The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (30 page)

A real Rebecca, she had said, a real Jewish beauty. How can I explain?

At this, she took her stick in one hand and, bracing the other arm against the arm of her straight-backed chair, rose slowly to her feet. Painstakingly, she moved toward her bedroom and without saying anything beckoned to me to follow. She stopped in front of a dresser. Out in the living room, I had noticed many times, there were dozens of photographs of her son, his children, their children, pictures that crammed every available shelf and tabletop. In here, in the bedroom, on top of the spotless dresser, were a handful of very old-looking photographs. One by one, she picked them up and, passing each one briefly into my hands before taking it back and carefully replacing it on the dresser, told me who the subject was of each: her mother, her father, to be honest I can’t remember now because that day, in 2002, I knew I’d have
many opportunities to look at them and enquire about them and hence didn’t look at them intently enough or listen to her meticulously enough, and now when I try to summon them to mind I have a vague impression of a picture of an attractive woman in a fur stole, and a very, very old picture of a distinguished, unsmiling old man in black who could have been a rabbi, or perhaps was merely wearing one of the round, vaguely Oriental caps that adult men of a certain vintage and era used to wear as a matter of course.

But I did listen with great interest to the story of how she came to repossess these ancient family photographs from her girlhood in Rzeszów and Kraków, since I had wondered how it was that she’d managed to keep them after she’d fled her comfortable house on Third of May Street, the house that had then been appropriated for use as Gestapo headquarters. Had she hidden them somehow on her person, I asked after she put the last photograph neatly back in its place, had she concealed them in the lining of a coat, for instance, as she fled, disguised, with her small child in tow, from hiding place to hiding place, alias to alias?

Mrs. Begley looked at me.
Achhh,
she said, Of course not, do you think I was crazy? I’ll tell you what happened.

We slowly made our way back to the living room. She lowered herself again into the chair, and then she told me the story: how, after the war was over, after she’d been reunited with her husband, the big doctor from Stryj who, like so many doctors, was taken east when the Soviets retreated in 1941, she was contacted by someone who’d come to live in her former house, the house I had tried and failed to locate the summer before.

He told me he had found a bunch of my photographs, she said, and if I wanted them, I could send money to such-and-such an address.

She grimaced, although her expression was not without some humor.

So I did it for a while, I would send money and he would send a photo, two photos.

I didn’t say anything. I was trying to imagine how much I would pay to ransom my past.

But finally my husband got angry, he was sick of it, and I stopped.

She paused for a moment as her eyes lighted on the shelves of pictures of Louis and his family.

And you see that now I have many pictures, she said.

A
T
J
ACK
G
REENE’S,
the picture of Shmiel, Ester, and Bronia started to loosen tongues, and the conversation about my lost great-uncle and his family
became, suddenly, boisterous and somewhat disorderly. For so many years, we had known nothing about them, which was frustrating. Now I found myself frustrated in quite the opposite way, because I wasn’t able to hear everything at once. Not knowing whom I should talk to first, where to put the microphone of my tape recorder, half-hearing scraps of conversations coming from all sides, I turned to Matt with an anguished expression, as these four old Bolechowers chattered to one another, and I said, I’m losing all this.

Jack Greene was saying, I remember the Jägers, I remember Shmiel Jäger, I remember Itzhak Jäger—you know he went to Palestine in the 1930s?

Yes, I said, I knew. Itzhak, Shmiel’s brother, the brother who, my mother told me at some point, was the sibling to whom her father had been closest, the one he’d loved the most, Itzhak who had been dragged with his two small children from Bolechow to the Middle East by his ardent Zionist wife. On the opposite side of the table, Boris Goldsmith was smiling and trying to make himself heard.

I remember, Boris said, he had the first radio in town. It was
big
—raising both hands he sketched a big box—with a big aerial.

The
r
of “aerial” was lodged high up in back of his throat, where the uvula hangs—precisely where my grandfather would have placed it.

It was very high, the aerial, Boris said. You couldn’t hear it, even…He also had the first telephone.

The first radio, the first telephone.
A big fish in a small pond
. As Boris told this story, which I prized because it fit an idea of Shmiel that I already had in mind, fragments of another story about appliances and status glimmered at the edges of my memory, although it wasn’t until I returned home and called my mother that I recalled precisely what it had been.
My father bought Uncle Itzhak and Aunt Miriam the first refrigerator anyone had in Haifa,
my mother said over the phone.
They didn’t have a refrigerator, and when they finally got electric lines through to this place where they lived, my father thought they should have a fridge, and he had one sent over. Itzhak and Miriam were the talk of the town!
But that afternoon in Australia, I couldn’t remember this story.

So you knew him pretty well? I asked Boris Goldsmith.

I knew him very well!

And then I couldn’t think of anything to say. This was the strangeness of this trip: here I was at last, talking to people who had known them well, very well even, and I had no idea where to begin. I felt like someone confronted with a locked door who is handed a very large bunch of keys. I realized, then, how ill-prepared I had been. How do you find out who someone was, really?
How do you describe a personality, a life? Fumbling, embarrassed, I turned to Boris Goldsmith.

So what kind of person was he? I asked.

Boris seemed taken aback.

He was an ordinary person, he said, slowly. He was a butcher. He had two trucks. He used to go from Bolechow to Lwów.

A butcher, the trucks, Lwów. This I knew, or could have guessed. I felt helpless.

And you knew Ester? I said, fumbling.

Oh yes…I used to come very often there. It was just across the street. I used to live there before he moved in there…

He had lived just across the street from them! I remembered, at that moment, how precious the moment had been, eighteen months earlier, when we’d met Olga and Pyotr and she had said,
Znayu, znayu, I knew them, I knew them
. I hadn’t dreamed, then, that we’d ever get any closer. And now here I was, and all I could think of to ask was, Do you remember when he moved in?

Boris shook his head apologetically and said, I don’t remember. It was a long, long time ago.

The way he said
a long, long time ago
was the way you might begin, or maybe end, a fairy tale. The room went quiet. Boris started talking again.

The house was there, he said. When he moved in he started to rebuild. He made it different. Then he bought two trucks, Studebakers. He was an expediter, he had a partner, his name was Schindler.

I shot Matt a look. He flashed a grin at me, but said nothing.

Boris went on, When the Russians came in ’thirty-nine, they took away his trucks, and then he was going in the country and buying cattles for the government.

Cattles
. My grandfather would have said it like this:
kettles
.

Buying cattle for the government? I asked. This was interesting: I’d always wondered what became of Shmiel during the two years of Soviet rule, between 1939 and 1941.

Bob interjected: For the government, because he was then an employee of the government.

He was an employee of the government! Boris agreed, loudly. Yes, the Communists!

It was only later on that I read the testimony of a survivor who’d written about the Soviet years: the liquidation and subsequent nationalization of all businesses; the unbearably high taxes, the disintegration of the Polish złoty and, hence, the
sudden evaporation of all liquid wealth, the queues in the few stores that had goods. The sudden, late-night deportations to Siberia of “bourgeois counterrevolutionaries”—a blessing, as it turned out, in disguise. I read this and tried to imagine what
going into the country and buying cattles for the government
must have meant for Shmiel, who’d given up a life in the United States, all those years ago, to rebuild his family’s fortunes. The liquidation of the old family business, the seizure of the two Studebaker trucks, the appropriation by some minor Soviet official of the duties that had once belonged to the leader of the butchers’ cartel, and, finally, assignment to a humiliatingly menial job—although it was, at least, a job related to the business he had known so well. It wasn’t, in fact, until Boris said
going into the country and buying cattles for the government
that I had ever really thought of Shmiel as a butcher, as someone whose livelihood resided in animals, as had the livelihood of generations of his family. When I was a child and my grandfather would come to visit, he would, at some point during his stay, take me and, sometimes, my mother as well and drive my mother’s station wagon to the local shopping center where, nestled between a barbershop and a pharmacy, there was a kosher butcher store. This store, narrow and always unnervingly cold because of the low open cases that ran down one side and were filled with frozen plastic-wrapped packages of stuffed derma and liver, was run by a pair of brothers with whom, once we got there, my grandfather would spend a good deal of time chatting in Yiddish. I often wondered, then, why we almost always left the store without actually buying anything, and it was only when Boris said
he was going into the country and buying cattles for the government
that I realized that my grandfather used to go there not only to hear the sound of Yiddish, but to talk about meat, about his family business.

S
OMETHING OCCURRED TO
me as Boris was talking. If Shmiel had, at some point, moved into a house across the street from Boris Goldsmith, then the house we had visited in Bolechow, the ancestral Jäger house on lot # 141, where Stefan and Ulyana now lived, was not, as I had assumed, the one in which Shmiel and his family had lived, and from which they had gone, however they had gone, to their deaths. Of this I wanted to be sure, and so I continued to question Boris.

So when he moved in he already had the four girls—?

Boris looked surprised. He had
three
girls, he said. I just remember
three
girls.

Well, I said, there were four, but—

I don’t think there were four. I don’t think so…

Boris picked up the picture of Shmiel, Ester, and Bronia, which by then had circled the table and come to his place. I picked up some other photos and, leaning across the table, pointed.

Lorka, Frydka, Ruchele, and Bronia, I said. At the opposite end of the table Meg Grossbard suddenly sat up.

And Bronia! she said. Yes! She smiled.

But Boris was unpersuaded. I just remember three of them, he insisted. I am positive he had just three daughters.

At this point Sarah Greene smiled and said, Well, they know better, they were their family!

Everyone laughed. I was afraid that in insisting on what I knew to be the truth, I had offended Boris by suggesting that his memory was faulty.

Boris, for his part, abandoned the daughters and said, a little testily, He was a butcher. I don’t remember his relations.

Do you remember he had a brother who went to Palestine? I asked.

I don’t know his brother, Boris said crisply. Just that he once had a
family
.

T
O CHANGE THE
subject, I asked everybody if there had been other Jägers in Bolechow. My grandfather had said that he had cousins who had lived in town, when he was a boy—Jäger cousins, I assumed, who had been related to his aunt Sima, the one whose headstone I had so improbably come across in the Bolechow cemetery.

That’s what I asked Jack just now, Mrs. Grossbard said, turning in my direction. There were Jägers in the
rynek
. They were uncles of Dusia Zimmerman…they were her mother’s brothers. Her mother was a Jäger. They had a sweet shop, a
cukierna
.

She turned to Jack and, in Polish, asked him how to render
cukierna
in English. Sarah Greene said, A coffeehouse?

Meg held up a manicured hand. No, no, no, no, she said.

This quadruple
no
was, as I would learn during the course of the day, a habit of hers when she was irritated by the inaccuracies of others. Her voice was tight and humorless.

Not a coffeehouse, I’m sorry, she said. We didn’t have
coffeehouses
.

Everyone laughed, and whether it was at Meg’s irritation, or at the absurdity that a little shtetl like Bolechow offered the likes of a coffeehouse, I was unable to tell.

I knew Frydka all my life, Meg told me. The last time I saw her was in ’forty-one when we could still walk the streets. And then I don’t know what happened to her. I have no idea. But Lorka I met in January or February ’forty two, in another girlfriend’s place, because there was her boyfriend.

I am used to the twists and turns of English syntax when it’s filtered through Polish, but I wasn’t sure who “her” referred to.

Whose boyfriend was there? I asked Meg.

Lorka’s boyfriend, she replied. Yulek Zimmerman was his name. That was the last time I saw her, because Yulek had a younger sister that we were friends with, me and Frydka.

She explained: Early in 1942, before the Jews of Bolechow were no longer permitted to walk the streets, Meg had gone to this Zimmerman house to see her friend Dusia Zimmerman, and when she got there Dusia’s older brother, Yulek, was there, with Lorka Jäger, his girlfriend.