All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (25 page)

As I wandered through the camp and chatted with refugees, I told myself that the citizens of the free world might someday be forgiven for having done so little to save the Jews of Europe. After all, perhaps they didn’t know, and if they knew, they didn’t believe it, and if they believed it, they didn’t understand it, and if they understood it, they were powerless to change anything. Besides which, there was a war on. The Hitler regime had to be destroyed. So perhaps there were extenuating circumstances. But they will never be forgiven for their treatment of the victims after the German defeat. After the war they knew everything, could no longer lie to themselves or to others. All you had to do was open a newspaper or a magazine, or watch a news-reel at a movie theater, or listen to the radio, and you would know of the tens of thousands of men and women eking out an existence in the same camps, in a German environment, under German eyes, because America and Canada, France and Britain, were unwilling to help them rebuild homes and futures.

But despite all this—astonishingly—I encountered neither anger nor spite in the camp itself. There was no trace of bitterness. On the contrary, the community showed a boundless spirit, and an unparalleled joie de vivre.

In several barracks young people were organizing to combat the British occupation of Palestine. Elsewhere in the camp plays by Sholem Aleichem or Peretz Hirshbein were staged. Humor and satire were dominant. There were cultural conferences, political meetings, evening concerts. The camp was a whirlwind of ideas and calls to action. An atheist intellectual introduced me to the works of Hugo Bettauer, another had me read Karl Kraus and Otto Weininger. I attended morning and evening services at the synagogue, where they studied the Mishna and pored over the Hasidic tales of the Besht. It was the same in other D.P. camps. People were getting engaged and married, schools and nurseries were opened, newspapers published. Yossel Rosensaft—about whom I will have more to say later—talked to me at length about the “Jewish kingdom” of Belsen. The Jewish poet H. Leivik described “The Marriage of Föhrenwald.” If some traded on the black market, what of it? What other kind of market was there in occupied Germany? If some merchants got rich, more power to them. I confess there was a time when I resented those survivors who dreamed
of personal fortune instead of working for the honor and memory of our people. But later I changed my mind. Who was I to judge them? If they sought wealth while a few friends and I devoted ourselves to study, that was their right. They had lost enough, suffered enough. Let them seek their happiness however they saw fit. Indeed, I am proud of their defiance and success. Instead of nihilism, they chose society. But where did they find their confidence in the future? How could those who had seen so many families annihilated now rebuild homes? How could they hope to integrate their children into a society whose murderous and dehumanizing end they had every reason to fear? I cannot account for their faith in man or in themselves, but I am eager to state how proud I am to be one of them.

I knew that someday it would be my duty to testify. And that the fate of those in the D.P. camps would be part of my testimony.

Bea was much appreciated by her superiors in UNRWA. Serving as executive secretary and personal assistant, she had many languages and was a jack-of-all-trades, drafting requests and documents, answering mail, serving as liaison between various agencies. She was like our father in that she liked everyone and everyone liked her. She was always ready to do a favor. I was moved by her popularity. She was known in all the barracks, in all milieus. Religious Jews, Zionists, intellectuals—everyone spoke of her with warmth and gratitude. She gave them all advice, information, and assistance. In the office she dealt with ten visitors at a time, giving each of them the impression that she was concerned only with him or her.

Her quarters, which she shared with several friends from Sighet, were so crowded late into the night that it was hard for us to find time to see each other alone. When we did, we held hands in silence.

The day of my departure came too soon. The night before I left we spent a moment alone, and I was finally able to ask some questions. I wanted to know about Sighet. Who had survived? What had she found in the house? She told me that very few Jews had come back, about a hundred at most—disoriented, lost, seeking a father, a mother, a husband. Who in our family had survived? She said there were only a few cousins, some distant relatives. What about those Nyilas bastards, those hate-filled anti-Semites? Only a few had been arrested, tried, and imprisoned. What else could we expect? The Red Army had given control of the police to some young Jewish Communists returning
from Bucharest, the labor battalions, and the camps. Whom else could they have any confidence in? (One of them, Aczi Mendelowics, later became Amos Manor, chief of the formidable Shin Beth security service in Israel.) As a result, there was some settling of scores with the fascists. That’s all? No public executions? No hangings? Not that she knew of. Acts of vengeance? None. And the house? The less said about that the better. The jewels? Gone. Other objects of value? Stolen. Everything was stolen. After we left, our good neighbors had swarmed over the vacated Jewish homes, looting them all. She stayed with the Davidowics family, distant cousins. In any case, survivors tried to stay together. Out of fear of ghosts? Out of fear, period. Drunken Russian soldiers sowed terror. A friend of my father’s, a clockmaker by trade, had his throat cut by a Russian soldier who fancied his watch. His daughter, who had arrived from Germany a few days earlier, found his decapitated body in the street. Surely we could not go “home.” What would become of the two of us? How long would Bea have to stay in this camp? How long could I stay in France? The future seemed far from promising.

Back in Versailles I found that my friend Kalman and two or three other “children” were about to set out for Palestine illegally aboard the
Exodus
. It meant I would be separated from my inseparable friend. “Why now, Kalman?” I asked. He shrugged. “I don’t see any point in staying here. I don’t like this transient life, so I might as well go. Do something useful, something true. As soon as possible.” Though mischievous by nature, he had become serious and romantic. I went with him to the station, and we talked while waiting for the train, though in muted voices so as not to be overheard by any British spies who might be roaming the platforms. I understood him, but I didn’t understand myself. I tried to. Why this desire to stay behind? I, too, loved the land of our ancestors, loved it passionately. Jerusalem had always figured in my most ardent and luminous dreams—Jerusalem my lullaby, my prayer. The mere evocation of its song made me feel elevated, transformed. What held me back? Hilda? Bea? François? Shushani? The latter answered my discreet request for advice with this comment: “If you’re going so as to know yourself better, fine. If it’s to learn, you’d do better to stay here with me.” “But if Eretz Israel needs me,” I replied, “what right have I not to heed its call?” He shrugged. “The people of Israel need intelligent, erudite Jews capable of learning and teaching. What would you take with you to Palestine? Your ignorance? Your spiritual poverty? Your doubts and neuroses?”

I asked to see Bo Cohen, who, after all, was the educational director of the OSE. It was his duty to guide us. A timid yet demanding man, he was our older friend. He and his young wife, Margot, attended to us with a devotion bordering on sacrifice. They were always ready to listen to us and support us. Bo’s view was that we should complete our studies first. A diploma was always useful, one way or another. Kalman did not agree. He ached to leave.

I also confided in Israel Adler, who was not only from Jerusalem but also a
shalia’h
, or emissary, of the Jewish Agency. His response was unequivocal: “When the time comes we will ascend’ together.” For the
moment he helped me with the choir. Our most beautiful songs were for Jerusalem.

I continued my studies. Shushani led me surreptitiously toward a subject that had always fascinated me: asceticism, the lure of and quest for suffering, the will to suffer so as to infuse one’s own suffering and that of others with meaning. We talked of the ascetic and his self, enriched or mutilated by suffering, the relation between suffering and truth, suffering and redemption, suffering and spiritual purity, suffering as a gateway to the sacred; the prophetic, rabbinical, mystical point of view. Was it necessary, even indispensable, to punish the body so as to allow the soul to soar to new heights? Why was the
nazir
(ascetic) considered a sinner in Scripture? Why was he compelled to bring a sacrifice to the Temple? How to understand the variety of ascetics? Even Samson, the greatest womanizer of his generation, was a born ascetic. It took me a long time to understand: Asceticism warns us that language is sacred, that words must never be uttered lightly. I took copious notes and then began to write, pages and pages. Maybe someday it would make a book. Why not? I had wanted to write ever since childhood. In Sighet I often went to the offices of the Jewish community to write a page of Bible commentary on the only available Hebrew typewriter.

Of course, I could write my memories of the camp, which I bore within me like poison. Though I never spoke to anyone about this, it weighed upon me. I thought about it with apprehension day and night: the duty to testify, to offer depositions for history, to serve memory. What would man be without his capacity to remember? Memory is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. What does it mean to remember? It is to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading and to call upon the future to illuminate it. It is to revive fragments of existence, to rescue lost beings, to cast harsh light on faces and events, to drive back the sands that cover the surface of things, to combat oblivion and to reject death. All this I knew. And because I knew it, I told myself I should write. But I had to be patient. Someday, in years to come, I would celebrate memory, but not yet. Even then I was aware of the deficiencies and inadequacies of language. Words frightened me. What exactly did it mean to speak? Was it a divine or diabolical act? The spoken word and the written word do not reflect the same experience. The mysticism with which my adolescence was imbued made me suspicious of writing. Rabbi Itzhak Lurie set nothing down on paper. His disciple Rabbi Hayyim
Vital did it for him, perhaps without his approval. Rabbi Nahman ordered that his writings be burned. The Zohar speaks of g
alut hadibur
, the exile of the word, for words, too, are exiled. A chasm opens between them and their content; they no longer contain the meanings they once harbored. Having become obstacles more than points of reference, words broke my spirit. I had no confidence in them, for I sensed what I would later come to feel with greater certainty: Human words are too impoverished, too transparent to express the Event. The problem was clear: how to surmount the dilemma that either the teller lies or the words do. Why proliferate lies? The Hebrew poet Bialik was right: “Words are whores. Decked out in their finery, they offer themselves to the first passerby.” I decided to wait, to make a kind of vow: Ten years would pass before I would speak, before I would come forward with my deposition. If I enjoyed writing, then thank God there were countless other subjects awaiting redemption—love, for instance, by which I mean love of the people of Israel and of its hope and suffering, or, better, love of Israel’s hope and suffering. Anyway, you get the idea.