Free The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn

fury, I once did something physically very cruel—Matt called me to say he’d stopped by a big international gathering of Holocaust survivors in Washington, D.C., where he lives. Matt is a photographer, so perhaps he was shooting a story about the convention; I don’t know, I can’t remember. At any rate he called me up to say that at this gathering he had run into someone who said he had known Shmiel Jäger.
    What ? I said.
    Not Uncle Shmiel, Matt said, hurriedly. He then related what this man at the Holocaust survivors’ convention had told him: that the Shmiel Jäger he’d once known had been born with another name, but during the war, when he’d joined a band of partisans operating near Lwów, he’d taken the name Shmiel Jäger since, for safety’s sake, these partisans would sometimes take the names of dead men they had known.
    I listened and thought, The oldest daughter was with the partisaner in the hills and died with them. Onkel Schmil and 1 daughter Fridka the Germans killed them 1944 in Bolechow .
    So you never know. It was for this reason that I filled out the Red Cross forms, not hoping for much, and gave them to the person at the desk, andwent home that day. About four months later I received a thick envelope in the mail from the Red Cross. My hands were shaking as I tore open the packet. Immediately, however, I saw that much of the bulk was due to the fact that the Red Cross was returning to me copies of the six forms I’d filled out. On a seventh piece of paper was a letter stating that there was no known information about the fates of Ester Jäger, Lorka Jäger, Frydka Jäger, Ruchatz (as I still thought) Jäger, or Bronia Jäger, inhabitants of the Polish town of Bolechow.
    With respect to Shmiel Jäger, the letter concluded, his case was considered to be “still open”…
     
    F OR THIS REASON, THEN, I was eager to meet my friend’s mother, this Mrs. Begley who had lived so close to my dead uncle and aunt and cousins. It wasn’t that I thought I’d learn anything from her; I just wanted to have the experience of talking to someone of her vintage and provenance, since it seemed incredible to me that there might still exist anyone who’d even walked the same streets as they did. That is how accustomed I’d grown to thinking they and everyone of their era belonged utterly and irretrievably to the black, white, and gray world of the past.
    And yet it is also true that when I heard about the existence of this very old woman, of Louis’s mother, I was flushed with a fantasy so intense that it almost shamed me, the way that adolescents are shamed. I wondered if it could be possible that, even though this woman had lived in Stryj and my relatives had lived in Bolechow, perhaps…they had met? Perhaps she might remember them? Shmiel’s wife, I knew (from where? I can’t remember), came from a Stryjer family. Her brother ran a photography studio there, and indeed one of Shmiel’s daughters would, as I found out only because of an accident after my grandfather died, end up working there, briefly; and so when Louis offered to introduce me to his formidable mother—or so I thought of her, having read some years previously Louis’s first book, which seemed to be a novelized account of how he and his mother survived the Nazi years, outwitted the Germans and the Ukrainians as my own family had not—when Louis offered to introduce us, my mind began to race. I envisioned a scene in, say, October 1938, when Louis (then Ludwik) and his mother might well have come into the Schneelicht Studio in Stryj to have a picture taken to celebrate this only child’s fifth birthday. I imagine Shmiel’s daughter, my mother’s first cousin Lorka, a tall, good-looking, somewhat aloof girl of seventeen, carefully taking Mrs. Begley’s coat as she enters the atelier (it will have a fur collar, I think,since her husband, as an ancient Ukrainian woman would recall to me on a street corner sixty years later, was the