The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (41 page)

I can’t tell you anything, he said, looking at me and spreading his big hands apart, because I hadn’t been there, I was in the army. In the Russian army.

I know, I said, in what I hoped was a reassuring tone of voice. But then, wanting to make him feel valuable, wanting to include him in the conversation as he had not been included in the events I had just been hearing about, I added, So what happened after the war was over. You went back?

Boris laughed and shook his head. No, he said, I didn’t go back, because I found someone when I was in a hospital in the Caucasus—he pronounced it
COW-cass-ooss
—and there I met somebody. Somebody in French uniform, and I went to him, and he looked like a Jewish person.

The idea that this Jew from a tiny town in Poland could have met somebody familiar-looking and sympathetic thousands of miles from home, deep in the Caucasus, struck me as so improbable as to be funny, and I grinned. There was, indeed, something the slightest bit humorous about the way Boris Goldsmith was telling this story, as if it were the opening of a joke. I could, in fact, imagine my grandfather starting one of his stories in just this way.
So think of it: there I was, in the Caucasus, in the middle of nowhere, and who should walk in but a Jew dressed up in a French uniform
…

He looked like a Jewish person, Boris went on, and so I went to him and I asked him, What, what’s to be done, go back to Bolechow?

So what did he say, I asked, right on cue, just the way I would have done with my grandfather.

And then Boris told me what the Jew in the French uniform had told him, during that improbable meeting.

Boris said,
He told me forget it, there’s nobody left
.

T
HAT HAD BEEN
on Sunday, March 23, 2003, my grandfather’s birthday. After Boris said,
He told me forget it, there’s nobody left,
everyone had slowly gotten to their feet, Jack and Bob and Meg and Boris, and one by one the guests said their good-byes and went home. Jack insisted on driving Matt and me back to our hotel. As I was getting out of his car, he suddenly leaned toward the open door and said, out of the blue, Of course I remember Shmiel Jäger—he wasn’t someone you’d forget!

It was the next day, Monday, that Matt and I went back to Jack’s place to interview him privately; it was on Monday that he told us so much about Ruchele. As I’ve mentioned, he had started to talk about Frydka—
she would hold her bag like THIS!
—but, he said, if we really wanted to know about Frydka, we should talk to Meg. So after those few hours with Jack at his place, that Monday afternoon while Matt and I were walking around downtown Sydney, the brightness and vivacity of whose buildings, the warmth of whose late-summer weather, the attractiveness and easy friendliness of whose shop clerks and taxi drivers and passersby were, during that visit, almost physically difficult to emerge into, after the darkness of the stories we had come to hear, stories that indeed—like those of Jack and Bob—inevitably became stories of enclosure, concealment, subterranean fixity; as we walked around this city, I stopped at a phone booth and dialed the number of Meg’s brother-in-law’s apartment to ask her yet again if she would consent to give me a one on-one interview.

I say “again” because, as everyone was leaving the day before, I had
mentioned to them that I’d be wanting to talk to everyone individually, and everyone nodded yes, that would be OK. Except for Meg, who shook her head.

Sorry, she said. That’s all I remember, I can’t help you anymore.

Besides, she added as she picked up her leather pocketbook, she had to look after her brother-in-law, who was very frail, and with whom she wanted to spend some time before she flew back to Melbourne at the end of the week.

So I wasn’t hopeful, when I dialed the strange, eight-digit number Jack had given me. The phone rang.

Hallo, Meg said.

Hi Mrs. Grossbard, I said, my heart thudding in my chest the way it had done years earlier when I’d called my grandfather’s sister, Sylvia, whom we’d been raised, in a way, to fear, and told her I wanted to interview her about the family history, which is when she replied,
I’m not telling you the day I was born because it would have been better if I’d never been born
…Hi, I said to her, and then said again that I hoped she’d had time to think about it and had decided she’d let us talk with her before we flew back the twenty-two hours to New York.

Her voice on the other end of the line was more weary than angry.

I can’t help you, I told you I don’t remember anything else, she said; although we both knew this was a lie.

Because I was on the phone rather than facing her in person, I summoned the courage to be persistent. Oh come on, I said, all we want to do is talk to you.

What’s the use? she said on the other end of the line, as much to herself as to me. Nobody knows, nobody cares. It will all die with us anyway.

I suddenly realized that she wanted to be convinced. So I said, Mrs. Grossbard, I think you’re wrong. That’s the whole reason we came here, to talk to you all, to hear the stories, to write them down. I want to
preserve
what you remember, that’s the whole point.

It will only die if you don’t talk to us, I added after a little pause.

Well, she said. There was dead air for a minute, and then she said, If I see you it must be in a restaurant, my brother-in-law is ill here, I can’t have people over.

Fine, I said. We don’t care. We’ll meet you anywhere, just say where. Silently, I was miming
VICTORY
for Matt.

Yeah! he said.

OK, Meg said, I will meet you tomorrow, Wednesday. Telephone me tonight, we’ll fix the time.

Great! I said. Thank you
so
much!

Later that evening, I phoned Meg again from our hotel room. She had clearly had time to think about our meeting.

She said, So I have decided, we will meet here, at Salamon’s, for lunch.

Great
! I said. I flashed Matt a V-for-victory sign as he peered at the TV news. The first American soldier had been killed in the new war.

But I can’t prepare anything for you, Meg added.

That’s fine, I said.

Perhaps I’ll make sandwiches, she said.

We love sandwiches, I cooed.

So you should come around noon, she said. She gave me Mr. Grossbard’s address, adding firmly that we wouldn’t be able to talk to him, as he was too frail to get out of bed. I clenched my teeth and said that was all right, we understood. I got ready to hang up the phone.

There’s one more thing, which I will insist on, she said, her voice tightening.

What? I asked.

And then she told me what her conditions for speaking to me one-on-one would be.

First: she wouldn’t discuss anything about the war, because it was too painful. You know, she said, I never speak about the Holocaust. My son is a bookworm, he begs me to write it all down, and now that I’m coming to the end, I think sometimes perhaps I will. But I can’t—I just can’t bring myself to go through it.

OK, I said. I promised I wouldn’t question her about the war itself.

She went on. She preferred not to talk about her own life at all, and would only entertain general questions about life in Bolechow during the prewar years, during her girlhood and early adolescence. She would be happy to share what memories she had about the Jäger family, but about her own family she preferred not to speak. If she did, for whatever reason, mention anything about certain experiences she herself had undergone during the war, they were to be considered off the record and I was not to make reference to them in the book she knew I would be writing someday.

Clenching my jaw, I said, OK.

So you still want to interview me? Meg asked, and this time I had a feeling she was smiling her bitter smile.

Sure, I said. Perhaps, I was already thinking to myself, she’d change her
mind when we came, when we took out all our recording equipment, the digital video camera, Matt’s tripods and umbrellas, the tapes, everything.

There was one more thing, Meg said.

I knew before she opened her mouth what it was going to be.

She said, I won’t answer any questions about Ciszko Szymanski.

W
HICH IS WHY,
although Matt and I spent, as it turned out, nearly four hours with Meg, hours during which, apparently having forgotten her own strictures, she talked at length not only about what she remembered about my family but also about the war, about other people she remembered, terrible stories, often, I can’t write any of it down.

I don’t want my life in your book, she told me. One day I am going to write my own book. Yes, you will see, I will.

Both she and I knew, even as she said it, that she would never write a book of her own, but despite my frustration over not being able to include some of what she told me that day, stories and anecdotes that could, possibly, shed light on what it was like to go through the war in Bolechow, I understood perfectly what she was afraid of, why she wouldn’t let her tales enter my book. She knew that the minute she allowed me to start telling her stories, they would become my stories.

So I can’t tell you what she said during our interview. But I can say that when we arrived at Salamon Grossbard’s tiny, slightly musty apartment in downtown Sydney, we did not find sandwiches waiting for us. A small table in the old man’s kitchen had been carefully set, and four silver chafing dishes were simmering away. Meg, who was now smiling broadly for the first time, ushered us into the kitchen.

Now I must tell you, she announced, that I’ve prepared a lunch that your grandfather would
adore
.

I blinked. OK, I said, a little warily.

Everything from Bolechow! she announced, waving her arm at the chafing dishes. A
déjeuner à la Bolechow!
Then she looked at me cautiously and said, But I wasn’t sure if—what nationality was your grandmother?

Russian, I said. I thought of the little shack in Odessa, burned to the ground, of the teenaged girl “walking across Europe.” Oh, I thought, I have stories I could tell you, too.

Ah, Russian, Meg said, pausing for a moment. And your father?

My father’s father was from Riga, in Latvia, I said.
He was born on the boat.
He was a twin. He, too, traveled great distances in order to fashion a new life, to reinvent himself far from the past; he, too, like his father, like my great-grandmother, like my grandfather, had come very far in order to be able to make their lives, the one to tell his stories, the other to keep silent
.

And his mother was from Kraków, I added, playing the Galicianer card.

Ah, from Kraków, Meg said, satisfied. Do you know what kasha is?

Kasha! I said, we
love
kasha! My grandmother used to make my grandfather plates of hot kasha—buckwheat grains that are first boiled and then fried with onions, served with bowtie-shaped noodles—which he would eat, the way he’d eat farina or oatmeal, with great precision, starting at the edge of the bowl and working toward the middle.
That way you don’t burn your mouth
, he’d say to me, as he blew carefully at the little mound of kasha in his spoon.

Do you know what pierogis are? Meg went on.

Of course, we said, we
love
pierogis! On the evening of the day the four of us had arrived in Poland, the evening before we went to Auschwitz, at the beginning of our trip to Ukraine, Alex Dunai had taken us to a “traditional” Polish restaurant. There, after spooning a dumpling into his mouth, Matt had looked at us and said, This isn’t Polish food, it’s
Jewish
food!

You know what is a
gołąki
? she asked, delighted.
Gawumpkee
. I thought of Mrs. Wilk, walking with her heavy-hipped tread up the shallow steps to my parents’ house all those years, carrying, sometimes, the enormous jars of stuffed cabbages. Of course we knew.

Yes, I said, we certainly knew what a
gołąki
was.

Ah! Meg exclaimed, you do! And you see, I thought, to be on the safe side—I thought maybe they don’t like this food, I bought a barbequed chicken to be safe. After all you’re
second
-generation American.

She said the word
second
with the barest suggestion of disdain.

You know, she went on, because there are very few people from our parts left who know about this food, very few survivors from Galicia. Because them, those from the west, they put in the camps, and so there were more chances of surviving, but us they finished in the mass graves.

It was hard to remember we were talking about food.

And then, shuffling slowly into the kitchen, leaning on a walker and wearing natty pajamas the color of which my grandfather, who spent his entire working life in a business that produced ornate braids and trimmings, and who talked about colors with the relish with which other people talk about ice-cream flavors, would certainly have called
French Blue,
came Mr. Grossbard.
In a high, papery voice he introduced himself to us, told us how pleased he was that we were working on this project, and sat down to his lunch.

At first, I was so surprised that I couldn’t think of anything to say.

It’s self-serve, Meg told us, please help yourselves. I had a feeling that she was enjoying the fact that she’d surprised us.

I sat down next to Mr. Grossbard and turned on my tape recorder.

My goodness, Matt said. I haven’t seen food like this since I was a kid!

Remember, I said to Meg, my mind racing, we’re Bolechowers, too, from way back.

Bolechow, it was a nice town, Mr. Grossbard said. A happy town. There were twelve thousand people, three different cultures. Three thousand Jews, six thousand Poles, three thousand Ukrainians.

He was talking about his childhood, the years when my grandfather still lived there.

So here he was. Over his French blue pajamas he was wearing a robe of a color I think you could have called
claret
. The very wide frames of his thick glasses accentuated a sense that his thin face was entirely vertical. There were tufts of white hair on the sides of his head, with a few wisps on top neatly brushed back from the middle of his crown. Perhaps it was his very great age that caused me to think of those desiccated faces of Egyptian or Mesoamerican mummies as I looked at him, faces that also give the impression that everything extraneous has been stripped away over the course of time: there was nothing there but high, almost Incan cheekbones, the hooked, aristocratic nose, the wide, intelligent mouth, the ancient dewlaps hanging at his throat. And yet all this was somehow softened by a pair of wide, large, almost comical ears, which gave him a wizardlike air at times. When he spoke, in a voice so eroded that it was more like a whisper, he would sometimes lean forward, when making a point, and emphatically smack both hands on his bony thighs; at other times, he would lean slightly backward while spreading his upstretched hands apart, the way a fisherman will describe the size of a prize catch, as if he were measuring something: time past, his life. The walker that he kept at his side had about it an almost ceremonial air, as if it were an emblem of some obscure religious or political power. As he talked, he would sometimes knead his right hand repeatedly with his left, a gesture that had an agitated air.

It was a nice town, he said again.

I know, I said.

Bon appétit
! he said.

I’m so happy, Meg said.

A
ND THAT IS
all I can tell you. After lunch was over, we repaired to the living room, where, for hours, she talked, and where her brother-in-law talked, too, to my delight, about growing up in Bolechow during World War I, about the house on Dlugosa Street in Bolechow that he was born in and eventually inherited and lived in with the wife and child who did not, like him, survive, Dlugosa, the street onto which Shmiel Jäger had moved, at some point in the 1930s, with his wife and four daughters (
the butcher? he was a very tall, a strong man, a very nice man, of course I knew him, very often we crossed each other’s paths, the children I don’t remember so well
); about how, when he volunteered for the Polish army when war broke out in 1939, he had been turned away because he was Jewish. (And I was an engineer, and they
needed
engineers! he exclaimed, laughing with surprising heartiness for a person who had lived nearly a century. He paused for a moment and then cried,
That was Poland!
) Although I can’t tell you in any great detail about what was said that day, I can tell you that I was happy that, for whatever reason, Meg had had a change of heart, and talked to us about a great deal, and that her brother-in-law had been strong enough that day to put on his robe and walk so painstakingly down the hall and sit with us for a few hours.