The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (55 page)

Malcia shouted the word
stupid
as Mrs. Szymanska had once done. She went on: He gived his life for this girl. But he loved her
very
much.

Like mother, like daughter, I thought.

She looked at me firmly. She said, And for her it was a
mitziyeh,
you know what it is a
mitziyeh
?

I shook my head no, and she gestured, as she liked to do, with her right hand, thumb and first two fingers squeezed together, the way you might do when you want to indicate that a recipe needs a pinch of salt.

Shlomo said, A
mitziyeh
—it’s something, something, you know, something special.

(Later on, I looked up
mitziyeh
in the 1938 Hebrew-English dictionary that I inherited from my grandfather, and learned that it means this:
a finding, a discovery; a thing found; a precious thing
. It was interesting to learn, further, that it is connected to the verb
mâtzâh,
which means
to find out, guess; to find; to come upon, meet, discover; to befall, happen.
What kind of culture was this culture of the Hebrews, I wondered when I looked this up months after my interview with the Reinharzes that day, a culture in which the notions of
coming upon
and
meeting
and
discovering
were inextricably linked to the idea of
preciousness
?)

Malcia nodded very vigorously and cried out, To stay alive! To stay alive! Who has such a
mazel
? Who has such luck?

I thought, then, of something my mother had said to me in Sydney, after she’d finished talking to Jack Greene on my cell phone.
Why didn’t
my
family survive?
she had said, her voice filled with tears.
Even just one of them?
After I’d hung up, I had repeated this to Jack, who’d said,
Look, it was just a matter of luck, that’s it.
Now, as I listened to Shlomo and Malcia, it occurred to me that although she’d died, in the end, Frydka had still been lucky. She had lived that much longer, after all; had had someone who wanted desperately to save her, someone who died for her. A
mitziyeh,
a
mazel
only seems strange if you’re thinking about things in hindsight, which is a luxury that Frydka and Ciszko did not have.

Shlomo said to me, Who knew that somebody would betray them?

I
WANT TO
get the chronology straight, I said again, although this time I was referring to one Jew in particular: to Frydka. Now at that point she was living in one of the
Lager,
right? And then—

Look, Malcia said. We could work till
Juni
’forty-three.

July! Shlomo exclaimed. Not June, July!

And after, the Germans said that now they are building a new
Lager
and everybody will be saved. But they just wanted to take everybody in one
Lager
. And that was the end.

I nodded. Jack had already told me how those who’d fallen for the Germans’ ruse had all been locked in the new camp and killed. Guns, he had said. Fire.

But at that point, I went on, instead of going in this
Lager,
Szymanski hid Frydka in his house?

Malcia nodded.
Yes.

So Szymanski was hiding her in his house, and this was after June ’forty-three.

Another nod.

July, Shlomo said.

July ’forty-three, I said. And so at some point after July ’forty-three she was hiding in his house.

(Again, I wanted specifics.)

And does anybody know where was his house?

As had occasionally happened before, I noticed that my syntax had vaguely changed, now that I was speaking with Bolechowers.

I
know where, Malcia said. Not far from Frydka’s house. It was on the beginning of the street—

I took out the map of Bolechow that Shlomo had sent me. Malcia looked at it and asked where Dlugosa Street was. Then she pointed with a little cry of victory.

Yes! Here was the Jägers and here—

(she pointed to a spot on the same street but the opposite side)

—was the Szymanskis, at the beginning of the street.

So he lived on the corner, down the street, I said. That was where she’d been hiding. That was the place. I knew the story by now; now I wanted a
place,
a spot to stand on, if I ever went back to Bolechow.

Shlomo, Solomon, and Malcia were talking in Yiddish and German about the liquidation of the
Lagers
in the late summer of 1943—which is to say, the liquidation of the town, since by that time the only Jews left who weren’t in hiding were those in the last
Lager
. By that point, I knew, the Reinharzes were hiding, immobile but alert, in the German officers’ recreation hall, the
Kasino,
right in the middle of town.

Am vier und zwanzigsten August,
Malcia was saying, in German now.
Dann is meine schwester gegangen: und jeden Schuss haben wir gehört.

On the twenty-fourth of August. That’s when my sister went. And we heard every shot.

They were in hiding, Shlomo explained to me, although I knew the story.

Malcia nodded and said to me, in English, And every, every—

She turned to Shlomo.
Unt yayden shuss hub’ ikh getzuhlt
.

Yiddish, again. I understood.
And I counted every shot.

She turned to me but continued in Yiddish.
Noyn hindert shiess hub’ ikh getzuhlt.

Nine hundred shots I counted.

She paused and said, in English now, And after they came to the
Kasino
to wash their hands and to
drink
! I was right there, I saw them! They washed the hands and they went to
drink
!

Shlomo, who was as obviously moved as I was at the image of the two hidden Jews, cramped in their tiny hideout, unable to see but counting, counting, one after the other, the shots that were ending the lives of their friends and neighbors, turned to Malcia and said, And you knew what was happening?

Malcia pointed with her forefinger to her temple. She said, We
imagined
.

I
, TOO, WAS
imagining at that moment. We had arrived around noon, and it was now nearly three; I had much to think about. It wasn’t just the new and sensational additions to Frydka’s story—
she was pregnant with his child, he was hiding her in his house
—although these, like the sounds of the shots that Shumek and Malcia had heard that day, could not be ignored; they demanded, if anything, an effort of the imagination that couldn’t help but add to the story I wanted to be able to tell.
They were lovers, they were deeply in love, these were desperate times, they were sleeping together, she was pregnant. He loved her that much—enough to endanger not only himself, but his entire family.
Well, I thought,
Good for her
. Good for
them
. I’m glad she knew a profound love, before she died. To hell with what Meg Grossbard thinks; to hell with
I know nussink, I see nussink!

And yet as important as this was, it was those other, smaller, less sensational details that I was thinking of when Malcia said
We imagined.
Here, too, there was much of interest to be extrapolated.
He loved her so much! She had such pretty legs!
These, too, were facts; these, too, might tell a little story. Perhaps it was her legs he’d first noticed, that day in 1918 when they’d met for the first time as adults, she a pretty twenty-three-year-old with her family’s regular features and solemn face, he an energetic young man, something of a war hero, determined to revive his father’s business. Perhaps he had seen her playing with her girlfriends, in the peaceful summer of 1919, down by the banks of the Sukiel, the place where their daughter would one day cavort with her girlfriends, just a few years before nearly all of them were raped or shot
or gassed. Perhaps it was that small thing that had triggered their romance, a romance that had never, as we now know, ended.
He loved her so much—au au au au!

It was while I was thinking about this business of imagining, of extracting the story from the small, concrete thing, that I realized that Malcia and Shlomo were reminiscing, after our huge lunch, about certain foods they used to eat, and which fewer and fewer people now knew how to cook.
Ahhh, bulbowenik!
Shlomo exclaimed. Shumek rolled his eyes in appreciation, and the other two started explaining to me what it was: a dish of grated potatoes and eggs that you baked and—

Wait!
Malcia exclaimed. I think she was relieved not to be talking about the past anymore, after all this time. You’ll sit here a little while, and I’ll make it for you!

I gave Shlomo a look. We had to be back in Tel Aviv by seven, I reminded him, since a friend whom I’d met in the States, a philosophy professor at the University of Tel Aviv, was expecting me for dinner.

Shlomo smiled broadly and said something to Malcia, who shook her head impatiently. It’s nothing, it won’t take no time at all, he said.

I thought, Why not? This, too, was part of the story; and after all, it hadn’t often been the case that some abstract aspect of the lost civilization of Bolechow could so easily be made concrete. I grinned and nodded. OK, I said, let’s cook.

Malcia took me into the kitchen so I could watch. We grated potatoes, we beat eggs, we poured them into a baking dish. We sat for forty-five minutes while it baked. We took it out of the oven to cool. While it cooled, I thought to myself that we had just eaten an enormous lunch with lots of wine; I suspected that I was about to be taken to an enormous dinner.

Still, I’d been raised in a certain kind of home, and I knew what to do. I sat down at the table and ate. It was delicious. Malcia beamed.
It’s a real Bolechower dish!
she said.

Only after I’d had seconds did we finally get up to go.

S
HLOMO AND
I went back down the concrete stairs of the Reinharzes’ building to the parking lot. What with the impromptu cooking lesson, and then the tasting of the
bulbowenik,
we’d ended up staying much longer than we had thought we would. The sun, low on the horizon, was mellow, and when we got
into Shlomo’s car we opened the windows. Shlomo was preoccupied, at first, with finding our way back to the highway from the apartment house on Rambam Street—a street, I was happy to notice, that was named after the great twelfth-century Jewish scholar and philosopher Maimonides (the acronym of whose Hebrew name, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, is RMBM). Rambam was a Spanish-born Jew whose family fled the anti-Jewish persecutions of the Muslim ruler of Spain and came, eventually, to Egypt, which is how Maimonides ended up becoming the esteemed servant of the enlightened sultan in Cairo. He is the scholar who, along with Rashi, is the most widely admired and studied of all Jewish intellectuals. The rationalist views expressed in his master-work,
The Guide for the Perplexed
—and, it’s hard not to think, the enormous renown that Rambam enjoyed—so enraged certain rival rabbis in France that they denounced him to the French Inquisition, while (by contrast) his death was mourned throughout Cairo for three full days by Muslims. Where do you live, and what are your loyalties?
parashat Lech Lecha
asks; and no wonder.

As we navigated our way out of the Israeli street named for this remarkable man, we talked enthusiastically about our long interview with the Reinharzes.

So she was
pregnant
, I said to Shlomo as he peered at the street signs.

Well, it’s what she says, he replied. But it’s very interesting, no?

I nodded. Very interesting. I had gone to Australia not even knowing what stories we’d hear, and now it seemed I had a real drama on my hands. I wondered what Meg would say, if I decided to share this latest detail with her.

Soon we were out of the city and racing back toward Tel Aviv. We must have both been feeling depleted, after such a long day; I didn’t mind at all when, after some minutes of companionable silence, he flicked on the radio. A female voice was singing, and it took me a moment to realize that she was singing not in Hebrew, but in English. The tune was familiar, but at first I didn’t recognize the song for what it was because the verse was unfamiliar to me. I had only known the refrain, it now turned out. The woman’s voice had become the voice of a young girl, a girl who was narrating the story of her own death. She had died, she sang, for love of a boy who would not love her back. Then the voice slid into the refrain:

I wish I wish

I wish in vain

I wish I was

a maid again

but a maid again

I ne’er can be

till apples grow

on an ivy tree

I sat up, sputtering, and turned to Shlomo. This is the song! I finally shouted, This is the song! The one I was telling you about on the way here this morning. The song my grandfather sang!

We both listened as the voice came to the last verse, which caught my attention, perhaps because
dying for love
was much on my mind that hot early evening:

Oh, make my grave

large, wide and deep

put a marble stone

at my head and feet

and in the middle

a turtle dove

so the world may know

I died of love.

How on earth, I thought as I wrote these words down—something about the grave, the stone, the
dove
moved me, and made me want to remember this lyric—did my grandfather come across this song? Why had he learned it?

The song was over, and the radio announcer said something in rapid Hebrew. Shlomo said, It’s an Irish song.