The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (10 page)

We know that the Tree of Knowledge in
Bereishit
was neither an oak nor a willow nor an apple, but a fig; and we know this, or at least infer it, from the fact that after Adam and Eve eat of the tree and acquire the shameful knowledge that they are naked, they cover themselves with the leaves of a fig tree. To this Friedman has fairly little to add, apart from the fact, which is admittedly interesting, that the improvised coverings the first two humans made for themselves were not actually “clothing,” but crude coverings, since it is God, in Genesis 3:21, who makes the first clothing for them. But Rashi explores the detail of the fig leaves more searchingly, and derives from it (as he does
so often) a moral conclusion. “By the very thing through which they came to ruin,” he writes, “they were corrected.”

To my mind, this progress from ruin to correction is intimately connected to the nature of knowledge itself, which is, at best, a process: from ignorance to awareness, from intellectual “ruin” to its “correction,” from indistinct chaos to orderly scholarship. Knowledge, therefore, encompasses at once the starting point, which is empty, harmful, painful, and the end point, which is pleasure. To my mind, it is this quality of process, of development, which can only take place over time, that answers, finally, the question of why Knowledge must come from a tree. For a tree is a thing that grows; and growth, like learning, can only happen over and through time itself. Indeed, outside the medium of time, words like “grow” and “learn” cannot have any meaning at all.

And it is time, in the end, that gives meaning to and makes sense of both the pleasure to be had from knowledge, and the pain. The pleasure lies, to some extent, in the pride in accumulation: before, there was void and chaos, and now there is plenty and order. The pain, on the other hand, is associated with time in a slightly different way. For instance (because time moves in one direction only) once you know a thing you cannot unknow it, and as we know certain things, certain facts, certain kinds of knowledge are painful. And also: while other kinds of knowledge bring pleasure precisely as I have described above, filling you with information that you wanted to have, allowing you to make sense of what once looked like a disordered jumble, it is possible to learn certain things, certain facts, too late for them to do you any good.

Listen:

M
Y GRANDFATHER DIED
in 1980. In the middle of the night, although he was very weak—at most one or two weeks, my mother had told me, away from dying of the cancer that was eating him alive—he got out of bed, wearing his immaculate white pajamas, and somehow had the strength to sneak past his sleeping wife, the one who had hated his feathers, the one who had been in Auschwitz, and to leave the apartment and press the elevator button “L”; found the strength to walk through the marble lobby of the Forte Towers and out the back doors to the swimming pool, into which he then found, finally, the strength to jump, although he knew that he could not swim.

That is how great the pain was. Now I ask myself, which pain?

Because my grandfather had committed suicide, I worried secretly—I was then twenty, but with respect to my grandfather I always seemed to be about eleven—if he would somehow get in trouble, whether the exacting details
of the funeral arrangements he had dictated to me, the washing of his body, the plain wooden box, the grave site in Queens that was, of course, waiting for him because he was a man of Bolechow, and had paid his dues—would be denied to him. But everything went according to plan, and my grandfather was buried in New York. During the weeks afterward, my mother flew down to Miami Beach several times to settle his affairs. (Even when anticipating his own death, he was funny. When she opened the safe-deposit box containing his papers, she found a note at the very top, written in the unmistakable handwriting of my grandfather, who knew my mother would only ever read this note upon his death. “Now Marlene,” it began, “first, you’d better stop crying because you know how lousy you look when you cry….”) As she had done in the case of her mother, she gave away most of his things to Jewish charities, but there were of course many things with special private and family significance that she brought home to Long Island.

Among these, for instance, was the faded-blue book called
Sefer HaZikaron LeKedoshei Bolechow,
the “Memorial Book of the Martyrs of Bolechow.” Seeing it, that summer day in 1980, I remembered having seen it in his apartment one day years before, when I’d come alone to visit him. I was fifteen at the time, and already somewhat officially the family historian, a fact in which my grandfather took great pride, however much he liked to tease me about my importunate questions. During that previous visit, he’d wanted my help in cleaning out a lot of old boxes of “useless things,” as he called them, and I sat next to him for a few hours one day, tossing things he was handing me—packets of letters wrapped in rubber bands or string, old driver’s licenses, articles from
Reader’s Digest
that he’d torn out—into a tall kitchen garbage pail lined with a white plastic bag. At one point, he went to the bathroom and I quickly sneaked a look at one of the packets of letters, which turned out to be his correspondence with his third wife, a lady called Alice. I scanned the letters quickly, and the occasional phrase caught my eye—for instance,
I don’t care, frankly, about your $400,000, I have money of my own
. (I naturally assumed that this particular missive came from the period of their divorce.) I berate myself, now, for not having crammed the whole packet into my suitcase; my grandfather would never have noticed. But I am also aware that at that point, I wasn’t interested in the marriages my grandfather made after my grandmother so unexpectedly died, because I thought of them as “recent” history and hence not of any real interest. Of course, his marriage to Alice in 1970 is farther from me now as I write this than Shmiel’s days as a businessman in
Bolechow were from the day I sat there combing through my grandfather’s useless correspondence.

Anyway, that was the day my grandfather took out the
Sefer HaZikaron LeKedoshei Bolechow,
“Memorial Book of the Martyrs of Bolechow,” and showed it to me, and I wonder if that was also the day when, perhaps that night after I’d gone to sleep, my grandfather went through this book and wrote down for me (I like to think) on that piece of his company stationery, which he had carefully preserved and had not tossed away, all the information I needed to know about who was who and what pages their pictures could be found on, looking ahead to the time when he wouldn’t be there to tell me himself.

My mother brought back other things, too, things of sentimental value to her (his glasses with the attached hearing aid, for instance), bank documents, his photo album with those black-and-white pictures that I would later come to know so well, even if I knew so little about the people in them.

There was something else she brought back, too, something I’d seen many times since I was young, but to which I hadn’t ever given a second thought. It was that funny wallet, the long, slender one with the pimples, that he’d often carefully put in the breast pocket of one of the jackets he liked to wear. I recognized it, of course, but I could never have guessed what was inside it.

For when we finally opened the wallet, what we found was this: many folded pages covered in writing, writing in an even, forceful, elegant hand, writing in German. My mother had studied some German, long ago, although not with great success—she liked to tell the story of how her high school German teacher, expecting great things from a girl whose name was, after all,
Marlene Jaeger,
had been bitterly disappointed—and so she put the sheaf in my hands, when we discovered them, since by that point I was in college and had been studying German myself.
Lieber Teurer Bruder samt liebe Teure Schwägerin,
I read: “Dear darling brother and dear darling sister-in-law.”
Liebe Jeanette und Lieber Sam
, I read:
Dear Jeanette and dear Sam. Lieber Cousin
, I read. I read, on three separate letters,
Lieber Aby
. Dear Aby.

Aby. My grandfather.

I read the dates:
Bolechów 16
/
1 1939
. I read, randomly, from the pages. From the opening of one:
Ich lebte einige monate mit der Hoffnung mich mit Euch meine Teure persönlich sehn zu können, leider wurde mir der Traum verschwunden
. “For a few months I lived in the hope of being able to see you in person, my dears, but my dream vanished.” (For a long time after I first saw it, I couldn’t stop thinking of this sentence: Why had Shmiel allowed himself to dream this hopeful dream, and why had it vanished? Who had given him false hope? I think
about this a lot, knowing as I do how brothers, for reasons that no archival document can ever illuminate, can fail each other.) From page 2 of another (all the pages are carefully numbered at the top):
Man hält mich in Bolechów für einen reichen Mann
…“People in Bolechow consider me a rich man…”
Du machst vorwürfe mein l. Frau warum sie wendet sich nicht zu ihr Bruder und Schwester
. “You upbraid my d[ear] wife for not having turned to her brother and sister.”
Wass die Juden machen hier mit, dass ist aber ein hunderster teil wass ihr weisst
…“What you know about what the Jews are going through here, is just one one-hundredth of it.”
Die liebe Lorka arbeitet in Stryj bei einem Fotograf
. “Dear Lorka is working in Stryj at a photographer’s.”
Die kleine Bronia geht noch in Schule
. “Little Bronia is still in school.”…
in ständiger Schreck ergriffen
, “gripped by constant terror.”
Gebe Gott dass Hitler verrissen werden soll!
“God willing, Hitler should be torn to bits!” And I read, of course, the signature, again and again:
Ich grüsse und Küsse Euch alle vom tiefsten Herzens, dein Sam
. “I bid you all farewell and kiss you all from the bottom of my heart, your Sam.”
Von Euer Treuren Sam
, “from your faithful Sam,”
von Euer Sam
, “from your Sam.” Sam.
Sam
.

Shmiel.

So this is what my grandfather had been carrying with him, all those years. The letters Shmiel had been writing, in the last desperate year while he could still write, when he thought he could find a way to get out. It had been there, right in front of my eyes, all that time, those summers when I’d idly look at the odd wallet, impatient to go outside and hear my grandfather’s stories, never dreaming of the story that he was carrying in his left breast pocket. It had been there, right in front of me, and I hadn’t seen a thing.

Listen:

Y
EARS AFTER MY
grandfather died, I decided to try out the Jewish genealogy Web site’s FamilyFinder page. To use this, you list all of your family names, along with the towns those names were associated with; then you list your own contact information—the idea being that someone looking for people with your names from your towns is bound to be related to you, and will want to be in contact with you.

So I listed my family’s names. When I did so, I decided to err on the side of thoroughness, and so listed not only the names and cities of origin of my three foreign-born grandparents (MENDELSOHN, RIGA; JAGER JAEGER YAGER YAEGER, BOLECHOW; STANGER, KRAKOW), but the names
of every single person I could think of who was related to my relatives, so to speak: and so my entries included RECHTSCHAFFEN, KALUSZ (my great-aunt Sylvia’s husband), BIRNBAUM, SNIATYN (my paternal great-grandmother’s relatives), WALDMANN, BOLECHOW (my grandfather had told me, when I was about thirteen, that his father had had a sister named Sarah who’d married a man named Waldmann), BEISPIEL, KALUSZ (relatives of “Tante”), MITTELMARK, DOLINA (the family of my grandfather’s mother), KORNBLÜH, BOLECHOW (the family of my grandfather’s paternal grandmother). And although I knew it was pointless, I also entered SCHNEELICHT, STRYJ.
Snowlight
. Maybe it was snowing that day.

And what happened was, a few of them worked. Almost immediately I was contacted by a nice lady from Long Island whose father was the grandson of that Sarah Jäger who’d married a man named Waldmann, and although it probably sounds foolish and sentimental, and the relationship is a very distant one, I was exultant about this discovery for weeks. Then, about a year later, an even more remarkable find: we discovered an entire lost branch of my father’s family, because I’d noticed that someone else was looking for BIRNBAUM from SNIATYN. (And how nearly we missed it: originally I’d put BIRNBAUM from KRAKOW, because I seemed to remember that this is where my grandmother’s parents had been from. Then, about a year after I’d first posted this, I was digging through some old letters from my Aunt Pauly and saw that in one of them she’d written,
I think they came from Cracow, but I also seem to remember someone saying the name of a town called Sniatin or Snyatyn, maybe that will help you.
That is how close a call it was—how nearly we missed finding the wonderful couple from Colorado who had, on their end, posted BIRNBAUM from SNIATYN, and who are our cousins.)

But the strangest response of all was the one I never expected, the response to SCHNEELICHT, STRYJ. I happened to be visiting my older brother at his home in the Bay Area a few years ago, and while there I retrieved a message on my answering machine in New York City from a man who said he’d seen my posting and wanted to talk to me about the name Schneelicht from Stryj. I was sufficiently excited that I didn’t wait to get back to New York, but instead called him from my brother’s house that evening. He lived in Oregon. He told me that his late father—the gentleman had died only a few years earlier, in 1994, at the age of 103—had been born Emil Schneelicht, in Stryj, and had lost several of his six siblings in the Holocaust. He said that his father’s parents names were Leib Herz Schneelicht and Tauba Lea Schneelicht, names that, of
course, meant nothing to me then. Then he told me the names of his father’s siblings. They were: