All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (56 page)

I therefore understand why survivors irritate certain writers who see them not as individuals who have suffered, but as symbols, guardians of the flame. The Talmud tells us that in the days of the Temple the original parchments of the Holy Book were exhibited so that scribes might readily consult them and correct possible errors. Survivors are a bit like these parchments. So long as they exist, so long as some of them are still alive, the others know—even if they don’t always admit it—that they cannot trespass certain boundaries. I have violently criticized films, plays, and television programs that trivialize Jewish memory. William Styron has not forgiven me for having publicly decried the film made of his novel
Sophie’s Choice
as deplorable and indecent. If only I had kept silent, or at least uttered a few kind words about fantasies born of good intentions.

Then there are the political critics on the left of the political spectrum who refuse to forgive my love for Israel and the people of Israel. Of course, that is their right and their choice. I will return to this subject as well.

For the moment let me say that I consider myself lucky. I work, I do what I like to do. There are moments of anger, others of gratitude, but never of bitterness. I have made friends, and they are my true recompense. They are there for me in moments of doubt. But what has moved me the most are the letters I receive from young people. Hundreds of schoolchildren write to me each year, among them children of survivors who tell me of their parents or grandparents. And then there are the strangers who speak to me in public places. An old woman approaches me: “Thank you for having survived.” A younger woman, waiting on line at La Guardia Airport, comments on a televised discussion among scholars and experts on the nuclear peril: “I watched the program, you spoke for me.” Messages from survivors: “Thank you for our children.” Or: “Thank you for my parents.” I appreciate these messages from all kinds of people, Jews and Christians. They help me rally at times of weariness and disappointment, counterbalancing the insults and death threats that pile ever higher on my desk.

•   •   •

In the middle of the 1960s, an Israeli consul introduced me to a young Franco-American couple who in turn introduced me to a friend of theirs, a young mother of Austrian descent in the process of getting divorced.

“My friends told me about you,” she said. “They’ve been trying to introduce us for a long time. But I said no.”

I wasn’t sure what I found most striking about her: the delicacy of her features, the brilliance of her words, or the breadth of her knowledge of art, music, and the theater.

The following week I invited her to lunch at an Italian restaurant across the street from UN headquarters. I ordered an omelette but never touched it. I only listened.

She, too, had spent the war years in Europe. There were stories about her childhood in Vienna, her visits to her grandfather’s house in Lvov, and her family’s flight to Belgium, France, and Switzerland. For the moment, concealing my fear of falling in love on the spot, I simply listened and looked at her, timidly.

We saw each other again, exchanged confidences, and became friends. I advised her to read Robert Musil, Elio Vittorini, Cesare Pavese. She knew Thomas Mann better than I did. Likewise the theater: she had studied acting with one of the most famous drama coaches in New York. From time to time we went to concerts. There was David Oistrakh at Carnegie Hall, and a particularly lovely evening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art listening to Rudolf Barshai and his Moscow Chamber Orchestra. Fluent in at least five languages, she was about to cofound an association of professional translators. We didn’t know it yet, but she was to become my wife.

Her name is Marion. Her little girl, Jennifer, was the best and most beautiful little girl in all the world.

For the moment I was leading a bachelor’s life in my tower overlooking the Hudson and Riverside Drive. It was a disciplined, nearly ascetic existence devoted to journalism and writing. I was up at six in the morning and worked on the current book until ten. Then came meetings, visits to the UN, press conferences, and the typing of my dispatches. Then back to my apartment, where I wrote while listening to chamber or choral music or at times Hasidic songs. Records were my one big luxury. Sometimes, when it wasn’t too cold, I would go for a walk on Riverside Drive, alone or with a colleague. (In those days it was not yet dangerous to walk the streets of Manhattan alone.)

My journalist’s job gave me a plausible excuse to decline unwanted social invitations and to leave dinners on the pretext of having to send cables. My own preference was to grab a sandwich (when I could afford it) at the kosher deli on the corner of 100th Street and Broadway.

I had been trying, since
One Generation After
, to discover a new language, to forge a style of narration consisting only of dialogue and disembodied, anonymous words. I knew I was taking a chance. Perhaps only the survivors, those who escaped, would understand, and perhaps their children.

In truth, my major concern has always been the survivors. It was for them that my first works were meant. Did I strive to speak for them, in their name? I strove to make them speak.

For they have lived in isolation for a long time, locked away, remaining aloof so as not to wound those close to them. Whenever there was talk of the war years, they would clench their teeth and change the subject. It was impossible to get them to let go, to touch wounds that would never heal. They had reasons to be suspicious, to think that no one was interested in what they had to say, and that in any case they would not be understood. With my books and articles I tried to convince them of the need to testify: “Do as I do,” I told them. “Tell your stories, even if you have to invent a language. Communicate your memories, your doubts, even if no one wants to hear them.” I shared with them my conviction that it is incumbent upon the survivors not only to remember every detail but to record it, even the silence. I urged them to celebrate the memory of silence, but to reject the silence of memory.

At first it was difficult, but eventually my efforts met with success. I began to receive manuscripts: memoirs, narratives, private diaries. I wrote countless prefaces and commentaries, mobilized acquaintances and relations, yet I probably didn’t do enough.

For me survivors constitute a family like no other, an endangered species. We understand one another intuitively. We are haunted by the same past, the same problems concern us, the same mission moves us. We often have the same friends and always the same enemies. There are all kinds of survivors, sages and whiners, optimists and pessimists, generous ones and bitter ones. Some decided to celebrate their survival by making money. Having lost everything, they re-created a family, a life, preferably a comfortable one. Wealthy, often very
wealthy, it took some of them years to become aware of the importance of joining the battle against forgetfulness. As they get older, they are catching up.

Night
and my articles in the Yiddish press were at the root of my friendship with Yossel Rosensaft and his Bergen-Belsen group.

Brimming with vitality, Yossel was short and stocky, shrewd and imaginative, a man who loved telling off-color jokes and irreverent anecdotes. Though rough, his language was brilliant and his lifestyle was princely. Yossel first impressed me as a study in contrasts. He lived in a luxurious apartment filled with canvases of Impressionist masters. Originally from Poland, a former inmate of Auschwitz and Belsen, he talked about the camps endlessly and without the slightest inhibition. I confess that at first I was taken aback. I thought he was trivializing our common experience and I couldn’t understand what motivated him. Yet he radiated a charm that was difficult to resist. He was a self-made man who respected writers and intellectuals and liked to surround himself with them. He had a sure taste—and was a good adviser—in art, as demonstrated by the quality of his Picassos, Chagalls, Renoirs, and Manets. He loved to laugh and make you laugh. He enjoyed life and was always ready to have a good time. Yet he was easily moved to tears. His friends adored him.

When I came to interview him for
Yedioth Ahronoth
, he told me about the transformation of Belsen just after war’s end. As president of the camp, which had become a center for displaced persons, he managed to establish a kind of temporary, autonomous Jewish town, with its own security, courts, hospitals, schools, and synagogues, even its own theaters, newspapers, clubs, and political parties. He must have liked my article, for he invited me back, but when I stepped off the elevator into his apartment, he wasn’t there. I waited five minutes, ten minutes. I scribbled a few harsh words—“Money gives you certain rights, but not the right to waste my time”—and walked out.

He phoned immediately to apologize. There had been a misunderstanding, a mistake, a message that somehow went astray. Would I please come back? He would send his driver for me. I told him I was too busy—and I stayed busy for another few years.

His best friend, Sam Bloch, a former partisan and born conciliator, was the Bergen-Belsen Association’s most likable and dynamic member. Like the high priest Aaron, he found quarrels intolerable. I
know few people who invest so much time and energy in fostering harmony among his fellows. However, with me he failed: I refused to see his friend again, at least until 1965.

Once again Yossel called and asked to see me. His group was organizing a pilgrimage to Belsen and he wanted to invite me. Something in what he said made me relent. I agreed to join the “Belseners,” as they called one another. After that we saw each other often. No matter what part of the world he happened to be in, he was always surrounded by his Belsen buddies, always rehashing funny or pathetic memories with them. “Remember the guy who showed up with his cow? And the British officer who came to harass us because of the way we were aiding illegal immigration to Palestine? And the stir our delegation made at the Zionist Congress in Basel?” He loved making speeches in Yiddish (his English was anything but polished). “When we look back on it …” they began.

At his home I met Jewish and non-Jewish notables, among them Israeli politicians and Yiddish writers. It was a varied group: Nahum Goldmann; Meyer Weisgal, one of the founders of the Weizmann Institute of Science; Levi Eshkol, a prime minister of Israel; and, for contrast, the actress Angie Dickinson. Some came to ask for money (I saw him hand an emissary of the Rabbi of Guer a thousand dollars in cash), others (among them collectors and art historians) to admire his pictures.

Like everyone else, he had enemies who expressed many reasons for their hostility (especially his wealth, which I suppose he flaunted) and friends who found as many reasons to defend him, including his commitment to the memory of the Holocaust.

Attached as he was to the Belseners, for whom he functioned as banker, lawyer, and a Jewish variety of father confessor, he was even more devoted to his wife and their son, Menahem. He admitted to spoiling him. After all, “he’s a Jewish child of Belsen,” he often said, perhaps too often. “You must help him to …” For me it was an irresistible argument. For obvious reasons, the children of survivors are particularly precious to me.

Nobody seems to have known it, but one day Yossel found himself ruined. Shortly thereafter he collapsed in the lobby of Claridges in London, and died. It probably was a heart attack, but there were rumors that he had killed himself. I never believed it. It wasn’t his style.

The funeral took place in the synagogue of our mutual friend,
Rabbi Joseph Lookstein. It was the eve of Yom Kippur. In my eulogy I took leave of him in Yiddish: “When your soul rises to heaven, six million of our brothers and sisters will come to greet you.…”

I stayed in close contact with many survivors, among them Manes Schwarz, Berl Laufer, Max Zilbernik, Itzik Guterman, Mendel and Dora Butnik. Gena and Yossele Tenenbaum, Sam Bresler from Toronto. Also, the Halperins, the Zuckermans, the Pantirers, the Bukiets, the Wilfs and Siggi Wilzig from New Jersey, as well as Felix Lasky and Dr. Hillel Seidman … every one of them active for Israel and the cause of remembrance in their communities. There was also a couple, Vladka and Ben Meed. Vladka had been a liaison agent for the (Bundist) Jewish Resistance in occupied Warsaw. In her autobiography (for which I wrote a preface) she recounts the socialist dreams of her adolescence. In 1944, living clandestinely in the crushed Polish capital, she celebrated May Day with a group of comrades by sending a message of solidarity to the “workers and proletarians” of the free world. A significant detail that is often overlooked: It was the hunted men and women, the humiliated and oppressed Jews, who encouraged their free, armed comrades, and not the other way around.

But of all the survivors it was Sigmund Strochlitz who became my closest friend and confidant. With his wife Rose, also a survivor, he lives in New London, Connecticut, where he is the
éminence grise
of local political life, and the owner of a Ford dealership. Nothing has ever divided us since we first met in 1965. Whether defending a Jewish cause or protesting against Israel’s enemies, we rarely act without consulting one another. Sigmund possesses both common sense and loyalty to the highest degree. His kindness and generosity are legendary. A valuable associate, he came to play a central role in many of my future projects.

During the eventful years of the 1960s I spent much time in the editorial offices of the
Jewish Daily Forward
. Like
Yedioth
, it was a place where people lived in the past. Once, headed by the legendary Abe Cahan, the paper had boasted a circulation in the hundreds of thousands.

My work consisted of editing agency dispatches and translating news items from the
Times
. Sometimes I wrote unsigned editorials.

In those days the paper was still the world’s most influential Yiddish daily, a gathering place for poets and actors, Zionist militants and
Bundist activists, all of them angling for a review. A Yiddishist in poet’s garb would corner you in the elevator and make you listen to his latest masterpiece, declaimed with great spirit. In the very same elevator an actress well into middle age would tell you of her having just been cast as an ingenue. A nihilist-anarchist would insist that his (unpublished) essay was essential to the survival of the Jewish people. A humorist would desperately try to make you laugh, out loud if possible, before you got to the ninth floor.