The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (17 page)

or, the most damning:

Of course there is no way to know what exactly transpired between the siblings here. What seems, on a cold reading of the words themselves, like callousness on my grandfather’s part could, after all, have been something more innocent. Perhaps, amid the treasures buried in the attics and sewers of the houses, still standing, that once belonged to the Jews of Bolechow, there is a cache of letters, stuffed with some photo albums and jewelry and wrapped in blankets and squashed into a leather valise that was sunk into the murk beneath an outhouse, among which can be found a letter with an American postmark, which begins
Dear Brother, We exhausted every possibility here, but cannot raise the sum you refer to. Has Ester tried writing to her siblings here in the States
?…Perhaps. Because all of the letters that my grandfather and Jeanette and Joe Mittelmark wrote (or may have written) to Shmiel have long since crumbled to dust, we cannot know.

Still, I tried. The month before we left for Ukraine, I convened a conference of my mother and her cousins—the surviving children of Shmiel’s siblings—to ask them what memories they had of that time, just before the war, when Shmiel’s letters would have been arriving. These three cousins had all grown up together, occasionally in the same apartment buildings, in the Bronx; they all knew the same things. We sat one afternoon in June 2001, on my mother’s cousin’s patio in Chicago, and they reminisced. But they weren’t old enough, weren’t close enough to what had happened, to know for sure; all they had was an adamant certainty that everyone had adored Shmiel, and that everything possible had been done for him. I wanted hard facts, details, some story or anecdote that had the uncomfortable asymmetry of truth, but what I kept getting was the smooth sound of comforting platitudes.

My mother’s cousin Allan, the host, said, firmly, They would have done anything possible to get them out.

Allan is the son of the middle sister, the one who once wrote to me
I’m not going to tell you when I was born because it would have been better if I’d never been born
, and I never wonder why he became a psychologist.

Everyone else enthusiastically agreed.

I remember when the news came, after the war, that they’d died, my mother’s other cousin, Marilyn, drawled.

Marilyn is a couple of years older than my mother, but has a smooth, almost translucent fineness of brow and nose and jaw that, she unnecessarily confides to me, she gets from her mother, my mother’s favorite aunt, Jeanette. (It was her
skin
that was so beautiful, but you can’t tell from the
pictures,
she said at some point during that weekend, in the surprisingly deep Southern accent that she had acquired during her years away from the Bronx.
Picshuhs
. I have many pictures of Marilyn’s mother—one in the opulent lace wedding dress her rich cousins, now her in-laws, bought to adorn their trophy bride, the other taken just before her death at thirty-five; in the latter, my mother tells me, Jeanette was mute, unable to speak because of the first of the strokes that would eventually kill her—and I am forced to agree, for none of the legendary beauty I have so often heard about is evident in these photographs of what looks to me to be a merely pleasant-looking Jewish lady of the earlier part of the last century. I wonder now whether the reason I was oddly relieved to hear from her daughter, one day almost fifty years after she died, that she was in fact beautiful, was that at this point I was still unwilling to entertain the idea that so many of my family’s stories might be embellishments or even fabrications.)

Anyway, Marilyn was now responding to my question about what was or was not done for Shmiel by her parents, who after all are the addressees of at least two of those letters, but while she was unable to remember ever hearing them discuss Shmiel’s pleas before the war, Marilyn had vivid memories of the day, months after the war had ended, when they got the news that he and his wife and children had been killed along with all the others.

I remember when the news came, this attractive Southern lady told me, fixing me with her wide-eyed, slightly surprised blue gaze. There wasn’t just crying—there was
screaming
.

Who knows what went on between those siblings, seventy years ago? Impossible to say. At one point, during the Chicago conference of cousins, I took out the photocopied translations I’d made of Shmiel’s letters to their various parents, and handed them out.

No, no, no, my mother said, vaguely pushing her copy across the table. I don’t want to read them, it’s too sad.

Then she made the slightly sibilant, sad, clucking noise with her tongue that she has always made when she’s about to utter the Yiddish word
nebuch,
which means something like
what a terrible pity
.

When Cain sulks over the fact that God has preferred his younger brother’s offering to his, God chides him: “Why are you upset, and why has your face fallen? Is it not that if you do well you’ll be raised, and if you don’t do well then sin crouches at the threshold? And its desire will be for you. And you’ll dominate it.”

Rashi is very concerned to explain the striking if rather mysterious image of sin, like a female animal, crouching at a threshold. Where is it crouching, we wonder; at the threshold of what, exactly? “At the entrance of your grave,” Rashi replies; there “your sin is preserved.” But of even greater import to the meaning of this passage, for him, is the precise antecedent of the word “its” in the line “its desire will be for you.” The Hebrew text here is, in fact, rather vexed. “Sin,” in Hebrew, is
hatâ’t,
a feminine noun, and hence grammatically we would expect the text to say, literally,
t’shukâtâh
—“her desire.” And yet the Hebrew gives us a masculine rather than feminine possessive here:
t’shukâtu,
“his desire.” Which is to say that when you read this line, it seems to say “his desire,” in which case the “his” would most likely refer, if anything, to Abel. Hence the meaning of the line would seem to be something like “his desire is for you”—i.e., for reconciling with you, for maintaining good relations with you, his brother—“but you will rule over it”—in other words, you will reject this surge of brotherly goodwill, or perhaps even more accurately, you will repress any goodwill of your own that rises, however unwittingly, in response.

Yet Rashi, for whatever reasons, is eager to rule out this reading. And so he states, of the words “its desire,” that the reference is to something not actually in the text—a phrase that is, in fact, a paraphrase of the word “sin” here,
yêtzer hârâh,
“drive toward evil.” Because this phrase is, grammatically speaking, masculine, Rashi thus gets around the problem of the text’s masculine possessive by supplying a masculine antecedent that is not actually in the text. Since this is a bit of a stretch, by any standard of textual
emendation—and since Rashi’s ruse entails further interpretive difficulties, not least of which is the fact that Cain patently does not “dominate” his sinful impulses, which is how Rashi’s effortful reading would require us to read the text—it is worth wondering why he is so eager to rule out the most natural reading, which happens to be the reading that requires us to think, among other things, about the tortured dynamics of aggression, guilty shame, and tentative forgiveness between quarreling brothers.

But then, who does not find ways to make the texts we deal with mean what we want them to mean?

B
Y THE TIME
we drove into Bolechow, my brothers and sister and I, on that Sunday in August 2001, we had been in Eastern Europe for four days, and our mood was not good. We four siblings—Andrew, Matt, Jennifer, and I—were traveling together for the first time since—when? I think it must have been 1967, during the famous “only” family vacation to Ocean City, Maryland, less famous in my mind for the inverted commas than for the fact that it was during that vacation that the final episode of the TV series
The Fugitive
aired, and even though I had begged my parents to make sure I was awake for the finale, they, thinking they knew best, let me sleep through it, with the result that I never did learn, or at least learn with a thoroughness of detail that satisfied me, the precise manner in which the true killer was revealed, never did see the satisfying moment in which the one-armed man was apprehended, the guilty party caught and the innocent victim finally, after so many years of being hunted, freed…I believe it had been that long, three and a half decades, since all of my parents’ children, or at least a significant percentage of us, had traveled together. We grew up in a modest split-level, my
brothers and sister and I, the four boys sleeping two to a room; but since those days we have grown unused to being together in close quarters for any period of time.

Because I am a classicist, I know that the word “intimate” comes from the Latin
intimus,
which is the superlative form of the adverb
in
, which means the same thing in Latin as it does in English—the comparative form being another familiar English cognate,
interior. In, interior, intimus:
inside, more inside, the most inside. I know that to many people who have families, these words will map out a self-evident emotional truth: that those who grow up
in
the same family will, because they shared the same inner space,
interior,
will feel closer, more
intimate,
to one another than perhaps to any other people, including their own spouses. But I also know, from my own and others’ experiences, that being so intimate, having too much access to what goes on inside those closest to you by blood—“inmost” is how my Latin dictionary defines
intimus
—will sometimes have an opposite reaction, causing family members to flee one another, to seek more—we use the literal and figurative terms interchangeably, these days—“space.”

This, I suspect, is at least part of why my brothers and sister and I haven’t spent more time vacationing together. As I write this I think of the bitter if suggestive joke my youngest brother once made—the one who didn’t come with us, perhaps because of an excess of intimacy—about how we relate to one another.
We’re close in the way that people who were in the same concentration camp were close,
he cracked.

We are told that Abel changed his life and became a herder of flocks while Cain remained a tiller of the ground—the commentator Emes LeYa’akov has much to say about the different verbs “to be” used of each of the brothers—and Rashi thinks we should ask ourselves why. Why? Because, Rashi says, the earth had been cursed by God, and hence the younger brother “separated himself from its work.” There is, in fact, an ongoing tension throughout the Torah between those who work the earth and those who tend flocks—just as there is, famously, an ongoing motif, even more striking, of murderous conflict between older and younger siblings. In light of the latter, it is worth noting that it is always the younger sibling who manages to endear himself to the father- or authority-figure, and subsequently to find himself the more prestigious line of work (shepherding, say, or advising Pharaoh), a phenomenon that, we cannot help thinking, is part of the resentment on the part of the older brother that fuels his fatal rage. (Even here, in Genesis, so early in our narrative, certain readers will be struck by Abel’s fastidious choice of a job that—as Rashi’s comment suggests—he cannot help knowing will win him
the approval of God, with whom, to me at least, it seems clear Abel is trying to ingratiate himself.) Indeed Rashi also remarks that Cain’s offering to God was “from the poorest”—a deduction based, in fact, on what is not in the text, i.e., any description whatsoever of Cain’s offering; whereas Abel’s offering is described as being the choicest. Perceptively, Rashi goes on to note that God not only reacted to these offerings, one agricultural, the other ovicultural (“He turned…He did not turn”), but must have registered His reaction, somehow, to the two brothers, since it is clear that Cain knew that God had rejected his offering.

But what’s striking here is the tension between the workers who are tied to the accursed ground—the farmers—and those whose livelihood derives from movable chattels, like flocks of sheep. I think of how resentful Cain is—of how envious certain farmers must be of those others who, although born of the same soil, the same country, seem to be luckier, because they enjoy the luxury of being able to go far afield, and because their wealth seems to increase of its own accord, and because this wealth is movable, too. I think of how the natural tensions between siblings, between those who grow up in close quarters and know one another too well, can be exacerbated by these economic resentments and envies. I think of certain brothers who stay put, trying to make a living off the resisting ground, and of other brothers who take their chances far away.

And I think of other kinds of siblings, too, those who grew up in close quarters and know one another too well, some forced to work the land, the others, seemingly luckier, more blessed, able to wander here and there with their (seemingly) ever-increasing wealth. I think, naturally, of Ukrainians and Jews.

A
S
I
HAVE
said, it had been raining from the start of our Eastern European trip—a cold, steady, wet drizzle, enough water to be irritating without ever providing the giddy relief of a downpour. After the months of anticipation about this dramatic family trip—the return to the ancestral shtetl was by now so cliché that we half-mocked ourselves even as we made the elaborate plans necessary to get four adults with careers onto the same plane at the same time—the unrelentingly miserable weather, since the Thursday morning when we had landed in Warsaw and then transferred to the short flight to the Kraków airport, where the big, blond Alex Dunai was waiting, beaming, at the arrivals area holding a small cardboard sign that said, forlornly,
MENDELSOHN
, seemed to be mocking the whole enterprise: the idea of the family return to its roots, the enforced family togetherness necessary to make it happen, and most of all the expectations of what we would find.

The latter in particular had, even before the trip had really begun, started
to feel oppressive. There was a good deal of bickering. We had no idea what, if anything, we were going to find here, and the unspoken but oppressive sense, as persistent and irritating as the constant drizzle, that we might well have made this difficult and expensive trip to this sodden and impoverished place all for nothing made us irritable. Because I had organized it all, because I was the one who had always wanted to come back, because it was I who had the notion, a deeply sentimental one I admit, that the return to the ancestral village should be a family affair involving as many of the siblings as possible, because I thought that one day I might write about this trip—because of all of this, I felt not only a grim responsibility to my siblings, but, even more, a terrible pressure to find someone who could tell us what happened, who could tell us the dramatic tale we were all hoping for. And so those first three days, during which we visited Auschwitz, toured what was left of the old Jewish quarter in Kraków, drove the five hours east to L’viv, spent a day in L’viv touring what was left of the old Jewish life there, too, were gloomy. Every decision—where to eat, what time to leave the hotel, where to go and what to see first—somehow became an argument.
I just don’t understand why he’s always so pissed off at me,
Andrew fumed one night, back at our hotel, about Matt. Since Matt had always been an enigma to me, too—we are closest in age, but during family get-togethers didn’t, for a long time, have much to say to each other—I had nothing to say in response.

We started in Poland rather than going directly to Ukraine, to Bolechow, partly because of something I wanted, and partly because of something Andrew wanted. I had wanted to begin this way because I was eager to travel through what had been Galicia, the province from which so many American Jews come. If we started in Kraków, the westernmost city in Galicia and the city where my father’s mother, my grandmother Kay, was born (a woman who, like my mother, raised four sons, certain of whom do not speak to certain others), and then drove east to L’viv, we’d traverse the whole province. I was, as I kept reminding myself, interested in the life of the Old Country, not merely its death, and I wanted to see what Galicia looked like, what the topography was, what kinds of trees and animals and people lived there. What kind of place my family had come from.

But we had also come here first because from Kraków it is only an hour or so to Auschwitz, and Andrew in particular wanted to see Auschwitz. Although he hadn’t always been interested in family history, as I had been, Andrew had enthusiastically signed on for this trip, and before our departure had spent
months immersing himself in the literature of the Holocaust, books about the Jews of Eastern Europe and about Polish and Ukrainian history. This was not surprising. His interests have always been many; more, I think, than those of any of the rest of us. Perhaps because he has the firstborn’s sense of limitless possibility, he has thrown himself into everything, from raising species rhododendrons to building furniture to collecting Japanese prints, with unlimited enthusiasm. He is tall, dark-haired, fair-skinned, and has a face not unlike the one described on an old family passport, dated 1920:
face: oval, complexion: fair, nose: straight
. He plays, at a high level, the piano, the harpsichord, the recorder, tennis. As often happens in large families, we children early on adopted, or were given, what I thought of for a long time as “labels.” I, with my kinked dark hair and blue eyes above their dark circles, was
Bad at Math but Good at English and French;
Matt, blond, yellow-eyed, with a wide grin usually reserved, during his combative adolescence, for people outside our family, and already something of a hero in high school for the photos he took of the soccer team, the students, the teachers, was
Secretly Sensitive Rebel;
Eric, with his mop of brown hair and watchful brown eyes, the sheafs of macabre and delicate drawings that he was already producing at the age of twelve and thirteen, with their unsettling captions (“Stop Following Me Or I’ll Have My Maid Strangle You”), was, as everyone knew,
The Artistic One,
although he also happened to be
The Funniest Person in the Family.
And Jen, the youngest, the long-awaited only girl, vivid, dark, and petite, with her eyes like (the old Jewish relatives would say)
black cherries,
the valedictorian, the cellist, the writer, was
The Star.
But to me, who spent the first fifteen years of my life sleeping two feet away from him, listening to him listen to his hockey games, wondering how anyone could be that good in math, science, English, and sports, Andrew was simply
Good at Everything.
So it was no surprise that he knew as much about Bolechow as I did by the time we left for L’viv; it was he, after all, who gave me the precious gift of
The Memoirs of Ber of Bolechow.
During the months that led up to the trip, that August, he was constantly e-mailing me with the names of books he’d read and thought I should acquire:
Bitter Harvest: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule,
say, or
Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust
. Of course I bought them.

And so, because Andrew wanted to go, and because Andrew rarely asks for anything; and because Matt thought he could get some interesting pictures; and because Jennifer, who had, lately, been making her own private study of Jewish life and religion, and who would soon be the only one of my
siblings to marry a Jew, was interested also: because of these things, which were important to my siblings, we went to Auschwitz, that first day we were in Poland.

I alone hadn’t wanted to come. I was leery. To me Auschwitz represented the opposite of what I was interested in, and—as I started to realize on the day I actually did go to Auschwitz—of why I had made this trip. Auschwitz, by now, has become the gigantic, one-word symbol, the gross generalization, the shorthand, for what happened to Europe’s Jews—although what happened at Auschwitz did not, in fact, happen to millions of Jews from places like Bolechow, Jews who were lined up and shot at the edges of open pits or, failing that, were shipped to camps that, unlike Auschwitz, had one purpose only, camps that are less well known to the public mind precisely because they offered no alternative to death and hence produced no survivors, no memoirs, no stories. But even if we accept Auschwitz as the symbol, I thought as I walked its strangely peaceful and manicured grounds, there are problems. It had been to rescue my relatives from generalities, symbols, abbreviations, to restore to them their particularity and distinctiveness, that I had come on this strange and arduous trip.
Killed by the Nazis
—yes, but by whom, exactly? The dreadful irony of Auschwitz, I realized as we walked through the famous rooms full of human hair, of artificial limbs, of spectacles, of luggage destined to go nowhere, is that the extent of what it shows you is so gigantic that the corporate and anonymous, the sheer scope of the crime, are constantly, paradoxically asserted at the expense of any sense of individual life. Naturally this is useful, since even now, even while the survivors live and tell their stories to people like me, there are, as we know, those who want to minimize the extent of what happened, even to deny that it happened at all, and when you walk around a place like Auschwitz, wander the enormous, vertiginously broad plain where the barracks once stood, and trudge over the great distance to the place where the crematoria were, and from there to the place where the many, many memorial stones wait for you, representing the countless dead of scores of countries, it begins to be possible to understand how many people could have passed through there. But for me, who had come to learn about only six of six million, I couldn’t help thinking that the vastness, the scope, the size, was an impediment to, rather than vehicle for, illumination of the very narrow scrap of the story in which I was interested.