The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (39 page)

But maybe not. Maybe, somehow, my mother’s aunt and uncle and childlike cousin survived the gathering process. In which case, we know, they would have been marched, after the days of terror in the courtyard of the city hall, the hours of screams and beatings and the crushing of children’s skulls, of watching Mrs. Grynberg standing dazed with the bloody bits hanging from between her legs, marched across town to the train station, past the house with the false wall behind which the young Jack and Bob were, at that very moment, hiding—and perhaps here Shmiel, as dazed as he was, looked up and recognized the house of Moses Grünschlag, a man of his generation whom he certainly knew, another preoccupied businessman who rarely went to shul and who had siblings in America who, like Shmiel’s brother, might at that moment have been bringing their annual summer holiday in Far Rockaway, New York, to a melancholy end—hiding and listening to the weeping and cries and groaning (indeed, to the
singing
) of which some small part, one sound, might have come from the throats of Shmiel and Ester and Bronia; and then forced, at some point, to get up into the cattle car.

Since by the time I talked to those four in Sydney that day I had already been to Bolechow, I was able, if not to imagine what any of this could actually have felt like for them, at least to envision the backdrop for this suffering, to see in my mind’s eye the buildings they passed during their final walk through
the streets of the town. From the courtyard of the Magistrat they would have walked straight down Dolinska, the street that leads south in the direction, ultimately, of Dolina; after a couple of hundred yards they would have made the left turn onto the Bahnstrasse, the rather long, dusty road, perhaps a half mile long, that leads to the railway station. I have made this trip myself, by now. It made me tired.

And afterward? Of their long final journey, the day or days on the train, in the suffocatingly cramped freight car, it is possible to know certain details from Matylda Gelernter’s witness statement, which I obtained after I flew to Israel and drove to Jerusalem one day: details that themselves had been conveyed to Mrs. Gelernter by the woman she refers to only as “Stern,” the woman who first was compelled to suffocate her two-year-old in the hiding place in which she had been concealed, and then, after being torn from that hiding place and forced to board the cattle car, left another child behind—perhaps one of the children who had slaked its thirst with its own urine—when she somehow managed to jump from the train, which is how we know, today, some of what went on in the same train that took Shmiel and Ester and Bronia to Belzec.

In trying to reconstruct what the final days or day of my three relatives might have been like, I have to entertain the probability that “Stern” described to Matylda Gelernter what it had been like inside the freight cars in far greater detail than Gelernter conveyed in her statement, and that Gelernter abbreviated her own description because she hadn’t actually been there and, after all, the focus of her testimony was to relate things of which she had personal knowledge. With this in mind, I have consulted other sources about the conditions inside the freight cars to the Operation Reinhard camps, during the late summer of 1942. I will not paraphrase these sources, will not “describe” what it was like, but instead will let the survivor’s account, cited by Arad, speak for itself:

This account, together with the account of “Stern” as relayed by Matylda Gelernter, suggests why whatever we see in museums, the artifacts and the evidence, can give us only the dimmest comprehension of what the event itself was like; why we must be careful when we try to envision “what it was like.” It is possible today, for instance, to walk around inside a vintage cattle car in a museum, but it is perhaps important to recall, in the age of “reality” entertainments, that simply being in that enclosed, boxlike space—an unpleasant enough experience, as I well know, for some people—is not the same as being in that space after you’ve had to smother your toddler to death and to drink your own urine in desperation, experiences that the visitors to such exhibits are unlikely to have recently undergone.

It may be, in any event, that Shmiel, Ester, and Bronia did not survive the journey in the freight car. If they did, however, what would have then happened to them would have been something like this (as we know from the statements of the few who survived, and from the testimony of those perpetrators who were later brought to justice):

Upon arrival, the trains stopped at the spur inside the Belzec camp. Within minutes of arriving (“three to five minutes,” one Polish locomotive driver later recalled), the cars were emptied of their freight of dead and living Jews. Gasping, dazed, smeared with their own and others’ filth, Shmiel, Ester, and Bronia would have stumbled out of the car into the “reception area.” Here, they may well have heard a German officer, perhaps even the commandant of the camp, Wirth, give his usual speech: that they had been brought here for “transfer” only and that, for reasons of hygiene, they had to be bathed and disinfected before being moved to their next destination. Whether Shmiel
or Ester believed this, it is of course impossible to know; but knowing how ready he had been, just three years earlier, to believe that a letter to President “Rosiwelt” might help him and his family to get to America, I will entertain the possibility that, like most people, he was reluctant to believe that the worst would happen, and so he may well have been one of those Jews who, as we know from the testimony of one of the officers who served under Wirth, actually applauded Wirth after he gave his speech to the dazed and shit-encrusted Jews on the railway siding at Belzec, the speech in which he assured them that their valuables, which they had been told to deposit on a counter, would be returned to them after the disinfection treatment. It is possible, although by no means certain, that Shmiel’s eyes alighted for a moment, that day, on the sign that read:

Attention!

Complete removal of clothing!

All personal belongings, except money, jewelry, documents and certificates, must be left on the ground. Money, jewelry and documents must be kept until being deposited at the window. Shoes must be collected and tied in pairs and put in the place indicated.

Maybe he saw this sign, and maybe its tone—not, when you think of it, all that different from the tone of similar signs in the swimming pools and shower rooms of bath spas throughout Europe, spas like the one in Jaremcze where Shmiel’s father, thirty years earlier, had dropped dead—had reassured him.

In any event, if things were proceeding normally, that day in early September 1942, which we now know was the period of the most intense “resettlement” activity at Belzec, Shmiel was at this point separated from his wife and daughter, and was brought to the undressing barracks. (The men were gassed first.) There is no question that he took off his filthy clothes; perhaps they included the dark coat and tattersall shirt he is wearing in the final photograph that we have of him, a tiny square on the back of which he has written
Dezember 1939
, which is therefore the only surviving relic of his life during the Soviet occupation. In it, he looks very old…. He was, as we know, very tall, and perhaps he had been beaten on the way to the Bolechow railway station; it is more than likely that, as he stopped to take off his shoes and socks, he was in considerable physical pain; and of course, then there was the shock, and now the horror of separation from Ester and Bronia. (Had he even been able to say good-bye to them? Maybe they were somehow separated in the cattle
car, maybe they had been placed in different cars, back in Bolechow.) On the other hand, being the sort of person he was, maybe the fact that he was now in an organized and orderly institutional setting was something he hoped was a good sign. Maybe, he thought to himself, the terror of the gathering in the courtyard of the city hall, of the march across the town to the waiting train, and then the train itself, had been the worst of it.

From the undressing barracks, the naked Shmiel Jäger, whom we must pause to remember was, at this point, a tall man with blue eyes and a full head of white hair, was now herded through the relatively narrow passageway known as the
Schlauch,
the “Tube,” a passageway about two meters wide and a few dozen meters long. Partly fenced with boards and surrounded by barbed wire, the Tube connected the reception areas at Belzec, in Camp 1, with the gas chambers and burial pits, in Camp 2. It is difficult to believe that my grandfather’s brother, a fastidious man, did not try, by cupping and lowering his hands (which, if they were like my grandfather’s hands, and mine, were squarish and dusted with dark hair), to cover his private parts as he half-walked, half-trotted along the
Schlauch
.

By September 1942, when Shmiel and Ester and Bronia were, I then thought, almost certainly gassed—there was almost no chance that this middle-aged man, who already looked old for his years, or his fat wife or young childlike daughter would have been selected for one of the work details, the groups of Jewish prisoners who cleaned out the chambers or buried the bodies after the gassing—Belzec’s old wooden gas chambers had been demolished and replaced by a bigger and much more solid building of gray concrete. After traversing the Tube, Shmiel approached this building and then shuffled up the three steps that led into it, which were about a meter wide and in front of which stood a big pot of flowers and a sign that said
BADE UND INHALATIONSRAÜME
,
Bath and Inhalation Rooms. Passing inside this solid new building, he would have seen before him a dark corridor, a meter and a half wide, on either side of which are the doors to the Bath and Inhalation Rooms.

It is possible that he still believed, even now, that these really were Bath and Inhalation Rooms. Into one of them he walked. The rooms had, as one German who helped operate this camp later recalled, a “friendly, bright appearance,” and were painted either yellow or gray, something institutional and unthreatening. The ceilings were fairly low—two meters, which for a man of Shmiel’s height must have been ever so slightly claustrophobia-inducing—but perhaps even now he didn’t register this, even now thought that he was going to be getting a disinfectant shower. There were, after all, showerheads
protruding from the ceiling. If he saw the removable door at the back of the Inhalation Room, which was across the room from the door he just came through and was, in fact, the door through which, ten minutes later, his body would be dragged, he probably thought nothing of it.

After this, though, after Uncle Shmiel is squeezed into this low-ceilinged, yellow-painted, friendly, warm-looking shower chamber, after it fills with nineteen-hundred and ninety-nine other Jews, it will surely be harder for him to think that he’ll be getting a disinfection treatment, and at that point the gas comes on, and I will not try to imagine it, because he is in there alone, and neither I nor anyone else (except the nineteen-hundred and ninety-nine or so others who did go with him) can go there with him…Or, I should say, with them, since within a short time Ester and little Bronia will walk up the same steps, enter one of the rooms, make the same journey. (Unlike Shmiel, they had stopped first in the haircutting barrack where the
Friseurs,
the barbers, shaved off their dark hair.)

So we cannot go there with them. All I think I can say, now, with any degree of certainty, is that in one of those rooms, on a particular moment of a particular day in September 1942, although the moment and the day will never be known, the lives of my uncle Shmiel and his family, of Samuel Jäger, my grandfather’s brother, the heir to and rebuilder of the business that the cautious matrimonial interminglings of those generations of Jägers and Kornblühs had been designed to enhance, a man who wrote a certain number of letters between January and December 1939, a woman who was very warm, very friendly, a forty-seven-year-old father of four girls, a natty dresser and a bit of a big shot, too, in the small town where his family has lived, it seems, forever, a young girl who was still very much a baby, to whom a seventy-eight-year-old man living in Sydney, Australia, will recall that he once said
Hallo, Bronia!
over a fence, a man, a woman, a child who have been forced, by this point, to live with the knowledge that their third daughter, her older sister, a sixteen-year-old girl whom the father had named to perpetuate the memory of his darling sister who had died, it would one day be intoned,
a week before her wedding,
was shot to death at the edge of an open pit; an uncle, aunt, and cousin who at that moment, the moment at which he and then they hear, perhaps, the strange hiss begin, have a niece and a cousin whom they have never met but whom he has mentioned, politely, in a few of those letters (
I say good bye to you and kiss you, and also dear Gerty and the dear child, from me and also from my darling wife and children to you and all the siblings too
), a niece who lives in the Bronx, New York, a pretty blond eleven-year-old with braces who, in the first
week of September 1942, has just entered the sixth grade (just as her future husband, then thirteen, so much of whose family would be lost to narrative, was just entering the eighth grade, where he played with a boy whom everyone called Billy Ehrenreich, which was not his real name but after all he lived upstairs with the Ehrenreichs, a refugee from Germany who would sometimes say to my father that he had had four sisters from whom he’d been separated and whom, he said, he’d “lost,” a word that my father, just a boy then, couldn’t quite understand)—in that room, they had eventually to breathe the poisoned air, and after a period of minutes the lives of Shmiel Jäger, Ester Schneelicht Jäger, and Bronia Jäger, lives that will, many years hence, amount to a collection of a few photographs and a few sentences about them,
She called him the król, the king, she was very warm, very friendly, she was just a baby, playing with her toys,
these lives, and many other things that were true about them but which now can also never be known, came to an end.