The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (67 page)

Shlomo said, They found him in Tikrit.

(Winter)

W
E SPENT TWO
days in Denmark, in mid-winter: a trip that, until quite recently, we really did think would be the last of our travels.

Because we flew out of New York on a Thursday night late in February, arrived on Friday morning, and left on Sunday afternoon, I can tell you relatively little about Copenhagen. For most of Friday afternoon and evening, and then again for nearly all of Saturday, we talked to Adam Kulberg, mostly in the apartment of his daughter, Alena, an art historian with whom, perhaps because like me she is an academic, but possibly because we have other things in common, blood being the least of them, I felt an immediate bond; but also—so that Matt could get a picture that “said” Copenhagen—in a beautiful park in the center of the city, in an allée of tall, funereal trees where, as we stood there, snow began gently to fall. Because we were in that city for such a short time, and because we spent nearly all of that time with Adam and Alena, we can tell you very little about Copenhagen, which was, I felt, a shame, since Denmark stands alone among the nations of Europe as a country with a remarkable record of mostly quiet but stunningly effective resistance to the Nazi anti-Jewish policies, the most spectacular example of which was the successful smuggling, in a single night, of nearly all of the country’s eight thousand Jews in small boats to Sweden, with (according to one book I consulted) only four hundred and sixty-four Jews deported to Theresienstadt, a place I did have time to visit. Four hundred and sixty-four out of eight thousand means that six percent of Denmark’s Jews perished in the Holocaust, which, although it looks like a cruelly high figure, in purely statistical terms pales in comparison to the figures to be calculated in a place like, say, Bolechow, of whose six thousand Jews—not terribly fewer than the Jewish population of the entire nation of Denmark—there were forty-eight survivors in 1944, which is to say that ninety-nine-point-two percent of the place’s Jews were killed. But we had little time to explore Copenhagen, let alone to search out whatever traces of its wartime history there might be. Indeed, you could say that a minor irony of the various trips that Matt and I took in search
of Uncle Shmiel and the others is that the only artifact of the famous rescue of Denmark’s Jews that we ever saw was not in Denmark but rather in Israel, where one of the tiny little boats that were used to ferry the eight thousand Danish Jews across the water to safety in Sweden is lovingly preserved at Yad Vashem—where, among other things, I did in fact obtain copies of a number of the witness statements that were taken just after the war was over from the few Bolechower Jews who survived, including the statement that ends its description of the behavior of the Jewish police with the following sentence:

Next to this typewritten list there was a handwritten addendum:
And Freilich
(
Jakub’s brother
).

Still, it’s true that during the couple of hours Matt and I had free prior to our first meeting with Adam we did wander in the neighborhood around our hotel, which is why, if someone were to say “Copenhagen” to either one of us today, certain images might come to our minds, for instance an image of an elegant little palace with a beautiful cobblestone courtyard through which soldiers in bright, toylike outfits regularly paraded. Or the image of a narrow street of orderly, low-ceilinged early-nineteenth-century houses, one of which turned out to be an antiques shop in which Matt and I spent perhaps half an hour or so after descending the few stone steps to the front door, and in which there hung, among collections of eighteenth-century books and dark old paintings and pewter vessels, an enormous framed copy of the front page of the Thursday, January 13, 1898, edition of the French newspaper
L’Aurore,
on which gigantic black letters shouted the notorious indictment
J’ACCUSE!
But for the most part, the images that come to mind are of the inside of Alena’s apartment—and of course the images that her father’s astounding narrative would conjure, images like something out of a fairy tale, or a myth. As we sat in the elegant apartment of Adam’s daughter, listening to her handsome and dignified and absolutely clear-minded father talk, first over a dinner that stretched late into the evening, then over a lunch that became yet another dinner over the course of an entire day, it became almost difficult at points to remember that we’d come to hear what he had to say about the Jägers, so remarkable, so improbable, so Homeric was the story he had to tell.

Which is not to say that we didn’t get what we had come for.

We came to interview Adam on Friday afternoon, a few hours after we flew
in. Alena Marchwinski opened the door. An attractive, intense-looking woman in her early fifties, she was wearing her dark hair pulled severely back, and had dressed casually but elegantly in a black open-necked sweater and black slacks. She introduced us to her family, who had crowded into the entrance hall of the apartment to meet us: her husband, Władyslaw, who goes by Władek and who is a concert violinist; their daughter, Alma, a girl of perhaps twelve with a dreamy face and a soft smile; and her parents. I looked at Adam Kulberg, this man who might be my relative. He had the face of a Mayan king: rectangular, a craggy nose, the kind of face that is suited for sculpture. His eyes, though, were gentle as he looked back at me, smiling. He had a full head of snow-white hair that was brushed, like his daughter’s, straight back from his high forehead to reveal the strong features. For this special occasion he had donned a dark gray suit over a lighter gray sweater that had slender vertical white stripes; this formality, together with the slicked-back hair and the fact that the points of his open white collar rested neatly above the collar of his sweater, gave this eighty-three-year-old man a curiously fashionable aura.

Our plan was to conduct an interview first and then have our meal. In her spacious living room Alena had set up a small glass-and-steel table in front of the divan where I sat down. On the table she’d placed an assortment of drinks: Evian, sparking water, fruit juices in small bottles. An entire wall to my left was filled with carefully organized books of the sort that scholars accumulate: multivolume sets of reference works, thick tomes. Catty-corner to it was a wall of large windows. On the sill of the window nearest to us a simple vase held a profusion of flowers. Below another of these windows, slightly off to the right of the group, Adam’s wife, Zofia, a very pretty woman with soft white hair, the short cut of which revealed large pearl earrings, was sitting on a small, tufted, Edwardian-looking leather sofa. She was wearing a dark skirted suit with a white blouse and satin jabot at her throat. That night, and then the next day, she smiled often and lovingly as Adam spoke. She had a wide, beatific smile, which it was clear her granddaughter had inherited, and she used it often.

Alena and her father sat down next to each other and directly across from me as I checked my recording equipment, she lounging comfortably in a dark-stained wicker armchair, he sitting erect in one of the dining table chairs that had been brought in for him. Behind them, through a large window, the weak but plentiful afternoon light streamed in. To my right sat Alena’s husband, a tall, handsome, reserved man who looked Nordic despite the fact that he, like his wife and in-laws, was born in Poland and had, like his in-laws, like the
Freilichs, like Ewa, like many Jews who had stayed in Poland after the war was over, left for Scandinavia in the late Sixties. Władek listened quietly as his wife and father-in-law talked, intervening only to translate for Adam whenever Alena left the sitting room to check on dinner. Throughout our long visit, Alena often smoked, with an un-American lack of apology or self-consciousness. Now, after everyone had settled into chairs and sofas, she lighted a cigarette and we began to chat.

For a few minutes we discussed the progress of the war, which was a sensitive subject just then if you were an American traveling in Europe, where the war was not popular—although, to be sure, the subject was not as sensitive as it would become eight weeks later, after the revelations about prisoner abuse by American soldiers, a subject I would have liked to be able to discuss with Adam Kulberg and the others, in fact. The reason I would have liked to bring this subject up was this: among the abuses said to have taken place was a certain bizarre humiliation that took the form of forcing the naked prisoners to climb on top of each other in order to form a living pyramid. When I first read about this in the papers, two months after I returned from Copenhagen, I was struck forcefully by this detail, since I remembered of course the detail, one of the first we ever learned about the Nazi torture of Bolechow’s Jews, that Olga in Bolechow had told us about, that August day in 2001: how, during the first Aktion, the Germans and Ukrainians had forced naked Jews in the Dom Katolicki to climb on top of one another, forming a human pyramid with the rabbi at the top. What was it, I wondered when I read about Abu Ghraib, what was this impulse to degrade that took the specific form of building pyramids with human flesh? But after a while it occurred to me that this particular type of degradation was a perfect if perverted symbol of the abandonment of civilized values; since after all the impulse to pile one thing atop another, the impulse to build, the impulse—spread across continents and civilizations—to build pyramids, whether in Egypt or Peru, can be seen as the earliest expression of the mysterious human instinct to create, to make something out of nothing, to be civilized. I, who had once spent so much time reading about the Egyptians, sat and read the newspaper on an April morning in 2004 and looked at the fuzzy photograph of the ungainly naked human pyramid, which for all we know was how certain Jews in the Dom Katolicki looked on October 28, 1941, and thought, There it all was, contained in this small triangle: the best of human instincts and the worst, the heights of civilization and the depths of bestiality, the making of something out of nothing and the making of nothing out of something. Pyramids of stone, pyramids of flesh.

But that came later. Now, at Alena’s flat, we turned our attention to another war, to the past.

First, we found out we were cousins.

Since the day of the phone conversation in Israel that had brought us here, I’d been eager to figure out what the relationship could have been between our families: after returning from our last trip, I’d thoroughly searched through all my genealogical records and could still find no connection between the Jägers of Bolechow and the Friedlers from Rozniatów, Adam’s mother’s family. I asked if his father’s family had been Bolechowers for a long time, and after Alena translated the question, Adam waved a hand behind his left shoulder, beckoning backward. She didn’t need to translate that: Yes, a long time. He said he’d known the Jägers from his earliest childhood, and counted out on his thumb, forefinger, and middle finger the names of the Jägers he knew of:
Shmiel. Itzhak.
Someone called
Y’chiel
, perhaps one of the cousins. He knew the wife, Ester, he said: she was beautiful, good-looking. He smiled.

I asked how many girls he thought there were.

Alena talked to her father for a minute and then said, He knew that there were four, but he only knew personally two: and the name of the ones he knew was Lorka—he thinks she was the oldest—and Frydka. They were both good-looking, but they were different. One was light, blond, and the other was dark.

Matt, who was holding the video camera, looked over and shot me a huge smile, which I returned. Adam Kulberg was the first person we’d talked to who knew how many girls there had been. Irrationally, perhaps, this gave him a kind of instant authority in my eyes. It was our last trip. I wanted to believe every word he said.

He said something to Alena, who said to me, He said that he always knew that his family were connected, like a family relation, with the Jägers. He always knew that it was a connection, but he never knew what
kind
of connection.

I had an idea. What was his father’s business? I asked. They spoke for a minute or two and Alena said, He had a butcher shop, and over a period of time he eventually had three butcher shops. They were in the center of the town, but one of the shops was not a kosher shop, and this shop was in front of the salt mine, the
salina
. The other shop was just beside the house, and the street address was Szewczenki 23, and it was just opposite the Dom Katolicki.

Akegn di DK
, across from the DK, Anna Heller Stern and Shlomo had said, that day in her apartment when Shlomo had smacked his hand against his forehead and said,
How did I forget? How I forgot?

I said, Well, that’s the connection. You know, the Jägers were also butchers.

They talked. Alena took a drag on her cigarette, exhaled, and said, He knows where was the butcher shop of Shmiel, next to the Magistrat. Five meters from the Magistrat, he said.

I nodded. In my mind’s eye I saw a piece of stationery from the
PARKER
-
JAEGER COMPANY
, which had been carefully tucked long ago into a book with a faded blue cloth binding.
67
—
Bottom. Our store, Left.

Beside the Magistrat, Alena repeated, Shmiel had the butcher shop. During the 1930s, she went on, translating her father’s memories, Shmiel had bought a truck and had started shipping his meat to Lwów, to other Jewish butchers. He had a reputation for being very good in business. He was very clever, very clever in business. And—she listened while her father added something—he was rather well known in the city, in the town.

I smiled but didn’t interrupt.

Adam now explained that his uncle, his father’s brother, had been Shmiel’s driver. His name was Wolf Kulberg. Alena said, And not only did he work for Shmiel but they were living there, in Shmiel’s house!