The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (83 page)

Alex approached the man and, heeding the old Russian woman’s words, shouted directly into the man’s face for a few minutes. Between the shouting, the icons, the smell of incense, and the music—and, now, the wild emotional let down of the information we’d just received—the whole thing started to feel like a farce, and Froma and Lane and I tried to repress an incredulous giggle. After a few minutes of shouting, Alex turned to me with his
let’s-get-out-of-here
expression. When we got outside into the relative quiet of the backyard, he said, This guy moved here in the 1970s, he doesn’t know
nothing.

So that was that. We started to walk toward the car. I was devastated: not two days ago I’d thought that I’d found the end of our story at last, and now it had vanished into smoke: the teacher’s house, the hiding place, the courtyard where they’d been shot.
Once there was a veranda in front, but now it’s gone.
It seemed that old Prokopiv wasn’t as clear in his mind as we’d thought.

And then, just as we were getting into the car, Froma said, Wait, he wants us. We turned around and looked toward the other house, and the young man was waving his arms and beckoning for us to come back. We walked back to
the house and he started talking to Alex. After a rapid exchange Alex brightened and said to us, He says that across the street on the other side is an old Polish woman, she has lived here all her life, she will know for sure the story, and which is the right house. She will
know.
He talked a little while longer to the young man, who pointed down the street and gave the address. The woman’s name was Latyk—a common name in these parts; she was no relation of the other Mrs. Latyk.

Again, the knocking on the window; again, the tentative shouted greeting. The house was large, white, and immaculate. Peering around the fence we could see a generous yard. Out of this yard, in a few moments, a small, solid-looking woman with thick white hair and a canny, round face appeared. She was wearing a thin gray robe that she clutched tight with one hand, and I think now that it was the fact that she wasn’t dressed for company that made her seem so wary as Alex explained what we were looking for. Almost immediately after he stopped talking her face relaxed and she nodded and smiled broadly.

She said,
Tak, tak! Tak. Tak, tak, tak!

She spoke rapidly to Alex in Polish. Alex said to us, She knows the story! She knows the story, she knows that there were two teachers who were hiding Jews. She said the names of these two sisters were—

He listened, and she said,
Pani Emilia i Pani…mmm…

She couldn’t remember the name of the other woman, it was clear. Emilia and who? While she frowned, trying to remember, Alex went on. One escaped, the other was killed.

This Mrs. Latyk suddenly said, Hela!
Emilia i Hela!
She said something quickly to Alex.

Hela was killed. Emilia escaped.

For the second time in three days I said, Does she remember their family name?

Alex asked, and Mrs. Latyk said, emphatically,
Szedlakowa.

Does she know the house? I asked. At least, I thought, we’ll know either way.

Alex said, She will show us precisely where it is, sure.

Froma and Lane and I said, Thank you!

It was at that point that Alex made all the introductions. Pani Janina Latyk. Pan Daniel Mendelsohn. Pani Froma Zeitlin. Pani Lane Montgomery.

The woman, now smiling and relaxed, started speaking again.

I heard her say,
Szymanski.

Wait, I said. Everybody was talking and I wanted quiet. Until now I had
wanted simply to know which, finally, was the right house. Now she had said
Szymanski.
It was clear that she could tell us more.

Wait, wait, wait, I shouted.

Everyone stopped talking and I said to Alex, What was she saying just now?

They talked again for a minute and Alex said, There was this guy who was helping Jews to find places to be hidden.

I said, And his name was?

Mrs. Latyk said,
Czesł
aw.

My heart started thudding. Old Prokopiv had told us about the house, had known that a teacher named Szedlak was hiding Jews there. Long ago, I had heard this story for the first time in a living room in Kfar Saba, and had wondered ever since how all the versions could possible be reconciled.
Ciszko was hiding her in his house. A Polish schoolteacher was hiding them both in her house.
Now we would see.

I said, Czesław who?

Mrs. Latyk said, Czesław—Ciszko,
Ciszko
!

The nickname. We all looked at one another. Again, Froma and Lane and Alex all started talking and asking questions at the same time. By now, they knew the stories as well as I did. It was exciting.

Wait,
I said. I was suddenly perspiring, and again I heard that faint echo in my ears. I said, more calmly, Look, I have to conduct this interview in a
very
specific way. We cannot feed her any information, we cannot tell her what we want to hear, we cannot tell her what we already know. This is the
last
time any of us will ever be in this place, and after what we just went through I want to leave here with something
definite.
So let’s just ask her what she knows and hear it out of her mouth. I want it to be
pure.

I turned to Alex and said, OK, she said Czesław, she said Ciszko, before that she said Szymanski. What does she know about him, why does she mention the name?

They talked for a minute. Alex said, Because
he
found the place for them to
hide.
And he was bringing food to them also.

Froma and I stared at each other. Another woman, middle-aged and pleasant-faced, appeared out of the house: Mrs. Latyk’s sister. The two women talked to Alex. He turned to me with a dubious expression. They are inviting you to the house, but I say that I’m sure we don’t want to bother them…

I gave him a severe look and said, I want to go. I think that if we were sit
ting down, it would be better. Tell her this is extremely important to me and my family.

Alex talked and the woman nodded and we all went in the house.

For the next forty-five minutes, she told us the story as she knew it, and it’s a story I can now tell although there’s no point telling it again here, since it’s a story the bits and pieces of which are already familiar to anyone who has read these pages. The difference is that as we listened to it coming from the lips of Mrs. Janina Latyk, a lifelong resident of Bolechow, a lifelong resident of Kopernika Street, a onetime neighbor of the sisters Szedlakowa, we all of us heard it for the first time from someone who was there, and who, because she was there, could tell us a story that accounted for all the bits and pieces that, until that day in July 2005, hadn’t quite been able to gel into a coherent narrative, a story with a beginning and a middle and an end.

What she told us was this: that she’d been born in Bolechow in 1928, which is why she was about fifteen on the day in 1943 when she came home from doing errands in the town center and everybody on the street was talking. What they were saying was this: their neighbor Hela had been discovered hiding Jews in her house. Everybody was talking! Mrs. Latyk said. Yes, there had been the two Szedlakowa sisters, but one of them, Emilia, had become afraid and had left town—gone, somebody said at the time, to Boryslaw. So when they were betrayed, it was Hela who was killed. She was hiding the Jews in a basement somewhere in her house, a place under the ground. And the boy Ciszko Szymanski, who had found for them this hiding place to begin with, was bringing them food every night from his father’s shop, he had a tannery but also a kind of shop in his house, people came there to buy meat, sausages. He loved this girl, this Jew, people said, so he found a hiding place for her and her father. But somebody saw him bringing the food every night to Szedlakowa’s place, and got suspicious, and this person—a neighbor, probably, she couldn’t remember—denounced him and Szedlakowa to the Gestapo. The Germans came and took the Jews to a spot by the end of the garden and shot them right there.

What exactly happened to Szymanski and Szedlakowa? we all asked. Jack Greene, ages ago by now, it seemed, had said he’d heard that they took him to a place in a field,
there,
and killed him. Now, Mrs. Latyk, who’d been there the day that it happened, said, He was killed in Stryj. And Hela was also taken to Stryj and they were hanged there together. But the Jews were shot on the spot.

Stryj, I thought: Mrs. Begley’s little provincial city. This small detail, which
I’d never heard before, seemed to me to be the absolute proof of authenticity. Jews were outside the law, you could just kill them, shoot them, anywhere. But disobedient Poles could be made examples of. They likely took them to Stryj to make some terrifying show of them there before the executions that were a foregone conclusion.

And that was the story. Now, all the pieces fit: Ciszko
and
Szedlak, the Szymanski house
and
the Polish schoolteacher’s house. It all made sense, now, and it was finally possible to see how what had really happened had, corrupted by distances both geographical and temporal—they weren’t right
there,
they’d heard it two or three or ten years
later
—metamorphosed into the stories, the many stories, that we had heard by now.

We sat and talked for a while more: about the war years, the terror people felt, the anguish at seeing longtime neighbors disappear; and, too, the brutality of the years after the Soviets took over in 1945, the conditions of near starvation, the petty oppressions. Mrs. Latyk reminisced warmly about the years before the war, the years of a girlhood spent with Jewish and Ukrainian and Polish friends, years when there were, as far as she could say, no tensions, no hatreds, no animosities. It was a busy, happy town, she said, smiling faintly. I sat quietly and listened, partly because I was moved to hear a Polish woman born in 1928 utter the same words my grandfather, a Jewish man born in the same town in 1902, had repeated over and over to me ages ago, and partly because it was the least I could do for this kindly-faced woman whom we’d almost never met, whom we would have missed if we hadn’t turned back that one last time when we thought that all was lost, and who had, finally, told me the story I had wanted to hear, from the beginning to the end, for a long time now.

O
NE THING REMAINED
now to be revealed to us by Janina Latyk, and I was nervous as I said, at the end of our long chat, Now can she show us what house it was?

She nodded. Before we left her house, I said to Alex, Please tell her my family lived in this town for three hundred years, and I’m honored and grateful to have her as a neighbor.

He translated my sentence and she smiled at me and brought a hand to her heart, then brought it back toward me.
Same to you,
Alex said.

We all left the house and walked slowly down the street. Mrs. Latyk stopped in front of the first house, the house we’d gone inside the first day we’d been here, the house with the trapdoor and the hiding place, and pointed.

I knew it,
I thought. I had been inside, had been in the cold, cold place.

This is the house, Alex said. She says, If you want, she can show you the place where they killed them. The neighbor saw the whole thing, people knew about it.

I said, Yes.

T
HE DOOR TO
the back garden was in the back of the Russian woman’s half of the house, and she bustled and burbled as Alex told her why we’d come back. Beaming, she opened the gate for me. I stood at the fence and looked back toward the end of the garden, a long, long garden densely planted with rows of vegetables and vines that extended all the way back to the distant end of the property. Mrs. Latyk, standing next to me at the fence, pointed. At the end of the garden there was an ancient apple tree with a double trunk. She said something to Alex. He said to me, That is the place.

Slowly, I started walking back to the tree. The vegetables and vines and raspberry bushes grew so thickly along the barely visible furrows that it was sometimes hard to find a secure footing. After a few minutes, I reached the tree. Its bark was thick, and the place where the two thick trunks diverged was about as high as my shoulder. Every now and then a tiny drop of rain, little more than condensed mist, would splatter on a leaf. But I stayed dry.

I was standing in the place.

For a while I stood there, thinking. It is one thing to stand before a spot you have long thought about, a building or shrine or monument that you’ve seen in paintings or books or magazines, a place where, you think, you are expected to have certain kinds of feelings that, when the time comes to stand there, you either will or will not have: awe, rapture, terror, sorrow. It is another thing to be standing in a place of a different sort, a place that for a long time you thought was hypothetical, a place of which you might say
the place where it happened
and think, it was in a field, it was in a house, it was in a gas chamber, against a wall or on the street, but when you said those words to yourself it was not so much the
place
that seemed to matter as the
it,
the terrible thing that had been done, because you weren’t really thinking of the place as anything but a kind of envelope, disposable, unimportant. Now I was standing in the place itself, and I had had no time to prepare. I confronted the place itself, the thing and not the idea of it.

For a long time I had thirsted after
specifics,
after
details,
had pushed the people I’d gone all over the world to talk to to remember more, to think harder,
to give me the concrete thing that would make the story come alive. But that, I now saw, was the problem. I had wanted the details and the specifics for the
story,
and had not—as how could I not, I who never knew them, who had never had anything
but
stories?—really understood until now what it meant to be a
detail,
a specific. The word
specific
comes, as I well know, from the Latin word
species,
which means “appearance” or “form,” and it is because each kind of thing has its own appearance or form that the word
species
is the word we used to describe consistent types of living things, the animals and plants that constitute Creation; it is because each type of living thing has its own appearance or form that, over numberless centuries, the word
species
gave birth to
specific,
which means, among other things, “
particular to a given individual.
” As I stood in this most specific place of all, more specific even than the hiding place, that place in which Shmiel and Frydka experienced things, physical and emotional things I will never begin to understand, precisely because their experience was
specific
to them and not me, as I stood in this most specific of places I knew that I was standing in the place where they had died, where the life that I would never know had gone out of the bodies I had never seen, and precisely because I had never known or seen them I was reminded the more forcefully that they had been specific people with specific deaths, and those lives and deaths belonged to them, not me, no matter how gripping the story that may be told about them. There is so much that will always be
impossible to know,
but we do know that they were, once, themselves,
specific,
the subjects of their own lives and deaths, and not simply puppets to be manipulated for the purposes of a good story, for the memoirs and magical-realist novels and movies. There will be time enough for that, once I and everyone who ever knew everyone who ever knew them dies; since as we know, everything, in the end, gets lost.