East of Time (26 page)

Father's older brother Avraham was a happy soul, and an extremely lucky entrepreneur. In 1903 he had successfully established a textile factory — in his dining-room! — and he never looked back. He had two huge wooden hand-weaving machines, and worked on one of them for sixteen hours a day. On the other machine was a young newly-wedded man from just outside town, whose way of life kept the sun locked out of his face. Since work began at daybreak and finished late at night, he could see his new wife only on the Sabbath.

Unlike my father, Uncle Avraham wore the traditional Jewish garb, prayed to God every morning, kept the commandments, and wouldn't hear of politics. His aim in life was a good meal and a sound business. And yes, he did well, very well. In fact the constant visits to the butcher by his wife, my buxom aunt Chaya, an expert in the culinary arts, used to create an envious wagging of tongues in our neighbourhood.

Avraham was a granary of stories, and his specialty was the fable. I remember him telling me on one visit: ‘When God created our world, He also created a speck of air and a speck of dust.' ‘Uncle,' I interrupted, ‘what is a speck of air?' He smiled at this. ‘Please, young man, a fable does not need a parable. Anyway, the speck of air,' he resumed, ‘floated around joyously, and still floats around today, without complaint. But the speck of dust always collides with somebody's eye. And who do you think suffers the most, the dust or the eye?' I shrugged. ‘Both suffer!' announced my uncle triumphantly. ‘The eye, because of the speck; and the dust, because it loses its freedom!'

But soon enough, war and the ghetto destroyed Avraham's happiness. The four sons and two daughters he had fathered in the alcove where he slept with his wife went off or were sent away, and never came back. In the end the only consolation from his once-flourishing textile enterprise was his two wooden weaving machines: they became an almost inexhaustible source of fuel for his stove.

Early in 1942, Avraham and Chaya received their ‘wedding cards', our ghetto euphemism for resettlement notices. When they brought us the news, and heard that we were also to be moved, uncle could not contain his joy. ‘You'll see, Gershon,' he declared with his ever-untamed exuberance, ‘we'll go together. And no matter where to, no matter how small a room we'll get, I'll build another factory. We're brothers after all, and together we'll live through this difficult time in our lives.'

I can still picture my uncle's disappointment, the look on his grey face, the way he crawled into himself, when father told him a few days later that we had been excluded from this resettlement and were staying. The Bundist party, of which dad was among the oldest members in the ghetto, had devised a way to remove our names from the list. Families had to be resettled as complete units, and we had two infants, my two sisters' little girls; it was a cruel winter and they would not have been able to make the journey. The job of ‘excluding' us was given to a young Bundist, Melech Wajsman. In the middle of the night, at the peril of his own life, he climbed through a window into the resettlement office, and by the light of a pocket torch removed the page on which our names appeared.

At the end of February it snowed, and the temperature dropped to perhaps 15 below zero. One morning at eight o'clock we went to say goodbye to our relatives. When we arrived we found uncle and aunt already sitting on a horsedrawn wagon with other people. On seeing my father, Avraham
jumped down. ‘Gershon!' he shouted with unquenched enthusiasm. ‘As soon as we get there, I'll write and let you know how things are, and you can waste no time joining us.' Waving her hand, Aunt Chaya cried ‘Be well!' and the wagon drove off towards the assembly point.

A month and a half went by without a word, without a hint as to the whereabouts of our relatives or the other deportees. Then, in April, a high-ranking officer sent by the commandant at the Chelmno camp, in the town the Germans called Kulmhof, some 70 kilometres west of the city of the waterless river, paid a surprise visit. He informed the Jewish ghetto administration — which quickly disseminated the happy news — that our deportees were living contentedly there, and letters would soon be forthcoming.

About six months later my mother, by now employed in the official ‘state laundry', found Uncle Avraham's jacket among clothes that had arrived from various resettlements to be cleaned. It was riddled with bullets, and in one of the pockets was a scrap of paper with a single word scribbled in blood: ‘
Chelmno
'.

 

 
Inner Freedom
 

My father, secular agnostic though he was, had his heart firmly planted in tradition. Passover, he would say, is the annual celebration when we rekindle our collective memory of the Exodus, mankind's first rebellion in the name of spiritual freedom.

April 1942 was a spring without a blade of grass, a spring of skies without birds, while the very mice searched for food across the futile land. In our iron stove, a drawer from our wardrobe hummed its swan-song; yet come evening, a white cloth and two lit candles made a bold appearance on a table
graced with emptiness. Father, in accordance with custom, had invited a friend to our Seder. A decent and noble man, Avraham Hirszfeld walked before God and had once belonged to that divine elite of whom it is written that not a word of theirs would the Lord let fall to the ground. But since January 1941, when his dying wife and two-year-old son had been sent to ‘work' outside the ghetto, never to return, the quiet man who used to spend his life in prayer had turned into a disillusioned cynic.

Our guest seemed visibly indifferent to the occasion as we sat down to the Seder; perhaps he had come merely to escape his loneliness. But as father recited the familiar preamble — ‘
This is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry come and eat.
' — and lifted an imaginary
matzah
with his empty hand, Avraham unexpectedly erupted.

‘Oh, please!' he cried out. ‘Our Almighty well knows that no normal ghetto household possesses a crumb of food tonight, let alone bread. Why should we continue to delude ourselves?'

My wise father was quick to reply. ‘Because here, illusions sustain us,' he said. ‘What is true or false has only a theoretical significance — that is, no significance at all — and to be beholden merely to reality in a ghetto like ours is to commit...' He wouldn't say what. ‘But let us continue, dear friend, with the beautiful myths embedded in our Passover story.' He resumed his reading, and we moved on to the
Ma Nishtana
, the great ritual question (‘Why is this night different from all other nights?') with its four answers — the second of which concerned the eating of bitter herbs.

‘Yes, yes,' our friend interrupted again, ‘
bitter
is the key word! I wonder how the future will understand our life, our sorrows, our mournful festivities — and more than anything, men like me who were willing to be lied to.'

‘Please,' said father sternly. ‘Let's continue.' And after the last answer had been given, he remarked: ‘Leave the future to posterity, Reb Avraham. I can assure you that a hundred years from now Jews will sit around the
Pesach
table, eating a fine meal, and perhaps they will even place on the Seder plate one further ingredient, a potato-peel, in memory of our present calamity!'

We looked at Avraham, who seemed unconvinced. Father pressed on. ‘
We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt—'

‘So what has changed?' our guest retorted almost at once. Then, as if realizing at last that he was making a nuisance of himself, he raised his palm. ‘Sorry, go on. I won't interrupt again.'

And so my father, the secular agnostic, continued his reading unabated, contributing occasional comments in relation to our present circumstances. And when he arrived at the end, he again inserted his own message. ‘Next year, may the radiant light of our Passover guide humanity in its conquest of darkness.'

Mother rose from the table and a few moments later served us our Passover meal: a watery soup, garnished with a solitary potato-peel, which however kept cunningly evading my spoon.

Father smiled, looking at each of us in turn. ‘The Jews will sing again,' he assured us, ‘and they will read from our ancient
Haggadah
— though possibly with a slight addition to the text: ‘
And the Eternal brought us forth from Egypt, and indeed from the ghettos and the camps, not by means of an angel, not by means of a seraph, not by means of a messenger, but by Himself, the most holy, blessed be He in His glory
.'

Later, as he shook father's hand to leave, I heard the embittered Avraham remark: ‘You seem visibly weary. Was it the reading or the sumptuous dinner?'

‘Probably both,' father answered. ‘Especially the latter.'

‘So why do we do it?' Avraham just couldn't let go.

‘To keep alive our inner sense of freedom,' said my father, gently closing the door.

 

 
Linguistics
 

Some sixteenth-century kabbalists believed that every word spoken by a righteous person created an angel. Evil words, on the other hand, begat devils. To confirm the truth of this postulation, they argued, one needed only to examine the language of the wicked.

Our German custodians in the ghetto — essentially an unsophisticated, unlearned lot — would not have been able to devise, on their own, a vocabulary that suited yet circumvented the finalities of purpose it had to denote. Luckily for them, there was no shortage of scholars in Berlin whose flow of words was prolific. These astute academicians zealously volunteered their services, and in no time at all they had begotten by daylight a night-tongue of deceit.

Resettlement
became a virtual euphemism for murder.
Special handling
signified torture. To
come high
did not mean to be promoted, but to be hanged. To be
called up
was not to read from the Torah, but to be deprived of every last thing you had. Best of all, and definitely the most eloquent, was
Work will set you free
— free, that is, from life. Surely a stroke of sheer genius!