The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (49 page)

Anna started talking about the Jägers. Her memories came in no particular order. I didn’t interrupt, because I was as interested in her chain of thought as in the memories themselves.

Shmiel Jäger had a truck, he used to take things to Lemberg, Anna said, using the old, old name for Lwów. And he would bring goods back from Lemberg…. They were a very nice family, a nice woman…

I am always interested to know more about Ester. Did she have clear memories of Ester, Shmiel’s wife? I asked.

Anna smiled.
Sie veyhn a feine froh, a gitte mamma, a gitte balabustah. Vuss noch ken ikh vissen?
She was a fine wife, a good mom, a good housewife. What else could I know?

She said something to Shlomo, who turned to me.

She was a child, he said, what happened in their house she doesn’t know. She said the mother was an excellent wife, the house was very clean, and the children were clean-dressed, the children were clothed very nicely.

Anna turned to me.
Di zeyst?
she declared.
Lorkas familyeh kenn ikh besser als Malka Grossbard!

See? I know Lorka’s family better than Meg Grossbard does!

She said something to Shlomo, who explained to me that her mother’s brother, a Mr. Zwiebel, was a neighbor of Shmiel Jäger. He was living next to him, Shlomo said. So Anna (he went on) used to come see her uncle, and for that reason she used to see Lorka all the time, not just in school.

To prove this, perhaps, Anna shared an early memory. I remember, she said, that when the first strawberries came out each year they would be on sale first in Lemberg. So your uncle Shmiel Jäger used to bring them from Lemberg to Bolechow, because they weren’t available in Bolechow yet. So Lorka would call for me at home the day the strawberries came and say,
Come, take some of the new strawberries!

I caught, suddenly and powerfully, a whiff of something, a trace, as unmistakable but elusive, of a certain rhythm of living, now invisible and unimaginable.

Shmiel and his trucks: everyone seemed to remember that. What kind of man was Shmiel, I wanted to know.

Anna gave a little smile and tapped her ear.
Er var a bissl toip!
He was a little deaf!

Deaf? I repeated, and she said,

Yes! Toip! Toip!

I was silent. Then I asked, Does she remember any of the other girls?

Di kleynste,
she started to say, the youngest—

Bronia,
I prodded. I was excited at the thought that finally someone might be able to tell us something about Bronia. Bronia, who had disappeared into the Bath and Inhalation Rooms sixty years before; Bronia, who had the bad luck to be so young when she was taken, and because nobody that young was a useful worker, almost nobody that young—her friends, her schoolmates—had survived, which is why so little of her is left today to know about.

Bronia? I said again. But Anna shook her head and said,
Ruchele var di kleynste.

Ruchele
? I asked, startled. Anna nodded emphatically, but I didn’t pursue it.

Which is why, when she went on to tell me that
di kleynste,
the smallest one, was a very solid girl, very sensitive, very delicate, that she belonged to a group of children who were all of them very polite and very gentle—a description, I knew, that fit well with Jack’s description of Ruchele—I couldn’t be sure if I’d ever learn anything about Bronia.

I
HAVE SOME
pictures to show you, I said to Anna.

To trigger her memories, I’d brought my folder of old family photographs, the ones I’d brought to Sydney, too. But after Sydney—after Boris Goldsmith had squinted at that tiny 1939 picture of Shmiel, Ester, and Bronia and said, with a sigh,
I can’t make it out
—I’d learned my lesson, and had greatly enlarged all the pictures I had. Now, even the smallest snapshot in my collection had grown to the size of a standard piece of printer paper: Shmiel’s careworn face,
in that final photograph from
Dezember 1939,
was almost life-size. As I handled the folder one of the enlargements inside slid onto the table: the 1936 photo of Frydka, Meg Grossbard, and Pepci Diamant in their fur-lined school overcoats and berets.

Duss iss Frydka mit Malka Grossbard und Pepci Diamant,
I said. This is Frydka with Malka Grossbard and Pepci Diamant. Anna immediately pointed to Meg’s face and, like someone taking a winning trick in a card game, gathered up the picture and said, Malka! Then she said,
Frydka var zeyer sheyn
—zeyer
sheyn!

Frydka was very pretty—
very
pretty!

As she said this, Anna made an admiring gesture, a universal expression of wonderment: hands to cheeks, eyes raised heavenward. We had come to talk about Lorka, whom no one else had known well, but it didn’t surprise me that we had gotten onto the subject of Frydka, a girl who was so beautiful, a girl for whom a boy had given his life, the kind of girl, I had already sensed, to whom stories and myths naturally clung.

I want to tell you a fact, Anna said, looking at this picture of the fourteen-year-old Frydka, and she started talking. Shlomo listened and then turned to me. He said, She said that Frydka should live today, be alive today. She was a modern woman, but she was living in the wrong time!

What did she mean? I asked.

Because the way she was living in that time, in a small shtetl, she was criticized! She was, you know,
free
!

Criticized? I said, while I thought to myself: What
was
it about her? Even then, they were talking about her. Even then, she was the center of the story.

Anna nodded. She should have lived fifty years later, she said again. Lorka, she went on, was quiet, serious, and had only one
sympatia
—

(later, I looked up
sympatia
in a Polish dictionary:
flame,
it said, and there was something about how old-fashioned
flame
sounded to my ears that moved me, when I recalled Anna talking about Lorka and her
sympatia
)

—one
sympatia
at a time. She had somebody that she liked, a brother of Mrs. Halpern. So she dated him…Bumo Halpern.

Really? I said. This caught me by surprise. I explained to them that in Sydney, Meg Grossbard had insisted that Lorka’s boyfriend had been her distant cousin—my distant cousin—Yulek Zimmerman. Anna shook her head emphatically and said,
Bumo Halpern.

OK, I said. Anyway.

Shlomo went on: Anna said that Lorka behaved, she behaved honestly and she didn’t—she had a sympathy to one man and she never betrayed him.

Betrayed.

And Frydka? I asked, knowing in advance what the answer would be.

Anna beamed at me, and shaking her head as if the memory still amused her, and waving her fingers in the air, she said,
Frydka var geveyn a
—

(she paused and, not finding the correct word in Yiddish, shifted to Spanish)

—sie’s geveyn a picaflor!

Frydka was a hummingbird!

Shlomo beamed as he translated this, enjoying the image; then added one of his own. Yes! He nodded, smiling: he remembered her, too. She was a butterfly! he cried. Going from flower to flower!

At this point, between Anna and Shlomo, a great deal of Yiddish buzzed and gurgled. Shlomo slapped his thigh and laughed.

She told me two stories, he said. One: about Frydka she can say that she and some friends were once going over to Russki Bolechow. Now there was a guy who was renting a room there, they were curious about him. So they knocked on the door, and who was there when it opened? Frydka!

I grinned.
A butterfly!
Well, I thought, who could blame her? I’d seen the pictures from Pepci Diamant’s albums. Frydka the moody teenager, mooning at her open photo album; Frydka on a brilliantly sunny day in a white dress and those open-toe shoes, squinting into the camera, tall and leggy; Frydka clowning in the bushes by the Sukiel River; Frydka scowling at the camera with her fingers to her finely carved lips, a pose nobody likes to be caught in, snacking on something delicious that her mother had prepared for her, a meal that turned to dust a lifetime ago. You could, I thought, get a crush on this girl.

Anna excused herself to answer the phone, which had rung quite loudly at the end of this story, and while she was gone I talked about Frydka with Shlomo, who had worked in the
Fassfabrik
with her.

You know, I said to him, I could tell from the pictures what Frydka was like, you could tell she thought she was a movie star—

Shlomo nodded and pointed a thick finger at me in that
Aha, I told you so!
way that he has. And I am telling
you,
he said, that I think that I saw her myself in the
Fassfabrik,
because there were two beautiful girls in the
Fassfabrik,
which we already, youngsters, were aware of—because I was twelve and a half years till thirteen and a half, till thirteen actually, in that place—so I remember we saw, probably one was Frydka and another one was Rita, Rita was a girl of a refugee family which came to Bolechow. A
Flüchtling,
a beautiful girl. And the other one was Frydka. And I remember the two girls represented the women
in the
Fassfabrik
. I remember, we would say,
if somebody was beautiful, it was Frydka and Rita!

Anna returned to the armchair. Did I want water, a soft drink, a Coke? Yes, I said, Coke would be great. While she was in the kitchen Shlomo went on with Anna’s second story about Frydka the butterfly, a story from darker times.

It’s a little bit difficult to translate! he said, laughing loudly. He said: Anna said that during the war, when people were working in the factories, most of the girls worked outside. But Frydka, because she, you know, because she was free in such a way…she arranged for herself that she was working inside! In the camp, in the
Lager,
in the barrel factory…

Well, I said, half-amused even as I spoke by my own reflexive impulse to protect the reputation of my long-dead cousin, We know from what Jack Greene told us, and from Shmiel’s letters, that Frydka had gone to a commercial high school to learn to be a bookkeeper. (
Darling Frydka has finished high school,
Shmiel had written,
it cost me a fortune and where is one supposed to find a job for her?
And again:
Frydka has finished with the Commercial School in Stryj, she still has one more school to deal with; I’d like to have her learn a trade as I see fit, as today one is nothing without a trade…
) And so, I went on, maybe that’s why she worked inside the camp building? After all, I thought to myself, hadn’t Jack said that she’d worked as a bookkeeper in the
Fassfabrik
?

Anna came back with a large bottle of Coke and put it down on the table. Shlomo relayed my objection to her. Anna shook her head, smiling broadly, and told him something.

She said no, Shlomo explained, Frydka didn’t work in an office, she didn’t do bookkeeping then, she worked at a machine. He turned once more to Anna and then turned back to me. He said, I told her that I sat next to Frydka inside that building and it was not so nice, it was very hard inside, but Anna said to me just now, No, no, it was nicer than working outside in the freezing winter!

Ess var shreklikh kalt!
Anna said to me, knowing I wouldn’t need a translation. It was horribly cold!

I remembered my endless conversations with Andrew, years earlier, in which we’d wonder how my grandfather would have fared, had he too been trapped in Bolechow during the war; about whether his wonderful ability to finagle what he wanted, to sweet-talk his way into and out of things, was unique to him, or was the expression of some characteristic that had once flourished in our family but seemed (for this was the unspoken feeling that
lay behind our interest) to have died out. Now Shlomo had said, not without admiration:
She arranged for herself to be working inside!

She should have lived today! Anna repeated.

I smiled. Yes, I thought, this was definitely a girl you could get a crush on.

I
WANTED TO
return to the pictures, to the one photograph of her friend Lorka that we had. But just as I was reaching into the folder to pull out the enlargement of that group picture, now just under seventy years old, Anna said something to Shlomo. I heard the names
Shmiel
and
Frydka.
Would we always be talking about Frydka? I thought.

Then Shlomo said,
Aha!

He turned to me. She said (he told me) that she heard, somewhere, probably that Frydka and Shmiel were hidden somewhere and somebody gave them up and they were killed.

Frydka and Shmiel?
I repeated, stupidly. Anna looked and me; it was clear she could tell that I had heard a different story. She nodded, looking at me, and went on.

Zey zent behalten bay a lererin…