The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (58 page)

Poor? I looked at her. Very poor?
Always?

She nodded. Yes, she said. I remember my father saying that when he was
a child and his family would take him to a resort in Poland, Zakopane, he felt badly because Avrumche was too poor to come along.

I thought for a moment, and said, Well, I knew that things were bad after my great-grandfather died, and then the war came—

She shook her head, then shrugged and said, Anyway, when they were
little
.

I thought of my grandfather’s stories. I thought of his description of his father, the prosperous businessman, the little bottles of Tokay he would bring to Vienna. I thought of his descriptions of the Ukrainian maid he had had, growing up, of the cook who had baked each child his own little challah, for Friday nights. I thought of him telling how his father had such great influence in the town. It wasn’t that I disbelieved these tales, necessarily. But as Yona talked about how desperately poor my grandfather’s childhood had been, I started to wonder, once again, how much of my grandfather’s stories were based on fact, and how much they were the projections of his vivid and yearning imagination. It’s no surprise if a small boy who’s barely ten when his father dies enlarges, over time, the memory of that father, gives the lost father an allure, a stature, a wealth that he might not actually have possessed, because during the terrible times through which this boy must now live, this enhanced memory—which will become ossified, over the years, into facts, into the stories he tells others, like me—allows the boy to think better of himself.
We were something, once,
this boy tells himself,
we were somebody special
. The hard times, if anything, now seem to the boy like a test of that mettle, that innate quality of superiority that his dead father, receding increasingly into the past, once had, and of which the wealth, the status, the esteem with which the boy, now grown up and a successful businessman himself, retroactively endows the memory of the dead father, when he talks about him in later years, was, after all, merely the outward expression. Sometimes the stories we tell are narratives of what happened; sometimes, they are the image of what we wish had happened, the unconscious justifications of the lives we’ve ended up living.
We were rich, we had maids. She was a Zionist, he was my favorite.
Only in stories, after all, do things turn out neatly, and only in stories does every small detail fit neatly into place. If they fit too neatly, after all, we are likely not to trust them.

I was thinking about all this, was starting to wonder just who and what my family had really been, when the check came. Yona insisted on paying; after a few ritual protests, I allowed her to. It was around two o’clock in the afternoon by now, and the sun was amazingly strong. I squinted.

You always had such blue eyes, she told me, looking evenly at my face as
we waited for the waiter to return with her change. I smiled and didn’t say anything. It was when we were parting, a few minutes later, and had started to exchange phone numbers and current addresses and e-mail contacts, that I actually blushed.

Yona, I said awkwardly, as I started to write her name on a napkin, this is so embarrassing.

She gave me a quizzical look.
YONA
was all I’d been able to write on the napkin. I looked at her and said, I just realized that in all these years, I don’t know what your family name is.

She smiled her little smile and shrugged a little and said,
Wieseltier
.

That was in the summer. Late in the fall, I came back to Tel Aviv with Matt, so he could take pictures—of Yona, of all the others. But Israel would be our second stop. First, we flew to Stockholm.

The tale of Abram’s wanderings as he made his way to the Promised Land is a story that’s preoccupied with increase: increase of territory, of descendants, of wealth. (And, presumably, of knowledge, too.) Abram’s burgeoning wealth, following his advantageous stay in Egypt, ultimately causes a rift between his employees and those of his nephew, Lot, and in order to avoid conflict Abram and Lot agree to split up and occupy different territories, the nephew claiming the plain to the east of the Jordan (a plain occupied, disastrously, by the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah), and the uncle claiming the land to its west. But increases of other kinds preoccupy Abram even after he is comfortably settled
in the land toward which he was told to “go for himself.” After all, God repeatedly promises him that he will be fruitful and his offspring will be as innumerable as the dust and stars; and yet Sarai, his beautiful wife, has failed to conceive. So among the plenty there is, too, dearth. Abram, aware of this paradox, bitterly lashes out, at one point, wondering what good his vast wealth is when strangers will inherit it. The problem is solved (seemingly) when Sarai offers her Egyptian-born slave woman, Hagar, to Abram, that she herself, Sarai, “might be built up through her.” Abram obliges—although not without some resultant marital tension—and Ishmael is born. Thirteen years later, when Abraham (as his name has by then become) is ninety-nine and Sarah (whose name also changed) is eighty-nine, God announces that in the next year, she will give birth to a son. Not surprisingly, this announcement evokes from Abraham a certain incredulity, and he falls, literally, on his face and laughs. In due course, the child is indeed born, and the Hebrew name that is given to this child fittingly recalls his father’s reaction to the news of his conception: the name means “he laughed,” which in Hebrew is
Yitzhak.

The unique dynamic of
Lech Lecha
is, indeed, one of movement between opposites: increase and lack, activity and stasis, barrenness and fertility, and—as is always the case with tales of adventurous travels—solitude and crowds, the loneliness of the traveler, on the one hand, and the multitudinous bustle of the places he sees but cannot belong to, on the other. To my mind, this constant tension between opposing forces, this tortured and expressive dynamic (which seems, I often think, a metaphor for the way in which we always want more, want to add to ourselves and grow as we move through our lives, even as we fear that that very addition and increase will make us into something that is not recognizably ourselves, will make us lose our own past) is most concisely and elegantly expressed toward the end of
Lech Lecha
, when God promises the nearly centenarian Abram that he will indeed be fruitful and multiply. As a symbol of his new status as the father of great nations, Abram will be the beneficiary of another increase: his name will gain a syllable and become “Abraham.” The name of his wife, too, will undergo a change, from Sarai to “Sarah.” Various explanations of the significance of the name change have been offered; Rashi goes to no little trouble, for instance, to explain how the Hebrew
Avraham
can, in fact, be construed in the way God wants it to be construed, which is as a contraction of
Av-hamon
, “father of multitudes.” The
r
in Avraham, not present in
Av-hamon
, presents a problem, although Rashi as usual solves this with considerable ingenuity. Similarly, much thought is devoted by Rashi to what happens to the final
i
in Sarai, once she becomes Sarah—since once a letter has been part of the name of a righteous person, it is an insult to the letter itself to remove it. (No worry: the final letter in the Hebrew spelling of Sarai was, we’re told, later added to the name of the hero Hoshea, who was thereby reborn as Joshua.)

As ingenious and indeed satisfying as this is, I find myself agreeing with another
commentator (not Friedman, who passes over the name-change passage in silence), who argues that the significance of the name-enhancement process lies less in what the names might actually mean but in the larger sense that, as he accepts the covenant with God, Abram must have a new name, just as monarchs assume a throne name on their accession. The significance of the name change is, in this reading, more psychological than philological. This makes perfect sense to me, who by now have become all too familiar with the checkered careers that names can have: how there can be a certain yearning to change the name, and in so doing to signal a necessary break with the life one has led; and yet how crucial it can be that the name be recognizable, too, because it’s not always clear what parts of the past will turn out to be worth saving.

(Autumn)

A
CCCHH
,
IT
’
S MESHUGA
, no?

It was early afternoon on a Sunday in December, and Mrs. Begley was telling me how crazy she thought my upcoming travel plans were. At the end of the month she’d be having a birthday, and I’d be returning from a trip that would zigzag from New York to London to Stockholm to London to Tel Aviv to London and back to New York. As she shook her head, half-amused and half-disdainful, I tried to explain that our erratic itinerary, the exhausting juggling of continents and climates, was all because of Dyzia Lew. As I made my futile case I had little notion of how meshuga that trip would turn out to be, what with the awful blizzard, the half-day delays, the canceled flights, the missed connections in strange airports; and then, worst of all, the almost comical series of misunderstandings about the lady from Minsk, the futile transatlantic flights to places she’d just left.

It had started with a phone call I received in November, four months after I returned from Israel.

Until that point, I’d thought we had two more trips to make: first, a northerly trip in the first week of December—the earliest Matt could get free—
which would include Stockholm, where Klara Freilich lived, and then Minsk, where Dyzia Lew lived. Then we’d go home and, perhaps a month or so later, we’d fly to Israel for a week so that Matt would be able to shoot portraits of the Bolechowers whom I’d met during the summer, when he hadn’t been able to come with me.

And then, I thought, we’d be finished.

But early in November Shlomo called me with bad news. Dyzia, he said, was very ill with some circulatory disease, sufficiently ill that she’d just flown from Belarus to Israel to receive treatment there. So there was no point in going to Belarus, Shlomo said. If anything, he went on, we must come to Israel sooner rather than later, since frankly there was no way to know how long…His voice trailed off. As Shlomo told me all this I thought, Here it is at last: Time catching up with us. I had known, of course, since the night that Jack Greene called me out of the blue and I decided, as he talked, that I would have to go to meet the few remaining Bolechowers in the world, that the people I needed to talk to were quite elderly; I’d always understood that someone might die before we got to them. But it was one thing to be aware of that theoretical possibility, and another to be confronted with the chilly reality of a particular woman’s being so ill that I might, now, never get to meet her and probe her memory.

I said to Shlomo, If she’s that sick, maybe I should interview her over the phone soon, now? The earliest that Matt and I could get to Israel to see her was that first week in December; I supposed we could postpone Stockholm and simply go directly to meet Dyzia in Tel Aviv, but now, in the light of Shlomo’s dire news, even the three weeks until December seemed like a dangerously long time to wait. Shlomo agreed, and said he’d talk to Dyzia and set up a time for me to call when he could be at her hospital bedside to act as translator. A few days later, he e-mailed me to say that everything was settled, that he’d be sitting at Dyzia’s side in the hospital at four-thirty in the afternoon, Tel Aviv time, on the following Sunday, and that that was when I should call to talk to Dyzia Lew.

Sunday the ninth? I asked.

Yes, he said, Sunday the ninth.

Now as it happened, Sunday the ninth of November that year was going to be a full day for me, a day rich with family feeling and rich, too, with thoughts about the past, since it was the day of the big celebration that my brothers and sister and I were going to be holding in New York City in honor of my parents’ fiftieth, “golden” wedding anniversary. It was a date, then, of
small and rather local significance for one particular family of seven people, unless you take into account the fact that November 9 marks another anniversary, an anniversary not of gold but, you might say, of crystal, one that, I suppose, is of equally great if somewhat oblique significance for my family, since in 2003 November 9 also marked the sixty-fifth anniversary of
Kristallnacht
. On that night in 1938 there began a vast nationwide pogrom throughout Germany and Austria, organized by the Nazi Party: two days of terror during which marauding gangs of Nazi youth (and adults) roamed the streets of Jewish neighborhoods, looting Jewish homes and businesses, beating and often murdering Jews, and of course breaking the windows of innumerable buildings. I say “of course,” because it is to the billions of shards of millions of broken glass windowpanes that the term
Kristallnacht,
“Crystal Night”—a term first coined at a meeting of the Nazi high command a few days after the event, the same meeting at which it was announced that Hitler had demanded “that the Jewish question be now, once and for all, coordinated and solved one way or another”—owes its grotesque glitter. Although the damage resulting from Crystal Night was enormous (although at least by later standards, the loss of life was negligible)—nearly a hundred Jews killed, seventy-five hundred Jewish businesses destroyed, over a hundred synagogues and holy places destroyed, among them, as we know, every single one of the religious edifices designed by the Hungarian-born architect Ignaz Reiser, designer of the Zeremonienhalle of the New Jewish Section of Vienna’s grand Zentralfriedhof—the real significance of that particular ninth of November, the reason it is a date that had, that year, a double significance for my family, was that
Kristallnacht
is now generally accepted as the event that marks the beginning of the Holocaust proper. And indeed, although the cities of Germany and Austria were distant in every conceivable way from the shtetls of what was then eastern Poland, it is possible to see a resemblance, what you might call a sibling resemblance, between what happened on
Kristallnacht
in famous places like Worms and Lübeck and Ulm and Kiel and Munich and Koblenz and Berlin and Stettin (the latter being the city from which my great-grandfather Itzig Mendelsohn and his family, including twin two-year-old sons, had departed in 1892 for New York), in places like Vienna and Linz and Innsbruck and Klagenfurt and Graz and Salzburg, “city of Mozart,” and what happened a little later on in tiny places like Bolechow. For instance, in November 1938 the Jews of Germany were fined a billion marks to pay for the damage that had been done on that night of crystal, which is to say, the Jews were fined to reimburse the Nazis for the damage that the Jews had suffered (and indeed, even the six
million marks—a relatively small number, compared to a billion—that insurance companies paid for the broken windows were diverted into the Reich’s treasury). These grotesque accounting practices of November 1938 were not at all dissimilar to those we observe being put into practice in November 1941, when the Jews of Bolechow were forced to reimburse the Germans for the cost of the bullets that had killed Jews.

On the ninth of November, then, a date that in 2003 was a day of rejoicing in my family, I called the number that Shlomo had given me and talked to the ailing Dyzia Lew.

Hello, Shlomo said into his cell phone. He was sitting next to Dyzia, he told me; she was ready. His voice echoed slightly into the phone.

You want to talk to her? he asked.

Well, I can’t, I said, she doesn’t speak English.

But don’t you want to record her voice? he said. By now, Shlomo understood my passion for concrete things.

Well, I can’t right now, I said, maybe next month when I’m there. By way of introduction, I told Shlomo to tell Dyzia that one of the reasons I wanted to talk to her so urgently was that Meg Grossbard had said that Dyzia had belonged to this group of girls that knew the Jäger girls.

Yes, Shlomo replied, I told her all that and she was starting to tell me that she knew all the girls, the Jäger girls, and she knows that Lorka was the elder one, and Frydka was in the middle, and she knows of the other one—Fania? She says she remembers only three, he went on.

I grinned to myself and said, There were four. Lorka, Frydka, Ruchele, and Bronia.
Bronia,
I repeated—although, I thought, who was I to be correcting what this woman recalled, I who still have a piece of paper on which, in the 1970s, I’d made a list that reads as follows:
LORCA FRIEDKA RUCHATZ BRONIA
?

Bronia, niye Fania,
I could hear Shlomo telling Dyzia, whose face I tried to imagine as I waited for everything I said, and some things I hadn’t said, to be translated a continent away into Polish.

She says maybe, maybe yes, Shlomo said into his cell phone.

I laughed out loud; by now, Shlomo knew why. And ask her which was the one she knew the best, I said.

A low buzz of Polish, then:
Frydka
.

I asked him to ask her if she had any memories of the parents, if she remembered them in any way.

No, Shlomo said after a moment of Polish. She don’t remember them at all.

I said, If she knew Frydka the best, what does she remember best about her
personality? What was she like? We heard she was a very lively girl, she liked the boys—is that true?

He exchanged a few words with Dyzia.

She was very beautiful, he said. Beautiful eyes. She said that Meg Grossbard knows her eyes, Frydka’s eyes, that they were beautiful. She said that Frydka was not such a, you know, an easy girl. She was beautiful, young, the youngsters were crazy after her.

More Polish.

She said in März ’forty-two Frydka was working at the barrel factory.

March 1942.

I was on the same factory, Shlomo went on, I was at the same factory but I don’t remember if it was true.

This surprised me. But he
had
to remember, I thought: it was he, sitting in Anna Heller Stern’s living room, who’d told me that story, the story about how everyone used to say that there were two good-looking girls in the
Fassfabrik,
and that one of them was Frydka Jäger.

Maybe, I thought, his “I don’t remember if it was true” referred to
März
’forty-two.

Shlomo continued. Dyzia worked then in the bureau where they supplied work, the
Arbeitsamt
they called it in German. She said she remembers in 1942, one day was a nice day, Frydka came to the
Arbeitsamt.
It was lunchtime, so she came from the barrel factory to visit her in the
Arbeitsamt
. She said that she remembers a guy named Altmann that talked to Frydka in that
Arbeitsamt
. She said again that she had a lot of friends but she was not an easy—

Not an easy person? I interjected, perhaps a little too quickly. My curiosity had been piqued by the thought that I was going to be hearing something new about her personality, something more than
there were three girls, she was the younger, she had beautiful eyes.
I told Shlomo, Ask her what does she mean when she says she was a difficult person.

Shlomo paused and then saw my misunderstanding. No, not that, not a difficult
person
. No, she means, for the boys, it was not easy to
get
her.

I said, Oh I see—although I wondered, in that case, just what
picaflor
had referred to. Trying to hold that story together, I prodded a little. But she liked the boys? I said.

A moment in Polish, then: Yes, she liked the boys, the boys liked her, but it was not easy to
get
her.

I felt relieved. I said, Tell her if she had to compare Lorka with Frydka, what was the difference in their personalities?

They spoke in Polish, then Shlomo said, She didn’t know Lorka so well, but people used to say that Lorka was, you know, she was easier than Frydka.

Easier than Frydka?
I remembered how adamant Anna had been about Lorka’s fidelity to her one boyfriend, Halpern—although, then again, the fact that Anna thought Lorka’s sole boyfriend had been this Halpern fellow, whereas Meg had told me that there was no question that it had been Yulek Zimmerman, should itself have suggested how fragile these perceptions, these stories could be.

She was easier than Frydka.
I said, You mean with boys?

With boys, yes. She says before the war she and her friends of her age were too young to start flirting with boys. But they would look up to Lorka and take her example.

Ah, I said, I see; although of course I didn’t. I said to him, Tell her that Anna Heller said Frydka was like a butterfly with the boys…

They talked and Shlomo said, Because she was so beautiful, so it was not a problem for her to flirt with each of the boys. She says that with respect to boys, she was selfish, Frydka. She wanted them only for her!

She was selfish with the boys, she wanted them all to herself, but she wasn’t “easy.” Six thousand miles from Dyzia Lew’s hospital bed I sighed and thought, Well, why not? I had known girls like that in high school, girls who toyed with boys until one day they fell hard for one specific boy, and that was that. I thought, Nothing will ever be known about the relationship between Frydka and Ciszko: what had brought them together, what its substance and character was, what they had done together and talked about: Nothing. But it doesn’t seem unreasonable to surmise, at least, that for him, it was serious enough to risk his life for, and that for her—possibly—it was serious enough for her to have given herself to him, to have become pregnant with his child. Hearing Shlomo report Dyzia’s impressions to me,
she wasn’t easy, she wanted them all for herself,
I realized that these two apparently contradictory details were, in fact, the bare bones of a certain story: a story of a willful and beautiful teenager, rather tall and perhaps a little bit spoiled, a girl whose flighty and egotistical personality, subjected to the tremendous and crushing pressures of war, to the unimaginable forces of hardship and suffering and grief under the Occupation, had metamorphosed into something heroic and brilliant, the way that a lump of ordinary carbon can, under the right pressure, be transformed into a diamond. But of course, we will never know.