The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (23 page)

In front of the house we had the
most
wonderful lilacs, she was saying. The most wonderful, you can’t imagine.

I’d noticed that she often said
you can’t imagine
when she wanted to evoke some positive, pleasant memory of her past, as if there were no point in trying to use more concrete, more descriptive adjectives for what had been good in the past, since after all, it was all gone. When she said this about the lilacs, I silently resolved to bring her back flowers from the garden of the house where she had lived so long ago. These flowers, I thought to myself, she would accept.

The day after we went to Bolechow for the first time, the day we drove back to see the cemetery, I told Andrew and Matt and Jennifer and Alex that I really wanted to stop in Striy. At first everyone enjoyed the challenge of finding Mrs. Begley’s house, and of course it was impossible not to resist the idea of doing a favor for an old Jewish lady, a Holocaust survivor, back in New York. (They hadn’t met her, and I was amused to think what they would think if confronted with this particular old lady, so different from the effusive, adoring old ladies we knew from our childhood.) But the search soon disintegrated into frustration. The problem with this house was, in a way, the inverse of the problem with the house that now occupies what used to be
lot #141 in Bolechow. There, we found the location but the house itself had been destroyed—it was the same place, but a different structure. Here, we were told that the house still stood—
a big house on the main avenue of the town,
everyone knew of it—but we couldn’t find it.
Number Five
,
Third of May Street,
Mrs. Begley had told me when she’d given me that list of places to see in Galicia; but history, I have learned, has a way of making a mess of local geography, and Third of May Street had changed names so many times that it was difficult to know which of the streets and houses we saw in front of us corresponded to the streets and houses on a prewar map of Stryj we had managed to obtain…

…N
OW WE HAD
obtained this map in the following way: When I told Alex that we wanted to stop in Striy, he told us that there was someone there that we’d certainly want to meet, given our interests—Josef Feuer, known far and wide as the last Jew of Striy. On the day we ended up spending so much time looking for Mrs. Begley’s house, Alex drove us to a decrepit block of apartments on the outskirts of town, and we walked up a few flights of dank concrete steps to Feuer’s apartment. The old man, stooped but dignified, with a short white beard and a scholar’s air, beckoned for us to enter the cramped room, and the four of us shuffled in and took seats at the wooden table in the center of the room. For a while we chatted with Josef Feuer who, in a mixture of German, Yiddish, and Russian, from which I tried to provide a running translation for my siblings, told us the story of his survival, which was similar to the one I’d heard about Eli Rosenberg earlier that year: the narrow escape, the flight east into the Soviet Union, the service with the Soviet army, the return to a desolated town. Like Rosenberg, Feuer had married and stayed in his hometown, but unlike Rosenberg he’d done something else, too. As we sat there listening to his story, it was hard not to gawk, for the entire apartment had been turned into a private archive, a museum of an extinct culture, in which Feuer himself had assembled whatever fragments of Striy’s lost Jewish life he could get his hands on: old prayer books, maps, yellowing documents, municipal surveys, photographs of people he knew and many he didn’t, Yizkor books, boxes bulging with his various ongoing correspondences with Yad Vashem or the German government. It was from this moldering archive of old papers that he produced, when we told him why we’d come to Striy that day, several large old maps of the town; and it was from the fat mass of more recent papers that he took a recent exchange of letters that, he said, would
provide us with an amusing story. He had, he said, written quite recently to the German government about getting them to erect a memorial at the site of the great Aktion in the Holobutow forest outside of the city, where in 1941 a thousand Jews were taken and shot; the site, he said, was overgrown and wild, and bones could be seen thrusting up from the ground.

As he told us this story, Feuer held up a copy of the letter he’d written, in German, to Berlin. Then he picked up another, bearing an official-looking governmental seal. The Germans, he said, had responded with great alacrity, and had proposed the following: that if Mr. Feuer and the other members of Striy’s Jewish community could raise a certain amount of money toward the landscaping of the site at the Holobutow forest and the construction of the memorial on it, the German government would be more than pleased to match the amount.

At this point Feuer brandished a third paper: his response to the Germans’ proposal. It’s difficult, now, to remember the gist of it, since the opening of his letter was so distracting. It said,
Dear Sir, All the other members of the Stryjer Jewish community are in the Holobutow forest
. This fact, the accuracy of which we had no reason to doubt, was surely what led this scholarly and gentle man to turn to us, as he was leading us down the gray steps of his building when our interview had ended, and say to Matt, who at that moment snapped his picture,
Tell them that I am the Last of the Mohicans
…

…S
O IT WAS
Josef Feuer’s map that we used to determine where Third of May Street must be. On the street that seemed the likeliest candidate, Alex stopped an extremely old woman wearing a head scarf. He begain to explain in Ukrainian what we were looking for, and then with an apologetic grimace on his wide, easygoing face, interrupted himself and turned to me.

The name of your friend in New York again?

Begley, I said, and then shook my head and corrected myself:
Begleiter.

Ah,
Doktor Begleiter
! the woman exclaimed, before Alex had a chance to translate. She smiled broadly and said something to him in rapid Ukrainian. Then he turned to us and said, She says he was a
very
big doctor here.

Sixty years, I thought to myself, thousands of miles, and we’d managed to run into this woman on this street, who out of the blue had pulled this fact, the one that we wanted. Still, the concrete object itself, the house where the big doctor had lived, was impossible to retrieve. For nearly an hour we walked up and down this long avenue; at one point we videotaped a house that bore
the number 5, although immediately afterward we were told that this particular part of the street hadn’t, before the war, been part of Third of May Street proper. After a while my brothers and sister began to grumble, and so rather than continuing to look, I started taking pictures of every single house on the street that, we were assured, had once been Third of May Street. When I sheepishly showed these pictures to Mrs. Begley soon after our return from our trip to Ukraine, she made a face and shook her head wearily.

Achhh, it’s
very
disappointing, she said while we were eating the elaborate lunch she’d prepared to celebrate my homecoming. She had looked at the slides I’d made, and as she did so all she kept saying was, I’m telling you, that wasn’t my street.

Still, she hungrily peered at every photograph, every slide, every minute of the videotape we’d made of the streets of Striy, including the stark images of the city’s once-great synagogue, now fallen in ruins, enormous trees growing out of its gutted interior and reaching easily for the sun, since there was no roof.
Look,
Mrs. Begley said as she and Ella and I rather uncomfortably perched on the foot of her bed across from the TV. She pointed and said, That was my life. After the video was over, we went into the dining room, where Mrs. Begley looked at the slides again and shook her head once more rather severely as Ella brought in an enormous tureen. I made this myself! Mrs. Begley said. Then she offered me stuffed cabbage and told me I was looking too thin.

W
E SPENT THE
day after the fruitless search for Mrs. Begley’s house sightseeing in L’viv. That evening, our last in Ukraine, Alex and his wife, Natalie, a doctor, hosted us all at a sumptuous dinner at their apartment.
The Ukrainians were the worst,
my grandfather had always told us.
Cannibals,
the lady in Sydney would hiss, later.
They were only nice to you because you’re Americans, because to them you’re more American than Jewish,
someone I would come to know well in Israel told me, when I described how generous, how gracious and kind all the Ukrainians had been to us during our six-day return to the Old Country, our two days in Bolechow. Knowing what I now knew—a very tiny part of what I would come to know—and seeing what I’d seen, the mass grave there in Bolechow, the roofless synagogue of Striy, it was tempting to believe them. But I knew other things, too, and had seen other things. Of course there were the terrible betrayals; but there had been the rescues, too, the unimaginable, risky acts of kindness. How, after all, do you know how people are going to behave?

The next day, a Wednesday, we all flew back to New York. The flight was long, we were exhausted, but we’d done and seen a lot, in the end, and we felt we had learned something; the trip had been a success after all. After our plane landed we all crammed into a taxi and raced toward Manhattan. Andrew was going to be spending the night in New York City before flying home to California the next day, but Matt and Jen, who both lived in Washington, D.C., were trying to make the eleven
P.M
. train back home. For some reason there was a lot of traffic heading into town from JFK, and we pulled up in front of Penn Station with just a minute or so to spare before the train was to leave. I can’t tell whether it was because of relief that we’d made it just in time, or something else, that Matt, as he raced toward the station, suddenly turned around and said, Bye, I love you! as my cab started to pull away. Then they disappeared into the night.

A
S IT TURNED
out, it was not until many months after our return from Ukraine that we began to learn, finally, the details of what had happened to Shmiel Jäger and his family.

On a cold February night in 2002 I was sitting in my apartment in New York City. I had had tea that day with Mrs. Begley, who still refused to call me anything but
Mr. Mendelsohn;
I’d been showing her another batch of pho
tos of our trip that I’d only that day received back from the lab. So when the phone rang that evening, not three hours after I’d returned home, and a deep Central European voice said, Mr. Mendelsohn? I shot back, without missing a beat, Mrs. Begley?

Once again the voice said, Mr. Mendelsohn? and I realized it wasn’t she. Flustered and slightly annoyed—I was embarrassed—I asked who it was.

My name is Jack Greene, the voice said, and I’m calling you from Sydney, Australia. I heard on the grapevine that you’re looking for people who knew the Jäger family in Bolechow?

The line hissed softly. Immense distances.

Ye-e-e-ss? I said, stalling as I scrambled around my desk for a pen and then started to write
GREEN
(
E
?).
AUSTRALIA
?
BOLECHOW
.
GRAPEVINE
??? on a piece of paper.

Well, this voice from the other side of the planet was saying, in a plummy accent that admixed with pure Polish the unmistakable consonants and vowels of a Yiddish-speaker, You should know that I dated one of Shmiel Jäger’s girls, and I’d be happy to talk to you.

And that is how we began, at last, to find them. Not on the trip itself; but, in a way, from having gone on the trip.

When we returned from Bolechow, we made tapes of the videos we’d taken there, which included videos of our interviews with Nina and Maria and Olga, and had sent copies to the remaining Jäger cousins, including Elkana in Israel. This turned out to be the beginning of the grapevine: Elkana had in turn invited some of the few remaining former Bolechowers over to watch the tape. One of these survivors was Shlomo Adler, the leader of the ex-Bolechower community in Israel, who during a flurry of e-mails much later on told us not to believe Pyotr, who may have convinced himself (Adler wrote) that he’d tried to help the Jews, but it was very unlikely, and told us not to bother trying to erect a memorial to the dead in the mass grave, because the stones would be vandalized and the construction materials stolen, and asked us, too, whether we’d noticed that there is no reference to the town’s Jews in the little museum in Bolechow. Most important, it was he who had mentioned our trip to Jack Greene, who had been born
Grünschlag
and who now lives in Sydney, very near his younger brother, with whom, miraculously, he had survived the war, and who dated one of the Jäger girls, and who knew them, and who was the first of what eventually turned out to be the twelve remaining Jews of Bolechow who told us, in time, what had happened.

When Jack Greene said
I dated one of Shmiel Jäger’s girls
, I had the same
vertiginous feeling I’d had when Olga in Bolechow had said,
Znayu, znayu
. All that distance, all those years; and then there she was, right there across the table, there he was, chatting with me on the phone, there they were, still out there if you knew where to find them: remembering them.