The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (5 page)

So German is the language they wrote in. But the only time I ever heard my grandfather actually speak German was long after Shmiel had become nothing more than the earth and weather in some Ukrainian pasture, when my grandfather, grudgingly preparing for the annual trip to the spa, Bad Gastein, that his fourth wife forced them to make, said to this woman (who had a number tattoed on her forearm and who, having been, a lifetime and many régimes ago, a well-bred Russian, disdained to speak Yiddish) as they finished packing their many bags and the special provisions for Schloimele,
Also, fertig
?—So, ready?—which may be why I would forever after associate German, even after I myself learned to read and speak it, with elderly Jews being forced to go places they didn’t want to go.

Zur Erinnerung, To remember me by
. That picture, with its inscription, is the reason why, until much later, Shmiel was the only one of the six whose birth-date and year we knew. April 19 was his forty-fourth birthday, but he didn’t write “on the occasion of his 44th birthday”; he chose instead “in his 44th year,” and as I read this I am struck by the fact that the word I am translating as “year” is
Lebensjahr,
which means, literally, “year of life,” and this diction, although of course it was casual and there’s no doubt in my mind that he didn’t give it a second thought when he wrote it, strikes me as noteworthy, perhaps because I know that, on the spring day this picture was taken, he had exactly four of those life-years left to live.

H
ENCE WE KNEW
a few names, and one date. After my grandfather died, certain documents pertaining to Shmiel, along with some other photographs
that none of us had ever seen, came into our possession, and it was only when we found these documents and looked at these photographs that we finally learned, or thought we learned, the names of the other girls. I say “thought we learned” because, as a result of certain peculiarities of Shmiel’s old-fashioned handwriting (for instance, his way of adding a tiny horizontal line to the tops of his cursive
l
’s, or of making his final
y
’s the way we today might make final
z
’s, if we bothered to write longhand letters in proper cursive), we had, I later learned, been misreading one of the names. This is why, for a long time, in fact for over twenty years after my grandfather died, we thought the names of Shmiel and Ester’s four beautiful daughters were as follows:

Lorca

Frydka (Frylka?)

Ruchatz

Bronia

But that, as I’ve said, came after my grandfather died. Until then I thought that all we would ever know about them were the one date,
19 April,
and those three names,
Sam, Ester, Bronia;
and of course their faces, looking out from the pictures, solemn, smiling, candid, posed, worried, oblivious, but always silent, and always black, and gray, and white. As such, Shmiel and his family, those six lost relatives, three of them nameless, seemed to be wildly out of place, a strange, gray absence at the center of all that vivid and noisy and often incomprehensible presence, that talk, those stories; immobile and unspeaking ciphers about whom, amid the mah-jongg and red nails and cigars and glasses of whiskey drunk over punch lines in Yiddish, it was impossible to know anything very important, except the one salient fact, the awful thing that had happened and that was summed up by the one identifying tag,
killed by the Nazis
.

L
ONG BEFORE WE
knew any of this, in the days when the mere sight of my face was sufficient to make grown-ups weep, long before I started pricking up my ears at whispered phone conversations, long before my bar mitzvah, the truth is that I was, at best, no more than a bit curious, not particularly interested in him, in them, except perhaps for some vague resentment that this resemblance made me more of a target for the grasping, clutching old people into whose mildewy apartments we would enter, during those summer and winter vacations, bearing boxes of chocolates and candied oranges that were yellow and green and red as well as orange, which was wonderful.

Most of them were harmless, and some were great fun. On the lap of my great-aunt Sarah, my father’s mother’s sister, I would contentedly sit, when I was six or seven or eight, playing with her beads and secretly but intently trying to see if I could see my reflection in the shiny surface of her Chinese Red nails as she played mah-jongg with her three sisters, who were very close. I have a dim memory of the house she lived in, in Miami. In this memory I was perhaps five. Inside, the adults and the old people were talking about whatever adults and old people talked about: family stories, whispered tales of earlier marriages; the names of relatives to whom we weren’t any longer speaking. I had gone outside to get away from the grown-ups’ talk, and was playing on a little lawn with my older brother, the one whose Hebrew name was
Shmiel,
a fact of which I was jealous. Andrew and I were playing on the lawn with the plastic military dolls then popular, called G.I. Joe, and I was very enthralled with an accessory my parents had just bought, no doubt to keep us boys quiet while they talked about whatever it was they talked about. This accessory was a gray plastic submachine gun, mounted on a little plastic tripod. I carefully lined up my submachine gun at the edge of a little ditch and started firing away at my brother’s G.I. Joe; at first my brother played along and I must admit that the sight of his doll falling into the ditch gave me an obscure sense of power, which I enjoyed since he was, after all, older and I was unused to getting the better of him. But then my brother and I began to fight over the plastic machine gun. Suddenly he yanked it out of my hand—he was eight, I was only five—and threw it down a sewer grating nearby. Wailing, I ran inside to where the adults were, and my great-aunt Sarah took me on her lap and I was soon comforted.

But some of these old Jewish people, we children knew, young as we then were, were to be avoided at all costs. There was, for instance, Minnie Spieler, the photographer’s widow, with her nose and clawlike fingers and the strange
“Bohemian” clothes she wore; Minnie Spieler, for whom, in our family cemetery in Queens, a blank sandy rectangle was waiting, with a tin sign stuck in the ground that said
RESERVED FOR MINA SPIELER
, which used to spook us when we went there every year to put rocks on the graves of dead relatives, and I would wonder, resentfully, what she was doing in our family cemetery anyway. Minnie you didn’t want to talk to; she would take your arm in her crablike hands at these gatherings and look into your face intently, like someone who had lost something and hoped you might be able to help her find it; and on realizing you weren’t what she was looking for, would suddenly turn aside and stalk into the next room.

So there were people like Minnie Spieler, who after a while stopped coming to family reunions—she had, it was said, moved to Israel—which is why it never occurred to me to ask about her again.

But the old person to be avoided most of all was the man we knew only as Herman the Barber. At those gatherings at which, occasionally, I could make people cry, this Herman the Barber would appear, tiny and shrunken, hunched over, unimaginably old, older even than my grandfather, and try to whisper things to you—or, I should say, to me, because I always felt that it was on me that he would bear down, if you could describe his slow but intent shuffle as “bearing”; it was toward me that he used to move, trying to grab a hand or arm and smiling and clacking his teeth, which I now realize were not his, and murmuring things in Yiddish when he got near that I couldn’t, then, make out. Of course I would move away as soon as I could squeeze out from between him and the wall and run into the arms of my mother, who would give me a perfect green semicircle of candied orange, while in the other corner Herman would be laughing with one of the other old Bolechowers, the Jews of that town where my family was from, pointing at me and smiling indulgently and saying what
a frische yingele,
a fresh little boy, I was. I would escape from him and join my brothers, and we would play our silly games, games that consisted, occasionally, of making fun of the odd words that would sometimes rise into the air above their whispered, contentious conversations, the words with their odd, wailing, Old Country diphthongs that made us embarrassed and which we’d mock.
TOOOIIIIPPPPP,
we would shout, running in a circle and giggling, TOIP TOIP TOIP! I grew up hearing my mother speak Yiddish with her parents, and some words and phrases I was able to figure out early; but others—like
vaihrbinishgrafpototskee,
which my grandfather would say with an amused smile if you asked him for, say, a nickel to buy a piece of bubble
gum, or
toip!
—sounded so silly that all we could do, we
frische yingelach,
was to laugh at the funny sounds.

Fresh we may have been, but in these instances I was never chided. Nobody yelled at you for trying to avoid Herman the Barber, ever since, in his confusion, he had given my brother—the one who’d yanked the whiskers of some other old man—a whole roll of Tums, thinking that it was candy, and my brother threw up for two days. To the other old people, you had to be nice; but Herman the Barber you were permitted to avoid, and after a few more trips to Florida, a few more summers and winters, he wasn’t there anymore when we came, and we never had to worry about him again.

I
T WAS ON
the day of my bar mitzvah that the search began.

Like every other Jewish child I knew, I had had some religious training. This was mostly to appease my grandfather, although, since the Reform Jewish education I was getting was so watered down, so denatured in comparison to the rigorously Orthodox
heder
learning he had acquired in Bolechow a lifetime ago, I and my three brothers may as well have been educated by Catholic priests, as far as he was concerned. This education, the aim of which was to prepare us for the day of our bar mitzvah, something else we did primarily to satisfy my mother’s father, was divided into two stages.

At the age of about nine or ten we had to start Sunday school, a weekly class that was held in the basement of a local motel, which later became infamous, at least locally, as the place in which the famous Italian-American pop singer Connie Francis had been raped in 1974 after performing at a local concert hall. In the basement of this unappealing building a tall and much-liked man called Mr. Weiss taught us Jewish history and Bible stories, the names and significance of the holidays.

Many of these holidays, I had by then realized, were commemorations of narrow escapes from the oppressions of various pagan peoples, peoples whom even then I found more interesting, more alluring and potent and, I suppose, more sexy than my ancient Hebrew ancestors. When I was a child in Sunday school I was secretly disappointed and vaguely embarrassed by the fact that the ancient Jews were always being oppressed, always losing battles to other, mightier, and bigger nations; and, when the international situation was relatively uneventful, were being victimized or punished by their glum and
unappeasable god. When you are a certain age, or a certain kind of child—odd, perhaps; perhaps the kind of child whom other, bigger kids pick on—you do not want to spend your free time reading about victims, about losers. Far more appealing to me, when I was a child and then an adolescent, were the civilizations of those other ancient peoples, who seemed to be having a lot more fun, and who, as it turned out, were the oppressors of the ancient Hebrews. When we read about Passover and the narrow escape from
eretz Mitzrayim
, the Land of Egypt, I dreamed of the Egyptians, with their playful love-poems and transparent linens and jackal-headed death gods and caskets of pure gold; when we read about Purim, about Esther’s triumph over the wicked Persian vizier Haman, I closed my eyes and thought of the superb refinements of the Medes, of the bas-reliefs at Persepolis, with their hypnotically repetitive depictions of innumerable and obeisant vassals wearing fine robes and sporting crimped, perfumed beards. When I read about the miracle that is commemorated each year at Hanukkah, the holy oil of the Temple miraculously preserved and increased over the course of eight days after the defilement of the holy place by a Hellenistic Greek ruler, I would think of the wisdom and potential benefits of Antiochus IV’s Hellenizing policies, of how they might have brought stability to that always-troubled region.

At the time, that is what I thought. But now I can see that the real reason I preferred the Greeks, above all the others, to the Hebrews was that the Greeks told stories the way my grandfather told stories. When my grandfather told a story—for instance, the story that ended
but she died a week before her wedding
—he wouldn’t do anything so obvious as to start at the beginning and end at the end; instead, he told it in vast circling loops, so that each incident, each character he mentioned as he sat there, his organ-grinder baritone seesawing along, had its own mini-history, a story within a story, a narrative inside a narrative, so that the story he told was not (as he once explained it to me) like dominoes, one thing happening just after the other, but instead like a set of Chinese boxes or Russian dolls, so that each event turned out to contain another, which contained another, and so forth. Hence, for example, the story of why his beautiful sister had been forced to marry her ugly, hunchbacked cousin began, necessarily from my grandfather’s point of view, with the story of how his father had died suddenly one morning in the spa at Jaremcze, since after all that was the beginning of the hard time for my grandfather’s family, the dire years that ultimately necessitated his mother’s tragic decision to marry her eldest daughter off to her brother’s hunchbacked son in return for the price of passage to America to start a new but, as it turned
out, equally tragic life. But of course, to tell the story of how his father had suddenly died one morning at Jaremcze, my grandfather would have to stop himself to tell another story, a story about how he and his family, in the rich days, used to vacation at certain beautiful spas at the end of each summer, for instance at Jaremcze, high in the pre-Carpathian foothills, unless of course they went not south but west, to spas in Baden, or to Zakopane, a name that I loved. But then, to give a better sense of what his life was like then, in the golden years before 1912 when his father died, he would go further back in time to explain just who his father had been in their little town, about the respect he commanded and the influence he wielded; and that story in turn would, in the end, take him back to the very beginning, the story of how his family had lived in Bolechow since the Jews first came there, since
before there even was a Bolechow
.

One by one, the Chinese boxes opened, and I would sit and gaze into each one, hypnotized.

As it happens, this is precisely how the Greeks told their stories. Homer, for instance, will often interrupt the forward motion of the
Iliad,
his great poem of war, spiraling backward in time and sometimes space in order to give psychological richness and emotional texture to the proceedings, or to suggest, as he sometimes does, that
not
knowing certain stories, being ignorant of the intricate histories that, unbeknownst to us, frame the present, can be a grave mistake. The most famous example of this is, perhaps, an encounter that takes place toward the beginning of the poem between two warriors named Glaucus and Diomedes: as the Greek and Trojan prepare to fight, each launches into a long story intended to highlight his military prowess and his family prestige, and the genealogies they retail are, as it happens, so long and detailed that it soon emerges that there are important family ties between them, and with cries of joy the two men, who only minutes before would gladly have killed each other, clasp hands and declare eternal friendship. Similarly (to move from poetry to prose), when the historian Herodotus, centuries after Homer, composed his grand history of the Greeks’ improbable and total victory over the vast Persian empire at the beginning of the fifth century before Christ, he, too, resorted to this old and mesmerizing technique. Hence it seems only natural to him that to tell the story of the Greek-Persian conflict, he must narrate the history of Persia itself, which involves digressions both great and small, from the famous story of a certain Eastern potentate’s desire to have another man see his wife naked (the arrogant sin, we are meant to understand, that set in motion a great dynasty’s downfall), to an
entire chapter dedicated to the history, customs, mores, art, and architecture of Egypt, since after all Egypt was a part of the Persian empire. And so on.

But then, every culture, every author tells stories in a different way, and each style of storytelling opens up, for other storytellers, certain possibilities that he may not otherwise have dreamed of. From a certain French novelist, for instance, you might learn that it is, in theory, possible to devote the better part of a substantial novel to a single conversation that took place over one particular meal; from a certain American novelist (born, however, in Poland), that dialogue can be made to appear interestingly, dangerously, indistinguishable from the narrator’s point of view; from a German writer you admire you may realize, with some surprise, that under certain circumstances pictures and photographs, which you may have thought inappropriate to or competitive with serious texts, can add a certain dignity to some sad stories. And of course those Greeks, Homer and Herodotus, demonstrated that a story needn’t be told in a straightforwardly chronological, this-happened-then-that-happened, way—the way that, for instance, Genesis tells its story, which after a while, it must be said, can seem tedious and flat. And indeed, although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, I now see that a certain ringlike technique of storytelling, which for a long time I thought my grandfather had invented, was the real reason—more than pagan beauty and pleasure, more than pagan nudity, more than pagan power and authority and victory—that the Greeks, rather than the Hebrews, gripped my imagination from my earliest childhood, from the beginning.

Which is how it came to pass that my grandfather, who to me represented Jewishness itself, created in me my lifelong taste for the pagans.

The history that we learned in Sunday school, the history of the Jews and the Jewish holidays, was, therefore, a history that set me at odds with myself, since I was a Jew who admired the Greeks. This ambivalence may have been the reason that I failed so woefully to satisfy the requirements of the second phase of my Jewish education, which was called Hebrew school, and which we began at the age of twelve. Hebrew school classes were held on Wednesday afternoons in the dark-pewed, gabled synagogue my family attended, and focused solely on preparation for the bar mitzvah. Conducted by a plump little man who prefaced his name with the title “Doctor,” in the exacting way a certain kind of Central European person might do (although this man was from Boston), these two-hour sessions were primarily devoted to the study of the Hebrew language itself. But by the age of twelve I was already studying
ancient Greek, and had advanced far enough to read certain simplified passages: a racy story about a god and a nymph, a passage from Herodotus about the crocodiles in the Nile, subjects that held far greater appeal for me than did the monotonously grumpy outpourings of the Hebrew prophets that furnished the texts of the
haftarah
portions that, on the day of the bar mitzvah, you had to chant after reading from the Torah itself, or the bizarre prohibitions about eating and lovemaking to be found in Leviticus. For this reason I studied my Greek but not my Hebrew, and hence although I learned the Hebrew alphabet well enough to read long passages fluently, as I would eventually do at my bar mitzvah, I had no knowledge of the language itself, apart from how to read and write the phrase
aba babayit,
“Father is at home.”

I
T WAS ONLY
much later, long after I had devoted my studies to the Greek and Latin classics, that I bothered to go back to Hebrew and study it with greater seriousness. This was not because I felt any more religious at the age of twenty-five than I had at the age of thirteen. I wanted to study Hebrew again because, in my mid-twenties, just before I entered graduate school, I was greedy to know languages, the way my grandfather once had known so many, and it bothered me that I’d squandered that early opportunity to learn one. And so I bought a thick volume called
Introduction to Biblical Hebrew,
and for about a year I slowly made my way through it. After a while, during those months in 1985, I started to be able to read biblical passages, and eventually I went back to the bookstore and bought some more books, not language guides but books that explained to me what I should have learned half a lifetime earlier; explained what, now that I had some expertise and interest in old literatures and sacred texts, I was eager to read about, not because I believed what they said, but because I was able, now, to understand them as products of ancient Mediterranean cultures.

And so for a few months I immersed myself in my Jewish education, and learned something about the composition of the
Tanakh,
the Hebrew Bible, the names and themes of its various books, and of the different
parashot,
the weekly readings from the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, how and when each
parashah
was read, and what it meant.

I learned, for instance, how
parashat Bereishit
, the first formal section of the book of Genesis, was about the beginnings of things, how out of the undifferentiated murk, gradually, the forms of things became clear: oceans, skies, heav
ens, earth, and later animals, plants, fishes, birds and, finally, humans. I learned how certain of its stories were allegories for the way the world is: for instance how the Adam and Eve story explained, among other things, why women must endure the labor of childbirth; how the story of Cain and Abel, which disturbed me so much when I was a boy that I never bothered to learn it properly in Sunday school and hence for a long time afterward was never clear whether it was Cain or Abel who was the “bad” one, explained why there is violence and murder and war in the world. I learned about
parashat Noach,
the section of Genesis that includes the story of Noah and the Ark, of his terrible wanderings across the face of the earth—which once again would become an undifferentiated mass of water, since God had decided to wash away his own Creation in a fit of annihilating rage that would not be his last—but also includes a genealogy of Noah’s descendants, focusing, with increasing intensity as the narrative progresses, on one family in particular, and then on one man, Abram. I learned how Abram’s trek across the known world in search of the land that God has promised to him, an epic wandering that is recounted in the
parashah
called
Lech Lecha
(“Go Forth!”), forces him, in the end, not only to pass through strange new geographies but to confront the extremes of human evil and goodness, as is recounted in
parashat Vayeira
, “And He Appeared”: for there we see how, in Sodom and Gomorrah, he encounters total rejection of God’s moral law, and on Mount Hebron he himself is called upon to submit to a total acceptance of God’s law, even if that law must cost him his own son.