The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (70 page)

T
HEY ARRIVED AT
Ashgabat in the evening. Here again, even this far, there were refugees everywhere: Ukrainians, White Russians. At the station people asked where they were going, might they be able to be of assistance; but of course Bumo and Ignacy knew that they couldn’t reveal that they wanted to pass through Iran to Palestine. And so they said nothing. Ashgabat was only fourteen kilometers from the Iranian border.

It was now early in 1942. As the two Bolechow boys hovered tantalizingly close to the land of the Peacock Throne, terrified even to mention where they yearned to go, a nineteen-year-old girl who would grow up to be Meg Grossbard laid eyes on Lorka Jäger for the last time at the home of their mutual friend Dusia Zimmerman, who herself, in time, would come to know something about the wisdom of total discretion.

In Ashgabat, news of the larger world was scarce. Soviet radio was useless propaganda, and listening to the BBC was a dangerous crime. The two boys loitered and eventually found a place to stay. As it happened, the day after they found lodgings they met somebody from Poland who was working in a barbershop. He had some information. Ashgabat, this Polish man said, was closed because of its proximity to the Iranian border; there was no use trying to go any farther. Bumo himself had seen the soldiers regularly patrolling the borders, but still he and Ignacy tried. They started walking from Ashgabat toward Iran. After a few hours, a border patrol stopped them. They were told that
they had to turn back; surprisingly, they were treated rather gently. The border soldiers bought tickets for the two Bolechow boys and said to them, You are not allowed to be here.

So they kept going. Throughout the year of 1942, the boys made their way northeast, cutting through the width of Turkmenistan, through the Kara-Kum Desert and across the Amu Darya River into Uzbekistan. At around the time Bumo Kulberg and Ignacy Taub were crossing the Amu Darya, Ester Jäger and her thirteen-year-old daughter Bronia were being shoved into the cattle car that would take them to Belzec, where they would expire in a gas chamber and where, immediately after their deaths, the mouths, vaginas, and rectums of their corpses would be pried open and searched for valuables before the bodies were thrown in a pit, only to be exhumed months later—at about the time that Bumo and Ignacy were ogling the sights of the legendary Silk Road city of Samarkand—and incinerated, after it was felt that this was a more advisable means of disposal for those two bodies and the six hundred thousand other Jewish bodies that had been buried along with them.

A few months later Bumo and Ignacy were nearing Tashkent, and it was at about this time that the young woman who was born Chaya Heller but who, because of the courageous goodness of a priest in Lublin, Poland, would one day be called Anna Heller Stern, turned to her school friend Lorka Jäger and said,
Come, give me a kiss, who knows when we will see each other again?

By the beginning of 1943, when the
W
’s were liquidated in Bolechow, Ester and Bronia’s onetime neighbors were in Tashkent, in the far eastern corner of Uzbekistan. At the time, it was the largest city in Central Asia, a city of two million people. Some time later, around the time the
R
’s were being liquidated, Bumo, traveling alone, reached Frunze—the present-day Bishkek—the capital of Kyrgyzstan.

It was very interesting! Adam exclaimed. He grinned modestly, as if to say, Anyone would have done the same. He said, I was twenty-one years old!

Did he ever think of how amazing all this was while it was happening? I asked.

Alma talked to her father. No, she said. He says it was his fate.

Wait,
Matt said. Why was Bumo traveling
alone
in Frunze?

Because, he explained, he and Ignacy, like all the other travelers and refugees who surged through the cities of Central Asia during the war, were in the habit of stopping in the bazaar of each city and town they passed through, to ask for news of the world and look for the friendly faces of foreigners like
themselves. And in one of these bazaars, in one of these places, Ignacy Taub had run into his family from Bolechow.

This is a true story, Adam said.

I didn’t doubt that it was. I thought of the man in the elevator in Prague, on the day Froma and I came back from Theresienstadt, who had turned to us and said, out of the blue,
Yes, I was in Babi Yar
. The woman in Beth Hatefutsoth who had turned out to be Yona. The woman in a flea market in New York City who, one summer day as she was trying to sell me a piece of fabric, cocked her head to one side and suddenly said to me, You lost someone in the Holocaust, didn’t you? I thought of Shlomo, asking me in the car on the way to Beer Sheva, Have you ever heard from a Bolechower, a famous American journalist called Krauthammer? and my saying No, I had only heard from a famous American editor named Wieseltier; and then Yona turning to me and saying her name was
Wieseltier
. Maybe there were no coincidences, I thought. Or perhaps it was just a statistical issue. Maybe there were so many Jewish ghosts that you were bound, in the end, to run into one.

After he said good-bye to Ignacy, in this bazaar in Kyrgyzstan, Adam said, he met two people from Bolechow. He didn’t remember in which city he said good-bye to Ignacy, but it was midway through 1943, which is to say when the last of the Jews of Bolechow were being liquidated; and he knew it was at the Chinese border. Another way of putting this is to say that by the time that Bumo Kulberg, a Jewish youth from a small town in Poland, reached China, there were no Jews left in Bolechow, apart from those who were living in cellars and attics and haylofts and holes dug into forest floors. Among these hidden Jews, at least for a little while, were, we think, Shmiel and Frydka Jäger.

With his two new Bolechower friends—one of whom, I may as well mention, was named Naphtali Krauthammer—Bumo had heard that at some distance from where they then were there was a camp for refugees from Poland, located in a place on the northern border of Uzbekistan called Tokmok. At this point Bumo had decided that he wanted to make contact with Poles, because now, after his original plan to reach Palestine had been thwarted, he was eager to find out where he could find the Anders Army, the Polish battalion that had been formed in 1941, after the Germans turned on the Soviet Union and Stalin realized that the many Poles who were then languishing in Soviet jails would be put to better use fighting Germans. The exploits of this unit were already legendary, and Bumo had heard that a captain in the Tokmok refugee camp was planning to go to Iran to join the Anders Army.

Travel from Frunze to Tokmok was, however, difficult. There were no easy roads, and the terrain was mountainous; some peaks were as high as five or six thousand meters. From one dwelling to another, the grown-up Bumo recalled, it was several kilometers. They weren’t even houses: they were
yurts,
the portable dwellings, made of felt and saplings, long used by the nomads of the Central Asian steppes. As Bumo and Naphtali and Abraham walked toward Tokmok there was a violent sandstorm, and they were forced to take refuge in a
yurt
inhabited by a young couple with a small child. These kindly local people offered food to the three strange-looking men: a kind of pastalike dough that had been filled with lamb. It was delicious.

At about the time that Bumo was relishing this savory meal, Ciszko Szymanski, as I later found out, was shouting,
If you kill her, then you should kill me, too!

And they did.

T
HE YOUNG COUPLE
offered the three men a place to sleep. They gave them mattresslike rolls to put next to the oven: the place of honor. It was dreadfully hot during the day, but bitter cold at night. The next day the Uzbek nomads showed them the way they needed to go: across a river called Chu. Off they went. When they came to the place it was filled with other refugees. The three Bolechow men found employment with a veterinarian who lived in a beautiful house with a garden and a sauna. A garden! They worked in the garden. Soon it became clear that the rumor they’d heard about the captain who could lead them to the Anders Army was empty. Although the three of them lived relatively well and had plenty of food to eat, a typhus epidemic broke out in the camp. A quarantine was imposed. After the quarantine was lifted, the three decided to leave. They went to another place they’d heard of, called Antonufka, where there was another camp for Poles. When they arrived, it was clear that the camp was run on a military model. There were military tents. The people who took refuge there earned their keep by doing hard work in stone quarries. Discipline was strict: every morning there was a reveille. Bumo soon realized that here, too, there seemed to be little chance of finding someone who could help him make contact with the Anders Army. The people who ran the camp said that anyone who wanted to work had permission to return to Frunze; it was all right to leave. So Bumo went back to Frunze and got work in a factory that manufactured farm equipment. The boss of the company was a lawyer from Kraków named Ravner. He was married to a beautiful Uzbek woman and with her had had two children.

As Adam Kulberg told this story on a snowy night early in 2004 in Den
mark, I thought of another story of an unlikely marriage I’d once heard, about that Jew named Shmiel Jäger from Dolina who’d married an Uzbek woman and had children with her who, as far as anyone knows, still live in Uzbekistan with their children and grandchildren, all of whom have a certain gene that, most likely, is a gene remotely connected to certain genes that I and my brothers and sister all have.

It was here, in Frunze, that Bumo became ill for the first time. Realizing one night that he probably had appendicitis, he walked to the hospital, where an emergency surgery was performed on him. Because supplies were limited, Bumo received only a local anesthetic for this procedure, which is why he was able to watch as they cut him open and removed his bursting appendix. As he went into the operating room Bumo entrusted his most valuable possessions—most valuable not merely because they were, at that point, his only possessions—to a kindly nurse who had offered to take care of them if anything happened to him. For it was still true that even now, he talked to the photographs of his family every night. The kindly woman took the pictures and, as she promised she would, stored them carefully until he was well enough to leave. The woman was German, the wife of a Russian officer.

After he recovered, Bumo Kulberg was determined to find an army unit, any army unit, with which he could fight. With the other two men he began retracing his fantastic steps. From Frunze they journeyed westward, back to Tashkent. It was here that Bumo rested for a while. For ten months, he worked at a Soviet champagne factory in Tashkent.

A Soviet champagne factory in Tashkent?!
Matt and I both exclaimed at the same time, laughing. Well, why not? We had drunk Soviet champagne in Nina’s cramped living room in Bolechow as her husband had played “Yesterday” on his rickety piano, had drunk it and had been incredulous that there was even such a thing as Soviet champagne.