The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (32 page)

One of these bombardments lasted for nearly a week, he sometimes added, and to illustrate this point he told another story. Once, after they had been trapped in the forest for many days because of one of these bombardments, terrified to go back to the town, he and his family and a group of other Bolechowers had been reduced to hunting and killing a doe and eating the meat in the woods. When he said this, he gave me a significant look, and I knew what he meant: an animal that was killed in a hunt could not be kosher. My grandfather came from a long line, generations in fact, of Jewish butchers; in the woods, they must have known what they were doing.
But if life is at stake, God forgives!
he would say at this point…

So he had burned his feet in the boiling water of the Sukiel, that night. But this wasn’t the end of the story. After pausing for effect, he would go on.
A boy I went to school with was boiled to death in the river that night
. Even now, as I hear, in my mind, the way he said the word
boiled,
I shiver. Who knows if it was true?
When we came back to town a few days later
, he would say, ending this tale,
half of the house was gone
.

I thought of this as Jack and Bob remembered how the Ukrainians, when the bad days first started, threw Jews into the river. Or (Jack added) sometimes they took the Jews alongside the river and just shot them.

You remember Gartenberg was shot? he said, looking at Bob.

Bob nodded, That’s right.

Roight
.

It was under the bridge, Jack went on.

Those were the first things, Bob said.

N
OW, FOR THE
first time, I got a clear picture of the first Aktion. I needed to know about it in as much detail as possible. This is when Ruchele had been killed.

The first
German
Aktion, Bob began, wanting me to understand the difference between the Nazis’ organized killing events and the random, private vendettas of certain Ukrainians, those who’d lived with their Jewish neighbors, the gentle old Ukrainian woman had told me in Bolechow,
like a big family
, was on the twenty-eighth of October 1941.

As he said this Meg nodded, looking pensively down at the table. Then, slowly and distinctly, she said, It was a Tuesday.

Bob went on. They took somewhere between seven hundred and—

Jack and Meg interrupted him simultaneously. A thousand, they both said.

—A thousand, Bob said. And they kept them for about thirty-six hours in Dom Katolicki, the Catholic community center, and they kept them there while the Germans were drinking on the podium and the Jews had to kneel down on the floor and they got drunk and they’d shoot a lot in the crowd. And anyway after thirty-six hours they took them out in trucks and drove them out of town and to Taniawa Field and they already had the big hole dug up, and they shot them all.

This is what Bob told me that Sunday, my grandfather’s birthday, when Matt and I met with all the Bolechowers. When I spoke to him alone a few days later, he said, Now I remember seven hundred and twenty, but all the others say it was a thousand. I believe they had a board across the hole and they shot them on the board. Machine guns, I don’t know. Everybody remembers slightly different, it all depends on what you heard and what you remember.

How, I wanted to know, did they round up the people for this Aktion? I remembered my family’s stories, that Shmiel had been on some kind of list.

Bob said, The Germans were going around with Ukrainian policemen, because at first they had a list. On the list, he explained, were the names of prominent Bolechower Jews: doctors, lawyers, businessmen. The idea was to demoralize the town by eliminating the leading citizens.

How, I asked, did the Germans come to assemble the list—how did they know who was who? The Germans, of course, were new to the area: unfamiliar with Bolechow and its inhabitants.

Bob replied that the local Ukrainians went with the German officers, pointing out who was who and who lived where. I believe there were 140 or 160 on the list, he said, and if the people were not at home, like my father, they just started to gather people on the streets.

They had a list, and Shmiel was on it,
my cousin Elkana had told me, once; from whom he had learned this, it is impossible, now, to know. This must surely be the same list that Jack was now talking about. And yet I was fairly sure that Shmiel himself wasn’t taken in the first Aktion. Aunt Miriam in Israel had written, long ago, that she had heard that Shmiel wasn’t killed until 1944, along with one of the girls, after they had joined the partisans; my brother Matt had run into that man at the Holocaust survivors gathering, the one who had once used the dead Shmiel’s name, apparently a practice of certain partisans. And Jack, in our first conversation over the phone, a year before, had told me that as far as he knew only Ruchele had been taken in this action. So I concluded that Shmiel, if he had been on that list (
very likely,
Jack said), had been away from home that day, when the Germans and the Ukrainians had come knocking.

People in Bolechów take me for a rich man,
he had boasted in one of his letters. Perhaps they had, and in the end it had done him no favors.

On the day we talked with all of them, I wanted to know how Ruchele had come to be taken.

Bad luck, Jack said, musingly. You see, there were four girls who were very close friends. There was Ruchele and three others. Out of the four girls, three perished that day. I figure they must have met up somewhere—that they had made an arrangement to meet, and they got caught and taken away.

As he spoke I thought of the picture of Ruchele that I had: a big, wide-grinned blond girl with the wavy Mittelmark hair she’d inherited from her grandmother, the same hair I had as a teenager. A nice girl, a sweet girl, a “placid” girl, Jack had told me. In October 1941 she was sixteen…

B
UT THAT COMES
later. Now I wanted to know what she was like, this girl whom the seventy-eight-year-old man I was now talking to had dated for a year and a half, sixty-four years before. Boris, when I’d asked him what Shmiel had been like, had said
he was a butcher:
my fault, I knew, for not having prepared the right kinds of questions, not having been able to foresee how hopeless it was to try to get a sense of what someone might have been like by simply asking,
What was he like
? Of course, maybe he didn’t have that much to say, anyway: if someone asked me, now, to describe certain of the neighbors
who’d lived across the street from me forty years ago, I’m not sure I’d have much to say except
He was an engineer, they were very nice
. So what, really, could I expect? And Mrs. Grossbard, who I knew had much more vivid memories, had begun by being too protective of her memories of Frydka to share them freely; this, I knew, was the reason for the stiffness, the withholding quality I had sensed from the beginning. And ever since the subject of Frydka and Ciszko Szymanski had come up, she’d shut like a door in my face, suspicious of my motives, rightly leery that my desire for a story, for some kind of drama to animate the otherwise unknowable lives of these people, would take the Frydka she had known and reduce her to a stick figure, a cipher.

So I had failed thus far to reanimate the lost. But Jack, I felt strongly, would be able to grasp what I wanted; it was just a matter of finding the right moment to talk. Jack, who can be forceful in conversation, is nonetheless rather courtly in an old-fashioned way. He never interrupts, and was quick to apologize whenever he realized he’d gotten a name or a date wrong. (Since Mrs. Grossbard never, to my knowledge, got anything wrong, I never had the opportunity to see her apologize.) This unassuming quality, I guessed, made him reluctant to go on at great length about his relationship with Ruchele during the group meeting, and so I arranged to talk to him in private the following afternoon, at his place. The house was quiet—Sarah had gone out, leaving some cake and coffee behind—and the conversation was easy.

His memories of Ruchele, he told me, went back to when they were both perhaps just fourteen, when he used to see her at the nightly meetings of the Hanoar HaZioni, the Zionist organization. He said to me, It met every evening. It was groups of ages, so I was in a group of boys my age, and she was in a group of girls her age.

He pronounced
girls
like “GEH-earls.” During the Thirties, the meetings of the Hanoar were where Bolechow’s Jewish teenagers did most of their socializing, apparently. Jack went on: In Europe the main meal was lunchtime. So in the evening you ate sandwiches, and after that you went to the Hanoar. I would say that during the winter the meetings lasted between say, five-thirty till ten in the evening, in summer from eight, or from seven-thirty, until ten. Every evening, and on Saturday from lunchtime till night. Look, I traveled each day by train to school, to the high school in Stryj, I had to study, it was a crammed day. But that Hanoar club was the pleasant part of it. We played together, we danced together, the horas, and the lectures, and so on. I must have known the Jäger girls from before, but I remember them definitely from then.

Matt asked, What did she look like?

Jack smiled and, after a moment, said, She was blond, and I liked blondes. She was a beautiful girl, she had long hair, you know, how do you call that—

(he gestured with one hand at the back of his neck and made twirling motions with his fingers)

—they were plaited. She had, I think, green eyes, and in one of them (here he held a thumb and forefinger up to his eye a quarter of an inch apart and squinted) she had a brown quarter in it.

Listen, he finally said, she was my puppy love, as they called it, my love, and I was wrapped up in it.

How did they meet, we wanted to know.

Jack told us a funny story. I wasn’t the first boy, he explained. There was a guy a year older than me, he also traveled to school in Stryj, and he used to go out with her. Mundzio Artman. He was a very religious boy and didn’t go to school on Saturday to Stryj—he’d go on Friday, and stayed over the weekend so he could come back on Saturday night. So he asked me, “Look here, you look after her on Saturdays.” Which I did! She cooled off to him and I became involved. I was fourteen, thirteen maybe, and she was the same age.

So when you were dating a girl in Bolechow in the late Thirties, we asked, what did you do?

We’d meet mostly at the Hanoar, and wherever the boys were not separated from the girls, we did everything together. We discussed, we talked. Needless to say she was more mature than I. I realized that later. You see, I didn’t like school. The studies, well, I wasn’t gifted on studies!

He chuckled with good-humored self-deprecation. When he said
on studies,
I smiled. Years after this conversation took place, Mrs. Begley’s son mentioned that the hardest part of learning English was the prepositions.

I remember when, Jack went on, at the end of the year, I got my report card. Ruchele was there in the train, or maybe in the school, to check up how I performed. And I don’t want to tell you her disappointment when she saw it! And I think eventually she cooled off a little…

Matt was gleeful. She wanted a doctor! he joked. I was gleeful for a different reason. I loved
more mature than I
. It gave this girl, of whom a single photograph now exists, a certain presence. I thought to myself, So she had certain ideas of what her boyfriend should be like; had, perhaps, an elevated sense of herself. She was, after all, a Jäger.

I asked Jack whether Ruchele herself had been a good student.

Jack smiled sadly and said, That I don’t know. But I must assume that Frydka was the smartest because she went to high school and the others
didn’t. Possibly the parents decided only Frydka should go to high school and not her. Maybe Ruchele was a good student but Shmiel couldn’t afford the high school at that time.

He paused. The fees were high, he said, as if trying to excuse Shmiel for not sending Ruchele to the high school. Plus the traveling, he added, plus the books, plus the uniforms…

The uniforms I had, by now, seen. Among the photos that Meg had taken out of the carefully folded plastic bag, the day before, was a very early one—it’s dated 1936, the girls would have been fourteen—of Meg, Frydka, and Pepci Diamant, standing alongside a fence on a winter’s day. All three are wearing heavy, dark winter coats, double-breasted, belted, fur-collared; on their feet are low boots, and they’re wearing school berets. Their faces are young and soft; Frydka’s is just losing its baby fat. Her face seemed to me to be older here than it is in another picture that Meg had shown me, a snapshot that belonged to Pepci (
who perished,
Meg said a second time as she showed me this picture,
although her photo album survived
), in which Frydka is lying on her tummy with her right arm crooked in front of her; she’s resting her chin on the back of her right hand, while with her left hand she holds open (as it happens) a photo album. She looks rather self-consciously off to the right, her eyes turned upward. There is something stagey about the photo, something actress-y; she’s a young girl, still, but already she’s posing. In this picture her cheeks are still round, whereas in the other photos that Meg had brought—the snapshot of Frydka, dated 1940, in which she wears a kerchief, babushka-style, and stares pensively out of the picture field at you, dark-eyed and quiet; the group photos in which Meg, Frydka, and their perished friend Pepci Diamant are skiing, swimming, posing—in these, Frydka is already a terrific-looking young woman: tall, dark, fine-boned, with an amused gleam in her eye.

So Ruchele didn’t go to Stryj to high school, Jack was saying. At the time she was going to seventh grade in public school, and then she started learning dressmaking.

I didn’t mention it to Jack at the time, but I knew all this from Shmiel’s letters, such as the one in which he wrote