The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (63 page)

It wasn’t until a year after I’d returned to New York from that trip, one night when I was watching the videotape of this interview for the third or fourth time, that I realized that I’d never said anything about an attic.

B
ECAUSE
I
NEVER
like having to go back and revisit places I’ve just been, it may have been the fact that I’d recently been in Israel; or perhaps it was the grueling trip to Stockholm; or perhaps it was Klara’s unexpected, frank acknowledgment of the psychological suffering she’d endured in her life; or perhaps, even, it was the sense, after we’d talked to her three days running,
that there was not much left to be learned; perhaps it was any or all of these that gave to our week in Israel an aura of melancholy.

There was something else, too, which we couldn’t know about until we landed at Ben Gurion Airport and had checked into our hotel. After Matt and I had settled into our rooms, the first thing I did was to call Shlomo: I wanted to confirm our various appointments over the next few days, which as usual he had very helpfully arranged. It was in the course of doing so that he told me that Dyzia Lew had flown back to Belarus only days before.

What?
I was furious, but tried not to show it. We’d scheduled this entire trip to coincide with Dyzia’s stay in Israel.

What happened? I asked, attempting to control my voice.

The treatment wasn’t working, Shlomo told me. So she went back.

He didn’t have to say, To die. Anyway, it wasn’t Shlomo’s fault; there was nothing to do but carry on. So I held my tongue, and we went over the itinerary he’d organized. But a certain sadness now clung to this trip more tightly than ever.

It was there when we went back to Beer Sheva to photograph Shumek and Malcia Reinharz. Once again, Malcia had prepared an enormous meal; once again, we sat talking and she smiled and spoke her forceful if broken English and thrust more food on us. Once again, Malcia shared her memories, this time for Matt’s sake: that Shmiel had been
toip,
deaf, that Ester had had
two such pretty legs
! That there had been only two girls, as far as she knew, and that they were a nice family, a handsome family. But this time it was as if she, too, were feeling depleted: her mood was far more pensive now than it had been when I’d interviewed her in June, and she tended, this time, to finish her sentences with a little sigh. She continued reminiscing, bringing out the memories in no particular order. She recalled the card games her parents had played: Rummy, Sixty-Six, something called
Der Rote König,
the Red King. The movies they used to go see on Saturday afternoons, when they’d sit in the more expensive seats, in the third row, with the lawyer Dr. Reifeisen who was nearsighted and who, I knew, although not from Malcia, had hanged himself from a beam in his office soon after the Germans came. Greta Garbo movies, Malcia remembered; Jeanette MacDonald! She remembered Bruckenstein’s, the restaurant that was owned by a pianist who was blind and who, during the first Aktion, in the Dom Katolicki, was ordered to play sprightly tunes on a piano that had been placed on the little stage while the Gestapo men put out the eyes of Rabbi Landau and forced the other rabbi who was there, Horowitz, to get up on that stage and lie naked atop some terrified naked girl as my mother’s cousin Ruchele lay cower
ing and listening, hours before her short life came to an end. She recalled how she and the other Bolechowers used to walk everywhere, as far as Morszyn, far into the woods where they would gather…
Erdbeeren?
—

Strawberries, I said.

Strawberries, she said, enunciating the word slowly,
und Blaubeeren
—

Blueberries, I said.

Blueberries, Malcia said. Strawberries and blueberries and
every
berries! She burst out laughing at her own joke, and then suddenly became wistful again. Oh, it was nice, it was nice. It was a
life
. It was, and it will never be again.

Sixteen again I’ll never be, till apples will grow on a cherry tree.

It was at this point that Shumek Reinharz said he wanted to show us something that maybe Matt would want to photograph. He got up slowly from the dining table to fetch something from his bedroom. Malcia went into the kitchen and returned with an enormous apple strudel she’d been baking. Matt did something with his camera, and I took advantage of the lull in the conversation to boast to Malcia that Matt had just been named one of the top ten wedding photographers in the country. She made delighted noises, and then Shumek returned and held out a bunch of yellowed papers to me. I took them carefully, almost gingerly: I know how fragile old paper can be. One, roughly the size of a passport, had a swastika on the front and said, in block letters,
PASSIERSCHEIN
. It was, I immediately recognized, the safe-passage document that had allowed him, as a “useful worker,” to walk the streets of Bolechow without getting killed. Inside there was a big letter
W,
and I remembered what Jack and Bob had told me in Sydney, how the work force had been divided into
R
’s and
W
’s; and remembered, too, how Bob and Meg had bickered about what
W
stood for. I handled this piece of paper and Shumek looked at me and said,
Wehrmacht! Wehrmacht!
and pointed at his chest. It was odd and exhilarating to handle a concrete object connected to what had been, until then, a story. I remembered that day in Ukraine, two years earlier, when Matt had glimpsed the tombstone on which the name
JÄGER
was written, and which turned out to be the tombstone of my grandfather’s relative Sima Jäger, whom I’d known about for years from my Internet research but who hadn’t seemed quite real until that moment.

I handed the
Passierschein
to Matt, who positioned it on the table and took a few pictures of it. But it was the next document Shumek handed me that caused to descend once again the sadness that seemed to adhere to this Israel trip. Every year, Shumek explained through Malcia, in order to continue receiving reparations from the German government, he had to present this
document. I scanned the German print on the piece of paper. It said that he, Solomon Reinharz, had endured certain privations and losses during the Nazi occupation of Bolechow, and that as a result he suffered from ongoing
Panik, Angst, Spannung.

I turned to Matt and translated.
Panic, Fear, Tension.

Malcia said, Every year he must present this certificate, to prove that he is alive!

Matt flashed his wide grin and said, Ask him how does he prove that he’s alive!

Everybody laughed, but there lurked behind the joke an unfunny and complicated history, and we all knew it. Soon afterward, the eighty-nine-year-old Shumek drove us all to the shoe store that he and Malcia had run since 1950, and Matt started taking pictures.

The sadness still clung two days later, when we went to Haifa to take pictures of Josef Adler.

We’d spent the earlier part of that Saturday at another giant family reunion at Elkana’s place, a lunch party at which, it seemed, even more first and second and third cousins had shown up than the last time. This time Elkana’s sister, Bruria, had come from Haifa. She turned out to be a fine-boned woman who wore her dark hair in a pageboy; she had brought from her home her
mother’s fabled photo album, the one over which, thirty years earlier during my parents’ only trip to Israel, my mother had exclaimed, crying,
Oh, Daniel, you should see the pictures Aunt Miriam has, Aunt Jeanette’s wedding picture, her dress is made completely of lace!
And yet now, sitting in Elkana’s living room, I looked through this fabled object at last and soon realized that nearly every picture in it, with the exception of that wedding photo (a photograph that, of course, could never even begin to suggest the tragedies and dramas that had resulted in that particular wedding) was merely a copy of a picture that we had back home in New York. It was obvious that Shmiel had sent identical copies of the various photographs taken of his family over the years to all his siblings, precisely the way that I and my own siblings do. To this disappointment was added the dismay I felt as I leafed through a number of quite old-looking, frayed photographs that I did not recognize, photographs that bore no labels or inscriptions of any kind, including a very ancient one of an Edwardian-looking man who, I wildly thought, could be my great-grandfather Elkune Jäger. When I held these mysterious images up to Bruria, whose English is as limited as my spoken Hebrew is, she shook her head sadly and made a little shrug. So all these, I thought, looking at the mute faces, all these are utterly lost, impossible to know.

I realized, too, as I looked through Aunt Miriam’s famous album, that my grandfather had owned many more pictures of Shmiel’s family than, it seemed, Uncle Itzhak had owned. It occurred to me that there were two possible reasons for this: first, that because Uncle Itzhak had lived and worked so closely with Uncle Shmiel, he didn’t need to have souvenirs of his older brother; or, alternatively, that because Uncle Itzhak left for Palestine under a cloud of
skandal!
, the two brothers didn’t communicate afterward. As I sat on Elkana’s sofa wondering about this, a line from one of Shmiel’s letters came back to me:
What does dear Isak write to you from Palestine?
It had never occurred to me, until now, why Shmiel, in Poland, had to ask for news of Itzhak, in Palestine, from my grandfather, who was in New York. Then again, Shmiel calls Itzhak
der lieber Isak,
“dear Itzhak,” so how estranged from him could he really have been? Impossible to know.

After we’d finished with the album, we went into the big communal dining room and ate. Once again, the meal began with a toast by Elkana, who slowly got to his feet and, looking at me with his narrowed pasha’s eyes, that amused and knowing look with which he would make his pronouncements about politics, delivered with a certain self-confident swagger that I recognized from my childhood, or would bid you farewell—
They will find him in Tikrit! All ze
best!
—raised an eyebrow as he raised his glass and said,
L’chaim and here’s to Dehniel’s book, he must finish it already and zen come back to Israel just to visit us and not always to interview!
Once again, two dozen or so people, with most of whom I had almost nothing in common, not geography or language or politics or personality, apart from a certain set of genes that were, even as we sat there, being diluted with each new generation, sat down to an enormous meal of fried whitefish and
chulent
and
tsimmes
and
kasha varnishkes,
the kind of food, my cousin Gal leaned over and told me, that young Israelis refer to as “Polish,” not because it is in fact Polish but because “Polish” is the word they use, with the tiniest flicker of a perhaps dismissive irony, to refer to the mores and manners of what, in my family, is referred to as “the Old Country,” which is to say nearly all of Jewish Europe from Germany to Siberia. Oh sometimes she’s just so
Polish
! this same cousin said, affectionately, of her overprotective mother, who is my second cousin Anat: the granddaughter of Itzhak,
Isaac,
as I am the grandson of Avrumche,
Abraham
.

It was Anat and her husband, Yossi, in fact, who, after this big reunion had ended in flurries of hugs and kisses, some genuine, some merely polite, drove us from Tel Aviv to Haifa, where Josef Adler was waiting for us. As we drove north away from Elkana’s, where after lunch Matt had paused to take some pictures of the family,
the family,
Matt and I talked about the Dyzia Lew disaster and whether it was possible, or even desirable at that point, to fly to Minsk to interview her.

Well, I did already interview her, I said, trying to convince myself as much as him. Is there really a
point
? She already told me that she didn’t know them that well, that she didn’t know Shmiel or Ester at all, that she only knew Frydka but wasn’t close to her. And frankly that story about Frydka being pregnant by someone
else
doesn’t fill me with confidence, I have to say. So is this woman really worth schlepping to
Minsk
?