The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (61 page)

During lunch, we were careful to talk only about pleasant things: how exciting and interesting our previous travels had been, how much we’d enjoyed meeting the other Bolechowers. We talked about Meg, about Jack and Bob. Jack Greene had been her brother’s friend, Klara said. She smiled when we mentioned Shlomo’s name: everybody, it seemed, was familiar with the “king of the Bolechowers.” She used to go to Israel often, she said, because her daughter, who had since died of cancer, had lived there. We talked about the Israeli Bolechowers. She didn’t seem to know the Reinharzes, and so I told her their remarkable tale of survival, hidden above the ceiling of the German officers’ club. She had arranged once to meet Anna Heller Stern at one point when she was in Israel, she said, but Anna had gotten sick, and had canceled.

Because Klara now seemed more relaxed, I gently prodded her about her memories of life in Bolechow before the war. Anything, I said, anything at all, in no particular order. Were her parents very religious, for instance?

Her parents hadn’t been particularly observant, she said after a minute, although of course they’d observed the big holidays, Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur. They’d go to the big synagogue on the Rynek, the one that eventually became a club for Ukrainian leather workers, only on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Matt gave me a look that said,
Just like us
, and I nodded. I asked Klara if she remembered what foods her mother would cook on holidays. Challah, she said;
gefilte fisch,
she said.
Tsimmes,
she remembered, smiling at the thought of that savory New Year’s dish of meat, sweet potatoes, carrots, and prunes.
My mother sometimes put honey in it,
my own mother used to say
of this dish,
Honey!
and I would think, with the special, protective tenderness that to this day I reserve only for my dead grandmother, my mother’s mother, Nana,
All that work for a dish she couldn’t eat.

We ate Klara’s savory food and she talked about the commercial high school that she and Frydka had attended, how classes had run from eight in the morning till two in the afternoon, how many and difficult were the courses they’d taken. All different subjects! she exclaimed. Ukrainian, Polish, mathematics, natural sciences, physics, geography, history. What they ate in Bolechow, when she was a girl: always fish on Friday nights, carp or trout; otherwise, chicken or meat or even turkey. Her mother had been a wonderful cook, she said: but then, how could she possibly say her mother
hadn’t
been a good cook! She talked about how she and the other teenagers would go to the Hanoar HaZioni after school; how there’d been an eight o’clock curfew for teenagers in the town, in the prewar years. How, come to think of it, Frydka Jäger hadn’t been one of the girls who went regularly to the Hanoar meetings. About the movies she would see as a girl, at the cinema in the Dom Katolicki. I still remember silent movies! she said, almost boastfully. Charlie Chaplin! Gary Cooper! Ramon Novarro! People said how he was so good-looking!

Klara offered me yet another piece of gefilte fish. I said I couldn’t, I’d already had two pieces.

Who’s counting? she said.

She talked about how she used to ski in the hills outside of Bolechow, how they’d played volleyball in school, how she had played Ping-Pong. (Matt and I exchanged a swift look:
Ping-Pong!?
) She remembered the school uniforms: berets for the girls, caps for the boys. Every school had a different color, she said. She talked about the homework she and her friends had to get through before the Hanoar meetings.

What do you expect? she said suddenly. People lived as
usual,
it was business as
usual,
we tried to get good marks in school because it was important to our parents, and that was all! Life as
usual
!

She talked about her wedding day, during the Soviet years. It was May, she said, a beautiful morning. She wore a light-blue dress with a dark-blue coat, and a little hat on her head. And suddenly, snow and rain! They took a carriage drawn by horses to a restaurant in the Rynek; they invited their wedding guests to this restaurant. But Klara couldn’t take part in the wedding dinner because she had a temperature. I was sick, she said to us, nodding at the recollection of this strange day of joy and snow and fever.

Who was there? I asked, wanting her to relax with these happy memories.
My friends, she said, my husband’s friends, my family, my brothers, my sister. At the rabbi’s it was just the family, and then the dinner was all the friends and family. But it was only a very modest dinner since I was sick.

What was the name of the rabbi? I asked. Did she remember? Klara thought for a moment and then she cried, Perlov! Perlov! She beamed and said, Now I remember! It’s a miracle!

I wondered if other miracles might happen. As Klara got up again to get the dessert, returning after a few moments with an enormous coffee cake, I asked her if she remembered anything else about the Jägers. The butcher shop to which she’d go to buy meat, for instance: Did she remember that there were two Jäger brothers? She thought for a moment and then cried out, Yes! Yes! Now I remember. I was a little girl. There were two Jägers, one had a butcher shop and the other was Fryda’s father—

(
Fryda
, she had said: the name on the birth certificate, not
Frydka
, the nickname; for some reason, this tiny, insignificant variation seemed to add a dimension to her recollection, seemed to make the girl I knew only as Frydka more real)

—my mother would send me to one of the Jäger brothers to buy meat, but I would go to another one because it was nearer to our house. Was one of them religious? The owner of this little shop?

Then, suddenly, she made an
aha!
face.
Tak, tak. Skandal!

She said something to Ewa, who turned to me with a look that was half-querying, half-amused. She said, The religious Jews started to boycott this shop?

B
Y THIS POINT
it was, quite abruptly, darker outside, and what with the heaviness of the meal and the disappearance of daylight, the mood of the room seemed to grow heavier and darker, too. Marek, I’d noticed, had listened carefully and courteously as his mother spoke about the days of her girlhood and teenage years, the normal,
life as usual
years before the war started, and as we ate our dessert and coffee he started to talk to me from the other side of the table, as Ewa and Klara talked softly to each other in Polish. It was clear there was something on his mind, and I could tell how frustrated he was at not having more fluent English. But I helped and prompted him now and then, and in the end understood everything he said.

I asked him how much he already knew of what he’d heard.

Not much, he said. Mostly I talked to my father. My mother told me about
it sometimes. Now I’m asking more because I want to know for my children. He told me he had two children, Jonathan and Sarah, eighteen and twelve. How much of this are they aware of? I asked. Marek shook his head. Five percent, he said. They know they were survivors, they were at a farmer’s under the floor, eleven months, and that’s all. I listened to him and decided that I liked him: his frank and eager interest, his openness in talking about difficult things to a total stranger. He looked, I suddenly realized, like a handsomer Bob Hoskins, and this unbidden association somehow strengthened the impression I had that he was a very decent person. We talked a while about how, as we got older, further away from the past, the past paradoxically had become more important to us. He said, My father, for him it was very important to be Jewish but he never taught us to be Jewish. I never had Jewish friends in Poland, but he pointed to me that I am Jewish, too—I must be strong, I must be the best.

I nodded sympathetically.

I wanted my children to come today for this reason, Marek told me. He said that his father had very rarely talked about the past, only on Yom Kippur, and then only “a few words.” But nothing
deep,
he added. I wanted to tell my son about my family, Marek went on, not only my wife’s family—

(his wife was Polish, he’d told me)

—but it’s so difficult. When you came here today, my mother wanted to remember the dates. I tried to tell her
dates
are not important, it’s not the dates, but how was it to
be
there, what was it like, who was my grandfather—not his profession, but his
personality
. She cannot understand that you want to know about trivial things, like what was the school like, the teachers. This is so difficult to explain.

I was very moved by this. So much of what he’d said, after all, dovetailed with my own yearning, over so many years, to learn the small things, the tiny details that, I told myself, could bring the dead back to life. At this point Matt, who when we were growing up would often say heated, emotional things that, at the time, would embarrass me, so naked were the feelings that prompted them—things like, Racists should just
die
! or, People who do that to animals should just be
killed
!—Matt said, vehemently, A lot of people want to know how they died, but not how they
lived
!

Continuing his thought, Marek nodded and said, People think it’s not important if someone was a happy man, or not a happy man. But this
is
important. Because after the Holocaust, those things disappeared.

Soon after this, we got up to leave. As I sometimes would do at the end
of these interviews, I asked Ewa to ask Klara what her best memories of Bolechow were. Ewa spoke to Klara and Klara, listening, made a wistful face. Then she said something brief to Ewa.

What Klara had said was,
The bad memories have erased the good.

W
E TALKED TO
Klara the next day, too, after Matt had taken some photos of her in a little square paved with cobblestones. It has to say “Stockholm,” he’d said to me the night before as we lay in our adjoining beds, softly discussing the long and, I felt, oddly thwarted conversation we’d had with Klara. She had told us a lot, I knew, but somehow I had the impression that she was keeping something back, which I had not had when talking with the others, except perhaps, at the beginning, with Meg. As I listened to Matt saying that his picture
had to say Stockholm,
I grinned, but took care not to let him see. Not having had time to explore Stockholm, after all—our day for being tourists had melted away as we waited on the runway at JFK—neither one of us could be quite sure just what Stockholm “said.” Cobblestones, with water in the background, seemed reasonable.

So the next day, the second day, we met Klara and Marek and Ewa at a spot that Marek had suggested, and walked for a bit. For her official photograph, Klara had put on a chic snakeskin jacket with padded shoulders. She was looking much happier today, as she posed in front of the small obelisk that stood at the center of the cobblestone-paved square, and flirted with the camera. It was bitter cold and gray outside, and rather damp; from time to time the sun seemed to be trying to find a way through the thin, weary-looking clouds, only to retreat after a few minutes. After twenty minutes or so of posing and picture-taking, we gratefully ducked into a coffee shop just off the little square. It was appealingly dark and warm inside, and a fire was burning. We all ordered cappuccinos.

Marek had wanted to talk about his father the day before, and now he did. My father was from another side of Bolechow, he explained, from the poor side. He went only to the fourth class—fourth grade. He had to go to work early in his life.

Before I’d left for Sweden, I’d checked once again in the 1891 Galicia Business Directory online at www.jewishgen.org. E
FRAIM
F
REILICH
, the database read:
HADERN
-
UND KNOCHESHANDLER
.
Rag-and-bones man. Yes: the other side of Bolechow.

With a soft look on his broad face, Marek went on talking about his father,
who had died long before I ever dreamed of finding out what happened to Uncle Shmiel. Marek said, He was…he was very
special
. Very, very special. He helped a lot of Jewish people after the war. Every Jew knows him here! He gave money to a lot of people. It was amazing: when he died—and he was here in Sweden only a very short time, because I brought him here to the hospital from Poland—when he died it was one hundred people here.

I realized he meant, at the funeral.

He said, It was amazing.

From the counter of the café came the sound of milk being foamed. Klara and Ewa were talking softly, and Ewa turned to me and Matt to explain that they were discussing a news report about some recent anti-Israeli feeling in Sweden. She said that a bookstore that sold openly anti-Semitic pamphlets and newspapers and books had opened near a church where, during the war, refugee Jews had been given shelter.

Klara shook her head and said,
Skandal!

The mention of newspapers reminded me of a question about everyday life that I’d meant to ask Klara. Were the papers in Bolechow mostly in Polish?

Mostly, she said. Her parents spoke Yiddish and Polish at home. Also a little Ukrainian.

Ukrainian
reminded me of another question: When Jewish people had household help, were the maids usually Ukrainian?
The maid betrayed them,
I’d heard someone saying a lifetime ago, before I knew anything at all.

Yes, Klara said, Ukrainians.

I thought suddenly of my grandfather teasing my mother’s stout cleaning lady, Mrs. Wilk, with his dirty jokes in Polish, and this led me to a further thought. Was there some kind of castle near Bolechow, I asked, that had once belonged to a Polish count?

No, she said, she couldn’t remember any such place.

I heard my grandfather’s voice saying,
They were hiding in a kessle
.

Then: Did she ever hear about Graf Potocki?