The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (38 page)

So that, as I was saying, was one picture of what the second Aktion looked like, give or take.

But before I come to the deaths of Shmiel, Ester, and Bronia, it seems only fair to try to imagine them as they were when they were living.

S
HMIEL, OF COURSE,
we know a little by this point. Indeed after talking to Jack and the others I feel I can envision him quite clearly, for instance, on that day in the 1930s when one of the pictures I know so well was taken: walking through the center of town—you call it the Ringplatz, if you are, as he is, old enough to have been born a subject of Emperor Franz Josef; it’s the Rynek to his children, the four beautiful girls who were born after the big war and who are, therefore, Polish, and think of themselves as wholly Polish until it becomes clear that they were wrong—there he is, walking through the Ringplatz, the Rynek, on his way to the shop, the head of the butchers’ cartel, somehow always taller than you recall, well dressed in a three-piece suit such as the one he wears in the picture I have, dated 1930, in which he strides purposefully on a city sidewalk. So I can see him in my mind’s eye, wearing a suit like that; or, perhaps, a suit like the one he’s wearing in that picture he sent as a remembrance of his forty-fourth birthday in April 1939, the one in which he’s posing with his drivers, two brothers, next to one of his trucks, the well-off merchant with his cigar and his gold watch-fob. I can see him. There he is, tall (as his second daughter Frydka was tall, too), prosperous, a tiny bit self-important, perhaps, moving in no great hurry since he wants to stop and greet everyone with that slightly lordly manner so many in his family have, a leftover from more prosperous times, as if he were indeed the
król,
the king, which is what some people, half-affectionate and half-mocking, secretly call him, and of course he knows it, everyone in this small town knows everything about everyone, but he doesn’t mind. His vanity is, if anything, secretly flattered: after all, he is the one who chose to stay in this town, when he could easily have gone elsewhere, precisely because he wanted to be a
macher, a big fish in a small pond
. And so why not enjoy being called the
król,
whatever the tones of voice of those who were calling you that? here he is, then, walking,
being a big shot, a man who liked to be noticed, who enjoys being a somebody in the town, a person who very likely thought, until the very end, that returning to Bolechow from New York was the best decision he’d ever made.

Later on things became difficult, and to this difficult period belongs the Shmiel of the letters, a vivid if perhaps slightly less appealing figure than the earlier, more grandiose figure, a middle-aged and prematurely white-haired businessman and the brother, cousin,
mishpuchah
to his many correspondents in New York, with whom he was reduced, as time went on, to pleading, hectoring, cajoling rather desperately and, it must be said, a little pathetically as he tried to find a way to preserve his family or, indeed, even a small part of it, the children, even one daughter,
the dear Lorka
. (Why her? Because she was the oldest? Because she was the favorite? Impossible to know, now.)

Still, at least it’s possible to hear Shmiel’s voice, through the letters. Of Ester very little remains, now—at least in part because years ago, in my grandfather’s, or somebody’s, apartment in Miami Beach, I didn’t want to talk to the scary Minnie Spieler, who only thirty years later I realized was Ester’s sister, since I’d never thought her interesting enough even to ask about. Having now talked to every person still alive who had the opportunity to see and know Aunt Ester, however obliquely, I can report that almost nothing is left of this woman, apart from a handful of snapshots and the fact that she was very warm and friendly. (A woman, I can’t help thinking as I contemplate the annihilation of her life—
annihilation
may seem at first excessive, but I merely use it here in its fullest etymological sense,
to reduce to nothing
—who would, in the normal course of things, have died of, say, colon cancer in a hospital in Lwów in, perhaps, 1973, at the age of seventy-seven, although that is impossible to imagine, because she died so young and so long ago that she seems to belong wholly to the past, seems to have no claim on the present. And yet there’s no reason, apart from the obvious one, that she shouldn’t have been someone I knew, someone like all those other mysterious old people who’d appear at family events when I was growing up; just as the four girls, who will always be young, ought to have been the middle-aged “Polish cousins” whom we’d have visited in, say, the mid-1970s, my siblings and I, some summer. When I mentioned this strange notion to my brother Andrew, he paused for a moment and said, Yeah, it makes you realize that the Holocaust wasn’t something that simply happened, but is an event that’s
still
happening.)

There is, then, very little that remains on the face of the wide world today—a face I’ve looked at often from above, during the trips I made to find something out about her—of what Aunt Ester had been during the forty-six years
she lived, before she disappeared from sight during the first few days of September 1942.
She was very warm, very friendly
, Meg had said, on the day we’d all gathered in Jack and Sarah Greene’s apartment. A few days later, when, after a great deal of hectoring and cajoling on my part, Meg finally consented to meet with me and talk to me one-on-one, in her brother-in-law’s apartment, I asked her to try to give me a sense of how a very warm, very friendly Bolechower housewife might have spent her time, in the days before the war changed everything.

Meg paused for a moment as she thought.

In winter, she said, the nights were very long. They used to play cards at our place, my father with his friends. And the ladies used to crochet and knit. Mostly embroider. That was the pastime. The parents used to play also bridge and chess.

The Jäger house was always very clean, she said, a little bit later on.

And then, toward the end of our conversation, she repeated what she’d said a few days earlier about the long-dead mother of her close friend, Frydka Jäger.
Her mother was very pleasant,
she said.
She had a cheerful personality, her mother did,
she said—although I should add that when, during this second and final conversation with Meg, she brought up Ester’s personality (which, I can now say with certainty, will always lack the telling detail, the vivid anecdote: who among us won’t remember the mothers of our high school friends as being friendly, and cheerful?)—it was to make a point about Frydka, her friend.

Frydka was like her mother, Meg said that day. Lorka was a little bit more—she was different.

How was she different? I pressed.

Meg paused.

She looked different, she
was
different.

But
how
different? I felt desperate to have one small fragment of Lorka’s personality, something concrete, something that would rescue her from the generic.

How shall I describe it? Meg said, spreading her hands in exasperation. Then she said, Her personality was different. She was different from Frydka. They looked different. They didn’t even look like sisters. Ruchele looked more like Frydka. But Lorka looked…different.

I ended up changing the subject. What, really, can you say about a person?

So it was very hard to know what Ester had been like. Perhaps she had played cards with friends on a winter’s night, or crocheted or knit; certainly she kept a tidy house. And she clearly had a pleasant disposition. She was
very
warm, very friendly, cheerful
. But this impression I have of her personality derives at least in part from the fact that an elderly woman who had once been a teenager in Bolechow was making a point about somebody else.

And about Bronia? Precious little of the youngest of Shmiel’s daughters, the youngest of my mother’s cousins, remains in the world now, either. The problem, in a way, was that she was too young: only ten when the war broke out, not quite thirteen when the second Aktion ended her life, she was too young to be a candidate for forced labor, which had the effect of prolonging some people’s lives, in some cases long enough to die in subsequent actions, in other cases long enough to make the decision to flee to the Babij camp, which was also eventually destroyed, and in still other cases long enough to make the decision to go into hiding, as Jack and Bob and the others had done, which is how they survived. For all of this, Bronia was simply too young, and it is simply as an ordinary young girl that the few people who could remember anything about her in 2003 recalled her, and hence it is as an ordinary girl I must now describe her, too.

I remember Bronia, Jack told me, at the end of his much longer narrative about Ruchele. She was a little kid, I would see her in the street and I would say, “Hallo, Bronia!”

The way he says
hallo
instead of
hello
moved me; there was something so cheerful and everyday about it, something a little bit dated. The word itself—although it is, of course, just an English translation of whatever Jack had once said to Bronia in Polish, decades ago—was like an emissary from a lost moment in history. I smiled.

Jack smiled, too. She was four years younger, she was Bob’s age. She was ten when the war broke out. Ruchele was born in ’twenty-five, I think it was September ’twenty-five, and Bronia, as far as I remember, was born in ’twenty-nine. She would be playing in the backyard, I’d stay by the fence and say “Hallo, Bronia.” She was a sweet girl, still very childlike. You could see her mind was still on playing, on games.

Perhaps it was this childish sweetness that had made Meg, on the day all the Bolechowers had met, smile at the mere mention of Bronia’s name, when I had handed around the picture of her, a pretty girl standing between her parents, that day.
And Bronia!
she had said, her face brightening for a moment. And yet when I talked to her in private, a few days later, she was frustrated that she couldn’t really remember anything about Bronia—not even having stopped to say hello to her in the streets.

The youngest one I can’t recall, Meg said slowly, as she sat in her brother-
in-law’s living room. Bronia. I was digging in my memory, trying, but I can’t…Lorka I saw, because I saw her growing up together, and Ruchele was around the house. But Bronia I just can’t—there are no recollections, I can’t tell you why. She was just a baby.

She paused for a second. When you went to the house she’d be there, when you showed me the photo I knew it was her. But I just can’t…Her voice trailed off.

So that was Bronia. In that one clear picture I have of her, from 1939, when she was most likely ten years old, she is wearing a dark-colored pinafore, low white socks, and Mary Janes. She is smiling. Her parents, who unlike her would have been reading the newspapers, aren’t.

A
ND THAT, AS
far as I knew, once I had spoken to all the Australians, was who they had been.

Maybe what had happened to them was something like this:

On whichever day it was—the third, the fourth, the fifth of September 1942—there came, mostly likely, the crashing at the door. (I cannot imagine that the Germans, with their Ukrainian guides, knocked: perhaps they smashed the butts of their rifles on the door of the white-painted house.) For whatever reason—most likely because they are already at work at the
Fassfabrik
—Lorka and Frydka aren’t in the house; and so it is Shmiel, Ester, and Bronia who are moved along (beaten? grabbed? knocked about with the rifle butts that had knocked against the door? Impossible to know) from the house and into the street, where so many others, weeping, screaming, terrified, are gathered and being forced in the direction of the Magistrat, the
ratusz,
the city hall besides which the Jäger family store has stood for generations.

In the courtyard behind the city hall they are made to wait, with the twenty-five hundred others, and as I contemplate this scene, I have to entertain the possibility that one or even more of the three, it could have been all three, even, don’t survive this waiting period. For instance, maybe Bronia was one of the ninety-six Jews whom the boastful Ukrainian single-handedly killed during that time, most of whom, as we know, were children. Maybe this girl was thrown from an upper story onto the pavement below; maybe she was spun round and round by a Ukrainian policeman by the legs until her head was crushed, splattering the matter of her brain, the matter that, so mysteriously, had once constituted the personality that no one, sixty-one years later, can recollect in any detail, against the corner of the city hall itself. Or maybe Ester, a large woman
by then, had moved too slowly when they banged against the door of the white-painted house, or maybe she was sick in bed that day and, either out of impatience or just for fun, either the German or the Ukrainian who had come to collect them shot the fat, sick woman there, on the spot, in her bed.

Or maybe one of the Ukrainians who were helping with the Aktion that day recognized Shmiel Jäger in the crowd, and maybe this Ukrainian was (as, for instance, the father of old Olga, whom we’d met in Bolechow, had once been) a butcher, too, a member of that little cartel of local butchers, and maybe this Ukrainian butcher had long resented Shmiel, the big-shot Jew who had lorded it over people in the way that he had, and maybe, because of that, this Ukrainian, when he recognized Shmiel, came over to him and beat him for a while with his pistol or the butt of his rifle, or simply shot him in the head.

(Or, worse, not in the head. You
begged
to fall into the hands of the Germans, Meg told me on the day she finally allowed me to speak to her in private,
believe me
. The Germans had what they called the mercy bullet, the
Gnadekugel
—she had finally remembered the word—but the Ukrainians would shoot you in the stomach, and it would be maybe forty-eight hours before you died. A horrible, slow death.)