The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (42 page)

Just before we adjourned from the lunch table, Mr. Grossbard leaned in to me and said, in his reedy voice, Bolechow was a place with three cultures, and we all got along.

I nodded.

It was a
human
place, he said.

I nodded again.

It was a human place, he repeated, where there was no anti-Semitism.

He pronounced it,
antisemi-TIS-m
.

No anti-Semitism? I asked. Sentimental I may be, but still, I know the dangers of false nostalgia.

Well, there was, but everyone needed everyone else, you see. A Pole needed the Jew for shops, a Jew needed a Pole for offices. Ukrainians, they lived in the surrounding area but they brought food and timber every market day, every Monday.

This I knew.
And every Kol Nidre, the Ukrainian woodsman would get so frightened, because the town was so quiet and the mountains were so dark, that he would come down
from the mountain and stay that night, that one night each year, with a Jewish family, he was so afraid of Yom Kippur
.

So there was the Ukrainians, Mr. Grossbard said. And each needed the other: after market day was over, the Ukrainians went to drink the beer at the Jewish hotels. And it was Jewish beer! And the Ukrainians brought the timber for the houses. And the Jews had the center of Bolechow, they lived above the businesses, or close by. And all the shops were Jewish. So they respected each other. It was a respect, the attitude.

He talked about the parks, when he was a boy, the orchestra concerts and the promenades, the ladies with their parasols walking among the trees.

I listened in silence, the way I used to listen.

Now the Germans did quite badly by my family, you know.

I nodded. The wife killed, the child killed.

But in
my
family, he went on, the ones we never could forgive were the French.

He sat back in his chair and nodded, slowly chewing a pierogi.

The French? I repeated, not quite making the connection. I looked across the table at Matt, who grinned. Our father doesn’t like the French, who, he would say with a sneer, never won a war but always had great undergrounds. Had Mr. Grossbard, in his wanderings after the Holocaust, been ill treated by the French? Was his mind wandering? Keeping my face politely blank, I said again, You never forgave the French?

Mr. Grossbard leaned toward me again, wagging his finger.

Yes, he said, the
French
.

He paused for emphasis, and then he said:

You know, my father never
did
get over the Dreyfus Affair.

In
parashat Noach
, after God instructs Noah in how to build an ark, he gives detailed orders about what Noah must bring into the ark; for we must remember that no breathing thing will survive the awful annihilation. “Everything that is in the earth shall expire,” God says. Noah will go, of course; and with him his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives. (The specific order—first men, then women, rather than, as one might expect, the elder couple followed by the younger couples—is an indication that separation between the sexes was maintained on Noah’s ark. “From this,” Rashi observed, “we learn that they were forbidden to have relations.”) And then, famously, the animals and birds: not two of each, as is commonly thought, but
at least
two of each, so as to ensure the possibility of future propagation of every species; of “pure” species—i.e., those suitable for sacrifice—seven pairs were brought, presumably so that the proper ritual sacrifices might still be observed after debarkation without imperiling those species’ future.

The description of the Flood itself lives up to the slowly building anticipation we feel as we read about the preparations for it: the founts of the earth and the windows of heaven opened, the rains poured down for forty days—the length of time, Rashi helpfully points out, that it takes for the fetus to form after conception (divine payback, he goes on to remark, for God’s having been troubled to fashion the fetuses of the corrupt)—and for one hundred and fifty days the waters remained on the earth, rising until they covered the mountains themselves. It would be difficult to imagine a detail more effective than this last one (well, at least in biblical times, when the scale of things was smaller than it is today) in suggesting the extent of the obliteration that God accomplished with the Flood—not merely the destruction of life, but the erasure of the landscape itself, the swift and sudden elimination of every familiar landmark, of every familiar thing.

It is this that puts me in mind of something that we are not told in
parashat Noach
. Perhaps because I’ve spent the past few years listening to stories of people who had to leave certain places in a great hurry, and because, moreover, Rashi at least is alert to the fact that Noah, whatever his close relationship with God, waited until the last minute to get on the ark, a detail that led Rashi to conclude that Noah, like the others of the Generation of the Flood, “was one of those of little faith, he did not believe the flood would really come until the waters were upon him”—I often wonder whether Noah and his family brought anything else with them, besides the animals, some memento, perhaps, of the lives they had before the world was completely wiped clean. Since the text makes no mention of this, I must assume that they did not, and as a result I can’t help thinking that this awful deprivation gave flavor to the joy with which Noah greeted the appearance of the olive sprig in the beak of the famous dove. We know, of course, what the immediate significance of the branch was, but I can’t help thinking that seeing the green leaf—a sudden, vivid, specific reminder of the world he’d left behind—must have felt, to him, like a reprieve from another kind of oblivion altogether.

I
T WAS LATER
that afternoon that we met with Bob Grunschlag. This was also the day that Matt had selected for a photo shoot on the beach.

Why on the beach? I had asked, a little irritated, when he announced that he wanted to drive down to Bondi Beach with Jack and Bob and have them get their feet wet a little for his portrait of the two brothers from Bolechow who had survived. Didn’t he know these were quite elderly people? I didn’t want to push them too hard. I needed their goodwill.

Look, he said, you do what you do, and let me do what I know how to do. My job is playing bad cop to people until they reach the breaking point. I need a picture that says “Australia,” otherwise why did I come?

Fine, I said.

So late in the afternoon of the following day, after we’d had our long lunch with Meg and Mr. Grossbard, we drove to Bob’s apartment, which is right on the beach, and talked to him for a while, much to the satisfaction of Jack, who had wanted to make sure that his little brother, who hadn’t really known the Jäger girls, was getting some attention, too.

Good boy, good boy, Jack had said, patting me on the shoulder affectionately when I told him we were in fact going to devote an interview to Bob.

Well, I said, I’m an older brother, too. I know how these things are.

But I didn’t, really. It would be another trip or two before I got close to Matt, started feeling protective toward him.

On the beach, Matt shepherded Bob and Jack into the surf and then, having decided there was no other way to get the shot he wanted, suddenly took off his own wet shoes and, turning to me, thrust them into my hands. He waded knee-deep in the early evening surf and started opening the cases that hung from his neck. He kept glancing worriedly up at the sky. Our conversation with Bob had gone on a little bit longer than he’d liked; the sun was starting to sink.

I only shoot with available light, he said.

I only talk to available people, I cracked.

Jack and Bob laughed. They were in a good humor; they didn’t have to be pushed. A little bit further, Matt said, waving at the brothers without looking up from the viewfinder of his boxy old Hasselblad. The brothers happily rolled up their trousers a little further, too. I heard the distinctive and by now familiar noise of the shutter on Matt’s camera opening and closing: not so much a
click
as a
k-shonck
. Since there was nothing for me to do here, I began to amble off. Let him do his thing, I thought.

But just as I was about to go for a little stroll, I noticed that a small crowd of surfers had begun to gather behind where Matt had taken his stand, shooting picture after picture.
K-shonck, k-shonck
. It was seven in the evening by now and the light was failing fast, and I could tell from the frown Matt wore that he still didn’t feel he had
the picture;
what was in front of him, evidently, didn’t quite match the image he had in his head. Well, I thought, I know what that’s like. Suddenly I saw him wading through the foamy water and approaching a dark-haired, white-toothed surfer. The sound of the surf was too loud for me to hear anything they were saying; it was like watching a pantomime. Matt waved his arm at the surfer, who couldn’t have been more than twenty, and then pointed to Jack and Bob, and then made a little inverted V with his forefinger and middle finger and used them to make little walking motions back and forth.
Dolina
hoise,
I thought. The surfer cracked a huge smile, then, and nodded. Lifting his board, he started walking back and forth behind Bob and Jack as the two brothers put their arms around each other’s shoulders. Matt began squeezing the shutter, over and over. He was smiling now. He was doing his thing.

And, as it turned out, I got to do mine, too. As the grinning surfer boy tried to look nonchalant as he walked back and forth behind the real subjects of the picture, some of his friends started circling around me: two other boys, one blond, quite tall and serious-faced, the other dark and grinning, and a big, wide-grinned blond girl. Who were these two old men? they wanted to know. Were they famous? Were they our parents? Was this guy a fashion photographer? What were they doing here?

I looked across at the two old men from Bolechow, and then looked up at these Australian kids. They were so enormous, so tall. They exuded health and goodwill. None of them could be older than nineteen. They looked genuinely interested. The girl was cocking her head to one side, expectantly.

Well, I said. It’s a long story.

The girl grinned and gestured to the boy whom Matt had conscripted for his picture. Hey, he’s our mate, she said. We have to wait for him anyway.

OK, I said.

How on earth to begin?

Well, I began, My grandfather came from this little town in Poland…

The next evening, Meg flew back to Melbourne.

That afternoon, she had invited everyone to lunch at a fancy restaurant downtown: Jack, Sarah, Bob, Boris, Matt, me. She was in a buoyant mood, suddenly. Something had shifted, during our long conversation together the previous day; she had decided we were all right. (She made you
lunch
? Jack had exclaimed the previous night, when I’d called to report on our interview with Meg.) I only wish I could tell you what she said. I only wish you could see her face, how expressive it is, the wit, the mournful humor that plays across it sometimes, how a world-weary irony can give way suddenly and devastatingly to a sadness I can’t begin to understand, the way it did when, at the end of that afternoon, Matt asked her to hold a photograph of her old friend Frydka as he shot her portrait, and just as the shutter clicked some memory washed over her and, as the final picture, which you will never see, clearly shows, she closed her eyes in grief, so that the picture that resulted shows the seamed face of an elegant if diminutive woman who is holding, in her immaculately manicured hand, a snapshot of a dreamy-looking, self-serious young girl whose eyes are wide open, although of course it is the old woman’s eyes who are open, now, while those of the girl closed forever sixty years ago.

During our final lunch, her face was animated, and her humor good. As we all met in front of the restaurant, she walked toward me.

What, no kiss on the cheek? she said, presenting it flirtatiously. I grinned and pecked her on the cheek. She turned to Sarah Greene, who was laughing, and grew expansive.

I can’t think about it, it’s amazing, she said. First of all that I am alive, after so long, and then that I meet cousins of my girlfriends. I still can’t believe it, that I’m standing here with the cousins of Frydka. It hasn’t sunk in, really. I can’t believe it.

I knew what she was talking about: the strangeness of suddenly being able to pick up threads long since abandoned, threads you’d never have guessed existed anymore. (
Doktor Begleiter? He was a very big doctor
!) You are now my family, she had told my mother the day before, when after the interview was over I called my parents’ house on Long Island so that this woman and her lost friend’s cousin could make contact. You are my relatives, now.

We turned to go into the restaurant, and, growing bold, I said I only wished there were others like her.