The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (69 page)

I thought all this but what I said was, yes, a heroic story! We never could have imagined where it would take us! (I meant
geographically,
and implied
emotionally
. But I also thought,
morally,
since I’d now seen how these facts and stories could force you, almost against your will, to judge people.) For instance, I said to Alena, we were now trying to find relatives of Ciszko Szymanski, although as she well knew, Szymanski was a common name in Poland. Laughing, I told them how, leafing through the program of a ballet performance I’d attended a few months earlier, I’d noticed that one of the dancers was named Szymanska, and that she came from Wrocław, where we knew Ciszko’s mother had gone after the war; and how I’d raced backstage and accosted this slender blond girl, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and started spilling the entire story of Frydka and Ciszko until I realized I was being ridiculous.

Everybody chuckled, and Alena said, They were in Wrocław?

We told her to tell her father the story we’d heard from Malcia Reinharz, about how Ciszko’s mother had bewailed her young son’s foolishness.
How stupid he was!

Matt said, He did a good thing! And his family was upset with him for doing a good thing! I looked at him with a sudden stab of affection. It was the same furious, outraged purity that he’d had in high school.

And yet, as I remembered Malcia’s anecdote, I remembered Josef Adler saying, It was
complicated
. I thought of Mrs. Szymanski’s outburst, and then thought of stories we’d just heard in Stockholm, heard in Israel. If it was impossible, grotesque, for us, for me or Matt or anyone of our idle generation, to sit in judgment on the emotions of these Jews whose stories we’d been hearing, maybe it was also impossible to sit in judgment on Mrs. Szymanski, who had cried out
How stupid he was!
when she recalled how he had died for a Jewish girl.

Well, I murmured, she lost her
child
.

Matt was indignant. But he acted like a human
being
!

O
NCE AGAIN, WE
made ourselves comfortable around Alena’s table. We showed Adam some more photographs. Shmiel and Ester on their wedding day, surrounded by hydrangeas. Shmiel with his fur-collared coat. The three girls in the white lace dresses. Frydka in her scarf; Ruchele with her wavy, Mittelmark hair. Shmiel standing in front of one of his trucks with Ester and her brother Bumek Schneelicht.

Adam picked up this blurry snapshot, in which Shmiel was already white-haired, looking far more than his forty-five years but smiling and thrusting his hands into his overcoat pockets with a self-confident, proprietary air, and said,
To jest Shmiel.
This is Shmiel. He turned and said something to his daughter, who said to me, This is Shmiel as he remembers him. He says he would recognize Shmiel Jäger anywhere.

I like to think, now, that it was because of Matt’s presence that, when I showed this man these particular pictures, I took care to ask him about the feelings they evoked in him.

I said to Alena, Ask him how does it feel to see these faces that he hasn’t seen in such a long time.

She translated this into Polish, and Adam took off his glasses carefully and thought for a moment. Then he smiled gently and said, I am thinking, and I am going back to the past. I feel like I am on my way to heaven.

E
VERY
B
OLECHOWER WE
had talked to until that night had survived by not moving: by staying perfectly still for days and weeks and months in attics, in haylofts, in cellars, in secret compartments, in holes dug into the forest floor, and in the strangest, most confining prison of all, the fragile prison of a false identity. The last story of survival we were to hear was, like a story you might hear in an epic poem, a Greek myth, a story of perpetual movement, of ceaseless wandering.

On the day of his twentieth birthday, Adam Kulberg left Bolechow. He told us that night that he’d always had what he thought of as an “instinct for information,” and his instinct, after the Germans started surging through eastern Poland on the twentieth of June, was to leave his hometown and travel east into the Soviet Union with the retreating Russians. He had no job that summer; he was young, he was restless. There had been stories from towns farther away, stories of Jews being shot in cemeteries. Few people believed the stories, but still, he told us, he had his
instinct
. He tried to persuade his parents that the whole family should leave—his mother and father, himself, his three sisters Chana, Perla, and Sala, girls who were roughly the age of Shmiel’s daughters Frydka, Ruchele, and Bronia. But his father, who hated the Russians, resisted. As his son argued with him, Salamon Kulberg said
No
. He gave Adam his blessing, but refused to budge. We are born here, the father said. Here is our house, and here we will stay.

How can you leave a home?
Malcia Reinharz had exclaimed in Beer Sheva.

On his twentieth birthday, Adam said good-bye to his family, kissing each of them in turn as they lined up in the kitchen. As he turned to leave, he impetuously grabbed three photographs. He has them still. In one of them, his youngest sister, Sala, is
wearing a watch that, as he realized on his millionth scrutiny of this rare relic of what his life had been, although he had coveted it for a long time and bought it with money he’d painstakingly saved, he had nonetheless let his sister wear.

So maybe I am a good brother after all! he said to Matt and me with a little smile, when he told us about this picture. He produced the photograph in question, so worn by now that the lost girl’s features are all but unimaginable to anyone but Adam himself.

Adam left his father’s house—which he would see again just after the war, a little bit older and transformed by his remarkable travels, although the house itself when he saw it again was, he later said to me, utterly unchanged; it was as if somebody had been cooking a meal, had been interrupted, and was planning to come back in a few minutes, which for all we know may well have been the case—he left this house, which would remain almost unchanged even though everything else would change, or at least ninety-nine-point-two percent of everything else, and started walking east. He was accompanied, at first, by two friends who had also had an instinct to leave. One was called Ignacy Taub; the surname, I know, means
dove
. The other was a boy named Zimmerman, but after a few days on the dusty road to Russia this Zimmerman boy started crying and said he missed his family, and so he turned back and went home. The next, and perhaps last, time that a boy named Zimmerman appears in the narrative of Bolechow is when, in the winter of 1942, Meg Grossbard expressed surprise, during a clandestine visit to the place where her friend Dusia Zimmerman lived, on seeing that Lorka Jäger had taken up with Dusia’s brother Yulek Zimmerman, a boy that Meg would never have guessed might be Lorka’s type. Yulek Zimmerman was killed in a “small” action that took place in 1943.

So Bumo—as we now must call him, since he was traveling with a friend and all of his friends called him not Adam but
Bumo
—so Bumo Kulberg and Ignacy Taub started walking. They kept to the smaller roads and every day walked farther east, making sure to keep an eye out for the other traffic: if they saw Russian troops, they knew they were, for the most part, safe. They kept walking and walking, and after a while their course took a southerly turn. They had hit upon a plan: they would walk to Palestine, taking a route through the Caucasus, then south to Iran, and then through Iran, where they would turn westward and penetrate into Palestine.

Palestine?
you might exclaim, as Matt and I did when we heard the beginning of Adam’s tale. Adam smiled self-deprecatingly. We were young, he said.

After three months, sometimes hitching rides, sometimes jumping on trains, Bumo and Ignacy reached the Caucasus, where they paused and worked for a
while at a tobacco farm. It was very hard work, but they were strong and young and, he had to admit, the weather was wonderful. The trees were heavy with fruit, they didn’t go hungry. At the collective farm they had a room with two beds. Everything was spotless. The walls were immaculate, whitewashed. They were even paid a little bit. The place was beautiful, remote. A place where they had many horses, Adam remembered as he spoke. Famous for Cossacks.

They were in Groznyy. In three months, Bumo and Ignacy had walked from Poland to Chechnya. Although it seemed incredible that there was a war going on—the beautiful weather, the fruit, the clean beds and hard, decent work—Bumo’s pillow was wet with tears every night. He missed his family, and he realized, now, that he was very far from home. At night, he would take out his three photographs and talk to them.

S
OON THEY HEARD
that the Germans were coming, and after talking it over the two youths decided that since they hadn’t stayed at home in Bolechow to wait for the Germans to come, they weren’t going to stay in Groznyy, either, however improbably idyllic it was. The local people and their fellow workers on the collective were sad to see them go: they were good workers, and everyone else was in the army. But the boys were firm. They took their back pay and started walking again. Sometimes they traveled by train. The surroundings were beautiful, Adam recalled. Like a
Kurort
. A spa. The two young men continued heading east through these breathtakingly lovely spots toward the Caspian Sea.

It was around the time Bumo and Ignacy were traveling through the tiny Soviet
Socialist Republic of Daghestan that Ruchele Jäger was made to stand naked on a plank that had been laid over a hastily dug ditch in a place called Taniawa.

In Makhachkala, the big port city of Daghestan that lies on the western shore of the vast Caspian Sea, Bumo and Ignacy found thousands of war refugees. It was very difficult to get food; nobody had any money. Despite these conditions, Adam and Ignacy, with little more than the clothes on their backs, and, of course, the three precious photographs, gaped at the exotic locals, whose everyday wear included enormous swords.

Sabers! Big swords! They were allowed to wear them! Bumo exclaimed. Even now, he shook his head in disbelief.

The city of Makhachkala was, Bumo thought, very beautiful, built like a cascade that dropped gradually into the sea. For three or four weeks they lingered there, waiting for a chance to get on a boat that would take them across the sea; they would continue heading east. The wait seemed endless. Soviet military personnel and their families had priority, thousands of women and children also fleeing east. Bumo and Ignacy spent hours and days loitering around the harbor, waiting to get on a ship. Finally they decided that in the event that only one of them could go, he should do so, and then wait on the other side until his friend joined him. This is what happened. Bumo went first, illegally. It took two days in unbearably crowded conditions to reach the other side, the port city of Krasnovodsk in Turkmenistan. The temperature was forty-five degrees Celsius—one hundred thirteen degrees Fahrenheit. It was, he said, like the Sahara. Krasnovodsk was known as the city without water, because the water in the Caspian Sea is salt water. Undrinkable. So water was rationed.

At around the time that Bumo was exploring the brutally hot city without water, Frydka Jäger somehow managed to get herself a place working inside the barrel factory, which wasn’t a bad thing, given how severe the Carpathian winter was.

In Krasnovodsk, Frydka’s distant cousin Bumo Kulberg got himself a job in the harbor as a longshoreman, hauling things off of ships, and waited for Ignacy Taub to appear.

After a month, Ignacy came. Although both of them could have had jobs in Krasnovodsk, they kept moving. It was too hot, and there were problems with the water. They knew that the most important thing was to stay healthy. So they decided to go farther, to Ashgabat, on the Turkmeni-Iranian border. They sneaked onto trains and in that manner passed through the terrible Kara-Kum Desert in Central Turkmenistan, a place so barren that the few train stations they saw had not names, but numbers.