Daniel Stein, Interpreter

PART ONE

1. December 1985, Boston

E

WA

M

ANUKYAN

I always feel cold. Even in summer at the beach with the sun blazing down there is a coldness in my spine. I guess it’s because I was born in winter in a forest and spent the first months of my life in a sleeve of my mother’s winter coat. I was not expected to live, so if life is a gift for anyone, it truly is for me. I’m just not entirely sure it is a present I really wanted.

Some people’s memory of themselves switches on very early. Mine starts with the Catholic orphanage when I was two. I always really wanted to find out what happened to me and my parents during the years I don’t remember at all. I learned a few things from my elder brother, Witek, but he was too little then and the memories he passed down to me don’t really fill in the picture. When he was in the hospital he filled up half a school exercise book and told me everything he could remember. We didn’t know at that time that our mother was still alive. He died of sepsis when he was sixteen, before she came back from the labor camps.

My identity documents give my place of birth as Emsk, but in fact that is only where I was conceived. My mother fled from the Emsk ghetto in August 1942 when she was six months pregnant, and took with her my six-year-old brother, Witek. I was actually born about one hundred kilometers from Emsk in impenetrable forest, in a secret colony of Jews who had escaped the ghetto and hid there right until Belorussia was liberated in August 1944. It was a partisan unit, although in reality it was just three hundred Jews trying to survive in an area occupied by the Germans. I imagine the men were more concerned to use their weapons to protect this dug-out town of women, old people, and the few children who survived than to fight Germans.

Many years later my mother told me my father stayed in the ghetto and died there. A few days after my mother’s escape, all the people still there were shot. She told me that he refused to leave. He believed an attempt to escape would only anger the Germans and bring forward the showdown, so my pregnant mother took Witek and left without him. Of the eight hundred people in the ghetto only three hundred decided to escape.

The Germans had herded Jews from Emsk and the surrounding villages into the ghetto. My mother was not a local woman, but she was there for a reason. She was a fanatical Communist and had been sent from Lwów as an agent. She had given birth to Witek in a Lwów prison in 1936. The father was a party comrade. My own father was someone she met in the ghetto. I have never in my life met a woman less suited to motherhood than my mother. I am quite sure my brother and I were born solely because of a lack of prophylactics and abortion facilities. When I was young I hated her, then for many years I viewed her with alienated amazement. To this day I can scarcely bear to be with her. Thank God I see her very rarely.

Any time I ask her about the past, she bristles and starts yelling at me. To her I have always been an apolitical bourgeoise. She is absolutely right about that, but I have had a baby myself and I know for a fact that when a child comes into the world, a woman’s life, to a greater or lesser extent, is subordinated to that fact. Not in her case, though. She is a maniacal Communist Party member.

A month ago I made the acquaintance of Esther Gantman. She is a charming, transparent old lady, very white and with a blue-rinsed head of gray hair. She is a friend of Karin. They worked together for some charity and Karin had been telling me about her for a long time, but I took no interest. Shortly before Christmas, Karin arranged a party for her fiftieth birthday, and I immediately noticed Esther. She just somehow stood out among all these people I half-knew. The party was far more heartfelt and sincere than is usual in America. There were a lot of Poles, a few Russians, and a couple of Yugoslavs. The Slavic presence made itself pleasantly felt at this American celebration and you heard snatches of Polish conversation.

I speak Russian and Polish fluently, but I have a Polish accent when I speak English. Esther noticed that when we exchanged a few words. “You’re from Poland?” she asked. I always have trouble with that question. It is difficult to give a quick reply, and you can hardly embark on a long explanation that my mother was born in Warsaw but I was born in Belorussia, don’t know who my father was, spent my childhood in Russia, and went to Poland only in 1954, went back to Russia to study, moved from there to the GDR, and then on to America.

This time, however, I said something I never normally say. “I was born in Emsk. More precisely, in Czarna Puszcza.” The old lady gasped and then asked, “When were you born?” I told her, “In 1942”. I never try to conceal my age because I know I look young. People never guess I am forty-three. She gave me a little hug and the blue rinse wobbled as her old head trembled. “My God! My God! So you did survive! That madwoman gave birth to you in a dugout and my husband delivered you. And then within a month, I suppose, she took you children and went off who knows where. Everybody urged her to stay but she wouldn’t listen. Everybody was sure she would be caught on the road or in the first village you came to. Glory be—you survived!”

We went out to the hallway and just couldn’t be separated. When we took our coats off the hangers it was so funny. They were both the same, heavy fox fur, which is almost improper in America. I found out later that Esther suffered from the cold, too.

We drove to her house. She lives in the center of Boston, on Commonwealth Avenue, a marvelous district just ten minutes away from me. As we were driving, I was at the wheel with Esther sitting next to me, I had such a strange feeling. All my life I have longed for somebody older and wiser, someone who could guide me and whom I could obey and joyfully do what they told me to. I always felt the lack of that. In the orphanage, of course, the discipline was strict but it was quite a different matter. All through my life I have played the role of the senior person. My mother, my husbands, my friends—none of them were ever really grown up. There was just something about this old lady that made me want to agree in advance with everything she said.

We went into her house and she turned on the lights. The bookcases started in the hallway and went all the way back into the depths of the apartment. She saw me looking at them. “This is my late husband’s library. He could read five languages and there are masses of books about art. I need to find a good home to leave all this to.”

I remember Karin had told me that Esther was a widow with no children, quite rich but very lonely. Almost all her family were killed during the war.

Here is what Esther told me. She first saw my mother in the ghetto in Emsk, when people who lived in the surrounding countryside started being forced to move in there. Before that only Jews from the town lived there. They had apparently moved voluntarily, because shortly before they went to the ghetto there had been a terrible slaughter of Jews in the town. They had been assembled in the town square between the Catholic and Orthodox churches and the local people set about killing them. They killed fifteen hundred Jews, and those who were not killed took refuge in the ghetto.

It was not a ghetto in the customary sense of one or more districts where Jews had lived since the Middle Ages. In Emsk, people abandoned their houses in town and moved into a half-ruined castle that had belonged to a prince of some description. They put barbed wire around it and posted guards. At first it wasn’t altogether clear who was keeping whom away from whom. The police were the local Belorussian police because the Germans considered that sort of work beneath them. Relations with the Belorussians were, needless to say, based on bribery. They were paid for everything and could even be bribed to supply guns.

“Your mother was not local,” Esther said. “She was quite pretty but very abrupt. She had a small son. I’ve remembered her surname. Kowacz, wasn’t it?”

I winced. I hate that name. I remember very well that my mother had a different surname. This was an assumed Party name used in one of the forged identity documents she lived under for half her life. One of the reasons I got married was to free myself of that false name. Everybody was terribly shocked. Fancy a Jewish woman from Poland marrying a German! Of course, Erich was a Communist, too, from the GDR. Otherwise he would not have been in Russia studying in the first place. That was where we met.

I gazed at Esther like a child mesmerized by a chocolate. She would have been the perfect mother, aunt, or grandmother, calm and gentle, elegant in a European way with her silk blouse and Italian shoes, but without ostentation or that naive American chic. She even called me “my dear child.” Without any prompting, she told me the ghetto had a robust internal organization, its own administration and its own special figure of authority, Rabbi Shirman, a renowned and learned man who people said was very righteous. Esther and her husband were themselves Polish Jews, both medically qualified, and had moved to those parts a few years before the war. Isaak was a surgeon and Esther a dentist. She had graduated from dental school in Frankfurt. They were not freethinkers, just ordinary Jews who would light the Sabbath candles but might just as easily go out on the Sabbath to a concert in the next town. The local Jews considered them outsiders but went to them for dental treatment. When Germany annexed Poland, Isaak immediately told his wife it was the end of everything and they needed to get out and go wherever they could—he even thought of Palestine. But while they were thinking what was the best and practical thing to do, they found themselves under German occupation, in the ghetto.

We were sitting in the drawing room of a fine apartment, furnished in the European style, old-fashioned but, to my mind, in very good taste. Its owners’ cultural level was plainly higher than mine, which is something I always sense because I don’t often encounter it. It was the home of wealthy people, with engravings rather than posters. The furniture was not a suite but had clearly been assembled piece by piece, and on a kind of low cupboard there was a big, wonderful Mexican ceramic, the tree of life perhaps.

Esther was sitting in a deep armchair with her feet tucked under her in a girlish way. She had kicked off her shoes, navy blue, snakeskin. Details like that always make an impression on me. My mother has good reason to consider me bourgeoise. The home, the orphanage are something that that chill in my back doesn’t let me forget. My mother regarded appalling penury as normal. She must have felt quite at home in Stalin’s prison camps, but when I escaped my poverty as an orphan, I could have kissed every cup, every towel, and stocking. In the first year of our life together in Berlin, in Prenzlauer Berg, Erich took a second job so I could buy things: clothes, crockery, and all the rest. He knew it was my way of getting over the past. The frenzy gradually subsided, but still, even here in America, my favorite pastime is shopping at sale time, going around garage sales and flea markets. Grisha, my present husband, takes it in stride. He is from Russia himself and grew up among people who hungered after everything. My son Alex was born in America, but he loves buying things, too. We are real consumerists, and Esther seems to understand all that.

“We thought conditions in the ghetto were dreadful, because at that time we had yet to see worse. We knew nothing then about the concentration camps, or the scale of the mass murder being perpetrated all through Europe.” She was smiling as she talked about all this, but there was something particular in her expression: detachment, sadness, and something indefinable. Wisdom, I guess. Yes, we were talking in Polish. That is always a treat for me.

“How long were you in the ghetto?” I asked her. “Less than a year, from the autumn of 1941. We left it on eleventh of August 1942. Then there were two more years in Czarna Puszcza, in the partisan unit. We lived in dugouts right through until liberation. A family partisan camp. By the end, out of three hundred there were one hundred twenty still alive. There were six children with us. Two more were born in the forest, you and a little boy, but he died. In spite of everything, we managed to keep all those who left the ghetto alive until the end of the war.”

“Why did my mother leave Czarna Puszcza?” I asked, knowing the answer my mother had given, but knowing also that she is a habitual liar. No, it is not that she is a liar, just that I don’t believe a word she says. That is why it was important for me to hear what Esther had to say. Esther wasn’t crazy.

“We tried to talk her out of it. I remember it well. Isaak was indignant that she was putting her children’s lives at risk by leaving our refuge. She did not even reply. The only person she had anything to do with in the ghetto was Naum Bauch, an electrician.”

That is how I discovered my father’s name. Mother never told me. If she had been a normal woman I would have been Eva Bauch. That was an interesting piece of information. “Do tell me about him,” I begged Esther.

“I didn’t know him well. I think he hadn’t qualified as an engineer.” She sat motionless, her back straight, every inch the aristocrat, and without a trace of the usual Jewish gesticulation.

“Isaak told me once, before the war, he asked Bauch to come to the hospital to repair some piece of equipment. He enjoyed a privileged position in the ghetto, as did Isaak, by the way. Some of the Jews had jobs outside, they had permits. Isaak saw patients at the hospital, and Bauch had work in the town, too.

“Your mother and Naum lived together in the ghetto. They had a little cell of a room in the left wing. The castle was half-ruined and we set about repairing it when we were forced in there. In the beginning we were even able to buy building materials. The Judenrat was in charge. Everything ended dreadfully. The fact of the matter was that the Judenrat was constantly buying off the Belorussian police. There was some complete louse, I don’t remember his name, a local police chief. He promised that the ‘operations’—you know what I mean, yes?—would not affect those of us in the ghetto as long as we kept bribing him. At this time all the Jews in the nearby villages were being exterminated, as we were well aware. The Judenrat was buying time, but that wretch couldn’t have done anything for us even if he had wanted to. He was just making money. By then nobody really had any money left. Women gave up their engagement rings, the last of their jewelry. I gave up mine. I didn’t know all the details at the time, and now they don’t matter.

“Some people really believed they could buy survival, and that is why, when the escape was suggested, a kind of community assembly was called and there was a split. Half were in favor of breaking out and half against. Those against were sure that after an escape attempt there would be terrible persecution of those who remained. Actually, things had moved on beyond mere persecution, you understand. Among those organizing the breakout were totally committed, real fighters. They wanted a showdown. They were receiving help from the town and there was contact with the partisans, although we didn’t know it at the time. In reality everything was being organized by a single Jew, a young chap, Dieter his name was. He was working as a translator in the Gestapo. Somehow he succeeded in concealing the fact that he was Jewish. He was arrested later, but he, too, managed to escape.

“On one occasion, when the war was already nearly over, he visited our camp in Czarna Puszcza. He was fighting in a Russian partisan brigade and was sent to us with a cow. The partisans had either bought it or helped themselves to it, and they asked one of our lads who was a butcher to make sausages for them. Dieter came with this cow, our people recognized him and were delighted. Somebody produced hooch, he sat down on a tree stump and started talking about Christ. People started exchanging glances. You couldn’t imagine anything sillier at that moment than talking about Christ. I think he had gone slightly mad. Believe it or not, by this time he had been baptized and was showing icons of some sort to us. It was hard to believe this was the person who had organized the breakout. In early 1945, after the liberation, we traveled with him on the first train into Poland. Somebody told me later that he became a Catholic priest after the war.

“Back then, though, on the night before the breakout, the disagreement in the ghetto was so violent that a fight broke out. Rabbi Shirman, who was already well past eighty, pacified them all. He was suffering from prostate cancer. Isaak operated on him in the castle. Well, it wasn’t much of an operation. He just inserted a catheter. The rabbi stood up on a chair and everybody fell silent. He said that he would stay, he had no intention of leaving. Those who had not the strength to leave should stay, but those who did have the strength should escape. Isaak said we would leave and we did. Your mother also left, taking her son, but Naum stayed behind. Nobody knew she was pregnant, only Isaak, because she had come to him a short time before and asked for an abortion. He refused because the pregnancy was so far advanced.” Esther shook her civilized head. “And you can see he was right—such a lovely girl was born, and survived.”

Esther looked very wearied, and it was late. We agreed to meet again and I left.

I have a strange feeling. I have always wanted to know about that time, and about my father, but now I am suddenly afraid. I want equally strongly to know and not to know, because for so long I dragged my past around and it is only in the last few years, with Grisha, that it has fallen away from me. Ewa, that little girl from the Polish children’s home in Zagorsk and the teenager from a Soviet orphanage, seem no longer to be me, just stills from a film I saw long ago. Now I have an opportunity of finding out how everything actually happened. I still cannot imagine what could make a young woman, a mother with two children, hand them over to a children’s home. It still seems to me there must be something there that I do not know.

2. January 1986, Boston

E

STHER

G

ANTMAN

I had supposed that by my age no new people would come into my life. In the first place, all the vacancies in my heart had already been used up by people who were dead. In the second place, here in America there are many worthy people but their experience of life is extremely limited, and that makes them rather flat and cardboard creatures. I also suspect that old age forms a kind of shell and your own emotional reactions atrophy. Isaak’s death also revealed how dependent on him I was, and am. I do not suffer from loneliness, but I notice it envelops me like a fog. Ewa has suddenly materialized in the midst of these rather melancholy feelings. I sense something fateful in her appearing. Here is a young woman who could have been my daughter. It would have been good to discuss this with Isaak. He was always able to say something insightful and even unexpected despite our complete agreement about everything. What would he have said about this girl? The very fact of our meeting is extraordinary. Even more amazing is that we got around to talking about Czarna Puszcza. Her mother, that Kowacz woman, was a complete monster. Isaak thought she was a Soviet spy. He always said the Jews are a driven people. He put Jewish zealots, especially the Hassids with their silk hats, ridiculous caftans, and patched and darned stockings, in the same psychological category as the Jewish commissars, ardent Communists and members of the Cheka secret police.

The second time we met, Ewa said something similar about her mother, only in a different way. It is amazing that she saw this despite having no intellectual sophistication or even a decent education. She is evidently very strong-willed, and honest by nature. She wants to tell the truth to herself and about herself. She questions me avidly. One time she stayed until two in the morning and, as I later discovered, her husband suspected she was having an affair or something of that sort. This is the third time she has been married. Her latest husband is an émigré from Russia, ten years younger than her and, she says, a successful mathematician.

In our conversations we always come around to that area that Isaak found so important and germane. He was forever joking that there wasn’t a Talmudist in the world who had thought at such length about the Lord God as he, a nonbelieving materialist.

She is young enough to be our daughter. Indeed, we were together in the forest at that time but she was born not to us but to other parents. Isaak used to say that in the twentieth century for Jews to have no children had become as much a gift from heaven as having many was in historical times. He never wanted children, perhaps because we weren’t able to have any. When I was young I shed many tears over the insubstantiality of our marriage, and he comforted me by saying nature had made us elite. We had been freed from the slavery of giving birth to children. It was as if he foresaw the kind of future that awaited us.

When we came out of the ghetto and found ourselves in Czarna Puszcza he asked me, “Esther, would you wish that we had three children right now?” I honestly had to say no. We left Europe after the Nuremberg trials. Isaak was included as an expert witness as a doctor, a captive of the ghetto, and a partisan. After the trials we had an opportunity to emigrate to Palestine, a year before the creation of Israel.

Ewa asks so many questions that I have decided to reread the notes Isaak made in those years. Actually, he was writing a book, but in fits and starts, and he kept putting it off “till later.” He died in his sleep at seventy-nine years of age, before he was old. He was robust and energetic. He never retired and the book remained unwritten.

Ewa is asking me about her father, Bauch. “Perhaps there is something about my father in your husband’s papers? What if I have brothers or sisters? You understand, Esther, I’m a child from the orphanage. All my life I have dreamed of having a family!”

Isaak’s papers are in perfect order, the notes sorted by year. I am a little afraid of opening them. Ewa said she would be happy to help me sort the papers—he wrote his notes after the war in Polish but switched to English in the late 1950s. I declined. It would be impossible to put his notes into somebody else’s hands. As it happens, all the events relating to the 1940s were described many years afterwards. Not even in Israel, but after we came to America, after 1956, when he was invited here to work.

One other thing surprised me in what Ewa has told me. When she was three months old she and her brother were put in a children’s home. Their mother was busy organizing the Gwardia Ludowa, fighting the Germans, and then being imprisoned in Stalin’s labor camps. She was released in 1954 when Ewa was eleven or twelve. Her brother, Witek, did not live to see his mother’s return. By that time Ewa was already a little Roman Catholic.

She is very pretty. Outwardly she belongs to the Sephardic type, with heavy black hair and a plain face, nothing overdone. Eastern eyes, not languid but fiery, like Isaak’s.

3. 1959–83, Boston

F

ROM

I

SAAK

G

ANTMAN’S

N

OTES

I have been interested all my life in the topic of personal freedom. It always seemed to me to be the supreme blessing. Perhaps in the course of a long life I have managed to take a few of steps in the direction of freedom, but one thing I most certainly have been unable to overcome or to free myself from is my national origins. I have not managed to stop being a Jew. Being Jewish is something intrusive and final, like the accursed hump of a hunchback, and it is also a beautiful gift. It dictates one’s logic and way of thinking, fetters and enfolds us. It is as irrevocable as gender. Jewishness restricts your freedom. I always wanted to move beyond its confines, and did, and wandered footloose down whatever roads I chose to follow for 10, 20, 30 years, but at a certain moment realized I had got nowhere.

Jewishness is unquestionably broader than Judaism. The twentieth century has known a whole pleiad of scholarly Jewish atheists, but they were taken to the gas chambers along with their religious brothers. Accordingly, for the outside world blood was the conclusive argument. No matter how Jews attempt to define themselves, they are effectively defined by outsiders. A Jew is somebody non-Jews consider Jewish. That is why christianized Jews were given no quarter. They, too, were to be exterminated. My involvement in the Nuremberg trials was more onerous than living in the ghetto or being a partisan. The reels of film I had to watch, taken by Germans in the concentration camps and by the Allies after liberation, shattered my European outlook. I lost the wish to be Middle European and we emigrated to Palestine in order to be Jews, but I was insufficiently driven to bring that off.

The 1948 war left no time for reflecting, but when it was, temporarily, over I found myself plunged into depression by all the bullet and shrapnel wounds, the amputations and post-burn plastic surgery. What had become of gastric resection, removal of gallstones, the banal appendectomy, and removal of intestinal obstruction, the peaceful illnesses of peaceful times? I took up heart surgery.

Palestine was in paroxysms, the Zionist state became a religious symbol, Jews became Israelis and, in one sense, the Arabs became Jews. I was nauseated to see nationalism in any of its guises being adopted as an ideal.

What is the main constituent of the Jewish sense of identity? A purposeful intellectualism directed inward at itself. An agnostic and atheist, when I came to Israel I embraced what I had fled from when I rejected my family traditions in early youth. Back then my refusal brought about a break with my family. My father never forgave me, cursing me and my medicine, and then the whole family perished in the gas chambers.

He would be very pleased to know that in my mature years I decided to study what for two millennia Jewish boys have been studying from the age of five. The Torah. What had bored me as a child and been rejected I now found extremely interesting.

Almost as soon as I arrived in Palestine I started going to Professor Neuhaus’s Jewish history seminars at Jerusalem University. I found them engrossing. Neuhaus was a brilliant scholar and viewed Jewish history not as a fragment of world history but as a model of the entire historical process of the world. Although that approach was alien to me, his lecturing provided much food for thought.

I discovered that the intellectual nimbleness of his students was of no less importance to the professor than the subject he was teaching. He was interested in their ability to pose, turn inside out, or even nullify the question itself. That was when I realized that the core of the Jewish sense of identity was seeing the burnishing of one’s brain as the meaning of life, constantly working to develop one’s thinking. This is what ultimately gave us the Marxes, Freuds, and Einsteins. Freed from the religious subsoil, their brains functioned even more intensely and brilliantly.

We really can regard contemporary (by which I mean Christian) history as a logical (Neuhaus suggests metaphysical) extension of the ideas of Judaism in the European world. It is extremely interesting to see the ideas of Christian and Jewish sages converging at this point, and there is no doubt that a surgeon needs a sharply honed brain no less than skilful hands.

It was at this point, partly because of my studies over these two years, that I took the major career decision to specialize in thoracic surgery, which had interested me since before the war. I should mention that the heart intrigued me not only from a medical point of view. I saw a mystery in what Leonardo da Vinci called this “miraculous tool created by the Supreme Artist,” a completely unfathomable mystery, like the origins of the world and of life. It truly is difficult to imagine how this organ of modest dimensions, formed from fairly resilient muscular tissue that is nevertheless delicate and vulnerable flesh, copes with its demanding task. In the course of many years it pumps millions of liters of blood, imbuing it with the energy essential to support life in all the minute cells of the human body. For me that paradox contained the metaphysical essence of the heart’s activity. It indicated that the heart was not a pump, or not just a mechanical pump, but that it functioned in accordance with something higher than purely mechanical laws. This vague surmise seemed to be confirmed by a golden proportion I saw clearly in the way cardiac structures related to the rules underlying how a heart functions. For me cardiac surgery was largely an attempt to understand and explain that mystery. Observing a diseased heart yielded invaluable information for understanding how infringing upon these divine proportions leads to impairment of cardiac activity and ultimately to death. I concluded that surgical intervention in the structure and functioning of the heart should aim to restore this proportion, to re-create the “divine curvature” so characteristic of healthy cardiac structures. This curvature is found in all of nature’s creations without exception, from the whorls of sea shells and ancient fossilized molluscs to the spiral construction of the galaxies. You see it in the work of architects and artists, in the curving of old Italian squares, and the composition of famous paintings. Admittedly, Leonardo also said, “The more you talk about it (the heart), the more you will confuse your listener.”

We found our feet in Israel immediately. I became head of the department of cardiac surgery at an excellent clinic and Esther set up in private practice as a dentist. Business was good. We bought a house in the marvelous village of Ein Karem, which had been abandoned by its Arab inhabitants in 1948. The view of the Judaean hills was a great joy.

One time a young Arab was brought in with a knife wound near his heart. We managed to save him. A doctor loves hopeless patients he has dragged back from the next world no less than they love him. The boy and I became friends. He told me his family had fled from Ein Karem, abandoning their home and an old orchard immediately after the War of Independence began. I did not tell him I lived there. I couldn’t, and what would have been the point?

Esther and I climbed up one day to the Convent of the Sisters of Zion in Ein Karem. The hills of Judaea lay before us like a herd of sleeping camels. The 90-year-old prioress was still alive in those days. She remembered the convent’s founder, Father Marie-Alphonse Ratisbonne, a christianized Jew from France. She came over to us and invited us to take supper with her. It was a modest affair with vegetables from the convent’s garden. She asked which house we were living in and she said she remembered its old owners. Many other people too. She had no recollection of the young man who had ended up on my operating table, but remembered his grandfather well. He had helped to establish the convent’s vegetable garden. By this time we had remodeled the old house. It was the first house we had had in our lives and we loved it greatly. We went back home that evening and Esther wept. My wife is not usually given to tears.

When I was young I wanted to be not a Jew but a European, and later I wanted, on the contrary, to be not a European but a Jew. At that moment I suddenly wanted to be neither, and so, after living 10 years in Israel, when I received an offer from America, I made an effort to break, if not with being a Jew then with Jewish soil, and moved to Boston. In 1956 open heart surgery was just beginning. I was tremendously interested in it, and had a few ideas.

What I really like about America is the concentration of freedom per square meter, but even here, in this old house built in the English colonial style, in the freest country in the world, we are living on land that used to belong to Wampanoags or Pequots.

Of course, there has long been nowhere on earth a Jew can feel completely at home.

Many years passed and I realized that I was just as far from personal freedom as I had been as a youth. Now, like a man possessed, I worked not only at my day job as a surgeon but also undertook experiments, constantly violating one of the seven commandments of Noah, addressed not only to Jews but to the whole of mankind: to not be cruel to animals. My poor primates. It was not their fault their circulatory system so resembles that of humans. Perhaps it is this ability to be possessed by an idea that is the defining characteristic of Jewishness. Our intensity. I am reminded of an extraordinary youth called Dieter Stein who organized the escape from the Emsk ghetto. First he went to work for the Gestapo on idealistic grounds, to save people from the jaws of hell. Then he became a Christian in order once again to save people from the jaws of hell. The last time I met him we were on a badly damaged train taking us to Kraków. It was night and we were standing at the end of the carriage. He told me he was going there to become a monk. I couldn’t help asking him, “To save people?”

He looked no more than seventeen years old and was emaciated, a stunted Jewish teenager. How on earth could the Germans have thought he was Polish? His smile was childlike. “Almost, Panie doktorze. You saved me so that I might serve the Lord.”

I remembered then having vouched for him to the Russian partisans. Memory expels everything it finds too difficult to cope with. How could I live if I had to remember all the evidence I was obliged to view during the Nuremberg trials?

4. January 1946, Wrocław

L

ETTER

FROM

E

FRAIM

C

WYK TO

A

VIGDOR

S

TEIN

Dear Avigdor,

Did you know I managed to find Dieter back in August last year? He is alive, but stuck in a monastery! When I heard he had become a monk I could not believe it. We were in Akiva together, we were Zionists, we were going to go to Israel, and suddenly this! A monk! After the war there are not that many of us still around. He is one of the lucky few, and all just to become a monk? When someone said he was in Kraków I went straight there. I was sure, and I still haven’t changed my mind completely, he must have been tricked. To tell the truth, I took a pistol along just in case. I captured a good Walther a while back.

Twenty kilometers on from Kraków I found this Carmelite monastery.

They did not want to let me in. Some old geezer was the gatekeeper and he was having none of it. I waved the pistol at him and he let me in. I went straight to the abbot. There was another old fart there in a sort of reception place. I took the pistol out again and the abbot soon turned up. Old, gray, hefty geezer. Come in, Panie. Invited me into his study.

I sat down, put the pistol on the table, and said, “You are to let my friend, Dieter Stein, go free.” He says, “Certainly. Only put your gun away and wait here for 10 minutes.”

Sure enough, 10 minutes later in comes Dieter, not wearing one of those cowls, just a workman’s overalls and with his hands dirty. We embraced and kissed. I said, “I am here to take you back. Let’s go.” He smiled and said, “No, Efraim, I have decided to stay here.” “Have you gone stark, staring mad?” I asked.

I could see the Abbot sitting at his big table smiling. I suddenly felt so angry, like he was laughing at me! How come he was so sure I could not take Dieter away? “What are you grinning at?” I yelled. “You have lured a good man here and you sit there grinning? You know all about tricking people! What is he to you? Are you running out of Jews?” He replied, “We are not detaining anybody here, young man. It is not we who are using force but you who have come with a pistol. If your friend wants to go with you, he is free to do so.”

Dieter just stood there grinning like an idiot. No, really, like a complete fool. I shouted at him, “Come on, get your things together right now and come with me!” He shook his head. That is when I realized they must have drugged him, or put a spell on him. “Let’s go!” I said. “Nobody is holding you here! This is no place for a Jew!”

At that, Avigdor, I saw them exchanging glances, that abbot and Dieter, as if it was me who was the lunatic. What can I say? I stayed there three days. Dieter is nuts, of course, but not in the usual sense. Something has gone wrong in his head. He behaved perfectly normal, he was not eating grass, but he has got some real God mania. He was such an ordinary regular guy, a good companion, really clever. No one had a bad word to say about him. Always ready to help, friends, enemies, and the main thing is—he survived! Then this!

Three days later we parted. Dieter told me he had decided to dedicate the rest of his life to serving the Lord, but why their Lord? It is not as if we do not have a God of our own. Anyway, I did not manage to make him see you can serve the Lord anywhere, not only in a Catholic monastery. We are 23, both of us. We could be doctors or teachers, there is no end of ways you can serve.

All in all, Avigdor, I am sorry for the lad. Come and see us. Perhaps he will listen to you. Bring him some photographs of Palestine or whatever. Perhaps you will be able to talk sense to him. For God’s sake, if he loves the Jewish people so much why is he ditching them for strangers?

For now I have settled in Wrocław. How things will develop I have no idea, but for the time being I have given up the idea of moving to Palestine. I want to build the new Poland. There is so much destruction and poverty. We have to fight that and get the country back on its feet.

My best wishes to you and your wife.

Yours,

Efraim Cwyk

5. 1959, Naples. Port of Mergellina

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… no staff, only a bag. I stayed for eight days in the monastery hostelry. At four in the morning I got up with everybody else for prayers, then went with the brothers to the refectory. After breakfast the cellarer allocated me my tasks and I performed them to the best of my ability. I lived that way for a week. Everybody was eagerly anticipating a visit from the bishop, and so was I. I had been promised money for the voyage to Haifa. I had no money at all. One morning the cellarer told me I should make a visit to Pompeii. I went to the local bus station and set off. The beauty along the way was almost more than I could bear: the Bay of Naples, Capri, everything dazzling. Our poor Poland, endowed with neither a warm sea nor sunshine! There is such a wealth of plant life and fish here. At the fish market you feel such joy and admiration at the beauty of the fish and all the creatures of the deep. Some are fairly terrifying, but mostly they are just a bit weird.

In Pompeii I encountered my first problem. They wouldn’t let me into the excavations of the city and the museum was closed because the staff were on strike. Well, I thought, what a marvelous country Italy is. I would like to see the staff try to go on strike in Kraków at Wawel! Anyway, I didn’t get in. I went for a walk, looked at the surroundings of the ruined city, admired Vesuvius, a mountain with such a delicate outline, not the least bit intimidating. You would never suspect it of the wickedness it demonstrated 2,000 years ago. I had just enough money for my return journey and a pizza bianca—that is, a piece of bread. As I walked through the modern city I saw a church, recently built, nothing special in terms of architecture. The noonday heat is really intense, so I thought I would go inside and rest in the coolness. It was the Church of Santa Maria del Rosario.

Oh, Władek, a tale unfolded which seemed to have been devised specially for me. Inside the church I found a collection of ex-votos testifying to the gratitude of people who had been granted a miracle when they prayed to the Mother of God. Usually, of course, these are depictions in silver of arms, legs, ears—whichever part of the body was healed. There were no arms or legs here, but drawings by the untutored hands of children and their parents illustrating the miracles. A child was shown being rescued from a fire. There were three pictures, one by the child, one by its father, and another by the fireman. A soldier in the First World War made a vow to marry an orphan if he returned alive, and his whole story was depicted. Here he was in the war praying in the midst of flames, here he was returning home and the prioress of a convent was bringing a girl out to him. The girl fell ill and was expected to die. The ex-soldier prayed to the Mother of God for her to be cured, and then the three of them are drawn by their five-year-old son. A driver who had been saved after an accident in the mountains had brought his driver’s license as a gift to the Mother of God, and somebody else had presented their medals from the war. So much sweetness and thanksgiving.

But that was not the end of it. A nun came out and told me this celebrated place existed because of the efforts of a lawyer called Bartolo Longo. He was a poor man but educated and had managed the affairs of a rich Neapolitan widow. Bartolo had a vision in which the Mother of God commanded him to build a church here. He told her he was poor, and the Virgin asked him whether he had one lira. He had. Then she said this would be a church of the poor, and he should collect one lira at a time for it. From the rich or the poor made no difference. He was to take only one lira from each. He started collecting but there was not enough. Then the widow for whom he worked added money to make up the shortfall. Soon they were married and founded the orphanage here from which the grateful soldier had received his bride. They went on to establish trade schools and great forces of grace became focused here. Many were healed of illnesses and had favors bestowed on them. Now Bartolo Longo has been declared a “Servant of the Lord,” which is the first stage toward being recognized as Blessed.

When I left the church there was a peal of thunder and a tremendous storm began. The thunder and lightning had such mighty power and were coming from the direction of Vesuvius, which made me wonder if the volcano was reminding us of its ancient self.

I returned to Naples, and the next morning the bishop came and gave me money for my journey. I went to the port and bought a ticket. The boat will sail for Haifa three hours from now. So here I am sitting and writing you this letter. Do you remember trying to restrain me, telling me one should stay where one has been placed? Perhaps you are right, but I am confident that my place is actually in Israel, and the proof is that from the first minute of this journey everything has gone in my favor. You can always sense whether you are moving contrary to Providence or in accord with your calling. God be with you, Władek. My respects to Father Kazimierz. I will write when I arrive.

Daniel

6. 1959, Naples

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MEET 12 JULY HAIFA PORT STOP DANIEL

7. Tourist brochure

“V

ISIT

H

AIFA

”

Haifa extends over the slopes of the biblical Mount Carmel and its foothills. Compared to other settlements in Israel, Haifa is a young city, having been founded in the Roman era. In the 11th century, Haifa flourished briefly during the Crusades, but by the end of the 19th century it was a modest Arab village. At one time Haifa was a focus for illegal immigration, and the majority of Jewish repatriates in the early 20th century entered Palestine through its seaport.

Mount Carmel is the jewel in Haifa’s landscape. It is a mountain range some 25 km in length. The highest point is 546 m above sea level. The local soil is very fertile, and in ancient times its slopes were covered with vineyards and orchards.

In the distant past the local pagan population held Mount Carmel to be the abode of Baal, and traces of pagan rituals have been found at its summit. Here too the Phoenicians worshipped the local deity Hadad. The Roman emperor Vespasian made a sacrifice to Jupiter on the mountain, and an altar and temple of Zeus of Carmel was situated here.

Carmel is venerated by believers of the three monotheistic religions. The mountain is believed to be where the prophet Elijah spent his life. Several caves are pointed out to which the prophet withdrew. It was also from here that, according to legend, Elijah ascended to heaven.

Carmel is a place of ancient monasteries. The first monasteries are believed to have been founded here in pre-Christian times by the forerunners of Christian hermits, the Jewish Nazarenes.

With the triumph of Christianity a network of monasteries sprang up. The Crusaders discovered Byzantine monasteries here in 1150, and they had existed long before that.

Today the largest and most famous monastery is the Roman Catholic monastery of the Order of Discalced (or Barefoot) Carmelites. There has been a monastery of this Order on the mountain since the 13th century. It has been destroyed and rebuilt many times. In its present form the monastery has existed since the first half of the 19th century. It stands on the south-west face of Mount Carmel at a height of 230 m above sea level.

Not far from the monastery is a lighthouse. Above its entrance is a statue of the Madonna. The whole complex of buildings is called Stella Maris, a guiding star for sailors.

Descending the mountain from the Gan Ha’em metro station we arrive at one of the main sights of Haifa, the Baha’i Temple, situated in the Persian Gardens. This temple is the global center of the Baha’i religion. The founder and prophet of Baha’ism, El Bab (Mirza Ali Mohammed Shirazi) was pronounced a heretic and executed by the Iranian authorities in 1850. The prophet’s remains are laid to rest in the Baha’i Temple. At the present time the faith has several hundred thousand adherents globally.

Baha’is believe their religion has assimilated all that is best from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The essence of the doctrine is expressed in the words, “The Earth is but one country and mankind its citizens.” Some of the fundamental commandments of Baha’i are of interest: unity of God, unity of religion, unity of humankind, independent investigation of truth, harmony of religion and science, elimination of all forms of prejudice, dogmas, and superstitions.

In terms of its industrial importance Haifa is the second city of Israel, after Tel Aviv.

Haifa is Israel’s main port. Construction of the port began in 1929 and was completed in 1933. There is a major shipbuilding works. Furthermore, with the expansion of the railway network during the British Mandate, Haifa became the central hub of Palestine’s railways.

The country’s only underground funicular train line operates in Haifa. It was opened in 1959 and has just six stations, from the foot of Mount Carmel to the terminus at Gan Ha’em (“The Garden of the Mother”) on the mountainside at Carmel Center. Adjacent to the station is a pleasant park in which Haifa Zoo and the Museum of Prehistory are situated.

The city has the oldest polytechnical institute in the country, known as the Technion and founded in 1912.

Haifa has history and art museums. The Haifa Museum of Art has sections on ancient art, ethnography, and modern art. You can also visit the Music Museum, the Clandestine Immigration and Naval Museum, and the Marine Museum.

The archaeological excavations of Tel Shikmona (Hill of Sycamores) are located on Cape Carmel. Remains of buildings and structures have been found which date from the time of King Solomon until the Seleucid Period (second century BCE).

They can be reached by the Nos. 43, 44, and 47 municipal bus services.

For sightseeing in Haifa you can book a tour with experienced guides who are fluent in many languages.

8. 1996, Galilee, Moshav Nof a-Galil

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(Audio recording transcribed by Ewa after a visit to the family of Avigdor and Milka Stein.)

CASSETTE 1

AVIGDOR. By all means turn on your tape recorder, but I’m not going to be saying anything all that special.

EWA. I have a bad memory and I’m afraid of forgetting something important. When I talked to Daniel in Emsk I wrote everything down in a notebook when I got back to the hotel so as not to lose a single word.

AVIGDOR. Well, it was probably worth writing down what my brother said, but me? By the way, when he came here from Belorussia he told me about you, the little girl they put in the sleeve of a fur coat. So, what do you want me to tell you?

EWA. Everything. Where you were born, what your family was like, what life was like before the war … And why he was as he was.

AVIGDOR. Have you really come all the way from America to ask me about our family? Of course I will tell you. But why he was as he was, that I cannot tell you. I have wondered about it a lot myself. He was somehow different from other people even as a child. I used to think he was so special because he always said yes. If people asked him for something, or wanted something from him, he was always willing to say yes. Later, when we met again here, I saw that he was capable of saying no sometimes. So that was not it. I will tell you truthfully, to this day I don’t know. He was one of a kind in our family. As for our family, it was completely ordinary. We lived in South Poland, an area which passed from one set of hands to another and had belonged to Austria-Hungary, Poland, and been part of the Principality of Galicia. My brother and I were born in a poverty-stricken village with a Polish-Jewish population.

Our Father, Elias Stein, was a soldierly kind of Jew the like of which you could find only in the Austro-Hungarian empire. Although he considered himself Jewish, attended the synagogue and associated with his co-religionists, he approved of secular education, which he had never received, spoke German fluently, and understood culture to mean German culture. He was a soldier and proud of it. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army for eight years and worked his way up from the ranks to finish as a junior officer, considering his period of military service the best years of his life. He kept his non-commissioned officer’s uniform like a relic in the wardrobe, and brought it with him on the second of September 1939, the day we all found ourselves among the crowd of refugees trying to escape the German invasion.

Our parents married in 1914, before the outbreak of the First World War, during a break in my father’s military service. They were distantly related. Such family marriages, arranged through a matchmaker, were commonplace in the Jewish community. My mother was an educated young woman who had managed to attend a school for future officials.

It was a late marriage. Now, looking back so far in time, it seems to me that they loved each other, but they had very different temperaments. My mother was two years older than my father, already an old maid of thirty. It was usual at that time and in that region for maidens to be given in marriage when they were no older than sixteen. My mother had a dowry. She had inherited an inn from an aunt, so even before marrying she had her own business. Admittedly it brought in a tiny income in return for a lot of hard work. My mother barely scraped a living from it, but for the whole of her life she clung to a comical belief that she was a woman of substance. Most of the people around were even poorer. When she married, my mother expected that her husband would run the inn. She had yet to discover what a highly impractical husband she had chosen.

My father did not enjoy being an innkeeper. He liked the company of clever, educated people, and here the only company was drunken Polish peasants. He did not have to sell vodka for long, though, because the First World War began and he went off to fight. My mother went back to trading and my father went off to the cannons. We have a photograph of him from that time, a gallant soldier with a moustache, in a smart uniform. He looks out proudly.

By 1918 everything had changed. The war had been lost and our village ceded to Poland. It was as if everybody had been deported from cultured, German-speaking Austria to backward, penniless Poland. Our father retained his German orientation right to the end of his life. He always preferred to switch from speaking Polish to speaking German, while at home, Yiddish, the main language of Polish Jews, was hardly spoken at all.

My elder brother was born in 1922. He was a late child but not the last, because two years later I was born. We were given traditional Jewish names, Daniel and Avigdor, but we have noble Aryan names, Dieter and Wilfried, in official documents. Those are the names we used as children, the names we were called at school. My brother reverted to his ancient name when he was ordained a monk, and I did when I came to Palestine.

Our family had a very hard life. My mother was in a constant rush to deal with the housekeeping and the inn. My father bought a shop because, as I have said, he did not care for the inn. This turned out to be the first of a succession of commercial disasters. All his enterprises failed, but for the first years at least my mother probably harbored illusions about her husband’s business skills. Later it became obvious that the only thing he was good at was running up debts.

In those years we worshipped our father and spent a lot of time with him. He had a romantic military past and was forever telling us tales about life in the army. Being a soldier was one of the best roles he got to play in his life. It was the Austrian army he fought in, but he considered the German military machine the acme of perfection. When we were little he would give us rapturous talks about Bismarck and Clausewitz. He did not live to see the ignominious collapse of German militarism, because that ideal mechanism ground him to dust along with six million of his co-religionists. I don’t think he was ever disabused of his faith that Germanic culture was the finest in the world. He read Goethe and adored Mozart.

Now, when I myself am long past the age at which my parents died in the concentration camps, I have a much better understanding of their edgy, touching relationship. My father was what Sholom Aleichem described as “a man of air.” His head was swarming with hundreds of ideas, not one of which was brought to fruition. He built castles in the air which collapsed one after the other, and every time this reduced him to a nervous wreck.

My mother had a strong personality and there were constant conflicts between my parents. My father would demand that she should bail him out by borrowing money from neighbors who were better off or from her sisters. They did sometimes help him to extricate himself from difficult situations. My parents often quarrelled, but for all that they were a devoted couple. Tempestuous disputes were followed by reconciliation. I think my mother felt sorry for my father.

We have never discovered how their lives ended. In the death camps, though. That much is certain.

EWA. When did you last see them?

AVIGDOR. On three September 1939. We parted on a road thronged with refugees, and all of us had a presentiment that we would never see each other again. Dieter was seventeen and I was fifteen. We were to be parted, too, for almost twenty years. I worshipped my elder brother. There was never a hint of rivalry between us, perhaps because he always treated me as his junior, playing with me, caring for me, looking out for me. Although there is a couple of years’ difference in our ages, we were sent to school at the same time. It wasn’t much of a school, Polish, for peasants’ children. There was a single classroom for children of all ages and the level was decidedly modest, but at least you were taught to read and write. We had no religious education. There was no longer a heder in the village. There were no more than a score of Jewish families in the entire district. There were not many children, but the Jewish cemetery and the synagogue had survived. I know even that has all gone now.

EWA. Have you been back?

AVIGDOR. What is there for me there? Not even any graves. Childhood is childhood, the river, the forest, games. After the First World War there was an economic crisis and life was very hard for the adults.

EWA. What do you remember of those times?

AVIGDOR. It was a time of migrations. Everybody, Poles and Jews alike, was migrating to the towns. The villages were left empty. A great emigration of Jews began. The more pragmatic went to America. Others, enthused by Zionism, went to Palestine. It all hardly touched our family. Mother held on to the inn as if it were our ancestral stately home.

She had two major priorities: to hold on to her asset, the inn, and to get us educated. The more so because it was obvious very early on that Dieter was extremely able. As children we were similar, like twins really, but my brother was far more talented than I. I never resented that, not least because I had my own modest practical skills. I was much better than him at working with wood and metal. You can see that even here in Israel. Although I never went to college, I am always put in charge of the agricultural machinery. To this day whenever anything breaks down, people come running to me, even though I’m an old pensioner now. I know all about everything here because I’ve been in this moshav from the day it was founded.

EWA. Is a moshav the same thing as a kibbutz?

AVIGDOR. A moshav is a cooperative of owners of plots of land, while a kibbutz has complete socialism, with everything communally owned as it was on the Soviet collective farms. Don’t interrupt! Now I’ve forgotten what I was saying … Yes, about Dieter, although nobody here has used his German name for a long time. Everyone just knows him as Daniel. Anyway, when he turned seven he was sent to live with an aunt in the nearest town so that he could attend a good Jewish school.

The school was exceptional. There was nothing like it in East Poland. It was a thoroughly up-to-date Austro-Hungarian teaching institution, secular not religious, and with the instruction conducted in German. It was really considered Jewish only because it was funded by Jews and most of the teachers were Jewish.

In those times it mattered very much what language the instruction was conducted in. German education was more valued than Polish, let alone the Yiddish or classical Hebrew used for teaching in Jewish schools. In spite of his flair for languages, Daniel did not know Yiddish well. Evidently destiny had a hand in that. He spoke without the least hint of a Jewish accent. In foreign languages his accent was unmistakably Polish. He mastered Hebrew quickly and spoke it fluently. He could read books I could never hope to read, whose titles I could barely pronounce, and yet he spoke it with a Polish accent. You may not believe it, but my Hebrew accent is better than his was.

My brother completed his primary schooling in four years. He came home only in summer, not very often in winter. There was no railway then, he couldn’t walk the forty versts, over forty kilometers, on foot, and as for horses, either my father would be away on business or he would have lent them to some business partner. At the time, my father was trying to deal in timber I think. That didn’t work out either. It was a great treat when my brother came home in the summer. He had so much to tell me. I sometimes think those talks we had went some way to remedy the deficiencies of my education. He had a knack of talking about complicated matters in a very straightforward and comprehensible way.

He had another stroke of luck when he gained admission to the Jozef Pilsudski State Academy. It was considered the best in the town and they accepted Jewish children. Teaching was in Polish, and they only separated Catholics and Jews for the religious lessons.

MILKA. Perhaps you’d like to pause now and I can serve lunch. I have it all ready.

AVIGDOR. Yes, good. Can I help?

MILKA. No need, just move to other seats so I can lay the table.

CASSETTE 2

EWA. Oh, Jewish food! Broth with kneidlach! Scrag end of neck!

MILKA. Why, do Jews eat this kind of food in America?

EWA. Only certain families. I have an older friend who cooks it. I really don’t enjoy cooking.

AVIGDOR. What, you don’t cook at all?

EWA. Almost never. My husband is Armenian and he has always liked to cook. Even today when we have guests he cooks lots of Armenian dishes himself.

AVIGDOR. Well, Armenian food is quite different. That’s like Arab cooking.

MILKA. Eat up! Eat up!

EWA. No, really it isn’t. They do have some Turkish dishes but the cuisine is far more refined. Very appetizing. But this Jewish food has the smell of home. It must be genetic memory. I was brought up in orphanages and nobody made broth for me when I was little.

AVIGDOR. Now, where did we get to?

EWA. You were telling me about the Pilsudski Academy, but I would like to know also about this society, Akiva, which you were a member of.

AVIGDOR. Ewa, all in good time. In that school he also learnt—you should find it interesting, because later on this ability proved very useful to Daniel—let me tell you … Jews were of course a minority in the school, but my brother was lucky to be studying in the same class as our cousin. The attitude toward Jews in the classroom was perfectly normal. I may be wrong, but I have always thought that anti-Semitism is in inverse proportion to a person’s cultural and intellectual level. There were children from the most cultured Polish families of the town in my brother’s group. At all events, neither he nor his cousin ever had to fight to defend their personal dignity. Daniel never did fight. It was not in his nature. Actually, I didn’t notice much anti-Semitism even though I was attending a professional school, a kind of vocational college, where the children were from a humbler background.

I think the first time Daniel encountered anti-Semitism was when he was prevented from joining a Boy Scout group. He was very upset. To this day, I do not know whether it was a general rule of their Scouting organization or just the Scout leader who did not want a Jewish boy in his troop, but Daniel was turned down. It was a blow to him. He really had many Polish friends, although perhaps not particularly close friends.

However, one Polish friend who was the son of a cavalry officer, did him a very big favor without realizing it. This is the story I wanted to tell you. I’ve forgotten his name, but this lad’s father was a colonel in the Polish army and ran a riding school. Twice a week Daniel and his classmates would go there to learn horse riding. This was a highly unusual activity for a Jew, but Daniel greatly enjoyed it and trained in this aristocratic sport for several years. He became a good horseman, and only a few years later that skill may have been what saved his life.

In the summer before his final year, Daniel came home for the holidays. That year we became particularly close. We no longer felt the age difference at all because we had new shared interests, and a new topic in family conversations was Palestine. We joined a Zionist youth organization called Akiva and attended meetings almost every evening. It was quite like the Scouts, with sports, hiking, nights spent out in the open, and training in endurance and loyalty. The big difference was that Akiva was a Jewish organization, political and educational. We were taught Hebrew, Jewish history and traditions. The Zionism in Akiva was not religious. They were not interested in Judaism. We were introduced to the Jewish tradition, a way of life and principles of moral conduct underpinned philosophically by altruism, pacifism, tolerance and contempt for acquisitiveness. These were straightforward but very attractive teachings and they became our philosophy of life. There was no chauvinism or anti-Communism in Akiva. Zionism had a strong socialist tendency which can be felt in Israel to this day. It was behind my decision to join a moshav. I liked the idea of a Jew who becomes the master of his land and lives by the fruit of his labors. I have been living here since I moved to Israel back in 1941. Nothing will induce young people to come here now. My children rejected any idea of staying here to live. As soon as they grew up, they moved away. The youngest, our son Alon, left home when he was sixteen.

Akiva became a home away from home for us. My brother and I would go off in the morning and come back in the evening with a new feeling of being part of a group united by shared values. Young people of our age who were religiously inclined probably experienced this sense of union with others during religious services, but we did not have that. At the traditional age of thirteen we observed the bar mitzvah rites—I do hope you know what those are, the celebration of coming of age—but it did not not make a great impression on me or my brother. It was just something that was done. Our mother wanted us to remain within the tradition.

The Akiva activities expanded our cultural horizons. Our parents’ ideas about life struck us as provincial. They were concerned only about their daily bread, and it seemed to us that our teachers were bearers of higher values.

My brother and I longed to emigrate to Palestine, a prospect our parents viewed without enthusiasm. They felt too old for such feats of heroism as cultivating new lands. We could see for ourselves that they were too old for that kind of radical change, and had no wish to leave them without support in their old age. In any case, we had no money. At that time the British authorities were allowing Jewish immigration within an annual quota, but required a financial surety from those entering their mandated territory. Young people under eighteen years of age were not charged for the certificate, so the door was open for me and my brother.

In 1938 we had the idea that one of us should go, the other staying behind to look after our parents. One of the alternatives we discussed was for Daniel to go and study at Jerusalem University. Given how successful he was proving, it was not a bad idea, but that, too, required a financial outlay. Although the certificate would be free, the fare to Palestine was expensive and there were also tuition fees to be paid.

My brother in any case had a full year of study ahead of him, and he was already seventeen. At this point my mother’s sisters decided to collect the necessary money to support their nephew. The hat was passed round the family. He worked exceptionally hard to pass his exams as an external student and gained his school leaving certificate a year earlier than his classmates.

One life ended and another began, but it was not the life everyone was looking forward to. On first of September 1939 Germany began its occupation of Poland.

MILKA. Can you not talk and eat at the same time?

AVIGDOR. I have already finished!

MILKA. You may have, but Ewa’s plate is still full!

EWA. Tell me how you met up again. How many years was it since you had seen each other?

AVIGDOR. Eighteen years, from 1941 until 1959. How we met? I was waiting for him in the port from early morning. I deliberately went on my own. Milka was about to have Noami, and Shulamita was very little. Ruth wanted to come but I told her to look after her mother. She was the oldest, eight years old, but I wanted our first meeting to be just the two of us. To tell the truth, I did not trust myself not to cry. We had been writing to each other such a long time, since 1946, and had said a great deal in those letters. My brother had not even known then that our parents had died in 1943. There was a lot I found puzzling. Why had he not started looking for them the moment he got back to Poland? I don’t understand. He had decided of course that they could not have survived, and that if they had they would only try to talk him out of his Catholicism, which he had already decided on, so he didn’t even try to trace them. It seemed an odd logic. He only started looking for me one year later. A friend of ours had found out where he was and tried to rescue him, without success. But after that? I simply had no wish to return to Poland, and he could not just come to Israel as a visitor. Being a monk is worse than being in the army. Soldiers do at least get leave or have a fixed term of service, but there was no end for Daniel. He was running all over the place with that Cross of his … I don’t even want to remember it. I’ll show you the cemetery later. That is a whole other story.

Anyway, there I was waiting for the steamer. There were not that many other people. Even then Jews were arriving by aeroplane, only a few came by sea. The steamer arrived from Naples. I had noticed among those waiting one person wearing a soutane and immediately guessed that my brother was being met. Finally they lowered the gangway and people started disembarking. Tourists, of course. Still I could not see him, and then my brother appeared, in a soutane, wearing a cross. I was not expecting anything different—I had known for thirteen years that he was a monk—but I still couldn’t believe my eyes.

Daniel did not notice me immediately. He was looking in the crowd for whoever was meeting him, and already that person was heading his way. I ran toward my brother, wanting to get to him first. He went over to that person who had come to meet him, they exchanged a few words, and I saw Daniel turn to me. “I will stay tonight with you, and go to the monastery in the morning,” he said.

We hugged. Oh, my blood! Still that same familiar smell of the man I knew. He had a little beard. I had never seen him like that. He was nineteen when we parted, and here he was a grown man. I thought, too, that he had grown very handsome. What are you laughing at, Ewa? Of course, I wept. I thought it was just as well I had not brought my wife. You fool, I thought. What a fool I am! Who cares if he is a priest? Who cares if he is the Devil incarnate? Why am I holding on to him so? All that really matters is that we’re both alive!

We got into the car and drove off. He read all the road signs and kept gasping. We came to the fork in the road where one arrow points to Akko and another to Megiddo and he said, “My God, where am I? Thirty-five kilometers to Armageddon. Do you see that?” I replied, “Dieter, I see it very well. Milka’s friend lives there, we go to visit her.”

He just laughed. “Megiddo! That doesn’t mean anything in any language in the world except Hebrew!” he said. “Let’s go there!” At that point I started recovering my wits and protested. “No,” I said. “The whole family is at home waiting for you. Milka has not been out of the kitchen for two days.” He was suddenly very still and asked, “Do you know what you just said? You said the family is waiting for me. I never thought I could have a family.” I said, “Well, who else are we to you? You don’t have any other one. That’s what you chose.”

He laughed, and said, “Okay, okay. Let’s go and take a look at this family then.” So I didn’t drive him off anywhere else, we drove straight home. At that time, Ewa, we didn’t live in the house we are sitting in now. On this same plot of land we had a little house without any amenities. It is still here, but only as an outbuilding now, directly behind this house. All our children grew up in it. In the 1950s our cooperative was not doing very well. It was really only from the early 1960s that everything took off. We had one of the best cooperatives in the whole of Israel.

Daniel and I got home and Milka and the children rushed out. Our little girl gave him a bouquet. What kind of flowers can you find in July? They are all long since withered. Shloma, our neighbor, had gone eighteen kilometers that morning to a flower farm and brought tulips, our flower. Do you think King David was singing his Song in the Bible about some other flowers? My girls crowded round him and I could see everything was fine. Of course he had that Cross hanging on him, which was odd, but I could put up with that. In Akiva we were taught to be tolerant of other faiths. I have been living so many years here with Arabs, and they are Christians, too. Did you know more of the Arabs here are Christians than Muslims? It is only lately relations have become tense. Before that we had many Arab workmen. One boy, Ali, lived with our family. He was older than our children. Of course, he has gone now …

So, Ewa, he came into the house and greeted us with “Shalom.” He came to the table and gave the blessing in Hebrew. He did not cross himself, nothing like that. All I could think about was trying not to cry, but when Milka brought the soup terrine through from the kitchen, Daniel himself started crying. Then I did, too. If my elder brother was crying, so could I. I saw he had not changed at all. In the years that followed I can truly say he did not change a bit.

I am an atheist, Ewa. I have never been bothered about religion, or about God for that matter. All this talk about whether there is a God or there isn’t. Some have proof that God exists, others that he doesn’t, but to my mind, six million Jews buried in the earth is conclusive proof that there is no God. Well, fine, let’s just say it is a personal matter what anybody thinks about God, but if my brother needed God so much, what made him choose the Christian one? How many Gods are there anyway, one, two, four? If you’re going to choose one, wouldn’t you expect a Jew to choose the Jewish God? To be perfectly frank, when you think back on all that happened then, what difference was there between God and the Devil? What a man my brother was! He was a saint. Incidentally, he wore that vestment for a while but then took it off and looked like anybody else. He loved wearing my castoffs. He didn’t like new clothes and if you gave him something new he was always passing it on to another person. Look, this is our last photograph of him, taken a year before he died. My oldest daughter was here and she took it. No, that’s me, and that’s him. We look similar, of course, but there is a difference, a very big difference. Sit down, please. Milka will bring in the strudel now.

EWA. How did your children get on with such a strange uncle?

AVIGDOR. They adored him. He played with them. One moment he was a horse, the next an elephant or a dog. We had four children. You know how it is yourself, you’re too busy, other things to think about. We didn’t play with them all that much, and when Daniel came it was a real treat. If there was anything big in their lives they would go to him. Milka was sometimes a little offended.

MILKA. Stuff and nonsense. I was never offended. When we had that trouble with Alon I was even grateful to him.

EWA. What trouble was that?

AVIGDOR. Milka, bring those letters. I want to show them to Ewa. Alon was our youngest. He always had a strong personality. When he was sixteen he decided to move out and go and live with his sister. We only just managed to persuade him to come home. Then he went off to study somewhere, which means we almost never see him. It’s been four years since we last saw him. We don’t know where he is or what he’s doing, only that he’s abroad and that he’s alive. And we know that if he gets killed our Ministry will inform us. Here, you’ll have to read them right now. I can’t let you take them away.

9. 1981, Haifa

L

ETTER

F

ROM

D

ANIEL TO

A

LON

Dear Alon,

Happy Birthday! You are 16 and have performed your first adult act by leaving home and going to stay with your sister. Sooner or later everybody leaves their parents, but you have done it in an unusual way, not because you have got married and decided to start a family, or because you have gone away to study or work. You have left because your parents do not understand you and because you are dissatisfied with the way they see things in general. What kind of position have you put your sister in? She loves you, of course, she is giving you a place to stay, but she is in a awkward situation in respect of your parents. It looks as though she is egging you on.

You know, you are right. It is not easy to live in a family where there is no understanding, but the fact of the matter, my dear Alon, is that this is a two-way process. They do not understand you, but you do not understand them. In our world there are altogether major problems of misunderstanding. By and large, nobody understands anybody else. I would go so far as to say that very often a person does not understand himself. Can you say, for instance, why you told your mother she was only capable of understanding the chickens on the farm? Can you say why you told your father that he had a mechanical understanding of life limited to the structure of carburetors and gearboxes? How very foolish it was to say such things. Yes, Milka understands her chickens. Yes, Milka knows what they need. When there was a plague of parasites and all the chickens in the district died, hers survived! For centuries people believed that only witchcraft could protect animals in that way, but your mother’s straightforward understanding saved 5,000 chickens! Milka’s kind of understanding is a rare gift.

And what about carburetors and gearboxes? These are complex mechanisms and your father has a profound understanding of them. He has invented numerous little mechanisms, all those crazy devices he attaches to his tractors! If he was a businessman and knew how to sell them he would be rich by now! He has a very astute technical mind and you seem to think that is of no importance. This is precisely the way human understanding connects with the world of plants and animals, and even with the universe. It is understanding of the highest, not the lowest, order!

To be frank, you have hit me where it hurts. I have spent my life wondering why there is such a lack of understanding in the world, at every level! The old do not understand the young, the young do not understand the old, neighbors do not understand each other, teachers their pupils, superiors their subordinates. States do not understand their populations, or peoples their rulers. There is no understanding between classes. It was only Karl Marx who came up with the idea that some classes are bound to hate others. The reality is that they do not understand them. That is true of people who speak the same language , but what if they speak different languages? How is one people to understand another? So instead, they hate each other because of their lack of understanding. I won’t give examples, I’m sick and tired of it.

Man does not understand nature. (Your mother is a rare exception—she understands her chickens!) He does not understand the language in which nature is telling him as clearly as can be that he is harming the Earth, hurting it, and before you know it he will have destroyed it completely. Most important, man does not understand God, does not understand what He is trying to instil in him through texts which are familiar to everybody, through miracles and revelations and the natural disasters which periodically befall humanity.

I do not know why this is so. Perhaps it is because modern man considers it less important to understand than to conquer, to dominate, to consume. By tradition the confusion of languages came about when people tried to build a tower up to heaven, manifestly failing to understand how wrong, unattainable, and senseless the task was which they had set for themselves.

Now, where did I begin? Happy Birthday! Let’s meet up. I have a small present for you. Call the church and Hilda will tell you where and when to find me. Or tell me where to meet you. Your Dodo,

Daniel

1983, Haifa

L

ETTER

FROM

D

ANIEL TO

A

LON

Dear Alon,

Two years ago you and I had a long talk about lack of understanding. On that occasion a family conflict was readily resolved and soon forgotten. This time I ask you to try to see your parents’ viewpoint, especially the viewpoint of your mother, and to understand why they cannot bring themselves to support you in your choice and be glad that you succeeded in gaining admission to such a special college. All three of us, your parents and I, at your age found ourselves in the thick of a thoroughly vile war. As you know, I ended up interpreting for the Gestapo, your mother was a courier in the Warsaw ghetto, and for eight months your father made his way through many countries convulsed by war to Palestine. I want to say to you that war, like prison and severe illness, is a great misfortune. People suffer, lose those dear to them, lose arms and legs, and much else besides. Most important, nobody becomes a better human being as a result of war. Do not listen to those who claim that war steels a man, that war changes people for the better. I believe only that war fails to make very good people worse, but more generally war and prison make people lose their humanity. I say this so that you should understand why none of us are delighted to learn that you are entering this special college which is not just for soldiers but for extra special soldiers, intelligence agents, saboteurs, I don’t know what to call them. In my younger years I came into contact with many soldiers, German, Russian, Polish, all sorts, and in all these years the only thing that gladdened me was that I was an interpreter. I was at least enabling people to reach agreement between themselves and I was not shooting at anybody.

Your parents hoped you would choose a peaceful profession, as an engineer or a computer programmer, as indeed you did yourself. I understand them, but I understand you too. You want to defend this country. Israel is like Holland with its dykes which constantly hold back the sea which wants to overrun the Netherlands, the low countries. Every Dutch person, even the children, is ready to block a hole in the dyke with their finger. Israel is in the same situation, except that in place of the sea there is the immense Arab world which wants to inundate our small country.

You expected your parents to be very pleased by your success, but instead they are upset because they love you very much and fear for your life. As for me, Alon, I will do my job and pray for you.

Best wishes,

Your Dodo,

Daniel

1983, Negev

P

OSTCARD FROM

A

LON TO

D

ANIEL

(With a view of the Negev Desert.)

Dear Dodo,

I have no objection to your prayers, but don’t insist on them. Since many others have claims, you can put me last on the list.

Yours,

Alon

1983, Haifa

P

OSTCARD FROM

D

ANIEL TO

A

LON

(With a view of the Golan Heights.)

Dear Alon,

I have put you last, after the cat.

Dodo Daniel

10. November 1990, Freiburg

F

ROM A TALK BY

B

ROTHER

D

ANIEL

S

TEIN TO

S

CHOOLCHILDREN

I was born in south Poland. Until I was seventeen, I had never traveled more than forty kilometers from home, but my first real expedition, imposed upon me and lasting for many years, began when I was seventeen, on the day German troops attacked Poland. I will tell you about that journey, which for me had much the same impact as the forty years the Jewish people spent wandering in the wilderness. I left Poland in early September 1939 as a boy and returned in 1945 as a grown man. During the war, without traveling any great distance, I found myself at one time in west Ukraine, which before that had been east Poland and later became part of the USSR; in Lithuania, both independent and occupied by the Russians and then by the Germans; and later in Belorussia, which used to be part of Poland, and also found itself under the Germans.

The shtetl in south Poland where I was born was neither a town nor even a village. Its inhabitants were Poles and Jews, and panic broke out the day after the War began.

It was only one hundred kilometers to the frontier with Czechoslovakia, and the German army was rapidly approaching from that direction. A great mass of people emigrated northwards. My family hastily gathered our belongings and loaded them on to a cart. We had no horses so I and my brother took the harness, and my father pushed from behind. My parents were elderly and, as my mother was ill, we put her on the cart as well. Our progress was laughable. After a few kilometers we were caught up by relatives and moved only the bare essentials onto their wagon, which was harnessed with horses. We clambered on.

I have this picture before my eyes of a road jammed with carts and crowds of people on foot. Everybody was in very low spirits. We were fleeing from the Germans but did not know where we were fleeing to. Just to the north and the east. My father was particularly depressed. He would have preferred to stay, having served in the Austrian army during the First World War. He had two medals wrapped in a handkerchief in the inside pocket of his jacket. He had brought his uniform, lovingly kept in the wardrobe for twenty years, but had to leave it behind with all the other things abandoned in the cart. He was silent and brooding, as he always was when he had to defer to my mother’s decisions. It was she who had insisted we should flee. Her plan was to reach Kraków and go east from there. My father did not like the idea and would have preferred to remain under the Germans.

What I most remember about that week was the constant worry about the horses. It was difficult even to get water for them. The wells along the road had run dry, and people were queueing to water their horses at any streams we encountered along the way.

There was nowhere to buy hay and my heart was filled with pity at the sight of our suffering nags. They were peasants’ horses which bore no resemblance to the sturdy, well-groomed stallions provided for our exercises at the cavalry regiment’s riding school. When we reached Kraków, I unharnessed them and bade them farewell. We left them in the street not far from the station in the hope that they would find kind owners.

Getting on a train was very difficult. We spent two days at the station before we managed to pile into a goods wagon. It was the last train to leave Kraków because a few hours later the railway station was bombed. A day later an attempt was made to bomb our train. The train escaped damage but the tracks were destroyed and we had to proceed on foot. I don’t think we had come more than two hundred kilometers. The local population were almost nowhere to be seen. Villages had been abandoned, and many destroyed.

A huge crowd of refugees—it was amazing that so many people had managed to fit on to a single train—straggled along the pitted country road. After a few hours we learned that the town of B. which we were heading for had already been taken by the Germans. We had failed to outdistance the invading army. My father kept muttering, “I said this would happen, I said this would happen.”

We decided to skirt the town. There were no Germans in the villages—they were consolidating themselves only in major centers. We turned off the road and set up camp in woodland. My brother and I were experienced campers. In Akiva we had been trained to take over new lands and we put up a small lean-to and somewhere to rest for my parents, made a campfire and started cooking kasha with what remained of the grain.

Our parents slept a little while the meal was cooking, and when they woke, we heard them talking quietly between themselves. My father was saying, “Of course, of course, you are right.”

Mother took four silver spoons out of her bag, a wedding present from our aunt, polished them with a handkerchief and gave us each one. We sat on the ground and ate kasha from a sooty cooking pot with silver spoons. It was our last family meal together. When we had eaten, Mother said it was time for us to part—they were too old to go on with us. “We will only be a hindrance to you on the journey. We have decided to go back home,” she said. “The Germans will do us no harm. I served in the Austrian army, they will take that into account. Don’t worry about us,” my father said. “And you try to make your way to Palestine. That would be best, because here you will surely be forced to work as laborers or they will think up something even worse,” my mother said. There were already rumors that the Germans were capturing local young people and using them as human shields for their tanks during attacks.

Our parents stood side by side, so old and small, and with such dignity. There were no tears, no lamentations. “Only promise me that you will not under any circumstances be parted from each other,” my mother added. Then she carefully washed the four spoons in what was left of the water, added two more from her bag, polished them with her handkerchief and admired them. My mother loved those spoons. They gave her a sense of her own worth. “Take them, even in the worst of times someone will give you a loaf of bread for a silver spoon.”

My father solemnly took out his wallet. He, just like my mother, liked solid possessions he could ill afford. He gave us some money. I think it was all they had left. Then he took off his watch and put it on my wrist.

I wondered afterward why we had been so docile in obeying them. We were already grown boys. I was seventeen, my brother fifteen, and we loved them very much. I suppose the habit of obedience was very strong and it never occurred to us that we could disobey or act differently.

On eleventh of September 1939 we said good-bye to our parents. When they went back down the road in the direction we had just come from, I lay on the grass and wept for a long time. Then I and my brother gathered up our few possessions, I put on the one rucksack we had between the two of us, my brother slung a knapsack over his shoulder, and we walked away, leaving the sun behind us.

For several days we stumbled along the roads, sleeping at night in the forest. We had no food at all and skirted round villages because we were afraid of everybody. In the end we realized we would need to get work as farm laborers. A Ukrainian peasant family took us on, and we were set to digging potatoes. We worked in the fields for a week, not for money but in return for food and shelter, although when we left the farmer’s wife gave us something to eat on the road and we again headed east. We had no plan at all, and knew only that we had to get away from the Germans.

The next day we encountered soldiers. They were Russian. We found we had escaped from the German occupied zone. It was completely unexpected. We knew nothing then about politics, and I can’t say it makes much sense to me even now. We knew there had been a non-aggression pact between Germany and the USSR, but not about the secret clauses which provided for a partitioning of Eastern Europe. Latvia, Estonia, and East Poland (that is, west Ukraine and west Belorussia) and Bessarabia were ceded to Russia, and west Poland and Lithuania to Germany. Under this agreement Lwów became part of Russia. We did not know Poland had surrendered, or that under the agreement between Stalin and Hitler Russia had reannexed some of the territories it had been granted after the partitioning of Poland in 1795.

We walked all the way to Lwów and were amazed, never having seen such a great city before, with fine houses and broad streets. There was trading going on in the market square and we had a great stroke of luck there when we met our friend Aaron Stamm who was also a member of Akiva. Stamm was older than us, and he, too, was dreaming of getting to Palestine. We found many members of Akiva had come together here and were hoping to make their way to one of the neutral countries, from which it would be possible to emigrate. At that time Lithuania was still a neutral state, and we decided to head for Vilnius. It all took time. The Zionist leaders had first to organize transit points all the way to Palestine, and that was very difficult with a major war going on in Europe. They were looking for safe, roundabout routes. This group of young people were stuck in Lwów.

My brother and I immediately started looking for work, and from time to time managed to earn a little money. My brother was better at this than I was. He would get a job in a hotel, or a bakery. Mother was right about the silver spoons, one of which I exchanged for a rustic loaf of bread.

The situation in Lwów was very difficult and struck us as at the time as completely nightmarish. There were so many refugees from Poland, mainly Jews. Looking back later, after all our misfortunes in the war, we no longer thought it had been all that bad: nobody arrested us in the streets, or sent us to prison, or shot us.

We got by somehow, five of us renting a shack in the suburbs, in Janow, not far from the Jewish cemetery. In the evenings we came together, dreaming of the future and singing songs. We were very young and had neither the experience nor the imagination to foresee what was in store for us.

Winter came early. By November everything was deep in snow and the members of Akiva split into groups to cross the frontier, which at that time was between Russia and Lithuania. Initially the frontier was not closely guarded, but the situation changed and the frontier guards became vicious. Our groups were intercepted and several of my friends were arrested and sent to Siberia.

I was the leader of one group. We tried to get over the border near the town of Lida and took the train there. We were met by a local guide who promised to take us across at night. We made our way through a trackless forest, sinking knee deep into the snow and feeling terribly cold. We did not have proper, warm clothing. Then, when we were totally exhausted and thought we had already crossed the frontier, we were arrested, spent the night in the local jail, and were released in the morning after handing over all our money. The same guide met us again, and this time led us over the frontier along a well-trodden path without any further difficulty. We heard later that this was a trick he had devised to enable his friends in the local police to make a little money. He was not all that dishonest, because he could have simply abandoned us. The remaining family spoons were handed to the policemen. On the whole, we could consider ourselves lucky.

My brother was lucky, too. He crossed the border with a different group. They were stopped by the Lithuanians but allowed to pass when they showed their Polish documents. My brother said they lived in Vilnius and the illiterate guards didn’t argue.

We were very pleased to have reached Lithuania and imagined that with a little more effort we would make it to Palestine. We were happy to have gotten away from Russian-occupied Lwów to Vilnius, which was Lithuanian only in a geographical sense. More than half the population were Jews and Poles.

11. August 1986, Paris

L

ETTER FROM

P

AWEŁ

K

OCI

SKI

TO EWA MANUKYAN

Dear Ewa,

I am perplexed by your refusal to read my book. At first I was offended, but then I understood you are one of those people who prefer not to know about the past in order to maintain their equilibrium in the present. It is an attitude I have met before, but if we conspire to erase the past from our memories and shield our children’s minds from the horrors of those years, we will be failing in our duty to the future. The experience of the Holocaust should be assimilated, if only in memory of those who died. Mass ideologies cut people loose from their moral bearings. In my youth I professed one such ideology and later, in a territory occupied by the Fascists, I was the victim of another.

In those years I was fighting with the partisans in the Carpathians and your mother was fighting in Belorussia. I did not then know that an ideology which places itself above morality inevitably degenerates into criminality.

After the war I compiled the history of a country which never appeared on the map of Europe, a country without defined borders—Yiddishland, the country of people who spoke Yiddish. I gathered materials on the history of Jewish resistance in the territories comprising Yiddishland—Poland, Belorussia, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Latvia. I published it in a succession of historical journals, and wrote my dissertation, since I was living in postwar Poland, on the history of the workers’ movement. The present book is not a scholarly monograph, however, but my reminiscences of those years and the testimony of people I knew personally.

We, the last remaining old timers of this charred continent, may not be on first name terms but at least we know each others’ names. I have been a friend of your mother’s from the earliest years of my life. We were children living in the same building on Krochmalna Street, which became known to the whole world thanks to the orphanage Janusz Korczak built there. Believe me, the name of your mother will be prominent when the history of this time is written.

I cannot demand that you should read the whole book, but I have made you a photocopy of some pages which I obtained from the archives with great difficulty. They tell of events which occurred shortly before you were born. I remember you complained that your mother wouldn’t tell you anything. You are unforgiving toward Rita, but you do not know what she went through. I think you should.

Yours affectionately,

Paweł

1956, Lwów

P

HOTOCOPIES FROM THE

NKVD

ARCHIVE

(Central Card Index, No. 4984)

All prisoners sentenced under political articles who are members of Polish socialist parties and organizations are to be released. List of 19 persons attached.

Acting Prison Governor, NKVD Captain A.M. Rakitin

Signature

Date: 5 October 1939

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I, Rita Kowacz (Dwojre Brin), was born on 2 September 1908 to a poor Jewish family in Warsaw. In 1925 I entered Mucha-Skoczewski College to train as a teacher. Regrettably, numerous arrests and periods of imprisonment have kept me from completing my studies.

In 1925 while studying at the college I enlisted in the ranks of the Grins revolutionary youth organization.

In 1926 I joined the Polish Young Communist League and organized a study circle at a hospital in Warsaw.

In 1927 I became secretary of the district committee in Wola, a suburb of Warsaw. Co-opted to the position of Secretary of the youth cell, I attended meetings of the Communist Party of Poland. During the period of disagreements between the “Bolsheviks” and “Mensheviks” I sided with the Mensheviks.

In March 1928 I was detained and arrested during a demonstration by a workers’ group at the Pocisk Factory and sentenced to 2 years’ imprisonment. I served the sentence in the Serbia Prison in Warsaw and the Łoma municipal prison.

In March 1930 I was released. I joined the regional committee of the Polish YCL and became secretary of the anti-war section.

In October 1930 I moved to Łód and set up a study circle in the hospital finance department. In Łód I was secretary of the district committee and a member of the provincial committee.

In January 1930 I was again arrested and given a three-year prison sentence, which I served in Sieradz Prison. There I was secretary of the prison Communist organization. Upon my release in 1934 I became a Party worker, first as secretary of the Czstochowa committee and subsequently of the Łód committee.

In November 1934 I was arrested, but released two months later.

In January 1935 I joined the Communist Party of West Ukraine. I became secretary of the Young Communist League of Lwów and district (Drohobycz, Stanisław, Stryj).

In September 1936 I was again arrested, and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. In November 1936 I gave birth to my son Witold in the Brygidki Prison.

In April 1937 I and my son were transferred to the Fordon Prison near Warsaw. In both prisons I was leader of the Communist organization.

In January 1939 I was again transferred to the Brigitki Prison in Lwów, from which I was released after the arrival of the Soviet Army.

Rita Kowacz

APPLICATION

TO THE MUNICIPAL PARTY ORGANIZATION OF LWÓW

FROM RITA KOWACZ

Pursuant to the liberation of East Poland and the transfer of these territories to the USSR, anticipating that inhabitants automatically acquire Soviet citizenship, I, Rita Kowacz, a member of the Polish Young Communist League since 1926, apply for admission to the ranks of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).

Signature

Date: 5 October 1939

A list of individuals is attached who are prepared to vouch for the truth of my statement and, as senior Party comrades, to recommend me for membership of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks):

1. Antek Wózek (“Pigsticker”)

2. Antek Elster

3. Marian Maszkowski

4. Julia Rustiger

5. Paweł Kociski

12. 1986, Boston

F

ROM THE DIARY OF

E

WA

M

ANUKYAN

Talking to Esther about my childhood, I have unexpectedly made some discoveries about myself. Esther is a remarkable person. She almost never comments or asks questions, but just her presence is so supportive, so intelligent that I seem to become more intelligent and sophisticated myself.

With Grisha it is just the opposite: intellectually he is so far superior to me that with him I am struck dumb and am terribly afraid of saying something silly. In the bedroom, however, I am completely in charge because I really am the cleverer one in bed. The thing I have discovered from talking to Esther is that my memories are far deeper than I thought and I am re-assessing them. Reminiscences, then, are not a constant. They are unstable and changeful. That is amazing!

Now, let’s think less about the instability of memories and more about the facts. I don’t really have all that much to go on. We know from official documents that my brother and I were taken to an orphanage by Sister Elbieta. Almost nobody now remembers a Polish Communist writer called Wanda Wasilewska, a favorite of Stalin, but it was she who organized this orphanage for the children of people Stalin himself had murdered. Without her, there would have been nothing. Officially the refuge was under the patronage of the International Red Cross but secretly of the Polish Catholic Church. How we came to be with Elbieta I have no idea. I know only that my brother and I were taken there not by our mother but by another woman and that the year was 1943. I was not even three months old at the time and Witek was six. Nor do I know how we were brought across the border. It must either have been done officially with documents from the Red Cross, or illegally. For two Jewish children the latter seems improbable, although for centuries village people in those regions have been crossing the border using secret tracks through the forest and swamps.

The Polish orphanage was in Zagorsk. Why this small town, a little Russian Vatican which had previously been known as the Troitse-Sergiev Monastery, was chosen for the home I do not know and now there is nobody left to ask. Perhaps there are still some old nuns living out their last years in Poland who looked after us then. After the war, in 1946 or so, the orphanage was moved to Warsaw, where I think it exists to this day. I was destined to return to it in the 1950s, when my mother brought me to Warsaw.

My first childhood memories are of huge church cupolas, the whistling of locomotives, white bread, cocoa, some kind of sweet paste, and American presidents. The Red Cross provided for us and the nuns had not learned how to steal. I was the youngest, the girls played with me and carried me around in their arms. The main thing was I had a brother, the first love of my life. He was so handsome. It is a pity not a single photograph of him has survived. Until I met Esther he was the only person I regarded as my senior. He died in 1953 when he was 16.

The orphanage went back to Poland in 1947 but Witek and I and a few other children were left in a children’s home in the USSR. Nobody claimed us. My mother was still in the labor camps and there were no relatives who might have come to take care of us. It was such good fortune that Witek and I stayed together, that we were not separated. We stayed in Zagorsk. Witek always spoke to me in Polish, in a whisper. It was our secret language. It was funny that, later on when I was back in Poland, for a long time I spoke in a whisper. My brother always told me that we would go back to Poland. I loved nobody in the world as much as I loved him, and he loved me more than anyone else. Those last years, when I was already at school, he would take me to the girls’ school which was in one district and then go on to the boys’ school which was in another. I remember the details of my first day. We were issued brown uniform frocks and white aprons, and he held my hand. The other girls were there with their mothers and grandmothers, but I had my brother and felt very superior. I was so proud!

Apart from our secret language, Witek shared another secret with me, by which time we were in the Soviet children’s home. He said we were Jews. He qualified this by adding that he believed in the Catholic God. I do not know whether he was baptized, but Witek told me I ought to pray and that the Mother of God was our patron. She looked after orphans. I did pray to her, but had not the slightest interest in her Son. I suppose my brother got all this from the nuns. When Witek died, I prayed for him to be resurrected but nothing happened. After that, relations between me and the Madonna went downhill and I stopped praying. Then I had a dream of her. It was nothing special. She stroked my hair and we were reconciled.

All these years my mother knew nothing about us. She did not know Witek was alive, she did not know he had died. She fought as a partisan, then she fought in the army, and then she was sent away to Stalin’s labor camps. She was released only in 1954, a year after the death of Stalin, and after the death of Witek.

My reunion with my mother took place in a hospital. I had caught scarlet fever and been sent to a hospital in Moscow. She came into the ward. She was ugly! Badly dressed, wizened. It never occurred to me that the thing she most feared at that moment was that she might burst into tears. Instead, though, I burst into tears—of disappointment. My mother sorted out our documents and we went to Poland. It was dreadful, the most terrible thing in my life. She did not take to me, and I simply hated her. I knew nothing about how or why she had left us. She was a stranger to me, and looked like just another clapped-out Russian housewife or coarse-grained kindergarten minder. I had pictured my mother as a blonde woman in a silk dress, with broad shoulders and fair curls tumbling down from a pretty haircomb.

Esther, don’t let this worry you. I am not insane. I have done the psychoanalysis. It’s just that the child I was needed a mother, a normal mother, not one who talked constantly about politics and Communism. She worshipped Stalin and still believed, after all those years in his labor camps, that his death was a terrible blow for all progressive mankind. That’s the actual expression she used, “progressive mankind”!

In Warsaw I met up with progressive mankind—a handful of comrades who had survived from the Communist underground. The most likeable was Paweł Kociski. We’ve stayed on good terms to this day. He’s sweet and I feel close to him. He, too, fought in the war in a Jewish partisan unit in the Carpathians. Of its 300 members, only two survived. When Gomulka started driving Jews out of Poland in 1968, he resigned from the Party.

Neither the camps nor the prisons had any impact on my mother’s beliefs, even though she was imprisoned, first in Poland and later in Russia, for over 10 years. She expounded her ideas to me endlessly, but my organism is astonishingly resistant to everything she says. I simply don’t hear what she is saying.

I lived with her in Warsaw for a year but she couldn’t cope with me. I behaved abominably. I was 13, a frightful age. Then she put me in that same orphanage which had previously been in Zagorsk and had now moved to Warsaw. That year was something special. I went to church with the other girls. We were surrounded by nuns who were quiet and strict and quelled by their mere appearance what was not even disobedience but mere murmurs of self-will. I battled my mother but submitted meekly and readily to the nuns. Soon I went to the church and got myself christened. It was what I wanted. Nobody pushed me into it. I probably did it partly to spite my mother.

I went to all the services and prayed on my knees for hours at a time. There was a great deal of persecution of Catholics then and the urge to resist the sheer nastiness of the world was very strong in me. It was probably the same spirit which made a Communist of her that brought me to the Church. I did not make friends among my classmates. I was a Yid, and to crown it all a zealous Catholic, two things any normal mind considered incompatible. I spent a great deal of time at the cathedral. It was no ordinary Catholic church but a truly enormous cathedral. It had a cathedra and everybody was busy during those months preparing for the installation of a new bishop. In the cathedral crypt were rows of tombs of bishops, priests, and monks—a succession of dates and names going back to the 15th century.

I prayed at every coffin, ardently, lapsing into a deep trance. The life aboveground completely passed me by. I didn’t even want to go outside. What did I pray for? That’s a good question. I would say now, for life to change, but then, at the age of 13 or 14, I prayed for nothing of the world that surrounded me to be there, for everything to be other. Without knowing it, I was probably on the brink of insanity. Perhaps the coffins protected me.

The nuns saw my fervor and I was given an important role in the approaching celebration. I would carry the cushion with the korona cierniowa, the Crown of Thorns. It was a day I will never forget. The church was thronged with people, thousands of candles were burning, the monks carried censers from which a heavenly aroma wafted. It is a fragrance which invariably takes me back to my short-lived and desperate faith. I was on my knees holding the Crown of Christ in my outstretched hands. My arms became numb and as cold as ice. With my knees I could feel the knots in the linen carpet covering the stone floor. It hurt. Then I ceased to feel the pain, ceased to feel my legs. I rose up with the Crown and floated toward the altar. I brought the Crown to the bishop decked in gold and heard the singing of angels. I was far away from everybody but at one with all of them. A monk gently took me by the hand, the Crown lay on the altar. I do not know what happened to me, but I think I had found faith.

I lost my faith again in a single day, when I was not allowed to take my first Communion because I did not have a white dress. When my mother came to the orphanage to visit, I implored her to buy me that wretched dress but she refused point blank. The priest would not allow me to take communion in an ordinary dress. The nuns loved me and, of course, they would have found me a dress, but I was ashamed to ask. That is because, as a person, I am much too proud.

All the other girls were deemed worthy of communion, and I was not. I walked out and left God and my faith behind in the church.

I lived in the orphanage for a year before my mother took me back. She tried one last time to make me into a family. She was going through a difficult time herself. The year 1956 saw the beginning of de-Stalinization. She fell out with all her friends, and only kindhearted Paweł Kociski came to visit her occasionally. Every time it ended with her shrieking and throwing him out. That year was the first time I felt sorry for her. She was as lonely and immovable as a rock.

I, however, was making my first friends. Actually, not friends. It was a romance with a guitarist, a real jazz musician. Those years were very difficult in Poland, but I remember 1958 as a year of great happiness. I had just turned 16. If anybody had brought me up, it was the Catholics. A conflict now arose: I had to choose between the Virgin Mary and the guitarist. Without a moment’s hesitation I chose in favor of him. Our romance was tempestuous and brief and followed by several more lovers. My mother said nothing. In my last year at school I decided that I absolutely must emigrate. There was only one way I could go, to Russia. My mother helped me for the first and only time in her life, using her contacts. I was sent to Moscow to study at the Academy of Agriculture. It was called the Timiryazevka. Nobody asked me what I wanted to study. There was a place for me there, and that is where I went.

I lived in a hostel for foreign students, who were mainly from the people’s democracies. I married Erich in my second year and never went back to Poland. My mother stayed there until 1968, when there were major disturbances throughout Europe, which spread to Poland. When the unrest was crushed, arrests began in Poland, dismissals. There was a movement in their Party against revisionists and Zionists. Gomulka expelled Jews, of whom there were still quite a lot in the Party, and all of them, as I recollect, pro-Soviet. My mother was expelled despite what she considered to be her great services to the cause. She fought to the last, writing appeals of some sort, and then she had a stroke.

She emigrated to Israel, a country for which at that time she had a deep loathing. She has lived in Haifa for 18 years now, in an old people’s home. She is considered a war hero and a victim of Stalin’s repressions, gets a pension and lives very decently. I visit her once a year. She is a wrinkled old woman with a limp, but her eyes burn with the old fire. I grit my teeth and spend three days with her. I don’t hate her now, but have not yet worked out how to love her. It is a pity, of course it is.

She never asks after her grandson. Once, when Alex was six, the same age as Witek when she gave us away to strangers, I took him there thinking she might melt a bit. She started telling him about what she did in the war. He asked her to show him her rifle but when she said she had handed her gun in when the war ended he lost interest in her. He’s a wonderful boy, very caring, and kind to animals.

In 1968, Paweł Kociski emigrated, too, but to Paris. He works at the Sorbonne in some institute for studying Jews. He left the Party, but my mother did not want to. She had to be expelled. Even in Israel she had the idea of sending a petition to be readmitted. She is mad.

I met Paweł some five years ago in Paris. He writes research papers on contemporary history and complains that his son has become a Trotskyite. How about that?

13. January 1986, Haifa

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Dear Paweł,

In spite of everything I do want to let you know I’ve moved. My room number is now 507 not 201. Everything else is still the same, I’m in the same almshouse just in case you feel a sudden urge to write although what is there for us to write to each other about? When you were in Israel in 1971 you didn’t even bother to let me know let alone come to take a look at me although of course there’s not much to look at. I am lame, I’ve only got one eye and I am cantankerous as my daughter keeps reminding me, that’s what she says, why are you so cantankerous?

Last week one of the girls in the canteen here told me I was cantankerous too, she got fired on the spot but I’ve been thinking about it and decided I really am, it’s true and I ought to face up to it. Of course a lot of irritation has built up in me but Paweł tell me, you have witnessed my life, we have been friends for as long as I can remember, has life been fair to me? You are the only person who remembers my mother and how she gave all her love to my brother and could not stand me, you witnessed that and the whole street knew it. I was a pretty girl and my first man who I loved passionately betrayed me and left me for my one-time friend Helenka who hated me even before that happened and how sickening it was to be left for her, my enemy. Don’t you remember? The betrayals came one after another. When I was put in prison for the first time in 1928 do you think I don’t know who put us all in there? After the war when I was working in the special department they showed me documents. Szwarcman betrayed everyone, he was a plant, but he wrote about me separately and blamed everything on me. I took part in a demonstration and he made it seem like I was the main Communist, probably I really was. Now, when so many years have passed and so many of our people have died ask yourself who has stayed true. Only the ones who died and me. I won’t say anything about you, you left the Party, you betrayed it, you changed. You sit there in the Sorbonne writing about how wrong Communist ideas are instead of talking about the errors of the leaders at that time. I have stayed the same and nothing will change me, in my eyes you are just as much a traitor as all the others but you are the only one who can understand me, even my daughter understands nothing. You wouldn’t believe it, sometimes she says the same words to me that my mother used. Ewa never saw her but she too accuses me of “egotism” and “inflexibility,” word for word. What did I want for myself? I never had anything, I never needed anything, I lived my whole life only ever having one pair of shoes at a time. When I couldn’t wear them anymore I bought new ones. I had one dress and two pairs of knickers and I am accused of “egotism”! When we were living in Warsaw Ewa told me I was a dreadful mother and no other woman in the world would have behaved like I did when I sent them to the orphanage she meant. It broke my heart in pieces but I did it for their future, so they would live in a just society. I sent my children away to keep them safe because I knew if they stayed with me they would be killed.

For a long time I knew nothing about them at all, it was only when the war was over I heard they were alive and first I couldn’t go to get them then because I was working in a special NKVD department on secret work and later I was back in prison. I was betrayed again. I have been unlucky, always surrounded by traitors, you betrayed me too. My greatest misfortune was when you left me for Helenka, after that I never gave my heart to anybody. You were a double traitor because you left Helenka too and how many others you abandoned I have no idea. In that sense each and every man is a traitor, but by then that no longer bothered me, I kept love and physiology completely separate. Men do not deserve love, although admittedly neither do women. I gave my love not to men but to the cause. The Party too is not without sin, I understand now that the Party too made mistakes, but either it will recognize and correct its mistakes or it will cease to be the Party to which I gave my heart, my love, and my life. I will never regret saying “Yes.”

I find Ewa just ridiculous. She lives the life of an empty-headed butterfly, fluttering from one man to the next. Every time she is happy, then unhappy, and she does not get bored by it all, if she gets depressed she just goes on holiday or changes her apartment, or buys another suitcase full of fancy clothes. When she comes to visit me she never wears the same dress twice. She brings two suitcases to last her three days!

If I try to say anything about it she starts yelling at me, I gave up trying to talk to her long ago, everything is my fault, even Witek’s death! For heaven’s sake, I was in a prison camp at the time, what could I do for Witek? And what could I do for either of them while I was tramping the front with my rifle, a tin of stew and a box of matches?

What could I do for them when I was sitting in a snowdrift for three days at a time waiting to derail a troop train? What does she know with her two suitcases of frocks? She comes to Israel and do you think she stays with her mother? No, she’s off to the Sea of Galilee or visiting some convent, she needs to go and see the Virgin Mary when her own mother is stuck on her own for months at a time!

I’m sure you think I don’t know how to get on with people and that’s why I haven’t any friends. Well what you need to understand is that this home I am living in is the best in Israel, and you also need to know that all the people here are bourgeois, rich people, bankers—the very people I have hated all my life, it is because of Jews like them that there is anti-Semitism! The whole world hates them and quite right too all these fine ladies and gentlemen! There are practically no normal people here, in the entire home there are only a few rooms paid for by the state and allocated to normal people, a few people who fought in the war or were wounded in the wars here, and heroes of the resistance. But why is Israel paying all this for me? It is Poland that owes me! I gave Poland all my strength, that is the country I fought for, the country whose future I lived for, and it threw me out, it betrayed me.

Anyway, Paweł, you get the idea. I want to see you. It does not matter all that much but I shall be 78 this year, and you and I played in the same courtyard and have known each other from the day we were born. I shall creak on a bit longer, but only a bit, so come and see me if you want to say good-bye.

I’m entitled to stay at a sanatorium once a year, a mud-bath spa on the Dead Sea, so if you do decide to come don’t make it December because I shall be there. Of course, they only let us go there in the low season because we’re getting it free. Or perhaps you will come in December and I will get you a room in the sanatorium. I will pay for it of course and we will be able to talk about old times there, so you would only have to pay your fare. Of course the sights in the center are not very cheerful, a lot of people in wheelchairs, me included incidentally. In spring, when it’s the high season, needless to say it’s only fat cats from all over the world who get treated there—and the veterans the heroes and all the old trash are not allowed anywhere near or they would spoil the look of the place. Our whole life has passed, Paweł, and the world is not a bit better than it was. You understand me.

Write before you come because Ewa is planning to come and I don’t want both things to happen at the same time. Look after yourself.

Rita

14. June 1986, Paris

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Dear Ewa,

I have just returned from Israel, after going there to visit Rita. I am very ashamed not to have done so before but only after receiving a desperate letter. Knowing her personality, I can imagine what it cost her to write like that.

First of all, let me reassure you that nothing bad is happening with your mother. She is growing old like the rest of us, and remains just as peremptory and unyielding, just as loyal and idiotically honorable. I have never come across anyone so willing to take the shirt off their back and give it to the first person they meet. It is not easy to have her as a mother or even, under anything like normal circumstances, as a friend. In appalling circumstances, though, in the face of death, you couldn’t find a better person. She dragged a wounded companion on her back for two days. He was dying and begged her to shoot him, but she hauled him back to base, where he died an hour later. Who else is capable of that kind of heroism?

Ewa, you are a disgrace! Find the time to visit the old lady. Of course, she is made of iron, but try to find the time to stroke the hair of that diabolical old lump of metal.

Do not go on getting even with her. She is what she is, a real Jewish battleaxe, a Jewess with tight little fists she swings at the first sign of injustice. She is as intolerant and unbending as our forebears and she will go to the stake for her ideals. Anybody reluctant to be burned at the stake she despises.

Me, for example. I unwisely boasted I had received an award for my book about the partisan struggle in “Yiddishland,” and for my pains had a whole bucket of shit upended over me for selling our sacred past for filthy lucre. It has been translated into English and German and you are wrong to refuse to read it. There are a few words in it about your mother, too. I will send you the book anyway and the time may come when you find it of interest. Which language would you prefer it in, English or German? It is never going to be published in Polish.

As always, Israel made a great impression on me. I had not been to Haifa before and was very taken by it. More so than by Tel Aviv, which I find a dull city with little history. Haifa has almost as many strata as Jerusalem.

Rita has moved to a new room and has an amazing view from the balcony of the whole of Haifa Bay. You can see the River Kishon. There is a fairly dire industrial zone there with cooling towers and warehouses but from above, you don’t see the warehouses. I went there for its historical interest. As you are a young woman who, in Jewish terms, is wholly uneducated, you don’t know “Mame-loshn,” that is, Yiddish. Most likely you have never even dipped into the Bible, whereas I in my youth attended a heder and gained the rudiments of a Jewish education. So I will tell you that it was precisely here, near the source of the Kishon, that something extraordinary happened in the ninth century BCE, during the reign of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, who encouraged the cult of Baal and Asherah. The prophet Elijah, a furious defender of the faith of the One God, organized a kind of competition in which he invited the priests of Baal to bring down fire from heaven to burn the sacrifices they laid on their altar. They called upon their gods at great length but to no avail. Elijah then laid a sacrificial animal on the altar of the One God, poured water three times over the altar, the sacrifice, and the firewood. He then prayed and fire immediately came down from heaven. Our side won. Elijah ordered that all the priests, 400 prophets of Baal and 450 prophets of Asherah, should be put to the sword immediately. That was done there and then. The people returned to the Lord, and Jezebel’s corpse was thrown to the dogs.

That is how our forebears understood justice.

Then I went up Mount Carmel. It was getting dark by the time we reached the gate of the Stella Maris Carmelite monastery. Just as I got out of the car (I was being driven by a very sweet person, a doctor from Russia who works in an old people’s home), a beat up motor arrived and out climbed a short man wearing a misshapen sweater and a battered straw hat. He was a monk from the monastery and, with a joyous smile, he told us all the sights which could be seen from this viewpoint by day. We thanked him and went on our way, and when we were back on the road, the doctor told me this monk was Brother Daniel Stein and very famous in Israel. It was only the next morning, when I was already waiting at the airport for my flight to Paris, that I put two and two together and realized that was the Dieter Stein I had written about in my history of the partisans. He was the one who led the people, including your pregnant mother, out of the Emsk ghetto! You keep asking who your father was. Well, that man did more for your life than your father. If not for him you would never have been born, because if he had not organized the escape, everybody would have been killed.

My slow wits had made me miss the opportunity of shaking a real Jewish hero by the hand. When you go to visit your mother, try to seek him out. As a Catholic there will be plenty for you to talk about.

Mirka sends greetings and invites you to visit us in Paris. We have moved to a new apartment and now live very pleasantly in the vicinity of the Mouffetard Market, a 15-minute walk from the Jardin du Luxembourg.

There will be a room waiting for you, but warn us if you are coming because we often have various people staying.

My very best wishes to you, dear Ewa.

Yours,

Paweł

15. April 1986, Santorini

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Dear Esther,

Our plans have been disrupted somewhat because when we flew to Athens, Grisha bumped into a friend of his in the hotel. Syoma is another mathematician and ex-Muscovite and urged us to change our itinerary and sail to Santorini instead of Crete. I was not keen at first, because I at least know something about Crete and had never before heard of Santorini, but then Alex surprised me. He was wildly enthusiastic and said he had read about it being a remnant of doomed Atlantis, so, after wandering around Athens for two days, we got on a boat and seven hours later were in Santorini. I can’t say Athens made any great impression on me. I found it rather disappointing. The ancient history is completely removed from modern life, with odd fragments of the ancient world here and there. There were a couple of pillars immediately in front of our hotel windows but the whole neighborhood was covered with dreadful five-story developments exactly like the one my friend Zoya lives in near the Timiryazev Academy of Agriculture in Moscow. The people, too, seemed to have nothing in common with Homer’s Greeks. An Eastern people, more like Turks than Europeans. It contrasted with Israel, where you have a sense of continuity with the past, and that the old ways of life have not been lost and even the people, their noses, eyes, and voices, remain the same.

That was my initial impression, but when we got to the Santorini islands, they simply took my breath away. The main island is shaped like a narrow sickle with a large bay in the middle, the remains of a volcano crater. It is said not to be completely extinct and to have minor eruptions from time to time, once in 100 years perhaps. We sailed up to sheer cliffs some 400 meters high, on top of which the city of Thira, a lot of little white houses, is perched. That same sheer rock face goes down an enormous depth. Just imagine, this is the inside face of a volcano which erupted 3,500 years ago. The island is a fusion of remnants of the volcano and of the island itself. We have been here three days already and it still quite takes my breath away. It is an enchanting tiny island. We rented a car and drove right round it on our first day.

Yet again I have to admire Grisha. He is knowledgeable about absolutely everything. He explains the geological strata to me and shows me the way they are layered. He spent half a day working something out on paper, complaining at not having brought his computer, and said that it was right that a tidal wave could have have reached Crete and destroyed the Palace of Knossos. I can’t say I saw the need for him to calculate that when it’s in all the guidebooks. You know, I have always loved traveling and now I’m certain that there is no better occupation. It is such a pity you weren’t able to join us. You absolutely must visit Santorini.

You know I prefer an outing to the shops to hiking in mountains and forests, but there is something special about this place. For the first time I have had the feeling of seeing for myself the greatness of the Creator. It’s not something you are aware of in everyday life, but here it’s as if your eyes have been opened. I have not felt it even in Israel where, of course, all the discoveries are about history, which you begin to see as a river whose banks change constantly but which flows imperturbably on. Here, however, nature is so powerful that it rules out any possibility of there being no God. I am not putting that well but I know you will understand what I mean. The hand of the Lord is here and can’t be overlooked. It is the hand of a Creator who has no interest in petty squabbles about what people ought to believe. It is such a pity your husband won’t be able to see this now.

I’m also delighted by my boys, Grisha and Alex. They have climbed every rock. I tend to sit on the balcony and look out, or on the beach. The sand here is volcanic, almost black, but then on another beach it is red or white. It’s magical. My boys have bought lots of books and are learning Greek! Alex says he wants to learn Ancient Greek as well.

Meanwhile, Grisha and I are enjoying something like a honeymoon and all these things taken together are making me happier than I have ever been in my life. I have bought lots of books and postcards, too, and Alex is snapping away with a new camera so you will shortly receive a full report. I lie in the hot midday sunshine when all sane people have gone indoors, but it has taken three days for me to lose that perpetual coldness in my back.

My very best wishes. I’m so sad you didn’t come with us. I am sure that if you were here it would be even better.

Yours,

Ewa

PS. When I think that instead of taking this magical trip I ought really to be sitting with my mother in Haifa and listening to her cursing, I feel a little ashamed, but, I have to admit, not regretful.

16. 1960, Akko

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OMMIER’S DIARY

Someone phoned yesterday evening to ask if I could teach him Arabic as a matter of urgency. I thought wanting to learn Arabic in a hurry was really funny. He was keen to start straight away but I asked him to wait at least until today.

Quite early this morning, an hour before our appointment, there was a knock at the door and I opened it to a monk in the brown cassock of a Carmelite. He was quite short, with big hazel-brown eyes, and he had a smile as bright as the sunshine. Introducing himself as Brother Daniel, he immediately started thanking me for being so splendid in agreeing to teach him.

I had not yet had my breakfast coffee and suggested we might put the lesson on hold a little longer and first have some coffee. Yes, yes, of course! We were talking in Hebrew and he told me he had come to Israel from Poland about a year ago to minister to a small group of Catholics here. The community didn’t have a building of its own but an Arab church had agreed to let them use it for services at certain times.

“They are such lovely people, these Arabs, and I felt that, living in Haifa where there are so many Arab Christians, it was somehow not right not to speak their language. I have been learning languages in a rush all my life, by ear or from a textbook, but Arabic really does need at least an introductory six or eight lessons,” he said cheerfully.

I stared at him in amazement. Was he naive, overconfident, or just plain stupid? When I started learning Arabic, I had my nose in my books for over two years before I began understanding the spoken language, and he thought six or eight lessons would do the trick. I let it pass.

At first I thought he was quite garrulous, but then I realized he had a mild form of the Jerusalem syndrome. This is a state of agitation which affects believers of all faiths when they first come to Israel. In 1947 I myself felt I was walking on coals. My feet were on fire. I can imagine how much more acute that feeling must be for a Jew if I, a Frenchman, had that sense of agitation for several months.

I gave him a double lesson. He picked up the pronunciation quite quickly and gave the impression of being linguistically very gifted. As he was leaving he told me that he has no money at the moment to pay for the lessons, but will be sure to settle up with me at the first opportunity. He is the most original private pupil of the few I have had over the years. Oh, and he saw my index cards on the table and asked what they were for. I told him I was compiling a Hebrew-Arabic dictionary and was particularly interested in the Palestinian dialect. He opened his arms and rushed to kiss me. He really is quite small, barely as high as my shoulder. Very expansive and very observant. As he was leaving he asked if I was a monk.

“I teach French in an Arab Catholic school for girls,” I told him, and did not mention that I am also a member of the Community of Little Brothers.

“Oh, you teach French!” he exclaimed in delight. “That’s simply splendid! We can work a bit on my French as well!”

Is it really so obvious I am a monk? I would never have believed it.