The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (37 page)
Read The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million Online
Authors: Daniel Mendelsohn
Lorka Jejger was born in Bolchow, Poland in 1918 to Shmuel and Ester. She was single. Prior to WWII she lived in Bolechow, Poland. During the war was in Bolechow, Poland. Lorka died in 1941 in Bolechow, Poland. This information is based on a Page of Testimony submitted on 22/05/1957 by her cousin, a Shoah survivor.
Whereas, in fact, not a single element of this entry in the Yad Vashem database is accurate, since (as we know from her birth certificate) Lorka was born on May 21, 1920, and she was, according to several eyewitness accounts, alive at least as late as the winter of 1942. And I might add that virtually all
of the information provided by the same important source, the central database at Yad Vashem, for “Shmuel Yeger” (or “Ieger”) and “Ester Jeger” (and the three daughters the database attributes to them: “Lorka Jejger,” “Frida Yeger,” and “Rachel Jejger”) is demonstrably wrong, from the spelling of their names to the names of their parents (“Shmuel Ieger was born in Bolechov, Poland in 1895 to Elkana and Yona,” an error which, I thought when I first read this, eradicates my great-grandmother Taube Mittelmark from history, and with her the sibling tensions that may well have resulted in Shmiel’s decision to leave New York in 1914 and return to Bolechow, a decision to which his presence in this error-filled archive is attributable) to the years in which they were born and died. But unless, like me, you had a vested interest in the few facts that can still be known about them, you’d never know that the information about these six people that you were so happy to be able to find in the Yad Vashem database was almost completely incorrect, and you’d never be the wiser.
So I am used to the discrepancies between the facts and the “record,” and don’t get very upset by them. But I can see how they might be unsettling to some people.
Anyway, as Bob now reminded me, on the big things everyone agreed. Bad things happened during the second Aktion.
B
OB TOLD ME
later that he and Jack and their father had survived the second Aktion because his father, the head of the Judenrat, had had warnings; and because after the first Aktion, they’d built a hiding place.
We were hidden, he told me when we spoke together in private, because we had a false wall in the stable. That was built by a Jewish carpenter after the first Aktion. You see we already knew there’d be another Aktion. We knew already because a few weeks before that there were Aktions in different towns in the whole area. And the day before the Bolechow Aktion, the second, Father came in and said, “Tomorrow it’s starting.” So we went in the hiding place during the night, or the early hours of the morning, before the whole thing started in the street. They went into houses, house by house, catching Jews in the streets, in the fields. Then they herded them to the railway station and packed them onto the cattle trucks and took them to Belzec. And Belzec was an extermination camp—
just
an extermination camp.
He knew I knew what that meant. At Belzec, you got off the train and went into the gas chambers.
The going into the houses, the catching Jews in the streets, in the fields: the
Grünschlags had witnessed none of this, of course. I remembered Jack saying,
If I would have witnessed it I would have been dead, too
. And yet, because of a particular accident of geography, the concealed Grünschlags did have knowledge of certain things that transpired during the three days that the second Aktion lasted.
We
heard
them leading them to the train, Bob said, because we lived in the street leading to the train station. As you walk along Dolinska Street, you turned right to go to the train station. And they were leading them along that street, to the cattle cars. So we heard the turmoil, the cries and the yells, and so forth. That ended and we came out of hiding, and you can imagine what the mood was.
No, actually: I couldn’t. And can’t. I have tried many times to imagine, to envision the experience of Uncle Shmiel and Ester and Bronia as they were taken or pushed or dragged from the white-painted, single-story house on Dlugosa Street, the house that Shmiel had fixed up when he first moved in, and were then forced to walk the short distance to the courtyard of the town hall—forced to walk that short distance and then waited there for days until they were made once again to walk, this time to the train station. Residing in the minds of both Jack and Bob are concrete memories of the sounds, the wailing and moaning and screams made by the two thousand Bolechow Jews who survived the first few days of the Aktion and made it to the train station; but these memories, and those sounds, are impossible for me to imagine since I have never heard the sound that is made by two thousand people being marched to their deaths.
And yet while it is important to avoid the temptation to ventriloquize, to “imagine” and then “describe” something for which there is simply no parallel in our experience of life, it is possible at least to learn some of what transpired during those three days in September, the three days of that second Aktion, since eyewitness reports have come down to us. These descriptions will of course never allow us to “know what Shmiel, Ester, and Bronia experienced,” since there is simply no way of reconstructing their subjective experiences, but it does permit us to construct a mental picture—a blurry one, to be sure—of certain things that were
done to them,
or rather were
likely
done to them, since we know that these things were done to others like them during the same event. I can look through the available sources and compare them, collate them, and from that arrive at a likely version of what probably happened to Uncle Shmiel, his wife, and their daughter in the days leading up to their deaths; but of course I will never know.
Of the various witness statements given by some of the forty-eight Bolechowers who survived the Nazi occupation, I randomly selected one given on the fifth of July 1946, by a certain Matylda Gelernter, thirty-eight years of age—born, therefore, the same year in which Meg’s brother-in-law had been born, the same year in which my mother’s aunt Jeanette had been born in Bolechow, too. She made the deposition in Katowice about what had happened in the town during the second Aktion:
On the 3rd, 4th and 5th of September 1942, the second action in Bolechów took place without a list: Men, women and children were caught in their houses, attics, hiding places. About 660 children were taken. People were killed in the town square in Bolechów and in the streets. The action lasted from before evening on Wednesday until Saturday. On Friday it was said that the action was already over. People decided to come out of hiding but the action started up again on Saturday and on that one day more people were killed than in the preceding days. The Germans and Ukrainians preyed especially on the children. They took the children by their legs and bashed their heads on the edge of the sidewalks, whilst they laughed and tried to kill them with one blow. Others threw children from the height of the first floor, so a child fell on the brick pavement until it was just pulp. The Gestapo men bragged that they killed 600 children and the Ukrainian Matowiecki (from Rozdoły near Z ydaczowy) proudly guessed that he had killed 96 Jews himself, mostly children.
On Saturday the corpses were gathered, thrown onto wagons, children into bags and brought to a cemetery and this time thrown into one pit. Concerning the fact that this action was to take place, Backenroth, a member of the Bolechów Judenrat who came from Wełdzirz, telephoned from Drohobycz. He said that we should expect “guests” on Thursday. But the Ukrainians of Bolechów themselves, not waiting for the Gestapo, started to capture and kill Jews before evening. My father, my child (not quite two years old) and I ran to the house of a Ukrainian we knew who had said at one time that he would let us in. But he didn’t let us in. We returned home and hid ourselves in a niche in our house. The child was crying and wanted to drink, but didn’t cry out because it was accustomed to this from the previous actions. Even when they shot a certain Jewess in front of the door of our hiding place, the child was frightened but kept quiet.
In the attic of the house next door my mother, brother and sister-in-law were hiding with a few-month-old baby. When Gestapo men and Ukrainians appeared in the neighbour’s attic, they wanted to escape so they climbed down the stairs
from the attic but it turned out that Gestapo men and Ukrainians were sitting in the room getting drunk on cherry brandy, which they had found in the basement. They were so occupied with the brandy that they didn’t notice the people coming down, who immediately stepped back up into the attic. But the child started to cry. My sister-in-law didn’t have any breast milk or anything else that she could use to quiet the child. She covered it with a pillow and it turns out that the child suffocated.
A large number of the Jews worked in factories at that time. But they were taken from the factories, led to the town square and here they were sorted near the town hall. The most talented according to the advice of the foremen of the factories were released and the rest were kept in custody. Soon they were killed in the town square and the streets. The walls and pavements were literally splashed in blood. After the action, the house walls and pavements were cleaned with the taps of the town hall.
A terrible episode happened with Mrs Grynberg. The Ukrainians and Germans, who had broken into her house, found her giving birth. The weeping and entreaties of bystanders didn’t help and she was taken from her home in a nightshirt and dragged into the square in front of the town hall. There, when the birth pangs started, she was dragged onto a dumpster in the yard of the town hall with a crowd of Ukrainians present, who cracked jokes and jeered and watched the pain of childbirth and she gave birth to a child. The child was immediately torn from her arms along with its umbilical cord and thrown—It was trampled by the crowd and she was stood on her feet as blood poured out of her with bleeding bits hanging and she stood that way for a few hours by the wall of the town hall, afterwards she went with all the others to the train station where they loaded her into a carriage in a train to Bełzec.
In the night after the action, the Ukrainians went looking for places to rob. They went barefoot. Among other things they tried the outer lock of the niche where we were hiding and enclosed. Our hearts stopped beating, we died. My child already made no noise. In the action—September 1942—which lasted three days, 600–700 children were killed and 800–900 adults. The approximately 70-year-old Krasel Streifer was also shot in her bed then, because she couldn’t walk. My mother-in-law Jenta Gelernter, age 71, also died then. She was taken out of bed in a nightshirt; they didn’t allow her to put anything else on. They shot her near the town hall because she couldn’t walk quickly. The rest of the Jews who had been captured, approximately 2,000, were taken to Bełzec. During the trip, Stern escaped from the train. She told us that more people had escaped like that. She continued to explain that once at a station along the way,
I don’t remember where, hot steam was let into the car and people were burned, started to faint and choke. People were terribly tormented by thirst, especially pitiful was the children’s situation, starving and dying of thirst. There were incidents of sating thirst with urine. Mrs Stern leapt out of the car leaving behind her four-year-old daughter. That same Mrs Stern had been caught in her shelter, which had been revealed by the crying and moaning of her two-year-old child. When they heard that Germans and Ukrainians were near the shelter, people started yelling at Mrs Stern that her child would give them away. Then she covered the child with a pillow and when the shelter was found anyway, the child turned out to be suffocated.
Ukrainian Siczowcy [extractTextmilitary units assisting the SS] specially brought from Drohobycz helped with the second action.
During the march to the train station in Bolechów for the transport to Bełzec, they had to sing, particularly the song “My Little Town of Belz.” Whoever didn’t take part in the singing was beaten bloody on the shoulders and head with rifle butts.
So that is one sketch of the kinds of things that happened during the second Aktion, a tiny part of Operation Reinhard—one aim of which, the records show, was to make the
Generalgouvernement
completely
Judenrein,
Jew-free, in time for the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, although another, perhaps larger aim was to spare SS men the psychological trauma of having to shoot children of my mother’s cousin Bronia’s age, or to shoot heavyset women,
very warm, very friendly
women, like Aunt Ester, although presumably it wouldn’t have been all that traumatic to shoot a forty-seven-year-old man such as Uncle Shmiel, a man who, after all, had once borne arms himself, fighting for his emperor. I have often wondered, since Jack Greene first called me and I began to be able to focus my mental picture of Ruchele Jäger’s death—and since I began reading more deeply in the literature about Operation Reinhard—whether whoever it was who actually killed her, who operated the machine gun perched at some distance from the plank on the open pit, felt any psychological trauma, although I know that the odds are heavily against it. But it’s important to try to think about this, about the moment of the shooting, because although we’ve become used to thinking of the killing in terms of “operations” and
Aktionen
and chambers, which are abstract-sounding terms, there was (and this is easier to envision in the case of the shooting, where the link between the hand that squeezes the trigger and the bullets, and the targets, and the resulting deaths, seems so clear, so direct) always
a single person who actually did it, and this I think is as important, in its way, to try to envision—I almost said “remember”—as it is to attempt to salvage something of the personality or appearance of a single victim, of some sixteen-year-old girl whom you knew absolutely nothing about until you began to travel vast distances to talk to people who knew her.