The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (35 page)

He fell silent for a moment, then went on.

I remember every hour, every hour and a half, my aunt came into the room
where I was in bed and said, You’re still not asleep, you’re still not asleep? At the time I was thinking of Ruchele, because it was a new shock.

What Shmiel and Ester and their three remaining daughters, for whom the fate of Ruchele was, until then, the greatest catastrophe of their lives, went through in the days following the first Aktion in Bolechow will never be known. (Although we do know that Shmiel, who was still alive in 1941, would have had to contribute money when the Judenrat ordered a collection of funds early in November of that year, which meant that, however indirectly, he had to pay for the bullet or bullets that had ended his third daughter’s life.) But now I do know this: that very briefly, a long time ago in the house of Jack Greene’s aunt, Ruchele had mattered very much to someone else, and when I considered this, as Jack went on talking to me, I was happy.

You see, I had known one of the girls perished, he repeated, but I didn’t know which one.

This, as it turned out, was the last thing anybody ever said to me about Ruchele Jäger.

The murder of innocent children is a notorious problem that arises in the text of
parashat Noach. Parashat Bereishit
, a tale ostensibly about Creation, ends with God’s disgusted awareness that “the wickedness of man was great upon the earth,” a realization that leads him—there has been much excited comment on this notion—
to “regret” having made humankind to begin with. (“What could this mean?” Friedman asks. “If God knows the future, how could God regret something once it has happened?”) The deity’s melancholy mood lasts only a little while, as we know, since immediately afterward he declares that he will “dissolve” mankind, animals, birds, and all creeping things.

The cause of God’s ire, the nature of the sin that elicits his disgust, is described at the beginning of
Noach
. The earth, as God becomes aware in Genesis 6:11, has been corrupted (
vatishacheth
); it was corrupted (
nish’chathah
)—the word recurs immediately in the following verse—because all flesh had corrupted its way (
hish’chith
). What exactly is the nature of this “corruption”? Rashi notes that the consonantal root of the Hebrew verb that recurs so strikingly often in these verses,
sh-ch-th
, denotes idolatry (it’s the verb used in Deuteronomy 4:16, when God warns his people against making graven images lest they become corrupt), and even more suggests gross sexual immorality. He glosses “all flesh had corrupted its way” as follows: “Even domestic animals, beasts, and birds had relations with those which were not of their species.”

The nature of the corruption, then, has to do with the wayward mixing of categories that are meant to remain distinct—a preoccupation of this particular religion, as becomes increasingly clear throughout the Torah, from that original act of cosmic Creation, described as a process of separation and distinction, to the rigorous insistence, in later books such as Leviticus, on the separation of kinds and species of things, for instance the segregation of dairy products from meat products, of the towels with the red stripes from the towels with the blue stripes. And indeed when instructing Noah on the construction, outfitting, and loading of the Ark, God reminds him that the pairs of animals with which he will eventually restock the earth (that second act of Creation) must be “each according to its kind”—a specification that Rashi explains thus: “Those who cleaved to their own species, and did not corrupt their way.”

The punishment for this particular brand of corruption, appropriately enough, reflects the nature of the crime. For the Flood that God unleashes has the effect of blurring the distinctions between things: as the waters rise, the ocean engulfs the dry land, and the mountains and distinguishing features of the landscape all disappear; when they do eventually reappear—as they had first appeared at the beginning of
parashat Bereishit
, when God first separated the water from the land—we are meant to feel it, surely, as a second Creation. This linkage between the crime and the punishment, another instance of the preoccupation in
Noach
with the way in which opposites are secretly connected, perhaps, is made evident in a striking verbal feature of the text: for the word that God uses when he says “I am about to destroy” all flesh is
mash’chitham
, which, like the words for “corrupt,” is derived from the same
sh-ch-th
root. In
Noach
, the punishment literally fits the crime.

Given the Torah’s obsessive preoccupation with segregation, separation, distinction, and purity, what is striking about the tale of God’s dissatisfaction with his Creation, and his decision to cause a Flood that will obliterate it, is his determination to destroy “all flesh.” The word “all” raises some difficult issues, implying as it does that at least some innocents will perish in the disaster. For presumably we can imagine that included in the designation “all flesh” there are, for instance, small children, or even babies—a category of person unlikely to have been engaging in interspecies miscegenation. Surprisingly, since he shows great humaneness elsewhere, Friedman shows no interest in the disturbing implication that God could be capable of killing innocents; he lingers instead on Noah’s “purity” and lack of “blemish” in a way intended to show how broad-minded the authors of this tale were. (“And it is important that a story composed by Jews emphasized the virtue of someone who is not a Jew…”; and indeed, this very passage has been adduced in certain debates to support the notion that there could be a category of people called Righteous Gentiles, i.e., non-Jews who tried to save Jews during the Second World War—people, presumably, like Ciszko Szymanski, about whom, in time, I would come to learn a great deal.) Rashi, on the other hand, wrestles, albeit briefly, with the dark implications of
Noach
. His sole comment on the phrase “the end of all flesh” is that “wherever you find promiscuity, catastrophe comes to the world and kills [both] good and bad.” This seems to imply either that the very sin denoted by
sh-ch-th
taints all who are even remotely connected to it, even the passive victims of (say) miscegenation; or that it is the guilty, through their indiscriminate sinning, who bring the punishment on the innocent as well—an interpretation that has the virtue of deflecting blame from God.

None of this, it must be said, seems very satisfying when you abandon the abstractions of the commentators and pause to wonder what, say, the extinction of the life of a small child might look or sound like, by drowning or indeed otherwise. Even after pondering Rashi’s commentary, it is hard not to feel, given the way that the Torah frets about maintaining distinctions between things, that the indiscriminate annihilation of the innocent along with the guilty in the Flood story is uncharacteristically sloppy and disturbingly—well, un-kosher. But then, perhaps in certain instances—when executing plans on a gigantic scale, for instance, plans for the reconfiguration of the whole world—the ability to keep all the details in mind, to make certain kinds of distinctions, becomes counterproductive.

D
ID ANYBODY KNOW
for certain when Shmiel and Ester perished? I asked an hour and a half or so into our conversation on the day of the group meeting. By then I had already adopted Jack’s word,
perish
.

Meg said she thought it was in the second Aktion.

Jack said, Yes, that’s what I think, in the second Aktion. I didn’t see them after that. He then added, But I’m not sure.

I asked if anyone had seen them between the first and second Aktions.

After the first Aktion, Bob said, of course, you know, life was changed. We had to wear the armbands.

I nodded. Among Meg’s snapshots was a remarkable one that had all too obviously been taken during this period: Pepci Diamant walking down a street with another girl—Meg had identified her as one of the
Flüchtling
, the refugees from surrounding the area who’d poured into the town as the Germans stomped across Poland—both of them wearing the white armband with the blue Star of David. In this snapshot, both young women are smiling. I wondered who had taken it; and wondered, too, what Pepci Diamant had been thinking when she pasted it into her photo album, which, as we know, would survive her.

Jack said, After the first Aktion, you didn’t go—you didn’t come in the street. There was an allotted time you could only appear, an hour or two each day.

The Judenrat, Bob went on, had to provide people for work and so forth, and that’s how it went on. And of course—

(I wondered why he said
of course
like this, and assumed that maybe he meant, simply, the bad luck of the Jews)

—at the same time a flood started.

A flood? I asked. For a moment I thought he was being metaphorical.
A flood of woes, a flood of troubles
, something like that.

But no: it was a real flood. It was raining a lot, Bob said, and took everything off the fields, so suddenly food became very expensive. There was hunger. By the time we got to the spring of 1942 a lot of Jewish people were dying—and not one or two a week but daily. Just of starvation.

I thought of Shmiel and Ester, the surviving three daughters, living in anguish and terror in the white-painted house. In his letters to my grandfather, to his cousin Joe Mittelmark, to Aunt Jeanette and her husband, he had constantly complained about money, the expenses of sending the girls to school, the fact that he didn’t have enough money to get his truck out of the shop. Now, by—say—Passover of 1942, there was no work at all, of course, and people were starving. How do people live, I had wondered, when there was no longer any economy? They didn’t; they starved.

Meg said, softly, Everyone talked about the hunger, after the first Aktion. I used to
dream
about bread. Not cake:
bread
.

Matt asked, I know this is going to sound silly, stupid, but I mean—can I ask something?

Of course, everyone said.

Matt wanted to know what it felt like, what the atmosphere in town was like, during those days after the first Aktion. I had started to notice that whereas I was preoccupied with learning what had happened, the events themselves, and in what order, it was Matt who always asked how it had all felt.

I mean, he said, here were people, members of your families had been killed, it was obviously awful. So when you saw one another in the street, during that time, you’d run into someone during the time you were allowed to go outside, what did you say, did you say to someone, “I’m so sorry, I heard about your mother,” did you talk about it?

It would never have occurred to me to ask any of this.

Meg said, There was only one topic of conversation.

Jack laughed humorlessly and said, No, three.

Meg didn’t laugh, but she picked up Jack’s cue.

Yes, she said,
three
: food, food, and food.

A
S THE FOUR
survivors talked about the period between the two big Aktions, I tried to reconcile what I was hearing with what I’d previously been told. Aunt Miriam—who, writing to me thirty years before, had had access to survivors who were long dead by the time I started asking my questions, but who may well have had greater intimacy with and more vivid memories of what had happened to my relatives—had thought that Ester and two of
the girls perished in 1942; that, clearly, would have been the second Aktion. The older girl, she had written to me, had joined the partisans and died with them: this, clearly, was Lorka, and as far as the Sydney survivors knew, this much was true. But Miriam had heard that Shmiel and another girl had perished in 1944, whereas the Sydney group was fairly certain that Shmiel, Ester, and Bronia, the youngest, were taken in the second Aktion.

Perhaps, I thought, what had happened was this: Lorka had wound up in the forests with the partisans, most likely the Babij, as everyone agreed. As to the others, Miriam had heard that Ester and two of the girls had died in 1942, whereas the truth was that Ester and two of the girls had died
by
1942: Ruchele in October 1941, during the first Aktion, and Ester and Bronia in September 1942, during the second. And maybe Frydka had indeed died in 1944, as Miriam had heard—
after
having joined the partisans, as everyone else now said she had. (Everyone, at any rate, agreed that she was still alive in 1943, before the final liquidations took place.)