain rose up and killed Abel; but we are never actually told what one brother said to the other. The authoritative Hebrew text remains silent; it is only the Septuagint, an Alexandrian Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible made in the first century A.D., and the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Hebrew and Aramaic Bible made by Jerome (later Saint Jerome) between A.D. 382 and A.D. 405, that tweaks the text to give it more ostensible sense, and it is their translations, inaccurate but more satisfying, that most of us know: “And Cain said to Abel, ‘Let us go into the field…’” Naturally, the impulse to maneuver the text so that it tells us what we want it to say is nothing new, either—as we have already seen—in biblical scholarship, or anywhere else.

Friedman, the modern commentator, seems less perturbed by this than Rashi is, and in keeping the brisk, good-natured twentieth-century practicality that characterizes his approach, supplies a perfectly reasonable explanation for the odd syntax of the text here: “Cain’s words,” he writes, “appear to have been skipped in the Masoretic Text”—the Hebrew texts represented by copies dating as far back as the 900s—“by a scribe whose eye jumped from the first phrase containing the word ‘field’ to the second.” To anyone familiar with the study of manuscript traditions, this seems a likely enough explanation: some ancient scribe, as he sat before a venerable and now-lost manuscript of the Torah that he was dutifully copying, and as he was about to write the now-lost phrase, “Let us go out into the field,” the remark made by one brother to another, shut his eye in a moment of weariness; so that, when he moved his tired hand to write once more, the tired eye, now reopened, was already focused on what was, in fact, the
second
occurrence
of the word “field”—that is, the word as it appeared in the line that we do have, the line that was not lost: “And when they were in the field…” And because he was tired, because he was, after all, only human (and we know what lapses human memory is prey to), this is the line he actually wrote, having never actually written the line that said “Let us go out into the field” (or something very much like that); and because of this tiny lapse, that one line, which if it actually existed would eliminate a troublesome reading from this most authoritative of all texts, was irretrievably lost. And yet the loss of this line does not seem to bother Rashi that much; or at least, he has an equally cogent explanation at hand—although his explanation is psychological rather than mechanical. His comment on the ostensible half-sentence that we translate as “And Cain said to his brother Abel” goes as follows: “He entered with him into words of quarrel and contention to find a pretext against him, to kill him.” To Rashi it is quite clear that the actual words that Cain said are immaterial, since they were false, merely a pretext; the commentary here indicates that Rashi knows well that, between brothers, there are darker forces lurking that need the barest excuse to rise to the surface and erupt into violence. What is of interest are the forces, not the pretext.

I
T WASN’T FAR
to the house of Maria’s sister-in-law, Olga, from the point at which Maria had turned back, in the middle of the road, leaving us in Nina’s broad and energetic hands: just a couple of hundred yards farther away from the town square on the narrow unpaved road that was lined with the steep-gabled wooden houses typical of the region, houses of one story, with a few large windows, that were not at all unlike those that my grandfather would draw, with his blue Parker pen with the nib that he would lick before writing, when I would ask him to show me what his house had been like, in the Old Country. We reached an isolated, very pretty old house standing on the bend of the road where it curves suddenly to the right, toward the cemetery. Alex knocked—not on the door but, as he likes to do, on a side window. A small dog barked from somewhere inside. Outside, there was a big yard with chickens and more dogs bustling about; there were plum trees in bloom. Alex knocked again. Finally, a tiny, solid old woman opened the door. She peered over Alex’s shoulder and then looked at us; then she looked back at Alex. This Olga was very old, plump but with the cool, translucent skin of extreme old age, and for some reason everything about her made me think about food: her face was as round as a loaf of bread, her two bright blue eyes peering out between fat cheeks, like raisins baked into a cake. Alex started his little
speech, and she suddenly seemed to relax—without, however, smiling—and motioned us in.

Again we filed into a strange living room. The house was a comfortable one, with several airy rooms whose large windows were hung with exquisite lace curtains; on every available wall elaborate rugs, weavings, and tapestries were hung. Dishes and glasses glistened in substantial-looking, glass-fronted cupboards. Again chairs were fetched, again we sat down; but this time something was different. (For one thing, I noticed that no food was being offered, and this struck me as numinous.) Alex was talking, and once again I heard the name
Jäger
, and she said something twice, and before Alex even translated, I knew it would be different, because she was saying, very emphatically,
Znayu, znayu
, making an impatient little gesture with both hands, as if it were plain what she was saying.

I know, I know
.

That much Ukrainian I had picked up, in the days since we’d arrived, the days of disappointment and bickering and rain. Olga nodded vigorously and said it again, and then started talking animatedly to Alex, who was trying to keep up as best he could.

She knew these Jägers very well, he said. It’s not just that she’s heard the last name, but she knew this family very well. They had a…butchery?

I nodded and said, hoarsely,
butcher shop
. At this point Alex interrupted himself to assure us that he hadn’t provided her with that detail, the information about what kind of business they had had. He knew how frustrated we’d been, and wanted to guarantee the authenticity of this particular memory of them and their lives.

She knows, he went on. She remembers.

It was the sudden and vertiginous sense of proximity to them, at that moment, that made my sister and me start crying. This is how close you can come to the dead: you can be sitting in a living room on a fine summer afternoon, sixty years after these dead have died, and talk to a plump old woman who is gesturing vigorously, who, you realize, is exactly as old now as Shmiel’s eldest daughter would have been, and this old woman can be this far away from you, a yard away; that’s how close she can be. In that moment, the sixty years and the millions of dead didn’t seem bigger than the three feet that separated me from the fat arm of the old woman. I was crying, too, because it was a moment that brought me closer to others of my dead. I felt intensely the presence of my grandfather, who before this moment had been the last living person I’d talked to who had known
them, and suddenly the twenty years since he had died seemed to shrink, too. And so I sat there, the tears bathing my eyes, thankful that Jennifer was crying as well, and listened to Olga talk. She said the name again, and looked at my pictures, and kept nodding. Alex went on.