The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (27 page)

So I waited for him to finish doing whichever of his routines he happened to be doing and tell me these stories about his many travels and many adventures. The one about How Crowded the Boat Was, the one about How Afraid He and Aunt Sylvia Were of Being Robbed and So They Hid Their Money Wrapped in a Kerchief, or, worse, How Seasick He Was, how it made him never want to travel by ship again. How, after two weeks on the boat, the famous two weeks of being sick, they had arrived in New York and tried to make their way to the location of the rendezvous their Mittelmark cousin had designated, and how everyone he talked to had replied to his queries with blank stares. He would, he told me, approach people and utter the name of this place with an interrogatory tone of voice:
Timmess skvar
?
Timmess skvar
? and it wasn’t until he wrote it down on a piece of paper that someone finally laughed and pointed him in the right direction:
Times Square
. And from Times Square my grandfather and great-aunt, accompanied by their English-speaking cousin, went to the Lower East Side, to East Fourth Street, to live in the apartment of their uncle, Abe Mittelmark, a red-haired man whose estrangement from, or resentment toward, his only sister, my great-grandmother, was responsible,
as I like to think, for the cruel matrimonial deal-making that would set the Jägers against the Mittelmarks for generations to come; and which was not the only instance of internecine sibling conflicts in my family.

Now, when I think of that trip, I whose longest journey was twenty-two hours in a business-class seat on a 747, I am impressed by the audacity he had to have simply to make the trip in the first place. As I write this I am looking at his Polish passport, the one with which he made that unimaginable journey, and although he is dead now and can no longer tell his stories, the document has its own tales to tell. By deciphering the elegant official handwriting with which its blanks are filled in, scrutinizing the visas and stamps, I can, with far greater precision than my grandfather was ever concerned with when he told his stories, reconstruct his trip to America.

I can, for instance, tell you that the passport (“DOWÓD OSOBISTY,” “identification paper”), number 19272/20, was issued to him at Dolina, the small village to the south of Bolechow that was the administrative center for the region, and where my grandfather’s mother’s family, the Mittelmarks, once lived, on the ninth of October 1920. Affixed to it is a small black-and-white photograph of my grandfather, the earliest known image of him. He is standing, it seems, against a wooden wall of some kind; the familiar face is smooth, serious, the nearsighted eyes very deep-set, the hair, still very thick, swept back from the high widow’s peak that I would inherit. The ears stick out ever so slightly, something I do not remember. The collar of his white shirt is narrow and uncomfortable-looking, and the extremely high, narrow lapels of the jacket he is wearing seem impossibly antique. The passport also provides a written description: stature “medium,” face “oval,” hair “dark,” eyes “blue,” mouth “medium”—precisely what this means I cannot say—and nose “straight.”

As I read this description now, having heard certain stories in which straight noses and blue eyes are elements on which the outcome depended, I wonder, not for the first time, how my sly, blue-eyed, straight-nosed grandfather would have fared, if he, like his older brother, had decided not to make the trip during which he used this passport. It is something my brother Andrew and I have discussed, when reminiscing about my grandfather and his tricks.

I bet he would have survived, Andrew once said, knowing well that there were other stories of my grandpa’s ingenuity, the times he bluffed and stonewalled people into giving him what he wanted, deals and breaks and, the one time I was a witness to his special kind of dexterity, when I was fourteen, a free wide-screen television from a savings bank—not for him, the account holder, but for my mother, which was, technically, against the rules. I, too, like to think
that my grandfather, had he not made his long journey to
Timess skvar
in 1920, would have somehow used his talent to get what he wanted, to survive…

…A
S
I know, for instance, that Mrs. Begley, to whom I sometimes spoke about my grandfather and who also was lucky enough to be blond and blue-eyed, survived.

You see, I was fair, and I spoke German
, she told me on one of my first visits to her apartment on the East Side, perhaps the first, in January 2000, when I was afraid she wouldn’t want to talk about the past, especially the war, but she surprised me by talking of little else, by even weeping, suddenly, at one point, as she pointed out to me the name, in the Yizkor book for her town, Stryj, of that seventeen-year-old boy who didn’t survive: whether a relative or a family friend, I couldn’t remember until I recently found the Stryj Yizkor book, the
Sefer Stryj
, online, and located the page on which she had showed me a list of names of the dead, a page bearing the Hebrew heading
Sh’mot shel Qidoshei Striy
, “Names of the Martyrs of Stryj.” (It’s perhaps worth stopping here to note that the Hebrew word
qidush
, “martyr” or “sacrifice,” is derived, as is the word for “sacrifice” in certain other languages, from the word “holy,”
q-d-sh
. The use of
qidush
in this way is consistent with the concept in Judaism known as
qidush HaShem
, which refers to dying in the name of a Jewish cause, the idea being that through the process of dying, you sanctify, or make holy (
qdsh
) God’s name—
HaShem
meaning “the Name.” The traditional example would be Hannah and her seven sons, who all died at the hands of Antiochus—this would have been Antiochus IV, the Hellenistic monarch of the Hanukkah story—because they wouldn’t eat pork or bow down to idols. But the use of the phrase also extends to Holocaust victims, who died based on the fact that they were Jewish.)

“Names of the Martyrs of Stryj” was, in any event, the page on which Mrs. Begley’s late husband, the very big doctor from Stryj whose name an old Ukrainian woman had instantly recognized six decades later, had caused to be entered the following text:

This Herbert Seinfeld, she told me as her low, deliberate voice broke, this Herbert Seinfeld had already had his emigration papers but failed to get out in time.

A boy of
seventeen,
she had said that day, weeping a little. He almost got out, but he didn’t make it.

I had said nothing, feeling embarrassed by this unexpected display of emotion. It was my fault: I’d asked her to show me this Yizkor book from Stryj because I wanted to see if Shmiel and his family were listed there among the names of the victims; his wife, Ester, as we knew, had been from Stryj. (And Minnie Spieler had been from Stryj, too.) And indeed there they were:

This is why I had wanted to look at the
Sefer Stryj,
and it goes without saying that if I had located this book years ago, I would have known that my great-aunt Ester had had a brother Emil who had not perished, and perhaps would have found him sooner than the day in 1999 when his son had called me out of the blue from Oregon to tell me, among other things, that Minnie Spieler was Ester’s sister.

So I looked at the names of my dead—noticing, for how could I not, that Shmiel’s name, SAMUEL, had been grossly misspelled, perhaps because of the same peculiarity of handwriting, the crossed lower-case
l,
a tic, now lost but once widespread among a certain echelon of people from a certain place, that had transformed Shmiel’s “Ruchaly” into “Ruchatz” in my eyes—I looked
at these names, whose presence on the page seemed obscurely like a confirmation of something, perhaps of the fact that these people for whom I was searching existed outside of my family’s private memories and stories of them, and for that reason was satisfying to me. But as I looked I suddenly felt foolish for having asked Mrs. Begley to look in her book for my relatives, whom I never knew and who meant something rather abstract for me at that point, when so many of hers, so much closer to her, were there, too.

You see, she repeated, pulling the book away from me slightly to run a cool, translucent hand over it, I was fair, and I spoke German. I could pass. My mother was very beautiful, but in a
Jewish
way. She was what they called a real
Rebecca
, a beautiful Jewish woman.

She stopped speaking for a few moments and simply looked across at me, steadily but warily, from beneath her hooded eye, the good one—whether to compose herself for the next story or (more likely, I suspect) because she doubted I could appreciate what she was telling me, I cannot say. I sipped my tea in silence. Then she took a breath that was also a sigh, and started telling me her own stories of slyness and survival, and other stories, too. Of, for instance, how, successfully hidden herself, she had bribed someone to bring her parents and in-laws to a certain place from which she would take them to safety, during the great roundup of Stryj’s Jews in the fall of 1941, and how when she arrived at this rendezvous she saw a wagon filled with dead bodies passing by, and on top of the pile of bodies were those of the elderly people she had come to rescue.

You see, she said, I recognized my father-in-law by the shock of long white hair that he had.

And then she added this: Because she herself was in danger, was “passing” at that point, she couldn’t allow herself to betray any emotion when she saw the bodies of her family passing by in the wagon….

…S
O WHEN
I hear about slyness, and survival, and the color of one’s hair or eyes, I think of Mrs. Begley, and I am also tempted to think of my grandfather and wonder whether he would have survived, too. But then, as I know, many clever people did not.

What else can my grandfather’s passport tell us, apart from the fact that at the age of eighteen he was fair, blue-eyed, and straight-nosed? I knew from his stories that he arrived in November 1920. (This element of his story is one that can be confirmed by the Ellis Island Web site: he did indeed arrive on the seventeenth of November 1920, on the SS
Nieuw Amsterdam,
accompanied by a
sister to whom the records refer as “Sosi Jäger” from “Belchow, Poland,” the latter being a name that I know to be inaccurate but which someone else might, at this moment, be carefully writing down on a notecard somewhere). But what, exactly, happened between the ninth of October, when he received his passport, and the seventeenth of November, when we know he arrived? The passport fills in many blanks of this particular journey. For instance, I know that on the twelfth of October he was in Warsaw, where he visited the Dutch and American consulates. I know that on the fourteenth of October he went to the German consulate, where he received a transit visa for passage through Germany en route to the Netherlands. I know from various border stamps that he and Aunt Sylvia entered Germany at Schneidemühl on the eighteenth of October, passed through that country, and exited the next day, the nineteenth, at Bentheim, whence they passed across the German-Dutch border to Oldenzaal, at the eastern border of the Netherlands, and that from Oldenzaal they then proceeded west to Rotterdam, where, after perhaps ten days of waiting in the Netherlands, on the fifth of November 1920—having yelled
Fire! Fire!
because he was afraid of missing the boat—my grandfather and his sister finally boarded the SS
Nieuw Amsterdam,
a seventeen-thousand-ton, fourteen-year-old, single-stack liner of the Holland America Line, six-hundred and fifteen feet long and sixty-eight feet wide, accommodating 2,886 passengers in total (of whom 2,200 were, like my grandfather and great-aunt Sylvia, relegated to steerage), and commanded by P. van den Heuvel, who, on arriving in New York Harbor twelve days later, signed an affidavit stating that he had “caused the surgeon of said vessel…to make a physical and mental examination of each and all of the aliens named in the foregoing Lists or Manifest Sheets, 30 in number, and that from the report of said surgeon…no one of said aliens is of any of the classes excluded from admission into the United States.”

Oh yes: we knew about the physical examination which, Captain van den Heuvel naively believed, all of his passengers had passed.
The girls had such long hair.
But the passenger manifest, which is the extant official record of my grandfather’s arrival, can’t possibly suggest just how it was that he got to America, how all the stories began.

But there is an odd gap. For the passport tells us nothing about what happened between the nineteenth of October 1920 (which, my friend Nicky assures me, was a Tuesday), and the fifth of November, which, according to the ship’s manifest now accessible through the Ellis Island Web site, was the day the ship sailed…

About those lost seventeen days, my grandfather told a certain story. In
Holland, he used to say, he and Aunt Sylvia ran out of the money their mother had given them for their journey; just how this happened, he never said. And
so,
he would say, he
spiffed himself up
and took himself to the various consulates and official offices in Rotterdam—of which there were many, it being a major port of embarkation for America during that period of intense immigration—and offered his services as a translator. Now his passport states that he spoke Polish and German, but I know that he spoke many other languages as well: the Russian he learned as a fifteen-year-old, guarding Russian war prisoners in Bolechow after the tables had turned and, briefly, the Austrians had the upper hand against the Russians who had, night after night, so cruelly bombarded the town (
they blew up the center of town!
); the Hungarian he grew up learning in school, until after the war, when his town no longer belonged to the Austro-Hungarian empire.
And so I got myself a job at a Hungarian office, translating from Hungarian into German and back,
he would say.