The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (66 page)

It was to this room that we rushed as soon as we got to Shlomo’s place, once we’d said good-bye to Anna. Shlomo sat down heavily in the desk chair and, putting on the reading glasses that hang, with an incongruous daintiness, from a cord around his neck, looked through some papers for a minute or two. Then he said, Aha, and lifted the receiver of the phone, which he cradled between his neck and shoulder. I picked my way among the papers, and near a bookcase against the wall found a place to stand while he made the call.

Even at a distance of a few feet, I could hear the tinny burble of a phone ringing somewhere far away through the receiver that Shlomo was holding; he must have had the volume turned up very high. Then Shlomo started talking animatedly in Polish. I heard him say
Pan Kulberg.
I heard him say
Anna Heller,
then
Klara Heller.
I heard him say
Bolechowa.
I heard him say
Jägerach
. I heard him say
Frydka Jäger, Lorka Jäger
. He said a lot more that I had no way of understanding.

Standing there, waiting for Shlomo to translate whatever this man Kulberg was saying, I remembered how, months earlier, on a late summer afternoon when Matt had come up to New York to take a portrait of Mrs. Begley and we’d sat in her living room discussing our various trips and what we’d found out, I’d mentioned that by this point I thought it might be a good idea to learn some Polish. Sitting in her thronelike chair in front of the dormant air conditioner, Mrs. Begley made a face.
Accchhhh,
she said, letting a dismissive hand flap onto the arm of the chair.
It’s too difficult for you, don’t bother!
She pushed more iced tea on Matt, to whom, I’d noticed, she had taken a fancy. To my surprise, she had readily acquiesced when he said he thought he’d get a more atmospheric photo if we took it in her bedroom, which meant that she had to get out of her throne and, leaning on her cane, make her painstaking and painful way through the living room. Why the bedroom? I thought, suppressing a surge of irritation at my brother. In the bedroom was her walker, and the hard, unflattering light from a window that was only lightly curtained. She would look like an old lady, I thought; in the elegant striped blouse she’d put on that day, she’d look like a prisoner of old age, and, although of course I knew that she was extremely old—she would turn ninety-three in December—I never
thought of Mrs. Begley as an old lady. I thought of her, in some strange way, as someone who had survived so much that there was no reason she wouldn’t survive time itself.

But Matt, I realized, was different, and saw a different woman than the one I had come to depend on so much, and for this reason, maybe, wanted a portrait of her sitting in her striped blouse on the lonely expanse of her big bed.

And because she liked him—partly because he is a big, good-looking man with beautiful yellow eyes and a wide, unpredictable, ingratiating grin, and partly because, as she had once told me, his moody picture of a solitary old Jew sitting in the grand synagogue in L’viv, which he’d taken on our first trip two years ago, had brought back to her wonderful memories of her girlhood in the lost world, the holidays, the meals, the way her father had carried her on his shoulders in shul on Simchat Torah so she could see what was happening—because she had decided to like him, she uncomplainingly got up from her chair in the living room and went to the bedroom and sat on the bed, and there he took the picture that, when he sent a copy to her, she declared the best picture ever taken of her.

From that point on, whenever I talked to Mrs. Begley, she’d end the conversation by saying something like this: How is that brother of yours, the one who’s so much better-looking than you are? And she would chuckle her mirthless chuckle.

For instance: a few months after Matt took the picture, Mrs. Begley called to ask me how my Yom Kippur fast had been. It was a nice
yontiff,
I said, we had a good fast and my mother had made a lavish break-fast.

She sighed heavily. It’s nice to hear those terms. They are familiar to me, but they won’t be long in this world.

Then she said, Give my best to your brother and tell him he’s much better-looking than you; and hung up the phone.

Six months after that, she called me on my birthday, which always falls around Passover. I told her about the big family seder we were all going to be attending on Long Island. Because her son happened to be abroad just then, I invited her, as I had sometimes done in the past, to come out and celebrate with my family and our friends, although I knew that she’d pooh-pooh the idea, as indeed she had done in the past.

Accchhh,
she said, sighing dramatically. (I envisioned her right hand, spotted and thin, flapping in disdain.) Once I would have gone, but my knees are bad, I can’t walk, I don’t feel well at all. But it’s nice you should ask.

It was pointless to argue, so I said nothing.

She added, I always maintained a nice Jewish home, not that it did me any good.

There was a pause. Listen, she said—often, she would signal the end of a topic, or an entire conversation, with a brusque
Listen
—Listen, give my best to your mother and father and say hello especially to your brother. You know, he’s a lot nicer-looking than you are. Ha!

Six months later, it was Yom Kippur again. On the afternoon of Kol Nidre, the evening service that marks the beginning of the holiday—the name
Kol Nidre
meaning “all vows,” since the ritual begins with a prayer on behalf of the congregation that all vows, obligations, oaths, and anathemas undertaken by its members from one Yom Kippur to the next might be absolved and nullified and made void, a prayer that began as a necessary corrective to the vehemence with which (as one source puts it) “Jews and Orientals” used to take oaths in ancient days, although this yearning for absolution from oaths took on profound new meaning for Jews, if not for other Orientals, during the years of the Spanish Inquisition, when Jews were regularly forced to formally abjure their faith and swear fealty to Catholicism (although, perhaps inevitably, the existence of the Kol Nidre prayer was long cited by anti-Semites as proof that the oath of a Jew could not be trusted, a curious if by no means rare kind of
logic
)—on the afternoon of Kol Nidre, Mrs. Begley called to ask me
exactly
what time sundown would be. While I checked an online Jewish calendar Web site that scrupulously gives the exact moment of sunup and sundown to the tenth of a second, I asked how she was feeling.

Not
vell,
she replied heavily. We chatted while I looked at the Web site, and I told her that I was thinking of going back to L’viv and Bolechow, that maybe that would give me an idea about how to finish my book.

Write fast, she said. Or I won’t be around to read it.

Then she asked me again what time sundown was, and when I’d told her again she said, All right, so tell your family to have a good fast…especially your brother, the
handsome
one.

I sat in my apartment, holding the receiver, and grinned. This was the point at which she usually liked to hang up on me, but this time there was a little silence on the other end of the line, and I was afraid she was going to ask me for a third time what time sundown was. But what she said was, And I’ll tell you something: I love you! How do you like that? To be loved by a ninety-three-year-old woman! Ha!

She gave her sour little laugh and hung up on me before I had a chance to tell her that I loved her, too. I had wanted to do so for a long time—I, who over the years of my childhood and adolescence had signed dozens of letters to my own grandparents
Love, your grandson, Daniel,
but could not remember having ever said
I love you
to any of them when it wasn’t merely a mechanical response—but for a long time had refrained, because I knew she’d laugh and say I was just being
sentimental,
just as she’d said, so dismissively, that I’d never learn Polish.

I
NEVER DID LEARN
P
OLISH.
N
OW,
in Israel, in December, as Shlomo spoke loudly with this strange man in Copenhagen, I listened uncomprehendingly to the sibilant sounds that crackled out of the receiver that Shlomo gripped tightly, the noises that were being made by a man who (I admit it) for a moment I’d hoped might be too frail or forgetful to require, now, yet another transatlantic journey. Shlomo turned to me and, cupping a hand over the mouthpiece, said, The Jägers—who else was there?

I said, Shmiel.

I heard him say,
Shmiel Jäger.

Then Shlomo listened for a long time as a firm, thin voice on the other end spoke.

Shlomo looked over the rim of his glasses at me, with an expression that said, If you were mad before because I forgot to tell you about Adam Kulberg, you won’t be mad because of what I’m about to tell you now.

He said, His father was related to the Jägers but he don’t know how. He remembers
everything
.

Shlomo talked more to Kulberg. I heard him say,
Ruchel…tak tak tak tak tak, tak. Tak. Brat? Wolf?

He cupped his hand over the phone again and said, His youngest brother, named Wolf, was living
at Shmiel’s house
!

I said, Living in Shmiel’s
house
?

Shlomo beamed, as if he were responsible for Kulberg’s brother’s address. Living in Shmiel’s house! And he knows they are related but he don’t know how, but he remembers
all
the daughters!

I thought,
Related
? I couldn’t imagine how, couldn’t imagine what relation this man, of whom I’d never heard, could be to us. Racking my brains, mentally flipping through the dozens, hundreds of names and facts I’d accumulated since 1973 when I first became obsessed with gathering and sorting everything that could be known about my family, I said, What was his mother’s maiden name?

They talked for a moment and then Shlomo said, Friedler, she was not from Bolechow, not from Bolechow. She was from Rozniatów.

Rozniatów? As far as I knew, we had no relatives, even by marriage, in the little village just a few miles from Bolechow.

At that moment Matt, who’d been in the living room doing things with his camera, walked into Bolechow World Headquarters. I turned to him and said, I’m going to have a heart attack because of this. This guy’s brother lived with Shmiel. He knows
all
of them.

Matt raised one of his fine brows in amusement and said, Where’s he live?

Copenhagen!
I said in a tight voice, not without exasperation. I thought again how easy it would have been to go from Sweden to Denmark, before coming to Israel.

At that moment I overheard Shlomo saying,
Tak, Frydka i Ciszko Szymanski…Shmiela Jägera. Ah, nu?

I turned from Matt to Shlomo. What did he say just now?

Shlomo nodded excitedly. He said, He tells me the story about the teacher that kept Frydka! He knows that Ciszko was killed together with Frydka. In Bolechow. This is a story he heard after the war.

They talked some more in Polish. Shlomo turned to me, raising his eyebrows high.

He said, He remembers the name of the art teacher who hid them!

He paused for effect and then said, The name of the teacher was Szedlak!

Shedlak? I pronounced it the way it sounded to me

Shlomo nodded, beaming. He knew what this news was worth. Yes.
Szedlak
.

I turned to Matt and said, I guess we’re going to Denmark.

Soon afterward, we finished talking to Adam Kulberg, to whom, after a brief, frantic consultation with our datebooks, we promised we’d come in February. Then we ate Ester’s epic lunch, rolling our eyes in mute appreciation of the many courses she brought out. We ate and ate, and talked about the remarkable new discovery, this man whom nobody had told us about, and finally got up to leave. It was our last day in Tel Aviv; the next day, we were going to Jerusalem, partly to do some innocent sightseeing at last, and partly because I wanted to go to Yad Vashem. Yona Wieseltier had a friend there who, she said, would help me get copies of all the witness statements that had been made by survivors from Bolechow after the war. We got up from the table, kissed Ester good-bye, and went into the hallway, where Shlomo pushed the button for the elevator. As we got into the tiny lift, a neighbor of Shlomo’s was getting out. He said something excitedly to Shlomo in Hebrew.

Shlomo turned to us, beaming, and said, They captured Saddam Hussein!

Matt said, This is amazing! He told Shlomo that we’d come home from our first trip for this project, our Ukraine trip, just before 9/11, and then had gone to Australia on the day the war started. And now, Matt said, on our last trip—

I shot him an amused look.

Matt grinned. Well, on what we
thought
was our last trip, they got Saddam Hussein!

Something occurred to me and I said, Where did they find him?

Shlomo spoke briefly with the neighbor.