All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (13 page)

And yet. Human miracles do exist, or rather, they could. That Saturday night someone came and knocked on our shuttered and nailed window facing the street that marked the ghetto’s edge. We caught our breath and looked at one another. Who could it be? A policeman ordering us to turn out the light? A friend of my father’s coming to warn him, as he had promised, of impending catastrophe? By the time we got the window open, the unknown visitor was gone.

Certainly it had been Maria, gallant, courageous, and loyal
Maria, a believer who never complained of her fate. Have I said often enough that she was part of the family? When we went on vacation, she came along. She participated in our festivals and in our mourning, leaving us only when the government forbade non-Jews from working for Jews, and when that happened she wept and swore she would return “as soon as all this is over.” In the days of the ghetto she would thread her way through barricades and barbed wire to bring us cheese and eggs, fruit and vegetables. And that night, a Sunday, she appeared again. She had managed to slip through the armed security cordon the gendarmes had thrown up around the half-empty ghetto. “No, it’s not witchcraft,” she said. “There are ways of getting in and out. I know a safe place. I wanted to come and tell you.… To beg you … The cabin in the mountains … It’s ready.… Come.… There’s nothing to fear there.… You’ll be safe.… There are no Germans there, and no bastards helping them. Come.…” Dear Maria. If other Christians had acted like her, the trains rolling toward the unknown would have been less crowded. If priests and pastors had raised their voices, if the Vatican had broken its silence, the enemy’s hands would not have been so free. But most of our compatriots thought only of themselves. Barely was a Jewish house emptied of its inhabitants than they descended like vultures on the abandoned possessions, breaking into closets and drawers, stealing bedsheets and clothing, smashing things, looting. For them it was a party, a treasure hunt. They were not like our Maria.

We gathered at the kitchen table and held a last family meeting. Should we follow Maria or stay? We surely would have accepted her offer had we known that “destination unknown” meant Birkenau—or even simply that we would be deported from the country. But we didn’t know. All we knew was what we had been told: that the convoys were headed for the interior. “Well-informed” Jewish notables in Budapest had given clear assurances on this point. In light of that, the general view was that we should tell Maria no. “But why?” she implored us, her voice breaking. “Because,” my father replied, “a Jew must never be separated from his community: what happens to everyone else will happen to us as well.” My mother wondered aloud whether it might not be better “to send the children with Maria.” By “the children” she meant the three oldest. Tsipouka would stay, as would Grandmother. We protested: “We’re young and strong, the trip won’t be as dangerous for us. If anyone should go with Maria, it’s you.” After a brief discussion, we thanked Maria but …

My father was right. We wanted to stay together, like everyone else. Family unity is one of our important traditions, as the enemy well knew. And he now used that knowledge, spreading the rumor in the ghetto that the Jewish population would be transferred to a Hungarian labor camp where—and this was the essential thing—families would remain together. And we believed it. So it was that the strength of the family tie, which had contributed to the survival of our people for centuries, became a tool in its exterminator’s hands.

I think of Maria often, with affection and gratitude. And with wonder as well. This simple, uneducated woman stood taller than the city’s intellectuals, dignitaries, and clergy. My father had many acquaintances and even friends in the Christian community, but not one of them showed the strength of character of this peasant woman. Of what value was their faith, their education, their social position, if it aroused neither conscience nor compassion?

It was a simple and devout Christian woman who saved her town’s honor.

Our turn came on Tuesday, May 16. “All Jews out!” the gendarmes screamed, and we found ourselves in the street. There was another heat wave. My little sister was thirsty, and my grandmother too. They didn’t complain, but I did, not openly, but it amounted to the same thing. I felt queasy, ill. I was suffering, but didn’t know from what. I was ineffably sad. As in the presence of death, I didn’t dare raise my voice. This was where my childhood and my adolescence, my prayers, studies, and fasting had led. These moments would remain forever etched within me. Wherever life took me, a part of me would always remain in that street, in front of my empty house, awaiting the order to depart.

I see my little sister, I see her with her rucksack, so cumbersome, so heavy. I see her and an immense tenderness sweeps over me. Never will her innocent smile fade from my soul. Never will her glance cease to sear me. I tried to help her; she protested. Never will the sound of her voice leave my heart. She was thirsty, my little sister was thirsty. Her lips were parched. Pearls of sweat formed on her clear forehead. I gave her a little water. “I can wait,” she said, smiling. My little sister wanted to be brave. And I wanted to die in her place.

I seldom speak of her in my writing, for I dare not. My little sister with her sun-bathed golden hair is my secret. I never even talked to Marion or to my son Elisha about her. It mortifies me to talk about
her in the past tense, for she is present. Her presence is more real to me than my own. My little sister Tsiporah, my little angel scorched by a darkened sun, I cannot picture you as deaths hostage. You will remain on our street, on the pavement in front of our house.

I gazed at the house—we all did—with anguish. Here we had lived a Jewish family life that was now gone forever. The laughter and laments, the peace of Shabbat, the prayer of the God of Abraham whispered by my mother and my grandmother, the festival of Sukkoth, the songs of Rosh Hashana, the Passover meals, the community gatherings, my grandfather’s visits. The stories of beggars and of refugees, the forbidden broadcasts of Radio London and Radio Moscow that we listened to at night, curtains drawn and shutters closed. I picture myself sitting under an acacia tree, a book in my hands, talking to the clouds. Tsipouka is playing with a hoop. “Come and play with me,” she says, but I don’t feel like it. And now, as I write these words, my heart is pounding. I should have closed my book and stopped my dream, dropped everything to play with my little sister. Other images rise up: the sleigh in winter, the horse and carriage in summer; a cousin’s funeral (a fortune-teller is said to have foretold her death); Bea sick with typhus: she lies in a room of her own, feverish and contagious, hovering between life and death. My grandmother asks me to go with her to the synagogue. It is night. She opens the Holy Ark and sobs, “Holy Torah, intercede on behalf of Batya, daughter of Sarah. She is young and can still accomplish many good deeds for your glory. Tell the Lord, blessed be His name, to let her live. She will be more useful to Him than I.” She closes the Ark and backs slowly to the door. There she stops and says, “If I have any years to live, Lord, give them to her. I exchange my future for hers. Let that be my gift.” When Bea takes a few steps, I glance at my grandmother. She has offered her life. What will become of her now? I picture our house and see Hilda inside, Hilda the oldest of the children, whose radiant beauty drew all the matchmakers of the region.

I see the people who came through that door day and night to consult with my father—my father who now, bent under the weight of his pack, knows not to whom he might turn for advice. And my mother, always gracious and brave, afraid to look at us, afraid to see the house, afraid to burst into tears only to find she can never stop. So she looks at the sky, the pitiless sky that numbs us with an unseasonable and stifling heat. And the sun? Will it keep its secret? The night before, very late, like makeshift gravediggers, we had dug a dozen
holes under the trees to bury what remained of our jewelry, precious objects, and money. I buried the gold watch I had been given as a bar mitzvah present.

For years I dreamed of returning to my native town. It was an obsession. It took two decades, and that trip has now been added to my obsessions. It was night. There was a sleeping town and a sleeping house which hadn’t changed: the same gate, same garden, same well. Choked with fear, as though caught in a whirlwind of hallucinations, I wondered whether it had all been a dream, whether our Jewish neighbors were still there, and my parents and my sisters too. Terror swept me away and carried me back. I waited for a window to open and for a boy who looked like the child I had been to call out to me: Hey, mister, what are you doing in my dream?

But strangers were living in my house. They had never heard my name. Inside, nothing had changed: the same furniture, the same tile stove my father had borrowed money to buy; the beds, tables, and chairs were ours, still in the same places. My feverish eyes wandered left and right, up and down. Was it possible that not a single trace of us remained? But there was one, just one. On the wall above my bed had been a photograph of my beloved master, Rebbe Israel of Wizhnitz. I remember it well: I had hung it there the day he died, the second day of the month of Sivan. I can see myself standing there, a heavy hammer in my hand, driving in the nail and hanging the frame. As I write these words, I suddenly realize that my mother died eight years later on exactly the same day, along with my little sister and Grandma Nissel. I cried for the Rebbe’s death as I hung his photograph above my bed. The nail was still there. A huge cross was hanging from it.

“We must go now,” my mother said. “We must stay together.”

It was Tuesday afternoon. We were still in Sighet. Our convoy would not leave for several days. We had been temporarily transferred to the smaller ghetto, whose inhabitants had just been driven out.

We moved into the home of Mendel, my father’s brother. My mother cooked our favorite dish, latkes, potato pancakes. This time there was no rationing; we ate all we wanted.

Mendel was my silent uncle. He had married Golda, daughter of my maternal uncle Israel. He was pious and shy. They had three children. Their photograph lies before me, saved by a relative.

Sacred books were scattered on the floor. Someone must have removed
them from his bag at the last minute. The table was set, and there was food on the plates. They had been taken away in the middle of a meal. This was what remained of a family.

After the war I questioned every survivor of the second transport I could find, seeking news of Uncle Mendel and his family. I thought I found the answer in 1988, when an elderly man called out to me in the lobby of a Miami Beach hotel. He was, like me, of Romanian-Hungarian origin, from a small village near Sighet, and he told me he had stayed in the smaller ghetto until its evacuation. In fact, he had been in the same camp with my uncle. “Really?” I exclaimed. “You knew my uncle?” “Knew him!” he said. “For years I’ve seen him, even in my sleep.” And then he told me. At first Mendel and his son had been spared, like my father and me, and had been sent to a camp where conditions were relatively tolerable. But they were in different barracks and saw each other only during the day, at work. One night they could not bear to be separated. When the roll was called, the SS Blockführer counted and recounted the prisoners and ordered: “Let the prisoner who does not belong in this barracks show himself.” Mendel’s son took a few steps forward. “Closer!” the officer shouted. My young cousin obeyed, halting when he reached the SS man. The officer slowly drew his revolver and shot my cousin in the head, point-blank. My uncle, that sweet and timid man, hurled himself onto his son’s body, as if to protect him in death. The SS man stared at him for a long moment and then shot him in the head too. “Ever since then,” my witness said, “I see Mendel and his son in my dreams.”

And I, I think of the biblical law that, out of compassion for animals, forbids the slaughter of an ox and his calf on the same day. The Germans, however, did not shrink from killing a father and son together, without a second thought, as one would step on two insects.

Fishel and Voïcsi, my cousins from Antwerp, later gave me a different version of their deaths. What is certain, though, is that the enemy annihilated my Uncle Mendel’s family.

And what happened to my Aunt Zlati, my father’s younger sister? I search my memories of the ghetto for her, but she is not there.

She was married to Nahman-Elye. I don’t remember their two very young children, nor do I recall their presence during the weeks before the transport. Nahman-Elye, it seems, was among those the Hungarian army released from the labor battalions to be locked up in the ghetto. It seems he was deported with the first transport and later succumbed to the pressures and temptations of the camp life and became
a cruel and murderous kapo. It seems he was tried, sentenced to death, and executed by former deportees. My uncle in the enemy’s service? A kapo? My uncle a torturer of his brothers in misfortune? I don’t want to believe it.

But yes, that’s the way it was.

We arrived at the station, where the cattle cars were waiting. Ever since my book
Night
I have pursued those nocturnal trains that crossed the devastated continent. Their shadow haunts my writing. They symbolize solitude, distress, and the relentless march of Jewish multitudes toward agony and death. I freeze every time I hear a train whistle.

Why were those trains allowed to roll unhindered into Poland? Why were the tracks leading to Birkenau never bombed? I have put these questions to American presidents and generals and to high-ranking Soviet officers. Since Moscow and Washington knew what the killers were doing in the death camps, why was nothing done at least to slow down their “production”? That not a single Allied military aircraft ever tried to destroy the rail lines converging on Auschwitz remains an outrageous enigma to me. Birkenau was “processing” ten thousand Jews a day. Stopping a single convoy for a single night—or even for just a few hours—would have prolonged so many lives. At the least it would have been a warning to the Germans: Jewish lives do matter. But the free world didn’t care whether Jews lived or died, whether they were annihilated one day or the next. And so the sealed trains continued to shatter the silence of Europe’s flowering landscapes.