The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (60 page)

We went through a curtained passageway into a living room–dining room area. Against one wall, a glass-fronted credenza with three shelves was neatly filled with bric-a-brac that reinforced the sense I’d begun to get that Klara was someone who liked fine and pretty things. On the top shelf, a crowd of glass and porcelain figurines glittered: apart from one tall cupid, nearly all of these were tiny statues of ballerinas, pirouetting, tracing arabesques, arms extended, legs extended, leaning forward, standing upright in attitudes of charm and ease. On the second shelf there was a good deal of silver: a squat pitcher, a tall ewer, some champagne
coupes
. On the bottom shelf I glimpsed a group of rather dainty porcelain figurines: a flirtatious eighteenth-century couple in elegant clothing, forever leaning toward each other over a porcelain card table; a seated milkmaid: figurines not unlike those that had once graced the credenzas and tabletops of my own grandmothers’ apartments, which as often as not were likely to feature reproductions of Gainsborough’s
Blue Boy
as part of the decor, figurines whose
appeal to these aging middle-class New York Jewish ladies, I have to surmise, lay in the fantasy of leisured gentility that they projected, which was the antithesis of the lives these ladies themselves had led. In Klara’s apartment, a few framed prints hung above a sofa, and a low table nearby supported a thriving plant and a silver candelabrum that held five red candles. At the far end of the room there was a small dining area featuring a table and a number of chairs, and it was there that Klara motioned for us to sit and eat and talk.

It was clear from the start that she was nervous. To put her at her ease, I said I wanted to start with some basics: for instance, what year she was born. Nineteen twenty-three, she answered, and then she asked, Why did I want to know? As we talked, I noticed that she twisted the rings on her fingers, and looked often from me and Matt to Ewa.

She was the eldest of four children, she went on, a sister and two brothers. She smiled faintly as she named them.
Józek, Władek, Amalia Rosalia.
Her maiden name was Schoenfeld, her father was an engineer in one of the local leather factories. In a little talkative rush, like a student taking an exam she hopes to get over with, she said, You want to know what year my parents died? They were very young when they died. Killed by the Germans. Leon and Rachel.

She stopped and talked to Ewa for a minute. Ewa turned to me and said that Klara had a statement that she’d prepared, and instead of talking like this she would prefer to read the statement. So you’ll know everything, she added.

I said, I’m really more interested in just having a conversation. I don’t want her to study. Tell her it’s just two Bolechowers sitting at the table.

Ewa relayed this and Klara smiled a little.

I asked what she remembered about the Jäger girls. After all, Meg had sent us here because, she said, Klara had been one of their group. How many daughters did she remember? I asked.

Ewa talked to Klara and then said to me, There were two.

I smiled and said nothing.

Ewa went on. She only knew Frydka and the only way she knew them was that she would go to the store to buy some meat. But otherwise they had no contact, really. She was young, and she had different girlfriends from her. She can tell you what she heard. She can only tell you that Frydka was taken by Ciszko Szymanski, and he wanted to save her. Somebody of course told the Germans that he was trying to hide her, and the Germans came of course and murdered him and her. But when and where she doesn’t know.

I noted the two
of course
’s and asked, a little bit later, What was Ciszko like?

Ewa said, She knew him by sight. He was quite large, everybody was afraid of him. Because he was a big guy, a strong guy, well-built. He was also the son of a butcher.

Matt grinned and said, They came together over meat! and everybody chuckled. Not for the first time, I wondered what
had
brought them together. Impossible to know.

Klara said, I don’t know why they met and how. Well, he liked her. She was a beautiful girl.

I said to Ewa, Tell her we heard two different stories, and I’d be interested to know which one she heard. The first was that he took her into the woods to try to get her to the partisans, and the other was that he was hiding her himself.

Ewa translated the question and Klara shrugged expressively and smiled more broadly than she had before, a smile of resignation. Could be, Ewa said after they’d exchanged a few words. Well, she thinks that the second—the other one, with the attic, and somebody told the Germans—is most close to the truth. The first one, about the partisans, she never heard about it. But she just
doesn’t
want to say anything either way.

She just doesn’t want to say anything either way
ended up being the theme of that first day with Klara, who over and over again, as we talked, seemed afraid to commit herself to any kind of definitive statement. Although frustrating for us, this was, I realized, admirable in its way. More than anyone else we’d spoken to, Klara emphasized that afternoon that anything anybody claimed to know about the fates of Shmiel and his family was, at best, hearsay. I was struck by how anxious she seemed lest something that could, in time, turn out to be inaccurate be attributed to her. At one point I said, Explain to her that we’re not
holding
her to anything, I just want to get at this…
cloud
of information.

Well, I don’t remember a lot, Klara said to Ewa. It’s very, very hard.

It’s fine, I said, and tried to give Klara a reassuring look. I decided, then, that for the rest of this interview, we’d talk only about innocuous things. I said, So she said she knew her by sight, then, a girl around town?

The two Polish women talked, and Ewa turned to me again. She was tall, and very nice looking, a good-looking woman.

In English Klara said,
Very nice! Very nice!
She smiled at me and Matt. We smiled back.

Then she said something else to Ewa, who suddenly looked intrigued.

It was a good camouflage, she said.

I said, What do you mean?

Ewa exchanged a few words with Klara and then said, First of all, the nose.

Klara made a little gesture with her hand to her face to indicate a small, turned-up nose.

Ewa said, The nose, a little bit like
that
. And she was light, and she had a quite Slavic face—not dark like mine, not dark like Klara. Well, in Poland, you could say she’s Polish.

Camouflage,
she had said. I thought of what Meg had said to me, in the first minutes of our meeting in Sydney.
You look very Aryan. Somebody who looked like you had a chance to live.

Ewa listened to Klara and said, She wasn’t—she didn’t look like a
Jew
.

Then she looked at me and asked if that was what Meg Grossbard had said, too.

A
T THIS POINT
I wanted to make Klara comfortable. Although I’d reassured her that we didn’t have to talk about the Occupation, she seemed very eager to read her prepared statement. It occurred to me that the written words of the statement were comforting to her, a feeling I myself, who had so hopefully ordered so many documents from so many archives over the years, was familiar with. That was fine with us, I said. Klara reached for something that lay on the table, picked up a piece of paper, and peered at it
through her tinted glasses. She began to read, one sentence at a time, as Ewa translated.

Klara Freilich said:

I was born in Bolechow on the twenty-third of August 1923, and I went to school in Stryj, to high school, the
Handelschule.

She said, In 1939 the hard life for Jews started, when the Germans came to our town. When they started to shoot and bombard our town I ran into the woods together with my parents and family.

She said, In 1940 the Russians came, and the Germans left. The Russians stayed in our town until 1941.

She said, I married in May 1941 during the Russian era in our town.

She said, In June 1941 the Germans came again and then the real Holocaust of the Jews started in our town. Because of our town’s industry, like the leather industry, they took the younger Jews and put them in a special place—

(she said
barak,
which I surmised was the Polish word for
Lager
)

—and the older ones were taken to Stryj.

She said, That’s why I and my husband stayed in this place for the young people, and we started to work in this leather industry and we were producing glue.

She said, Every day we went to our job together with the German police and the Ukrainian police and they were beating us and harassing us every day.

Klara took a deep breath at this point and went on, In December 1943 we ran away to the woods but it was impossible to stay there because Germans and Ukrainian police knew about it and tried to take people back.

She said, Accidentally, we met a fellow from a nearby village and he was so kind that he took us with him to this village. But I have to underline that this fellow was half-Polish, half-Ukrainian.

She said, His name was Nikolai Krekhovyetsky from Gerynia.

She said, This fellow built for us a place under the floor, like a bunker. It was under the barn where the cows were.

She said, The conditions of our life in this bunker are simply impossible to tell.

At this point Klara looked up from her paper and said, Why do I have to tell you a lot? Do you want me to tell you?

We told her to tell us whatever she wanted.

Klara let the paper drop to the table and spoke to Ewa for a few minutes,
and then Ewa said to us: She says that every day, almost every day, the Germans and the Ukrainians came and wanted to find the Jews because they knew that he was hiding Jews. And they found other Jews, but not Klara and her husband. It was Klara and her husband and her husband’s brother, and another guy, a boy from this village.

Perhaps because I was listening to all this with Matt at my side, I was particularly moved to think that the two brothers had figured out a way to stay together all that time (another brother hadn’t survived, we later learned): first in Bolechow itself, where they’d managed to linger in the forced-labor details until the last possible moment; and then in the hideout. I was about to ask Klara about this brother of Yankel Freilich—she hadn’t even told me his name—but she was eager to get through her narrative.

She doesn’t want to tell you everything because it is a too-long story, Ewa said.

Klara went back to her paper. She read:

And besides those people in this bunker we had the company of mice, rats, and other things.

She said, In this horrible state we survived until the war was over.

She said, I have to tell you that in 1942 the Germans killed my parents, and my sister, and my brothers.

After a moment I told Ewa, Ask her if that was the second Aktion.

They talked, and Ewa said, It was the last Aktion. Her father survived that long thanks to the fact that he was a professional specialist, so the Germans needed him. And she says that later on, it doesn’t matter, it’s not important.

Soon after this, Klara suddenly interrupted as I was saying something to Ewa and talked to her in a rush of Polish. Ewa listened and then translated. Klara, she said, had just had a vivid memory of something that had happened during the first Aktion, when Klara and her family were trying to conceal themselves during the roundup. They were at home, Ewa said. They were staying with some Poles, a man named Szymanski, he had a tannery.

Szymanski?
But this man had a tannery, and Ciszko’s father, I had always heard, was a butcher who had a little delicatessen attached to his house. Well, I thought: Szymanski was a very common name.

And she went outside in order to beat a carpet, Ewa went on, but this guy, maybe it was Szymanski, shouted at her, Listen Klara, the Germans are coming, hide! So she went to this place in the house where they kept wood. The walls weren’t built very tightly, so she could see out. And she remembered,
just now, that one German was standing outside and looked right at her, but didn’t see her. And a German shepherd dog was with him, the Nazis always had them—and she was sitting on a piece of wood on the floor and they were looking at her, the German and the German shepherd, and she was looking right at them but they didn’t see her.

Klara leaned back in her chair and told Ewa she had to take a break.

A
FTER A WHILE
Klara got up and served an enormous lunch. Gefilte fish, borscht, cold poached salmon in raisin sauce, delicious bread. Yes, she said, smiling, the bread was homemade, too, although she’d had to make it the day before, because she didn’t have enough time today. As an accompaniment, she served vodka in little glasses, and kept making sure that everyone’s glass was filled. She made a joke in Polish, and Ewa, smiling, translated it: Fish like to swim, so you have to have some vodka with it!