The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (53 page)

Aha! Shlomo pointed. We are in Beer Sheva.

Oh Why Die You Hit My Andrew

W
EARING A SLEEVELESS
housedress covered with cheery flowers in various shades of blue, Malcia Reinharz was waiting for us on the landing in front of her door. As we walked up the concrete steps toward her she smiled broadly, exposing even rows of teeth. Hallo! she said in English. The voice was deep and had a pleasantly grained texture, like a clarinet. Her hair was pale auburn, and her long, full-cheeked, humorous face was almost girlishly animated.

Hallo Malcia!
Shlomo said. He had told me that Malcia spoke good English; her husband did not, but Shlomo would translate for him. We walked inside. The apartment was darkened against the afternoon sun. Toward the rear, in front of windows whose shades had been drawn, was a cluster of comfortable furniture; at the front, just past the door, was a small dining table. Sitting at the table, his back to the kitchen wall, was Mr. Reinharz. I liked his face: oddly youthful, grave but friendly. He had the pleasingly old-fashioned look of a well-to-do farmer: he had on a crisp tan shirt, dark trousers, suspenders, and a tan golfer’s cap. He rose to shake our hands. Then Malcia gestured to us to sit down.

Please, Malcia said. First we will talk a bit, and then we will eat, it’s all right?

It’s all right, I said. Perfect.

The three of them chatted for a few minutes in Yiddish as I set up my tape
recorder and video camera. Shlomo was explaining what would be happening; they nodded as he spoke. Then I was ready. When I talked, I tried to look at both of them, but since I knew that Malcia could understand me better than her husband did—and because there was something so appealing, so deliciously soft and available about her, qualities my mother’s mother had once had—I found myself speaking to her more. Still, I noticed how, during our long conversation that day, she and her husband would look at each other as we all talked, as if silently to confirm whatever they were being asked or whatever she was telling me for the two of them.

All right, I said, I’m going to start asking.

She nodded.

We didn’t know anything about Shmiel, or the wife, or the children, I said. So I’m going all over the world and talking to everyone who knew Shmiel, and from those conversations I’m trying to bring back something of Shmiel and the family. Because all we ever knew until now is that they were killed.

She closed her eyes.
I
know, she said.

And we want to know something better than that, I said.

Malcia nodded again and said, Oh, I know, I know them very well.

I was struck by the way she kept using the present tense when speaking of these dead:
I know. I know them very well.

She said, Ask what you want. What you need.

OK, I said.

We started to talk. She told me that her family were all Bolechowers. Would she tell me what year she was born? I asked. She burst into a wide grin and said,
I was born in Hungaria! In 1919!
She seemed amused by the idea that I felt awkward about asking her how old she was. She explained, then, that she’d been born in Hungary while her parents were briefly staying there, but that they’d soon returned to the town and that, from the age of three months, she’d lived there. With her parents, she said, and her sister Gina, and her two brothers, David and Herman. She said, And nobody is living. I have only a picture of my younger brother.

She told me that she was married in 1940.
Who today is married for such a long time, sixty-three years? Nobody!
She burst out laughing and waved her hand, as if to dismiss the protestations of anyone who’d been married less than sixty-three years.

So you knew the Jägers when you were growing up? I asked.

I knew them very well, she replied, switching now into the past tense. It was Shmiel Jäger with his wife, she was a pretty wife. With pretty legs!

Wiss pretty lecks.

Malcia touched her heart with her left hand and then made a gesture of connoisseurship, like a maître d’ describing a particularly tasty specialty of the house.

Oh! she had legs—I have not
seen
such legs!

I smiled, and so did Shlomo.

And two pretty daughters, she went on. Lorka too had pretty legs!

She also? Shlomo asked, amused.

Yes. Malcia nodded.

I was more interested in another detail.
Two pretty daughters
. Everyone, it seemed, had a different memory of how many children Shmiel and Ester had had.

You knew only two of the girls? I asked.

Only
two? As we talked, Malcia would listen silently and patiently, like an attentive student, with a grave expression on her long and alert face; but often as soon as I’d finished speaking her face would instantly register some strong reaction. Now, she was making an exaggerated face of incredulity.

There were four, I said.

Malcia looked at me.
Four?!
Four children he had?

I named them all. Lorka. Frydka. Ruchele. Bronia.

Four
girls? she repeated. I showed her, then, the picture of Shmiel, Ester, and Bronia, but all she said was,
Ja,
Shmiel Jäger.

She put the picture down on the table and said, simply,
Ai, Gott.

I know only that the oldest was Lorka, she continued after a moment, and the younger was Frydka. And we were often in touch. With Lorka—of course. She was a
pretty
girl. And Frydka, she was a bit higher from Lorka.

She placed one hand high in the air and I realized she meant
taller
. I let her keep talking. To me, all of this was much more than charming: as much as we’d learned thus far, still every scrap, every detail was precious. Ester had pretty legs. Frydka was taller than Lorka. We hadn’t known it before; now it was part of their story.
Frydka was a very tall girl, taller than her older sister,
I’d tell my family when I got back home…

Then she said, She was a heavy one, Frydka. A fighter, a
fighter.

Here we go again, I thought to myself; it always ends up being about Frydka. A fighter? I said. What do you mean by that?

Malcia took a sip of wine.
Ja.
She was so
robust
!

She pronounced it ro-BOOST! and as she said it she put up two arms in a pugnacious pose, like a prizefighter.

Robust, I repeated. Well, I thought, she
was
a fighter.

But Lorka, Malcia went on, unaware of my preoccupations, was pretty. And she had two legs—!

Her voice trailed off and she looked heavenward, as if calling God to witness.

I showed her the picture of the whole family in 1934, the picture in which they were mourning for my great-grandmother, Taube.
It means a dove
. Suddenly Malcia looked up at me, beaming at some memory.

Shmiel Jäger was
hiresh
! Because I expected her to lapse into Yiddish or German whenever she couldn’t find an English word, I was confused, until I realized she was speaking Hebrew. As she said this word,
hiresh,
she pointed helpfully to her ear, much as my mother used to gesture and point when she spoke on the phone to my grandfather in Yiddish, which is how I learned much of my Yiddish.

Toip,
Shlomo said. Deaf!

I know, I said.

You must to speak to him
very
loud, Malcia went on. Perhaps it was the vividness of this memory that made her slide, once again, into the present tense.

And he was a tall man? I prodded.

Yes, he was tall—a very nice man.
And
—he loved his wife! Malcia again made the face of someone calling God to witness.
Au au au au!
she exclaimed. He loved her
so
much!

I didn’t say anything. It is, after all, possible to keep referring to your wife as
die liebe Ester
, “dear Ester,” out of habit or obligation; but now we knew.
He loved his wife!
If their children’s friends knew it, I thought, they must have been demonstrative with each other, this loving couple, Shmiel and Ester.

I showed her another picture.

Ya, duss ist Shmiel Jäger.
She sighed. Shmiel Jäger, a very pretty man he was. A pretty man, a very handsome man!

Then she reached her hand into the air and said,
High!

M
ALCIA MADE SURE
that we all had wine in our glasses and went on reminiscing. I looked at the bottle.
MURFATLER PINOT NOIR
, the label said.

I used to go with my mother to buy meat in his shop, she said. And he gived my mother the bestest meat that he had! Together they were saying
Du,
because they went together in school.

After a moment I realized what she meant: that her mother and my great-uncle had used the informal German “you” instead of the formal. They were, after all, old school friends.

So you would have been close in age to Lorka, I said. She was maybe one year younger.

Yes, yes. We were not in the same class, but in the same school—there was not another school in Bolechow!

So did you play together?

Yes, yes, Malcia said. Then she hesitated for a moment and added, But she was—every time she was—

Groping for the word she wanted, she turned to Shlomo.
Es tat ihr immer leid,
she said, laughing impishly. In German it would have meant,
She was always hurt, always sorry.

Insulted? Shlomo ventured.

Still giggling, Malcia said in Yiddish,
Zi is immer geveyn mit a hoch Nase.

A high nose? I’d never heard the expression.

Ah! Ah! Shlomo said. He turned and looked right at me. She says she kept herself, you know—as “somebody.” He took a finger and with it lifted up the tip of his nose in a universal gesture of snootiness.

Why was that? I asked Malcia.

She made a deprecatory face. Well, she knows that she was pretty, that she has a good home, good parents…

What exactly was the reputation of the family? I asked, and at that she launched into a story. There was a charitable organization that her father had founded, she said, called Yad Charuzim, The Hand of the Diligent. She laughed. When my father was the president, she said, I would tell everyone,
My father is the president!
I grinned, and she added that Shmiel had been the president at one point, too. This explained, at long last, a photograph I’d seen years before in the Bolechow Yizkor book. In the bottom of the two photographs that appeared on page 282, my grandfather had written, were his two brothers Shmiel and Itzhak. In it, Shmiel is sitting, dressed in a dinner jacket with a wing-collar shirt and black bow tie, at the center of a large group of well-dressed men; sitting on the floor was Itzhak, holding up one end of a sign that must have borne the name of whatever club this was, but in the reproduction the only letters visible in the photograph are C H A. At that moment Malcia said something quickly to Shlomo, who left the table and went to a pile of papers. A moment later he returned and handed me a photocopy, on
A-1 paper, that had clearly been made from the original of the image so faultily reproduced in the
Sefer HaZikaron LeKedoshei Bolechow
. The original, it now turned out, belonged to Malcia. On the photocopy the placard that Itzhak is holding is quite legible:

ZAŁOZYCIELE

19 JAD 28

CHARUZIM

BOLECHOW

FOUNDERS OF THE YAD CHARUZIM, 1928, BOLECHOW.

Malcia pointed to a face I knew well: handsome, aloof, sporting an impeccably trimmed toothbrush mustache that (I can’t help thinking) he thought would make him look older, more dignified. He was only thirty-three. Itzhak, by contrast, looks the faintest bit amused.

Here, she was saying, now in this picture is Shmiel Jäger the president. And this is my father.

She pointed to a dignified-looking man with pale eyes and a goatee sitting in the same row as Shmiel. And this is Kessler the carpenter, she went on.

Once again, I was both moved and pained by the thought that each of these people had a family, a story; and that somewhere, somebody who was interested in, say, the Kessler family might be saying,
And wasn’t that one Jäger the expediter, in the middle, he had the trucks? And isn’t that his brother, who had the butcher store, you remember the story…?

Yes, Lorka had a good home, a good family, Malcia said, making a little shrug as her voice trailed off. I thought again of Shmiel and his letters to my grandfather.

Or,