The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (79 page)

We turned back.

She said, Don’t you want to ask him something else?

I thought, Here we go again: the pushing, the reluctance to let go, the insistence on going back for one last look, one more question. I felt a twinge of exasperation, and not merely because I didn’t want to turn back. At Taniawa, there had been a little scene between Froma and Alex. When we finally reached the site of the mass grave, idyllic and remote, Froma had commented that the Germans would never have found this spot without the help of local Ukrainians. Ever since she and I had been in Vilnius together, and had visited the mass grave in the Ponar forest, with its hundred thousand Jews sleeping their unquiet sleep beneath the picnicking grounds, we had returned almost obsessively to the issue of local collaboration. Many times since then we had discussed the mechanics of the killing, which so often would not have been possible without the help of local people, the people who knew who the Jews were, where they lived, where the fields in the forests were. Many people think of the Holocaust and think,
Germans.
Just recently, at a bat mitzvah I attended in New York (a ceremony of which my grandfather would have disapproved, but then, time changes even traditions), someone who had heard about my search for what happened to Shmiel, my many trips abroad, came up to me and said, Doesn’t it make you feel uncomfortable around Germans? and I asked, You mean Germans in general? and then I laughed and shook my head and said, No, of course not; and then I added, And anyway, if I were the kind of person who thought that way, I’d be more afraid of Ukrainians than of Germans. Froma was particularly preoccupied with this issue, and at Taniawa she’d said, They never could have found this place without the Ukrainians, and Alex, who was hot and tired, had bristled a little and snapped back at Froma that what she had said was
impossible to know
—bristled not because he was a Ukrainian, since as a historian he is interested in facts, and is therefore acquainted with the stories of Ukrainian atrocities, just as he can tell you the facts of the great forced starvation, the Soviet soldiers who surrounded the towns and villages, one after another, and simply took out all the food and let the people die, which
eventually they did, after they had eaten the mice, and the rats, and finally one another. It was because Alex was interested in facts that he bristled and said, I’m sorry, but how do you
know
that, there’s just no evidence for that in
this
case, it was just an open field then, any place would have done, anybody driving down this
road
could have found a place like this or any other place, OK? It had been to quell this moment of tension that I’d spoken up, as we stood there in the green and leafy glade, and said,
I think we just need to think for a moment about this girl, a sixteen-year-old girl. Her life.

It was because I had this uneasy scene in mind, and because I was afraid that Froma was going to bring up something about Ukrainian collaboration, that I responded to her question about our wanting to ask Prokopiv
something else
by saying, firmly, No, that’s OK.

Froma persisted. Don’t you want to ask him what he knows about when they took them?

Hmmm? I said, not wanting to get into it. We knew what had happened, by now. And clearly this Prokopiv didn’t know my family. I thought it was time to finish up here, to take a few more pictures and leave.

What you asked the
others,
Froma went on. What happened when they took the Jews away?

Alex was perspiring heavily; a big man, he suffered more from the heat than we did. Even so, he repeated Froma’s question in Ukrainian. Prokopiv talked for a while and said, yes, he remembered one time when some Jews were taken to where the brick factory used to be and they themselves dug up pits in that place, and they killed them and buried them there. There was a memorial of some kind at that place. And others were killed in the cemetery.

Where’s this memorial? Froma asked.

He thinks it’s in the forest, Alex said after a brief exchange. The Germans took them to this club that there used to be here, they were taken to the movie theater and then they took them to that place and killed them.

It was clear they were talking about the first Aktion, about Taniawa. This was a waste of time.

OK, I said, let’s say thank you, and let’s go.

But Froma said, Does he know of any that were
hidden
? What she was interested in was this: As we had stood in front of the Dom Katolicki that morning, we’d encountered a diminutive and very old woman who, after she’d stopped briefly to greet Stepan, had begun to talk to us, and while she talked had said that long ago she’d helped to hide a little Jewish girl named Rita. Then the woman had burst into tears and said,
The Jews never did anything and they killed them all
anyway.
This had touched Froma, and it was clear that the story of Rita was much on her mind. So she said, now, Does he know of any that were hidden?

Alex, standing a few yards away with Prokopiv, gestured as if he couldn’t hear. Loudly, I repeated the question. Does he know of any who were
hidden
?

Alex relayed the question. Giving up, I moved away from the car and walked back to Prokopiv.

Prokopiv gave a tight little smile of assent. Hidden, he said. Yes, I know.

Motioning with his head in the direction of the next street over, the old man started talking again. I heard what I thought was the name
Kopernika.
Copernicus? My Ukrainian was clearly no better than my Polish.

Alex listened and then translated.

He said, In Kopernika Street there were two Polish women who were schoolteachers. One of them was hiding two Jews. The Jews were taken and the teachers were killed.

S
TANDING THERE, IN
the moment after old Prokopiv had said
two Polish women who were schoolteachers, one of them was hiding two Jews,
I understood for the first time in my life the expression
rooted to the ground.
I couldn’t move. My ears were ringing. I heard my voice echoing in my head when I finally spoke. It is only because my digital voice recorder continued to run as I stood there speechless that I know I said, But this is the—it’s the—

I tried to collect my thoughts. I said, Ask him was it a Polish
art
teacher? Because that’s who was hiding my uncle and his daughter, an art teacher from the school, ask him—

It occurred to me that I still hadn’t told Alex this part of the story. There was so much that we’d learned since I’d last seen him, so much for us to catch up on, and I’d been saving it all for the big dinner that he and Natalie were going to be hosting the next night, Saturday, after Lane arrived. I hadn’t told him all of what I’d learned, hadn’t yet told him about Frydka and Shmiel and Ciszko and Szedlak, because I didn’t think it would matter, on this trip, today.

Ask him, I had said, barely knowing what I was saying. Alex started talking to Prokopiv, and I cleared my throat and said, Does he remember the
name
of this teacher? There could have been two teachers, I thought, after all there had to have been more than one teacher in this town, maybe another one was also hiding Jews. Maybe it wasn’t the same one. Maybe it wasn’t them. I had to be sure.

Alex asked the question. Prokopiv listened and then nodded twice, vigorously, and smiled broadly. His teeth were small and square.

He said,
Tak tak.

He said,
Szedlakowa.

He said something else, one sentence.

Alex looked at me. He said to me, He says she was killed right in the yard of her house.

I stood there and said to the old man, as if the force of my emotion at that moment could transcend the language barrier:

That was my uncle and his daughter. It
was
.

In the months that have passed since that afternoon, Froma has told me that when she tells the story of what we found during that trip, tells it to other people, she describes me, at the moment when Prokopiv uttered the name
Szedlakowa,
as having
melted.
And it’s true that something snapped in me at that moment. I simply sank down and squatted there in the dust of the street and started to cry.

Partly it was this: the bizarre coincidence that of all the stories of
people who were hidden,
this man, whom we’d almost missed that day, whom we would never have talked to if we’d come five minutes later, whom we’d never have asked the right question if Froma hadn’t once again pushed, demanded one more look, this man knew only one story of Jews who’d been hidden, which turned out to be the one story I was interested in, the story I’d spent the past four years tracking down and piecing together.

And partly it was this: that for a long time it seemed that there could never be real confirmation of that story, because everyone who’d told it to me, in all the various versions that they had heard, had been absent when it happened. Now I was talking to a Ukrainian, not a Jew, which is to say, someone who was there when it happened. Suddenly, it seemed less like a story than a fact. I had hit bedrock.

I crouched on the quiet street with my hand over my wet eyes, and when I finally looked up Prokopiv had come closer and was looking at me with an expression of deep, almost fatherly sympathy, the way a man might look at a child who had hurt himself.

Aiiiii,
he said with a deep sigh.
Tak tak.
Yes yes. It felt like,
There there.

Froma and Alex were silent for a while. After a while Froma asked softly, Everyone knew of it? Everyone knew this story?

Prokopiv gave a firm nod. Yes, yes, Alex said. Everybody knew. He says everyone was talking about it right when it happened.

Right when it happened.
Not in 1946 in Katowice, not in 1950 in Israel, not in 2003 in Australia. It was this thought that reminded me that I had work to do, that I needed to get information now. My mind cleared, and I got to my feet.

I said, So he says there were
two
teachers? This was news to me.

The two Ukrainians talked for a while, the old man of ninety who had seen so much and the bearlike young man in his thirties who, for whatever mysterious reasons, taste or temperament or accident, had ended up devoting his working life to tracking the history of the Jews of Galicia. Alex said, Yes, these two teachers were two sisters, they were living together. And he thinks both of them were killed.

I asked, Does he remember what part of town these ladies lived in?

Alex talked to Prokopiv and then gave me an intense, private look.

He said, Sure he remembers. He will take us to the house, if we want.

The street was quiet. A little breeze ruffled the leaves of the apple trees.

I said, Yes. We want.

T
HE HOUSE THAT
had once belonged to the Szedlak sisters, a low, single-story bungalow not unlike many of the houses you see in Bolekhiv, looked deserted when Prokopiv pointed it out to us as we drove him to the church. We dropped him there with effusive thanks.

During the ride, Froma had told Alex to ask the old man if he remembered the name of the
betrayer
. I myself was feeling so overwhelmed with the discovery of the Szedlak house that it hadn’t occurred to me to ask. I couldn’t imagine discovering anything else; it had felt like enough. But Alex, who was, I could tell, deeply affected emotionally by what was happening, was as eager to pursue this tack as Froma was. He talked for a while with Prokopiv, who shook his head sadly.

He doesn’t know who betrayed them, Alex said as we drove the short way from the neighborhood of the Dom Katolicki to the Rynek, where the little gold-domed Ukrainian church stood, fifty paces from the house where my grandfather was born. Alex added, He says maybe
then
he knew. Yes, back then, people knew…. But it’s such a long time.

The thought that perhaps Prokopiv was protecting someone flashed briefly through my mind, and when Froma spoke I knew she was thinking the same thing. She said, Everything that happened, happened because someone, an individual, made a decision. She and I had talked about this a
great deal over the years. In Ponar she had expounded on a thought she’d framed before and would frame again: that the Holocaust is so big, the scale of it is so gigantic, so enormous, that it becomes easy to think of it as something mechanical. Anonymous. But everything that happened, happened because someone made a decision. To pull a trigger, to flip a switch, to close a cattle car door, to hide, to betray. It was with this consideration in mind—which to the record of historical facts, to the catalog of things that happened and could be witnessed, adds the invisible dimension of morality, of
judging
what happened—that she had asked
Who was the betrayer?
and had wondered, as I briefly had, whether Prokopiv’s inability to come up with a name that everyone had once known was the result of a moral decision of his own just then, perhaps a decision not to bring judgment down today on some ill and ancient neighbor, rather than the inevitable consequence of the passage of so many years.

We drove back to the Szedlak house. Prokopiv had told us that there had once been a nice veranda at the front. There was no veranda now. The house presented its long side to the quiet street, a blank stucco expanse punctuated by three modest windows. It looked inscrutable. The door, it seemed, was on the far side, which you reached by going through a chain-link gate and up a little walkway into a courtyard. Toward the back of the courtyard was a little outbuilding, its sloping roof made of the same corrugated metal that the house was covered with. It had a door and a little window. I looked at it and thought, Too obvious. In the walkway that led from the street to the courtyard, two dogs, a little black terrier and a big German shepherd, lay looking up at us. They did not look particularly friendly.