The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (7 page)

A
S TIME PASSED,
when I was a young man in my twenties, I would occasionally dip back into the files I’d made, push my research a little farther, write a few new letters to this or that archive, learn a few more facts. By the time I was in my thirties, late thirties, it seemed clear that I knew everything there was to know about my family history: about the Jägers most of all, since in addition to the documentary evidence, the material obtainable from archives and libraries, there were all those stories; and, over the years, about
my father’s family as well, the taciturn Mendelsohns. The only gap, the only irritating lacuna, was Shmiel and his family, the lost ones about whom there were no facts to pencil in on the index cards, no dates to enter in the genealogy software, no anecdotes or stories to tell. But as time went on it hurt less and less to think that we’d never know anything more about them, since with each passing decade the entire event receded, and with it they, too, grew dimmer, blunter, not only those six but all of them; and as decade followed on decade they seemed more and more to belong not to us but to History. This, paradoxically, made it easier not to think about them, since after all so many people were thinking about them—if not them specifically, then about a kind of generic
them,
those who had been killed by the Nazis, and for this reason it was as if they were being looked after.

Still, every now and then it would happen that some reminder would rise to the surface of things and make me wonder if there might still be something left to learn.

For instance:

My grandfather preferred to tell stories that were funny, since he himself was so funny, and since people will love you more if you amuse them. I remember—or rather, my mother told me—how he once made my great-aunt Ida, my grandmother’s sister, pee in her pants at the Thanksgiving table one year, a long time ago, so funny was the story he was telling. We don’t know which of his many funny stories it was, since the story of how he made her pee her pants has now eclipsed the story itself—has become a funny story of its own, one that now gets told in order to illuminate, or perhaps to preserve, a certain aspect of my dead grandfather’s personality. To me in particular he loved to tell his stories about the town in which he was born, and where his family, that family of prosperous butchers and, later, exporters of meat, had lived “since,” he would say, clearing his throat wetly in the way that he did, his eyes huge and staring, like a baby’s, behind the lenses of his old-fashioned black-plastic glasses, “there was a Bolechow.”
BUH-leh-khuhv,
he would pronounce it, keeping the
l
low in his throat, in the same place where he caressed the
kh,
the way that people will do who are from that place;
BUHlehkhuhv,
the pronunciation that, as I found out much later, is the old, the Yiddish pronunciation. The spelling, too, has changed: Bolechow under the German-speaking Austrians, Bolechów under the Poles, Bolekhov during the Soviet years, and now, finally, Bolekhiv, under the Ukrainians, who had always wanted the town, and now own it. There is a joke that people from this part of Eastern Europe like to tell, which suggests why the pronunciations and the spellings keep shifting:
it’s about a man who’s born in Austria, goes to school in Poland, gets married in Germany, has children in the Soviet Union, and dies in Ukraine.
Through all that,
the joke goes,
he never left his village!

That I was mispronouncing the name of the town in which my mother’s family had lived for over three hundred years was something I didn’t know until I met an old woman in the late 1990s, the mother of a man with whom I had recently become friends. After knowing him for some time I learned that he, who is of my parents’ generation, was born in the town next to Bolechow—a small city, really, once called Stryj, now spelled Striy, which I have since visited, a place where today tall trees grow luxuriantly in the middle of the roofless ruin of what used to be the city’s main synagogue. When I discovered the strange geographical coincidence that linked our families, I mentioned it to my friend, who like me is a writer and who, knowing of my interest in the history of that small and now forgotten part of the world, offered to introduce me to his mother, a woman then nearly ninety years old; perhaps she would share with me her memories. His mother. Mrs. Begley.
Begley:
another name that, like the names of the towns where people like her once lived, had subtly altered; for the name had in fact been
Begleiter,
which in German means “companion” or “escort.” Of course I eagerly accepted my friend’s invitation, since by then, when I was nearly forty, there had been a small number of strange coincidences, odd reminders of Bolechow, or Shmiel, or our family’s specific past, that had surfaced improbably in the present, tantalizing us with the possibility that the dead were not so much lost as waiting…

A
FEW YEARS AGO, FOR
instance, I read somewhere that, sixty years after the event, it was still possible to submit to the International Red Cross the names of Holocaust victims to be traced. And so one day I walked to the local Red Cross office, which is in a large, rectangular, rather impersonal building not too far from my apartment. On the front of this building is a large red cross. Inside, I duly filled out a set of six Missing Person forms. I did so with the barest flicker of optimism, knowing what the odds were; but even so, I told myself, you never know.

And you never
do
know. Maybe fifteen years ago my youngest brother, who at that point was a costume assistant on Woody Allen movies, was shopping for fabrics in a dimly lighted store, a place filled with rolls of fabrics, located in the Garment District in New York City. He noticed that the elderly man at the counter bore a tattoo on his forearm, and struck up a conversation with this
man. During this conversation, my brother mentioned that our own relatives who had perished in the disaster were from Bolechow, at which point the old Jew in the garment shop clapped his hands together in a kind of ecstasy and exclaimed, Ach, Bolechow! They had the
most
beautiful leather!

There was the time when, after I posted an inquiry in an Internet genealogy site, an old man called me to say he’d once known someone called Shmiel Jäger. Before I could respond, he added that this Shmiel Jäger had come from Dolina, a small town near Bolechow, and had fled eastward, when the Germans came in the summer of 1941—fled, as it turned out, deep into what was then the Soviet Union.
I heard he married an Uzbek woman, he even had children with her!
this old man, who was hard of hearing, shouted into the phone. Amused at the thought of a shtetl Jew roaming as far as Uzbekistan, I thanked him for getting in touch and hung up, thinking, So there’s nothing to be excited about.

And yet it was odd: like the unexpected touch of a cold hand.

Or there was the time that another one of my brothers—Matt, the one born just after me, with whom for a long time I had no great intimacy (unlike the youngest, who like me was thought to be artistically inclined and to whom I always thought I was very close); Matt, with whom I felt, while I was growing up, an obscure but ferocious competitiveness, and to whom, in a moment of fury, I once did something physically very cruel—Matt called me to say he’d stopped by a big international gathering of Holocaust survivors in Washington, D.C., where he lives. Matt is a photographer, so perhaps he was shooting a story about the convention; I don’t know, I can’t remember. At any rate he called me up to say that at this gathering he had run into someone who said he had known Shmiel Jäger.

What
? I said.

Not
Uncle
Shmiel, Matt said, hurriedly. He then related what this man at the Holocaust survivors’ convention had told him: that the Shmiel Jäger he’d once known had been born with another name, but during the war, when he’d joined a band of partisans operating near Lwów, he’d taken the name Shmiel Jäger since, for safety’s sake, these partisans would sometimes take the names of dead men they had known.

I listened and thought,
The oldest daughter was with the partisaner in the hills and died with them. Onkel Schmil and 1 daughter Fridka the Germans killed them 1944 in Bolechow
.

So you never know. It was for this reason that I filled out the Red Cross forms, not hoping for much, and gave them to the person at the desk, and
went home that day. About four months later I received a thick envelope in the mail from the Red Cross. My hands were shaking as I tore open the packet. Immediately, however, I saw that much of the bulk was due to the fact that the Red Cross was returning to me copies of the six forms I’d filled out. On a seventh piece of paper was a letter stating that there was no known information about the fates of Ester Jäger, Lorka Jäger, Frydka Jäger, Ruchatz (as I still thought) Jäger, or Bronia Jäger, inhabitants of the Polish town of Bolechow.

With respect to Shmiel Jäger, the letter concluded, his case was considered to be “still open”…

F
OR THIS REASON, THEN,
I was eager to meet my friend’s mother, this Mrs. Begley who had lived so close to my dead uncle and aunt and cousins. It wasn’t that I thought I’d learn anything from her; I just wanted to have the experience of talking to someone of her vintage and provenance, since it seemed incredible to me that there might still exist anyone who’d even walked the same streets as they did. That is how accustomed I’d grown to thinking they and everyone of their era belonged utterly and irretrievably to the black, white, and gray world of the past.

And yet it is also true that when I heard about the existence of this very old woman, of Louis’s mother, I was flushed with a fantasy so intense that it almost shamed me, the way that adolescents are shamed. I wondered if it could be possible that, even though this woman had lived in Stryj and my relatives had lived in Bolechow, perhaps…they had met? Perhaps she might remember them? Shmiel’s wife, I knew (from where? I can’t remember), came from a Stryjer family. Her brother ran a photography studio there, and indeed one of Shmiel’s daughters would, as I found out only because of an accident after my grandfather died, end up working there, briefly; and so when Louis offered to introduce me to his formidable mother—or so I thought of her, having read some years previously Louis’s first book, which seemed to be a novelized account of how he and his mother survived the Nazi years, outwitted the Germans and the Ukrainians as my own family had not—when Louis offered to introduce us, my mind began to race. I envisioned a scene in, say, October 1938, when Louis (then Ludwik) and his mother might well have come into the Schneelicht Studio in Stryj to have a picture taken to celebrate this only child’s fifth birthday. I imagine Shmiel’s daughter, my mother’s first cousin Lorka, a tall, good-looking, somewhat aloof girl of seventeen, carefully taking Mrs. Begley’s coat as she enters the atelier (it will have a fur collar, I think,
since her husband, as an ancient Ukrainian woman would recall to me on a street corner sixty years later,
was the biggest doctor in town
), and, her natural reserve dissolving, saying something charming to the little boy, who is wearing a woolen cap from beneath which strands of his fair hair, which may or may not help save his life later on, escape. My fantasy is that the sudden warming of this serious-looking girl makes an impression on the Mrs. Begley of 1938—she is herself a serious and deeply shrewd woman—and because of that impression, Mrs. Begley will remember her, remember the murdered girl Lorka Jäger, remember her so many years later and in that way will help me rescue her.

But what happened was this:

I finally met Mrs. Begley for the first time in 1999, at a reception for one of Louis’s sons, who is a painter. The party, which was held in an upstairs room at an impressive-looking uptown gallery in New York City, was noisy, and Mrs. Begley was sitting, very erect, with an expression that mixed a grandmother’s prideful pleasure and a deaf person’s isolated irritation—she had a bad enough time hearing in general, she told me soon after we met, without all that
noise
—in a chair at the back of the room.

So you had family there? she said to me after I’d taken her hand and crouched down to talk to her, slightly disoriented by the way in which she’d spoken, as if we’d been in the middle of a conversation, and not quite sure whether “there” meant eastern Poland or the Holocaust.

Yes, I replied, they lived in Bolechow.

BUH-leh-khuhv
is what I said. This Mrs. Begley had a long, intelligent face with a high, clear forehead, the kind of face a person of another place and generation would have described as
the face of a Rebecca,
a soulful beautiful Jewish woman’s face; crowned by an immaculate coif of pure white hair, it was dominated by a tenacious, wry, covert gaze that was not diminished by the fact that it emanated from one eye alone; the other was opaque, and slightly hooded, and I never asked why. This gaze would hold your own and not let go during conversations, a gaze that even after I’d known her for a while struck me as unnerving, not least because it always seemed as if the eye, watchful, remote, assessing, was reacting not to the conversation that was taking place, but to a hidden conversation, a conversation about what happened to her and what she lost, a loss so great that she knew I would never understand, although she was sometimes willing to talk to me about it. On the night I met her, she was sitting there, elegant in a black velvet pantsuit, grasping the head of a walking stick in one hand and leaning toward me, partly to suggest she was interested
and partly because of the terrific noise, and when I said that my family was from Bolechow—
BUH-lehkhuv
—her good eye flickered with amusement, and for the first time she smiled.

What,
BUH-lekhuhv
? she said, disdainfully.

The first word sounded like
vawt
.