The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (24 page)

Because his nighttime call had caught me by surprise, I asked Jack Greene after a few breathless minutes whether he wouldn’t mind if I called him back later that week, so I’d have time to prepare an interview.

Sure, he said. Feel free to contact me whenever you like. For me it is as precious as it is to you.

A day or so later I called Australia and talked to Jack Greene for a long time on the phone, and it was from him, really, that we started to learn about Shmiel and his family, how they lived and how they had died. And smaller things, too. It was in this conversation that I learned that the “Ruchatz” of Shmiel’s letters was really
Ruchele,
sometimes written
Ruchaly. Now the first thing I have to say to you
, Jack said that night,
was that the third daughter of Shmiel was Ruchele, spelled R-U-C-H-E-L-E
.

I protested that I was sure that Shmiel had written
R-U-C-H-A-T-Z,
and Jack laughed. No, no, he said, sometimes you would make a line across the
l,
and that’s a
y,
not a
z
. When he said this I felt suddenly foolish and ashamed. I had been brought up to be deferent to old Jewish men, after all.

But he merely laughed and said, Look, I used to go out with her, so I know this.
Ruchele
.

ROOKH-eh-leh,
I repeated to myself silently. I listened to him correcting me and thought, How could I get something as basic as a name so wrong? And yet despite the shame, the adolescent embarrassment, there was now this, another precious nugget of new information to add to my growing hoard: this Ruchele had been the third of the four. We had never known for sure what the order of the children was.

As Jack talked I listened intently, making sure that the little red light on my voice recorder was on, occasionally typing notes into a file I’d opened on my computer whenever he said something that struck me as particularly noteworthy. A lot of what he told me was undramatic—for instance, that young teenagers in Bolechow would go to see movies in the Catholic community entertainment center, the Dom Katolicki, although perhaps “undramatic” is inappropriate since it was in the same entertainment center that some of those teenagers were forced, only a few years later, to entertain their tormentors before being killed. He told me about the American movies they would see (Wallace Beery, he recalled) and about the meetings of the Zionist organi
zation that he attended in order to see Ruchele, and about Shmiel’s business, and about how Bronia
looked like her mother, exactly
and Shmiel had the first telephone in town, and that the boys and girls would take walks in the park in the evening, and that Ruchele did not have her father’s showy personality.

She was a very placid girl, he said. Blond hair. In my eyes she was a
beautiful
girl.

Then he paused and, as if just then remembering, said, Frydka was a
very
good-looking one.

For reasons I would learn a few minutes later, the thought of Frydka led Jack Greene to the subject of the war years, and this is when he told me what he’d heard about our relatives’ fates, although he emphasized that this was merely what he’d heard, since of course after a certain point he himself had been in hiding.

I can tell you, he began, that Ruchele perished on the twenty-ninth of October 1941.

I was startled, and immediately afterward moved, by the specificity of this memory.

I said, Now let me just ask you, why—because you remember the date so specifically—why do you remember the date?

As I wrote down
RUCHELE
?
OCT 29 1941
, I thought to myself, He must have really loved her.

Jack said, Because my mother and older brother perished on the same day.

I said nothing. We are each of us, I realized at that moment, myopic; always at the center of our own stories.

Then Jack went on.

He said he could only surmise that Shmiel, his wife, and the youngest daughter were taken in the second Aktion, early in September 1942, but that he knew for a fact that Frydka, the second girl, about whose employment prospects Shmiel had worried in a letter to my grandfather, had managed to get work in the barrel factory—one of the local industries that had been appropriated for the German war effort—and was still alive after that Aktion.

Thirty years after I’d started asking questions and making notations on index cards, I was finally able to write this:
SHMIEL, ESTER, BRONIA, KILLED 1942
.

I know I saw Frydka there in the factory after that Aktion, Jack said. Those who had positions as forced laborers had at least some chance of surviving, he said.

I wrote,
BARREL FACTORY. FORCED LABOR
?
SURVIVE
.

The idea was to get yourself a job for the war effort, this voice, which sounded so much like my grandfather’s voice, said over the phone. And that gave you some feeling of security—that they wouldn’t take you tomorrow. They might take you in three months, but not
tomorrow
.

A little later on he added that he’d heard that when it became clear that the few hundred remaining Jews in the town were going to be liquidated, Frydka and her older sister Lorka had escaped from Bolechow to join a group of partisans operating in the forest outside of the nearby village of Dolina. Unlike some local partisan groups, he said, this group was happy to take Jews. The group had been organized by two Ukrainian brothers, he added, named Babij.

Jack said, B-A-B-I-J, and I wrote,
FRYDKA
/
LORKA
?
BABIJ PARTISANS
.

Then I wrote
DOLINA
, and after a moment added
TAUBE
. The Mittelmarks were from Dolina; my great-grandmother Taube had been born there. It was in Dolina that she had played, and perhaps fought bitterly, with her older brother.

You see, Jack said, there were three Polish fellows, not Jews, and the boys were assisting the partisans, or they were in contact with them. And one night—I wasn’t in Bolechow at the time, I was in hiding, but I heard this later—the boys were found out, and the Germans took the three Polish fellows and they shot them in town. That was exactly—well, more or less at the same time they wiped out the Babij group in the forest. I think there were maybe four survivors.

Four?
I said.

Jack made a noise on the other end; wry amusement, perhaps, at my naïveté. Well, he said, think of Bolechow. Of six thousand Jews, we were forty-eight who survived.

Again I said nothing. I looked at my computer screen.
FRYDKA
/
LORKA
?
BABIJ PARTISANS
. I typed,
BOYS HELPING WERE KILLED
.

That night in February 2002, little guessing how far this story would end up taking me, how many miles and continents we would travel to find out what had really happened, who had really been helping and who had been found out and killed, I was more interested in the girls than in the boys, and so I said, I see. But by this time the girls were in the forest, no?

That’s right, Jack said. The boys were in contact with the people in the forest, they used to visit them, they used to supply them, I don’t know if with ammunition or with food, I don’t know. They were killed because they were supplying them with something.

Right, I said. I typed the words
SUPPLYING SOMETHING
into the file I’d opened.

You see, the Germans implanted spies, Jack continued. That means, Jews who ran away, they were spying on the group and revealing everything. I imagine they were being forced or blackmailed into betraying them, somehow, something.

This made me snap up in my seat. As I typed
JEWS
?
BETRAYED
!!, I had a sudden idea of what must have happened, of how the story I was hearing now could have been connected to the stories, the fragments, that I’d heard long ago. Clearly (I thought), the betrayal of the Babij partisans had gotten garbled in translation somewhere between the event itself and the point at which someone told my grandfather and his siblings what had happened to Uncle Shmiel and his family; and somehow this sole element of the story, the
betrayal
, had gotten itself woven, over time, into my family’s private narrative. My grandfather and his siblings and the others, all of them, had willingly believed this story, as we ourselves had in time, this story that my brothers and sister and I had traveled halfway across the world to confirm, because we wanted to believe that there
was
a story; because a narrative of greed and naïveté and bad judgment was better than the alternative, which was no narrative at all.

At the same moment that Jack Greene told me about the spies who ratted out the Babij group, and I realized what the origins of our family story had been, I remembered my mother’s cousin Marilyn in Chicago as she recalled the reaction to the news of Shmiel’s death—I remembered her using the word
screaming
—and I realized that I’d made the trip to Chicago, too, in the hopes of finding a drama. I saw then that I’d wanted to unearth something unpleasant in the history of my grandfather’s and great-aunts’ and -uncles’ relationships with Shmiel, something that would confirm my private, suspicious narrative about a closer, more terrible betrayal of siblings by siblings, which was, after all, something I knew about, and something that could provide a coherent motivation for their failure to save Shmiel—if, of course, there
had
been such a “failure.” My desire to have that narrative was no different from my grandfather’s desire to believe the stories about the Jewish neighbor or the Polish maid. Both were motivated by a need for a story that, however ugly, would give their deaths some meaning—that would make their deaths be
about
something. Jack Greene told me something else that night: that like Shmiel, his own parents had been hoping to get their family to safety, hoping to get visas; but that by 1939 the waiting list for papers was six years long. (And by then, he said, everyone was already dead.) Because I am a sentimental person, I would like to think—we will, of course, never know—that my grandfather and his
siblings did everything they could for Shmiel and his family. What we do know is that by 1939, nothing they could have done would have saved them.

All during our trip, I had been disappointed because none of the stories I’d known about was confirmed by what we heard and saw; all during the trip, I’d wanted a gripping narrative. It was only when I listened to Jack Greene that I realized I’d been after the wrong story—the story of how they’d died, rather than how they had lived. The particulars of the lives they had led were, inevitably, the kinds of unmemorable things that make up everyone’s day-to-day existence. It is only when everyday existence ceases to exist—when knowing that you’ll die in three months rather than tomorrow seems like an oasis of “security”—that such lost details seem rare and beautiful. The real story was that they’d been ordinary, and had lived, and then died, like so many others. And once again we learned that, of certain ordinary lives, and deaths, there is, surprisingly, still much more evidence than you might guess at first.

This is why, when I began to think that there was only so much I could get over the phone from this rich and unexpected new source of information, and when, as if reading my thoughts, Jack suddenly said that what I should
really
do was to come to Sydney and spend some time with him and his brother and, he now told me, a couple of other Bolechow survivors who lived there, I knew that I would go. They had been there, they had known them, and I knew that I had to see them. This man who had surfaced from nowhere to tell me in one phone call more than my family had ever known, this man who sounded like my grandfather when he spoke, had dated little Ruchele; and his mother had been killed on the day that she had been killed. We were bound, now, to Jack by bonds of both love and death.

There was another factor, too:

So I should really come to Australia? I asked Jack at the end of our conversation that night.

Don’t hesitate, he said—

(OK, I won’t! I interrupted: wanting to please him, the way I’d have tried to please my grandfather)

—because I won’t last long.

So Australia was our next stop. And it was in Australia, when we met with Jack Greene and the four other Bolechower Jews who after the war had chosen to settle on that remote continent, as far as it is geographically possible to get from Poland, that the contours of the story came into focus at last, and we began to get the kind of concrete details that we’d wanted, the specifics that can transform statistics and dates into a story. What color the house was, how
she held her bag. And then Australia led to Israel, where we met Reinharz and Heller, and Israel led to Stockholm, where we met Mrs. Freilich, and Stockholm led to Israel again, and Israel led to Denmark, where we met Kulberg, with his remarkable tale.

In the end, we got our story.

But there was one particular, one concrete fact that I already knew about one of the Bolechow Jägers even before we went on those other trips and met those other people. We knew, as I have said, that Ruchele Jäger, Shmiel’s third daughter, died in the first Aktion, on either October 28 or October 29, 1941. We don’t, and can’t, know for sure exactly how old she was: for some reason, the Polish National Archives in Warsaw, while it possesses the birth certificates of her two elder sisters, cannot find those of Ruchele and her younger sister, Bronia. Jack Greene thinks she was sixteen, and this is probably true. But I do know one thing for certain, know it for a fact, and don’t need any archive to tell me it’s true: I know that Ruchele had to have been born after September 3, 1923.

I know this because that was the day on which another young woman named Rachel,
Ruchele,
died. Because Eastern European Jews only name their children after the dead—I and my four siblings are named after dead relatives, just as my grandfather and his six siblings were, and because of this practice people who are interested in Jewish genealogy have a remarkably reliable method of determining certain dates, if the information is otherwise lacking—I know for a fact that Shmiel’s daughter Ruchele Jäger had to have been born after the death of her father’s and my grandfather’s sister: the first Rachel Jäger, born in 1896, the doomed bride whose tragic and unexpected death, also horribly premature, would later become, over the course of many years, my family’s greatest story, a mythic narrative at whose heart, or so I believe, stands an even older legend about closeness and distance, intimacy and violence, love and death, that first of all legends, first of all myths about how easily we come to kill those to whom we are closest.