The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (62 page)

Yes! Klara said. But he wasn’t from Bolechow!

I smiled and told the story I’d heard in Vilna, about the Potocki who’d been burned at the stake by the Church after he converted to Judaism.

In Bolechow, Klara said emphatically, a Jew who converted to become a Christian was put out of the community!

She turned to Ewa and told a longish story. Ewa listened, nodding, and then said, There was one family that she knew, a Jewish family who lived either in Gerynia or another place, not a town, but a village. In this family there
were two sons. One son fell in love with a Ukrainian girl, and the mother of this boy wanted him of course to leave this girl, so the family moved away to Bolechow. But love overcame everything! So he stayed and converted to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. And he was expelled from the family and the community—the Jewish community—and everyone in Bolechow would point out the mother, saying “That’s the mother of the convert!”

She told this story, and as she did so I realized that I was very tense, because I was worrying about Matt, wondering, as Klara said
the mother of this boy wanted him of course to leave this girl
—
of course!
—what my brother, who’d fallen in love and married a Greek Orthodox girl, was thinking as he listened, too. I thought of my grandfather, who in many letters, and then in his will, had written,
If any of my children or grandchildren go outside the Jewish faith, they should not benefit from one penny of my hard-earned money.
From the Old Country he had brought over more than just his accent, his stories. Every person, in the end, is a person of a specific time, a specific place, and from that there is no escaping, however far he may travel.

But Matt said nothing.

M
AREK GOT UP
to leave; he had to get to work. We shook hands and said we’d see him the next day, since he’d told us that he was going to try to get his son, Jonathan, to join him and his mother and us for lunch somewhere. Earlier, he’d confided to me the reason why Jonathan hadn’t come the day before. Klara and her grandson had, it turned out, quarreled just before we arrived: he’d apparently told her that he was very busy with schoolwork and wouldn’t be able to stay for the whole afternoon, and taking offense at this perceived lack of interest, she had told him that if he couldn’t spare time for the whole story, he shouldn’t bother to come at all. They are very close, Marek said, but both very proud! Now, Klara’s son, Jonathan’s father, was playing the middle man, to reconcile them in time for Jonathan to meet us before we flew off to Israel.

I was hoping that Jonathan could join us for a different reason. His English, Marek had told me, was excellent, and I was hoping that Klara might open up more if she were talking to her grandchild.
They are very close,
Marek had said.

Marek left. I asked what I thought of as a Matt question, a question about feelings, not facts. I told Ewa, Ask her how she felt yesterday after the interview.

Ewa translated the question and then listened as Klara spoke. Ewa said, Well, she says she was nervous and couldn’t sleep, so she took some pills. She couldn’t concentrate. She said she hasn’t always been stable in her nerves.
Every time she experienced something new, she went to doctors, to psychiatrists, and so on. And everyone told her she had to just lay quietly. But her husband had cancer for fifteen years, and then her daughter. A beautiful girl, she died. The problem is that from time to time she can’t remember the very bad things, because she doesn’t
want
to remember. She says she never talked to her children about these things. Her husband maybe talked about this when he was alive, but she went through such horrible things that are not to be—

Ewa, who had been translating all of this as Klara spoke, listened for the end of the sentence; but Klara’s voice had trailed off. Then she resumed talking. A lot of people went away, to hiding, but me and my husband were the longest time in this place where they kept all the Jews, the
Arbeitslager,
after the others went—we ran away to the woods much later after Dyzia and Meg and the others.

We nodded and tried to make the sympathy we felt for her plain on our faces. Ewa said, But she says it was really nice to meet you, and she will call Meg and tell her how nice it was to meet you.

None of the other survivors we’d met had talked this openly about the psychological anguish they’d experienced as a result of their wartime experiences, and I wanted to say something that would make Klara feel good. I said to Ewa, Tell her we’re very grateful, tell her every little thing is meaningful and important to us. Like when she told us what Ciszko Szymanski looked like…

As Ewa translated this, Klara interrupted. Did Meg tell you what Ciszko looked like? she wanted to know.

Matt and I exchanged broad grins, and I launched into the story of how Meg had refused to talk about Ciszko. I explained Meg’s joke:
I know nussink! I see nussink!
Matt laughed out loud as I finished the story. I was struck by how eager Klara seemed to know what we’d learned from Meg, and whether the information we’d gotten from Meg dovetailed with the information she was giving us.

Klara said, I do not know much about him, just that he wanted to save her. And he died because of it. So why doesn’t she want to talk about it? She paused for a moment, and then said, Meg is very careful with every word. Dyzia, Dyzia Lew, a school friend of mine, my best friend, she is very sick now, this woman is very open and will talk to you.

I said, Yes, we’re going to talk to her on Thursday. I turned to Matt and said, That’s good to know, about Dyzia Lew.

Klara said, When you see her tell her I wish her well, and I wish her a long, long life.

I
T WASN’T UNTIL
the next day, at a noisy Italian restaurant with her handsome teenaged grandson at her side, that Klara finally told her story.

It was clear from the moment we arrived that Jonathan’s presence both soothed and buoyed Klara. She was animated and talkative, and over lunch she readily agreed to tell us about the whole of her experiences during the Occupation, which she did slowly, waiting for Jonathan, at whom she gazed adoringly, to translate each sentence. And so as we sat at a big round table, Klara talked: about the bombing when the Germans invaded in the summer of ’41, the first Aktion, the terrifying, silent encounter with the German and the German shepherd as she and her family hid from the Ukrainians and Germans who were looking for victims. How she and her husband, Jakub,
Yankel
, had planned almost from the beginning to escape; the terrible months in the work camp, waiting for the right moment. How he had run away from Bolechow first, to the tiny village of Gerynia, how frightened she had been when, the next day, she followed him. The hiding place that they’d had to abandon when the wife of the farmer who was concealing them expelled them, fearing—not unreasonably—for her own life, for the lives of her own family. The second hiding place, under the floor of the barn.

What did the hiding place look like? I asked. Ever since Sydney, ever since the story of Frydka and Ciszko had first threaded itself into my imagination, I had
wondered what the physical reality of these hiding places had been like. Since I would never know for sure where Frydka—and, perhaps, Shmiel, too—had been hiding, I was eager to have a picture, some concrete particulars, of what it could have been like, at least. Klara talked for a minute or two, trying to explain the layout of the hiding place in which she’d lived for nearly a year under the earth. Suddenly, she snatched a paper napkin off the table and took a pen from her son and drew a map, which she thrust toward me as she started explaining.

That is the stable, Marek translated. And that’s the opening to the basement. That’s the basement. From the basement you could go under the stable, under the floor. It was like a secret door. In the corner was a secret door that went to the cellar underneath. There were four people there.

Marek paused, and Klara said in English, I, my husband, my husband’s brother, my husband’s friend. Again I opened my mouth to ask about this brother—I still didn’t know his name—but Klara started talking again in rapid Polish.

When they wanted to sleep, Marek said, one of them had to stand up because there was only room for three to lie down.

I have a terrible fear of small, enclosed spaces; I shuddered. OK, I asked after a moment, so they’re in the cellar, but what are they talking about, what are they discussing, planning, during all those months?

Jonathan relayed the question, and Klara then told what seemed like an involved story, and when she finished talking Jonathan turned to me.

The farmer’s wife brought them the food, he said. They were very nice people. They had two daughters, one of them was Hanushka. And they were seven and nine years old. Both of them went to school. In secret my grandmother was teaching the older daughter mathematics and such. But it created a problem, because soon the girl knew a lot more than the other students, and the teacher started asking questions.

I thought, Even generosity could be deadly.

Jonathan went on, But the girl’s father was very intelligent. He told the teacher that they had an uncle who was staying with them, and it was he who had been teaching the girl.

He added, This girl would run to the forest and bring them blueberries, blackberries.

I thought,
The first strawberries of the season!
but what I said was, Was she ever concerned that these two small children knew about them? Was she worried that they would give them away?

Jonathan talked to Klara, and then turned to me and said, No, no, no. She really loved those two girls. She wasn’t afraid.

Then she said something else, and he said, She tried to write to them after the war, but she never got a response.

Klara went on talking and talking. She said they had remained in their cramped underground lair until the Soviets liberated the area in the summer of 1944. She said they were like animals, they lived like animals,
with
animals. She said she couldn’t find the words to say how it feels to live in a hole in the ground with rats running around for all those months. She said it was a miracle they survived, because you could be killed at any second: if it wasn’t the Germans, it was the Ukrainians.

Klara then talked about how it felt to return to Bolechow after the Soviets had liberated the town, how she and other survivors had found their way to a house in town—she thought it might have been Meg Grossbard’s house—and shared their stories there. (How many people is she talking about? I asked, twenty? thirty? and Klara said, Maybe ten.) How she had tried to work in a hospital just after the war, but she was too weak to carry things. How she hadn’t stayed long in Bolechow after the liberation, because, she said, I had lost everything, everything was lost. So she and her husband had left forever and, against all odds, had prospered in Poland, even under the Communist regime; and then had come here, to Sweden.

When her story was finished, I asked Jonathan how he felt, now that he knew the whole tale. He said, I think it’s kind of astonishing—I didn’t know that they were such a long period of time and that it was so complicated. In my mind it was like they were in hiding and then they came out. I didn’t, I didn’t…I didn’t think about all these small
details
.

I nodded and said, Details is what we want so badly, too.

Matt said, Imagine living in a place the size of your
shower stall
for eighteen months—it’s hard to comprehend.

Jonathan nodded. I knew some things, he said, but I didn’t know just how horrible it was.

I said, Well, I’m sure we haven’t even heard the most horrible. Whatever she tells us, I’m sure there’s a lot that’s much worse.

At that very moment, Marek leaned over and said something in a low, confiding voice to me and Matt. We listened as he spoke and then I said, Oh, my God.

S
O KLARA’S STORY
had, in the end, been told. Watching her look at Jonathan, I had no illusions that her decision to narrate everything that had hap
pened to her in the order it had happened—or almost everything—was for my benefit. It was, all too clearly, for Jonathan: for this bright and serious youth who had told me, as we were seating ourselves around the large round table at the beginning of that meal, that he knew too little about what his grandmother had been through in her life. In his near-fluent and almost unaccented English, he had said, I just know fragments, not the whole picture.

So we had gone to Sweden, as we had promised an incredulous Meg we were willing to do. And yet we still had only had fragments of a picture that, it was starting to appear, would never be whole.
She just doesn’t want to say anything either way
, Ewa had said, when we’d asked Klara which of the two entirely incompatible stories about Frydka was more likely to be true, the one in which she’d run to the partisans or the one in which Ciszko had been hiding her.
She thinks that the second—the other one, with the attic, and somebody told the Germans—is most close to the truth. The first one, about the partisans, she never heard about it.