The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (77 page)

That is when I realized they were still showing movies there.

Perhaps because I was enjoying my knowledge, enjoying the confidence that my maps and interviews had given me, and perhaps, simply, because of the beautiful weather, I was in a buoyant mood. The contrast between this confident and sunny visit and the one we’d made in 2001 couldn’t have been greater. For once, I told myself, I’d found exactly what I was looking for.

In a matter of only a few minutes, it began to be clear I was wrong.

I
T STARTED BECAUSE
we couldn’t find the one thing I’d wanted more than anything else to find, which was Shmiel’s house. In Australia, Boris Goldsmith had told us that Shmiel hadn’t lived in the house that he and his siblings had been born in, House Number 141, the address given on those hundred certificates of birth and death Alex had sent me years ago, but had moved in the Thirties to a big new house on Dlugosa Street. Over time, Jack and the others, in Australia and Europe and Israel, had confirmed this and had drawn maps for me pinpointing the location of the street—just across the street from the Little Park—and of the house itself, four houses down on the right as you enter the street. But four (and even five, and six) houses down the street that more or less corresponded to Dlugosa Street on Jack’s map, which was called Russka, there was an enormous, very long and very ancient-looking barn that occupied what looked like several lots. It seemed clear there had never been a house there. We started wandering down the street, farther away from the Little Park. This ambling around the town was, I had to admit, a lot more pleasant than it had been before, when Andrew and Matt and Jen
and I had trudged through the rain and the mud. It wasn’t yet eleven in the morning, and the air was already quite warm. Our footsteps crunched aridly in the dirt and gravel of the street. Every house, it seemed, had a long back garden filled with apple and plum and quince trees. Dogs barked lazily. Alex stopped a woman, a young woman, and asked whether she knew of some old person who lived nearby who could tell us the location of the street that was once called
Dlugosa.
They chatted for a minute, and Alex made a motion with his arm, beckoning for me and Froma to turn back. We must walk this way, back toward the park, he said. There is an old man who lives in the beginning of the street.

The woman led us to the house and pointed. A thickset man with a Slavic face and a full head of white hair combed straight away from a low, suntanned forehead was sitting in a kind of motorized wheelchair in the yard in front of the house; still, when he saw us coming he rose to his feet. He and Alex started talking. He didn’t seem to know anything about Dlugosa Street. Alex gave a quick wink, and had started to tilt his head to the side with a
let’s get out of here
gesture—a tic I’d come to recognize as his sign that we were wasting our time and should be moving on—when the old man in the chair loudly saluted someone who was coming down the street from the direction we’d just come from. We turned to look.
Stepan
, the old man said. This Stepan ambled up to us and shook hands firmly with everyone. He had on a blue-and-gray-plaid workman’s shirt and an old-fashioned cap. When he spoke, you could hear the sound of a faint sloshing, almost a buzzing. He had no front teeth, which did not prevent him from smiling very often. His skin was as brown and weathered as saddle leather.

Alex repeated what he’d just told the other man. We were looking for Dlugosa Street, he said. We were looking for the house of this American’s great-uncle, a Jew who had lived in Bolekhiv, in Bolechow, before the war. Shmiel Jäger.

Jäger!
Stepan exclaimed. He started talking rapidly to Alex.

Alex, whose broad face was already red from the sun and beaded with perspiration, beamed more brightly. He looked at me and said, He says his father was a driver for Shmiel Jäger!

Oh
really
? I said. But here, I realized, was another contrast between 2001 and 2005. In 2001, Jen and I had lowered our heads and wept simply because we’d found someone who’d known of Shmiel and his family, without actually knowing them: that’s how impossible it had seemed, then, that there might still be people in the world who could remember them. But now I’d talked to
so many people, people who really knew them. This is why I listened to what Stepan had to say with interest, but not excitement.

Jäger, tak
, Stepan was saying. As he talked, Alex gave a running translation.

Jäger had a truck. In this truck he would move goods between Bolechow and Lwów. His father would drive the truck. And he, Jäger, would sometimes tell the father to take a couple of horses to help him to pull the truck up a hill, because sometimes it was very overloaded and sometimes would get stuck! Very big horses, German horses, the kind they used to use in the war to pull cannons.

Oh really? I said again. By this time a few other people had gathered around to hear what was going on: a middle-aged woman in a housedress, and two younger women in jeans and tight-fitting T-shirts.

They were, in fact, curious about us.

He used to go to Lwów, Alex went on, translating for Stepan, and if something broke he would be very upset, it would be ruined! He had his shop somewhere near the center, a place where three new houses were built since. Not far from the Ratusz, opposite the Magistrat. Across the street.

Yes, I said.

And so Stepan stood there talking for a while, and told us many things. He remembered the Szymanskis, a Polish family. They had a house with a kind of tavern inside, you could eat good sausages there. The house was now gone. He knew nothing more about the Szymanskis. He remembered the Grünschlags; they had a lumber store. He remembered a family called Zimmerman. He and the other old man remembered the Ellenbogens; they had a shop on the Rynek. He remembered some Jews who had been taken to Siberia in 1940: Landes. He remembered the names of people I’d never heard of: Blumenthal, Kelhoffer. He remembered Eli Rosenberg, who had returned to Bolechow and lived there long after the war was over. He remembered that during the Occupation, all the Jews were killed. He remembered certain specific things from the war years, too, for instance the day he had been helping his father with some job not far from the Rynek and shooting had erupted. Bullets everywhere,
pchoo! pchoo! pchoo!
Stepan said, making little bullet noises.
Down! Down!
his father had shouted at him, and they lay on the grass to avoid the bullets. Who was being shot? we asked. Probably Jews, he said. He saw once how the Jews were being led down the road as Nazis with rolled-up sleeves stood with machine guns. And a couple of local guys (Alex translated), who were not in uniform, were helping them. There was also a Jewish police militia organized by the Nazis, and the Jewish police knew everybody.
So these Jews were led to the place at the end of the town, near Taniawa. Yes, he knew where Taniawa was, his father was one of the men who had helped to make the monument. They used to mow grass up there.

Good, I said, we’re going there. I’d heard that it was so overgrown that it was impossible to find anymore; clearly this Stepan was the ideal person to help us find it. (And we did go there, later that day, after an hour’s search in a forest so opulent with chest-high wildflowers that being there was like being in a fairy tale, and I turned to Alex and said, the way my mother would have said it, But it’s so
beautiful,
this place!, and he smiled grimly and said, It was
always
in a beautiful place. Finally, with the help of a youngish man who lived nearby—not so young, though, that he was too young to have had a father who’d been there on the day it happened, and had gone home to tell his children about the rows and rows of Jews who’d been lined up there and shot—with his help we found it and we stood there by the little concrete obelisks, this man and Alex and Froma and Stepan and I, and there was a moment of silence. I felt a little bit foolish. Then I took out the enlargement of the picture of Ruchele and said, I’m not sure, but I think we just need to think for a moment about this girl, a sixteen-year-old girl. Her life. And this is where she died, in this place, right here. I passed around the picture, and everyone took it in turn and looked at it and nodded sadly. Then we left.)

So Stepan stood there in Russka Street and as we encircled him he told us what he remembered. Froma wanted to know what the feelings of the Ukrainians had been during the occupation. Everyone was always afraid, Stepan said, and at that moment the other man, the man with the fierce face and the mane of white hair, who had remained silent throughout our conversation, stepped up. Of course everyone was afraid, he said. Then he told a story. A Ukrainian named Medvid—it means “bear”—had hidden a Jewish family. They were discovered, and the Nazis came and killed not only this man, Medvid, and his entire family, hanged them all, including small children, but they also killed everyone in the whole area whose name was Medvid.

German logic,
I could hear Jack saying. That order, that surface formality with no rational or moral content.

The old man went on. So after that, he said, nobody even tried to help anymore. Or almost nobody.

I thought of Ciszko Szymanski. I thought of all the survivors I’d talked to, nearly all of whom had been hidden by Ukrainians. I thought of the Szedlak woman, whoever she had been. For some strange reason, people had, in fact, continued helping. When Alex, of his own accord, asked Stepan whether he
knew stories of people who had turned in Jews to the authorities, Stepan said, I don’t know people like that. There were good people, and there were bad people. I listened and thought, Yes. There were Szymanski and Szedlak; and there were the pitchforks, there was the neighbor who betrayed them. When all is said and done, it was as simple, and as mysterious, as that.

In the end we talked for about forty minutes, standing there in the sun as Alex got redder and redder. The one thing that nobody seemed to know was exactly where Dlugosa Street was. Stepan scratched his chin and frowned, then shook his head.
Dlugosa Dlugosa Dlugosa.
No. But he could tell us, however, that during the Stalin years, everyone who lived in the street on which we were now standing, on Russka Street, was deported to Siberia because they had houses with tin roofs, and tin roofs meant that you were bourgeois, counterrevolutionary. His own family, he added with the broad, cavernous smile of a toddler, had been spared when this irrational (but, we knew, by no means uncommonly irrational) decimation took place, because their house had a roof made of thatch: a proletarian roof.

He talked and we listened. He said something to Alex, who turned to us and said, He said you should talk to a woman who lives in the…the German Colony—?

Yes, I said, I knew about it, it was up past the bridge. Jack had told me.

—the German Colony, her brother was also a driver for Shmiel, maybe she knows more.

OK, I said.

And he says even more you should talk to a very old man named Prokopiv, he works in the church now. He is so old, maybe he will know more than anyone.

OK, I said.

Do you want to go there? Alex asked. He knew we’d come here today for a specific purpose, to have the experience I needed to write about: to see the places about which I now knew so much, to walk, as much as anyone today can do so, in their steps. He knew, because we’d e-mailed and talked to each other so much over the past years, and knew me so well at this point, that I didn’t want to spend time culling stories that were, by this point, stories of a variety with which I was by now familiar, stories I already knew.

No, I said, it’s OK, why not? I thought to myself, These stories were charming: the dray horses, the stuck truck. A few more couldn’t hurt.

We all got in the blue car, Alex and Froma and Stepan and I, and drove to Prokopiv’s house.

If only because of the magnitude of the punishment that they suffer, it is curious that the sin for which the inhabitants of the luxurious cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are exterminated is never actually named, much less described in detail in
parashat Vayeira
. Although there is, as we’ve seen, a strong implication that the sin is that of sexual transgression, involving practices well outside of the famous proscriptions given in Leviticus, a biblical text with which we are not concerned here, there is really nothing in the text that says why the cities must be destroyed: God merely announces to Abraham, more or less out of the blue, that the “outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah has become very great,” and that their sin—unnamed—is “very grave.” In defense of God, whose taste for total annihilation as well as for creation has by this point been well established in Genesis, Rashi lingers over the fact that God then announces that he will “descend” to take a look at the cities of the plain, in order to make sure that the “outcry” he has heard is in fact accurate. “This,” the French sage declares, “has taught judges not to issue a verdict in capital cases except through seeing [them],” which is an attractive thought, although it is probably fair to say that modern legal intellects are more likely to linger over the fact that in this case, the condemned don’t seem to have been informed of the charges against them—charges that, at least in the text that we have, are neither named nor, indeed, ever proved, which is worrisome when the accused is an entire population.

There then ensues one of the strangest exchanges in the Torah’s vast catalog of prickly dialogues between patriarchs and the Deity himself. As God’s destructive angels head off to the evil cities, Abraham confronts God with a concern that any contemporary reader is likely to have as well. What worries Abraham is what has worried some commentators at other points when contemplating the wholesale ruthlessness of God’s punishments (as, for instance, in the passage in
Noach
that raises the faint possibility that innocents—children, say—might be drowned by the Flood): What if there are blameless people living in the cities that God has destined for inescapable extermination—as, given the magnitude of the obliteration, there are likely to be? What if, say, even fifty innocent people lived among the wicked of Sodom and Gomorrah? (Fifty, as we know—like forty-eight—being but a tiny fraction when you consider the population of an entire city.) Would it not, Abraham argues, be a sacrilege unto God himself to punish the innocent along with the wicked? Would it not be unjust? Should the judge of all the earth commit an injustice?