The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (78 page)

God readily takes his prophet’s point, and assures him that if there were only fifty good men in Sodom, he would spare the entire place (“the entire place,” as Rashi pauses to explain, eager as he is to suggest that God is being unnecessarily generous, refers not only to Sodom but to the other cities of the plain, since Sodom is a “metropolis”). Perhaps worried by God’s swift reply—nobody who has ever bargained feels safe when the other party agrees too readily to his terms—Abraham squeezes his Creator a bit, and tries to get him down to forty-five: would God spare Sodom (and the whole place), he asks,
if there were only forty-five righteous people there? God agrees: forty-five. And so they continue, from forty-five to forty, from forty to thirty, from thirty to twenty, from twenty to ten. Abraham desists from his aggressive bargaining only after he gets God to promise that he won’t destroy the greater Sodom area even if there are but ten righteous people in it. In the end the cities are destroyed, the luxuriant and decadent cities of the East, with all their people, the young, the old, the sick, the lame, even the newborn infant at his mother’s breast, presumably, although here again the text is reticent with details, as unwilling to describe the punished as it was to describe the crime.

In a way, this story is irresistible to those who feel a lingering unease after the story of the Flood, with its faint suggestion that precisely that which Abraham later fears, the slaughter of the innocent along with the righteous, took place then. And yet for me, the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah—or rather, the deaths of the men, women, and children of those two cities, since I have learned by now that it is too easy to say that this or that city has been destroyed, when what you really mean is that all the people in the city have been killed—is troubling for another reason. Although I admire Abraham’s acuity in the marketplace, I have always wondered why he should have stopped at the number ten. Friedman has almost nothing to say on the subject, and simply accepts God’s verdict: “Since God knows the situation and its necessary outcome, why speak?” Rashi explains, rather ingeniously alluding to the Flood narrative, which is the prototype of this story, why ten is the number of each successive decrement in the bargaining process. (Because the number of those rescued in Noah’s ark was eight, and eight plus Abraham plus God equals ten.) But neither commentator seems much troubled by the question that troubles me so much, which is this: Even if there were fewer than ten good Sodomites—even if, let’s say, there were only one righteous person in the whole vast metropolis—wouldn’t it be unjust to kill him along with the guilty? Or even this: As long as there is one good inhabitant of the country of the wicked, can we say that the entire nation is guilty?

T
HERE WAS NOBODY
home at old Prokopiv’s place, so after dropping Stepan at home, where his irate wife was waiting on the porch, hands on hips, wondering where he’d been all morning, we drove to the German Colony and found the address he’d given us for Mrs. Latyk, the old woman whose brother had worked for Uncle Shmiel.

As he likes to do, Alex knocked on a window rather than the door and in Ukrainian called out, Is anybody home? After a minute or two, a white-haired woman appeared at the chain-link gate that led to the tidy little backyard. Her deeply lined but animated face, the broad, surprisingly mobile features, the frank nose with its ski-slope tip, the strong white hair pulled carelessly back into a lit
tle bun, the vigorous, large hands that flapped and waved as she walked slowly to the gate, even the intense cornflower blue of her thin cotton housedress—all these projected a kind of solid trustworthiness. Alex talked to her briefly and at some point said
Shmiel Jäger,
and she nodded vigorously and said
Tak, tak,
and beckoned for us to come through the gate. As she motioned to us to sit down on some plastic chairs in a corner of her little shaded yard, she told us she had been born in 1919. No, she said, Stepan had been wrong: it was her uncle, she said, who’d been Shmiel’s driver, not her brother. But yes, of course she remembered Shmiel Jäger. She didn’t see him often herself, and so didn’t remember the children—she thought there might have been a daughter—but sure, she remembered Jäger, he had a big truck. His drivers would drive this truck to Lwów and pick up all sorts of goods there, clothes and food and fruit—

Strawberries,
I thought—

—and other things, and transport them to various places…

And so it went. We talked for about half an hour, and she shared with us what memories she had: homely things, everyday things. Things we’d heard. She knew that Jäger had lived somewhere near the Rynek, but the house wasn’t there anymore; another house had been built on the site where his had been. Yes, her uncle had liked working for Jäger, she said. And Jäger had
loved
her uncle! They were close, not just a man and his worker. Jäger was known as a nice man, a generous man. People liked him. Her uncle’s name? Stanislaw Latyk.
Stas,
she said. His children had long ago moved to America; if we wanted, she would give us their names and addresses. The son in particular, she thought, would remember a lot. I said yes, that would be nice, and thought to myself, Maybe they’d have charming stories to tell, too. (“And Jäger
loved
our father!”) She brought out a piece of paper, and as I copied the address, she showed us snapshots of her uncle, the whole family. I promised I would call her cousins in the States when we got home, and soon after this, when we had shaken her firm hand warmly, we walked back to the Passat. Alex’s instinct was right: we shouldn’t waste too much more time on these interviews.

As it happened, I did phone the children of Stas Latyk a few weeks after we got back from that trip, although the stories they told me were not charming. When I talked to Lydia, the daughter, who now lives near New Haven, she gladly lingered over what memories she could summon, trying to help in whatever way she could. Yes, sure, she remembered Shmiel Jäger, she said: her father had been very friendly with him, they were close. During the war, she added, her father had his own big truck—he’d stopped working for Shmiel and gone into business for himself during the Thirties—and had somehow
created a kind of hiding place out of one of this truck’s huge fuel tanks, and in this hiding place he had smuggled Jews to safe spots, to other hiding places. (After I told her what I knew by then about Shmiel’s fate, she said it may well have been her father who’d taken him to the Polish schoolteacher’s house.) This, she added, had to have been before the day on which, during a roundup of Jews, her father had seen a German soldier brutally dragging a woman away from her child, and had gone up to this soldier and struck him in the face and said,
Shame on you.
For that, Stas was taken to a Gestapo cell and beaten for two days. When he finally came home, Lydia said, he was so unrecognizable that her mother fainted. Soon after that, fearing for his life, Stas Latyk had disappeared into the forest. Lydia and her mother and brother Mikhailo found out later that he’d joined up with the Russians at some point and returned after the war to Bolekhiv, but by then the rest of the family was in America, and for one reason or another, because of the way the world was then, because of other things, they never saw him again.

I also called Michael Latyk, as Stas’s son Mikhailo is now called. He lives in Texas. He was very warm when I rang him out of the blue the day after I spoke to his sister, and said, yes, of course he’d be happy to share his memories of his father, the war, anything. He confirmed what Lydia had told me about his father’s close friendship with Shmiel, adding only that, as he recalled quite clearly, the two men had often engaged in impromptu wrestling matches.

Wrestling matches?
I couldn’t wait to tell my mother.

What else did he remember? I asked. It was hard for him, he said: he was a boy, it was a very bad time, he saw terrible things. He was part of the crowd that gathered around the Dom Katolicki that night in October, he said: he had seen people being lined up against the wall and shot. There was the time one June day he’d been outside, picking and eating cherries off a tree, when suddenly he heard the sound of shooting and looked up to see a group of people being shot right there in the open. After that, he said, he hadn’t been able to eat for three days. He had seen other things. A woman, six or seven months pregnant, wounded, asking for a doctor, a doctor. And then there was the time when, after one of the big
Aktionen
, he’d seen a boy of about his own age who’d been shot in the the right shoulder during the roundup—
No, wait,
it was the left shoulder, he could see it in his mind’s eye—but had somehow survived. He remembered seeing this boy about four days later, sitting at the fence of a
Lager.
He was sitting under the fence, Michael recalled, all swollen with hunger, and he was taking—

His voice grew ragged and he began to weep. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, he said. I can’t tell this.

It’s OK, I said, the way I sometimes talk to my children. Just take your time, take a deep breath.

He took a breath and said, He was taking.

He broke down again. I could not imagine what the outcome of this story was going to be, but as I sat at my desk with the phone in my hand I realized that I was squeezing the receiver so hard my hands were wet.

Finally Michael Latyk in Texas in August 2005 took a deep breath and said, He was sitting all swollen with hunger, sitting by the fence, and he was taking the lice off his own body and eating them.

Then he said: I’m sorry, I can’t talk about these things anymore.

I nodded and then remembered I was on the phone. Yes, I said quietly, OK, you’ve been so helpful, I appreciate so much what you’ve shared with me, I and my family appreciate it—

Suddenly he interrupted me. But there’s one more thing I have to tell you, Michael said. You know that expression, “Eat a Balanced Diet”? Well, for the rest of my life, every time I hear that expression, I think of
that.

I had kept my promise to Mrs. Latyk, and had called her cousins in the States.

W
E FOUND THE
old man Prokopiv just in time. As we pulled up in front of his house, he was walking briskly away from his front door toward town—on the way, as he later told us, to his job at the church, where he tidied up every day. The house was large and handsome, a generous wooden structure with a steeply pitched tin roof. It was painted brick red, and the frames of the windows were white. The impression it gave of being a barn was enhanced by the fact that it stood a little to the side of the street in the middle of a profusion of apple trees, and altogether it looked like something you might come across during a pleasant day of driving in the countryside. Prokopiv himself, whose first name was Vasyl, gave no hint of being ninety. His frame was tall and quite solid, and he had a handsome, oval head and a firm-fleshed face, almost completely unlined, except for two deep laugh lines on either side of his wide mouth. His puckish nose, like that of Mrs. Latyk, ended in a little ski jump, which gave him an incongruously boyish quality. Like Josef Adler on the day I’d met him, he was wearing a tan shirt with epaulettes. He looked about seventy. His handshake was crushing.

Because Prokopiv was clearly on his way to an appointment that he wanted to keep, Alex kept the introduction short. He said we were Americans, looking for people who may have known Jägers from Bolechow.

Prokopiv brought his left hand to his face as if in contemplation and spoke for a minute in Ukrainian.

He doesn’t remember Jägers, Alex said.

What with the unexpected interviews with Stepan and Mrs. Latyk, and the hour we’d spent looking for Taniawa, it had been a long day by this point. The sun was hot. A little hastily, I said, No? OK.

Prokopiv said something else to Alex, which from its intonation I knew was a question. I was pretty sure I heard the word
zhid:
Jew.

Alex said
Tak,
Yes, and added a sentence, at which point Prokopiv threw back his handsome head and laughed, a laugh of recognition.

Alex said, I told him about the trucks, then he remembered immediately.
Tak tak.
Yes yes. He remembers. Shmiel Jäger. He was living in Russki Bolechow. He doesn’t know where the street was. He knew the name, he didn’t know them himself.

I said, OK, that’s nice. Then I asked him to ask Prokopiv, who I knew was eager to get to church, if he recognized some other names: Szymanski, Grünschlag, Ellenbogen. He and Alex talked for a minute, and Alex again said, Yes, he knew those names. It was a small town. Everyone knew who everybody was.

OK, I said, so he remembers some names.

Alex nodded and made the
Let’s leave
face, the
We’re not going to get anything else from him
face. Yes, he said. All right then.

We thanked Prokopiv and he started on his way, and Alex and I turned toward the car.

Wait,
Froma said.