The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (64 page)

I added, after a moment, From what I hear, Belarus makes Ukraine look like
Paris
.

We pulled up in front of Josef Adler’s house on a quiet street on a hill in Haifa. A lone child played by a parking sign; a cool evening wind pushed an empty paper coffee cup across the street. A few months earlier, Josef had mentioned to me on the phone, when I’d called to get his address, that there had been a terrible suicide bombing in this very neighborhood. A bus had been blown up. But now it was quiet. Apart from the child, there wasn’t a soul on the street. That week, I’d noticed that the newspapers and televisions were free of violence; the big story in the papers just then was about the attempts
by the descendants of the Wertheim family, once the richest Jews of Berlin, to get reparations for the vast holdings that had been seized by the Nazis, including the land on which a new office complex for the German Bundestag, the Parliament, which had been dedicated on the day we’d arrived in Tel Aviv, had been built.
BUNDESTAG
’
S SHAKY FOUNDATIONS
, read the headline in
Haaretz
on the day we met with Josef Adler.

We went to the front door, where Josef was waiting. Once again, he was dressed with an almost military neatness. But this time—partly because of the fact that he was in his own comfortable home, and partly because of the presence of his wife, Ilana, a slim, good-looking brunette who looked far younger than her age and whose voice had, as do the voices of many Israeli women, a certain appealing bitterness to its timbre, a note like the rind of an orange—this time he seemed more relaxed, more expansive than he had six months earlier, when he had retailed for me, crisply and with a scholar’s dispassion, the history of Bolechow under the Occupation. After introductions were made, we all sat down around a low table and Ilana brought out a pot of coffee and an enormous brass platter heaped with nuts and fruits: oranges, dates, figs. We drank the bitter coffee and ate the fruit and talked.

For the wife’s sake, I described once again what our project was, and what we had hoped to achieve. Because there was something about this couple that appealed to me, I wanted to say something that would please her, and would be true. After talking for maybe twenty minutes about the Bolechow project, I said, I must tell you I was very happy I spoke to Mr. Adler the last time I was here. I went on, saying how impressed I had been, on my last trip, that her husband had taken the trouble to drive all the way from Haifa to my hotel room in Tel Aviv to talk to me. I said how important it was for people to be so forthcoming, so generous with their memories. I described how, in some cases, it took more than one interview to establish a rapport with people. I smiled and described how we’d called Meg Grossbard every day when we were in Sydney, trying to persuade her to talk to us, and then how lovely and excited she’d been when we finally got to her brother-in-law’s little apartment. And even then, I added, she was very reluctant to say anything about the war, anything at all about her family.

Josef looked at me from across the low table and said, She had a good reason for that.

Matt and I exchanged confused looks and Matt said, What was the reason for that?

In an even voice Josef said, Her brother was a member of the Jewish police, and he had not such a good reputation for that.

Matt and I exchanged looks.
I know nussink,
Meg had joked.
I see nussink.
I thought of Anna Heller Stern who, during my last visit, had said that she was more afraid of the Jewish police than of anyone; thought, too, how much easier it is, often, to be cruel to those with whom we are truly intimate, the ones we know too well. Cain and Abel, I’d thought as I listened to Anna. Siblings. I thought, Maybe Ciszko Szymanski wasn’t the only thing Meg didn’t want to remember.

What was his name? we both asked simultaneously.

Lonek, Josef said.

Not such a good reputation?

Josef was philosophical. Well, you know, today it’s very hard to judge such things.

I made an emphatic gesture. I’m not
judging
! I judge
no
one, I said. And it was true. Because it is
impossible to know
certain things, because I will never experience the pressures that people experienced during the war years, the unimaginable choices that had to be made, because of all this, I refuse to judge. Still, there was this new thought, as I sat there eating sweet dates and figs: All those years of knowing nothing about Shmiel and all the rest had provoked in me a terrific yearning to know, to have facts and dates and details; and yet it had never occurred to me that the facts and dates and details I learned might add up to something more than entries in a chart or elements in a story—that they might one day force me to judge people.

I said, I want to emphasize my business is not judging. I judge no one. I can’t be in 1942, I don’t know what it was like, people did what they did, they were under unimaginable pressure and stress.

Josef said, It’s complicated. There were some Jewish police who were good, and some were bad.

I said, Of course it’s complicated.

Josef sighed and said, With Lonek Ellenbogen—

(Meg’s maiden name, I knew, had been Ellenbogen, which in German means
elbow,
a name that might strike you as the most bizarre surname imaginable were it not for the fact that, as even a cursory search through the Jewish Records Index–Poland database on jewishgen reveals, a name that was just as common was Katzenellenbogen,
cat’s elbow
)

—with Lonek it was like this. We were in this forced labor camp, Shlomo and myself. Shlomo’s cousin, Moishele, he was brought from the Stryj ghetto. He met with us. But the day they decided to liquidate the Stryj ghetto—in
Stryj—they also arrested people who had been sent
from
Stryj to work in the labor camp in
Bolechow.

In Sydney, months before, Jack Greene had told me a story about Dolina, my great-grandmother’s hometown, a place whose World War II monument today, because it was erected by the Soviets, makes no mention that the people lying in the mass grave behind what used to be the town’s synagogue—today it is a Baptist church—were Jews. Even after there were several Aktionen in Bolechow, he’d said, his voice still filled with a certain bemusement, even after two years, when the Germans had killed four, five times in Bolechow, the Jews of Dolina weren’t touched. This, Jack told me, had confused and enraged Bolechow’s surviving Jews, who thought that maybe the Dolina Judenrat was doing something right that the Bolechow Judenrat wasn’t. And then, Jack reminisced, one night the Germans came and liquidated the whole town of Dolina all at once. The whole town! That’s the German…procedure, logic, I don’t know what to call it. Now, in Haifa, listening to Josef Adler talk about the Stryj Aktion, I thought, Here it was too: liquidating the Jews of Stryj didn’t mean merely killing the Jews who happened to be
in
Stryj. German logic.

So, Josef went on, anyway Lonek came with the Germans, the barracks were surrounded by SS and Jewish police, and Lonek entered and he recognized Moishele. He said, Moishele, you must come. And Moishele said, Have pity on me, you
know
me. Lonek said, You have to go, it’s your duty to go.

Josef gave me a look. You see, Lonek was convinced that somehow he’s doing some kind of very important duty that he had to comply with. It was their duty to execute their own…And Moishele was taken away to the Rynek and they shot him.

We listened in complete silence. Then Matt said, What happened to her brother, to Lonek?

Josef said, He was also killed in the cemetery. He tried to run away, but I don’t remember if it was the same day or it was later. No, it was later. I only heard about it. First they had to arrest them, and then they conducted them along Shevska Street, Schustergasse, and they had a kind of military discipline, they were arranged in rows…His voice trailed off, and then he said, Ah, it was strange.

In Ukraine, Olga had told us,
They marched them two by two up this street to the cemetery. The sound of the shooting went on so long that my mother took down her old sewing machine…

And Lonek Ellenbogen, he tried to escape, he tried to climb the wall of the
cemetery—the wall doesn’t exist anymore—and he was shot. And someone told Shlomo how it happened.

He finished, and Matt, articulating my own unspoken thought, said, But if you were Jewish police, perhaps—even naively—you thought, If I am Jewish police I will get better treatment?

It’s complicated, Josef said again. Anyway, after so many years, after all Meg is not responsible.

I thought of Meg, her pride, her riveting acuity, the oscillation between tenderness and steeliness, and for a moment I could have wept. She had surely always known of the stories that we were hearing today for the first time, and just as surely, I now saw, she was terrified we’d find out. Terrified that we’d judge her brother, a boy in his—what? twenties? late teens?—who’d buckled under pressures that no American or Australian kid of nineteen or twenty-two today could even begin to conceive of. He had swaggered, had thought he was doing something important when he refused to let an old friend escape. She had been terrified that we’d judge him. No, I thought: Terrified that we’d judge
her
. I shook my head and said to Josef, No, no. I’m just trying to understand psychologically—Meg remembered many things, but anything about her in the war—nothing! How she survived, what her story was: nothing. It’s like a black hole.

Ilana, who had remained silent throughout her husband’s narrative, and through my response, spoke softly from her seat. She said, And I think time has nothing to do with it, because we don’t forget.

I looked across the table. There was something about this dark and thoughtful woman that I found very appealing: the opinions she expressed seemed to me complicated in just the right degree, a fine balance of unsentimental rigor and a softening humanity. As if to confirm my silent appraisal, at that moment Ilana Adler said, rather heatedly, extending an arm as if to embrace the whole of our conversation that evening,
What is memory?
What is
memory
? Memory is what you remember. No, you change the story, you “remember.” A story, not a fact. Where are the facts? There is the memory, there is the truth—you don’t know,
never
.

Soon it was time for us to leave for the train station. Matt, as usual, was worrying about the fading daylight, and so we finished our coffees and went outside, where he took some pictures of Josef standing by the parking sign, whose Hebrew warning, I thought to myself with a smile, certainly “said Israel.” Then we got into Josef’s car. As we pulled up at the intersection of two streets called
Freud
and
Wallenberg,
Josef turned to me and said, apropos
of nothing we’d been talking about, a sentence that could have been an explanation, a justification, I’m not really sure, It isn’t enough to be nice to people. In Bolechow we were nice to people, and it didn’t do us any good.

I
NTENSIFIED AND DARKENED,
now, by unpleasant revelations, the gloom clung still when we went to our final destination the next day, the cool and darkened apartment of Anna Heller Stern: another exhausted and melancholy return to a place I’d already been.

Once again, she had prepared an elaborate tray of cakes and cookies; once again, she hovered, making sure we had enough Coke, enough iced tea. Once again, she told us what she remembered about Shmiel and Ester and the girls. Once again, she related what she’d heard about Frydka and Ciszko. This time, however, since both Dyzia and Klara had offered recollections of Ciszko as well as of Frydka, we prompted Anna to try to remember what the Polish boy had been like.

Yes, she said, of course she remembered him. He was heavy, not too
high,
and blond.
Blaue augen.

Solidly built, I guessed was what she meant; medium height, and blue eyes. That much, all three women agreed on.

He was hiding somewhere, she added, unprompted, but probably not in his own house: his mother would have killed him! she said. He was bringing her food, she said. And then somebody denounced them. This is what she’d heard, at least.

So she told us everything once again. She shared, too, her own remarkable story of hiding, a hiding that was, unlike Frydka’s, successful. Once again she showed the picture of the Polish priest who had saved her life by making false papers for her. Once again she showed us the false baptismal certificate, the one that had given her the name
Anna,
which she’d kept ever since. Matt took a picture of the document.
ANNA KUCHARUK
, it said.

I noticed that the date of birth given on the certificate had just passed, and smiling I said I was sorry to have missed the big day, if that was indeed her real birthday. Anna said yes, that was her real birthday, in fact; she’d just turned eighty-three. Happy Birthday! we all said.

Matt wanted to know what she planned to do with all these documents. Would they go to Yad Vashem? he asked.