Daniel Stein, Interpreter

PART TWO

1. September 1965, Haifa

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NGEL TO HER

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Dear Mother,

Happy birthday! Unfortunately I wasn’t able to phone you because Daniel and I were in Jerusalem for a few days, going around to see officials at the Ministry of Religions and the Latin Patriarchate. We even had to see a Russian archimandrite. It is all in connection with an amazing plan. I don’t know whether it will work out, but I very much hope that it does. I will tell you all about it in detail later. But first, about you.

From your last letter I know your most recent analyses have been normal. Thank God! It is dreadful that you were so ill, but even from that something good has come. We have never before been so close. During the month I spent with you I came to understand you far better, and I feel you understand me better, too. Is it always necessary to pay such a high price before we can understand each other?

You asked me to explain in more detail what I am doing here, but that is quite difficult. I am rushing about a lot, but by no means all of it makes sense. Brother Daniel—the more I know about him the more I want to tell you—is always laughing and teasing me. He says I spin my arms like a windmill but what spills out of me is not flour but handkerchiefs, purses, and ballpoint pens.

Last week I did lose my purse again, but it had only 15 lirot in it. Fortunately I had taken 300 to a needy family that morning and transferred 800 for a young woman’s studies. Last month we received a donation from Germany and were able to pay the electricity bill. We pay for the electricity in the Arab church. They have their service in the morning and don’t need to put the lights on, but ours is in the evening and we can’t do without light. Since they allowed us to hold our services in their church the cost of electricity has gone up fourfold.

Now, about our plan. Some time ago we went on a trip to Mount Carmel. Daniel took a group of 10 or so of our young parishioners and of course I went too. It was a wonderful place, an ancient Druze village. You have probably not heard about the Druze. They really are a unique people, quite unlike anybody else. Daniel said that they were originally Muslims, but venerate a saint called al-Hakim whom Muslims do not recognize but who in many respects resembles Jesus. Just like the Christians they live in expectation of the Second Coming but keep their faith profoundly secret. They venerate the Torah, the new Testament, and the Quran, and also have some secret books of their own. They even have a special principle, I’ve forgotten what it’s called, which requires them to conceal their true views and adapt externally to the morals and religion of those around them. As always, Daniel talks about them very interestingly. We did not go into their village but climbed on up the mountain.

Wherever you excavate in these parts you can be sure there was already something there in olden times. Not far from that village Daniel showed us an old church. It was in ruins but had not yet completely collapsed. We thought how marvelous it would be to rebuild it for ourselves. After all, we are a community with nowhere to live. We could reconstruct it. Admittedly, there is no water supply and no electricity. The nearest spring is in the Druze village and the electricity lines end there too. We could just about get by without electricity, but not without water.

Daniel said he would try talking to the village elder and see whether they would give us permission to tap into their water supply. If our venture succeeds it will be brilliant. We could leave Haifa and live here autonomously, and it would be a pleasant 5 kilometer walk for Daniel to the monastery. To drive there you would have to make an almost 30-kilometer detour.

Daniel said getting water from the Druze would be far more straightforward than getting permission from the Church hierarchy. Anyway, we went to petition them. He will speak to the Druze elder in a few days’ time. I wanted to go with him but he said it would be better for him to go alone and tell me all about it afterwards.

As I am writing I realize I have forgotten to tell you something important. Daniel says that with my entirely respectable Hebrew I could go to study at university. He promised to find the money for it. There is a preparatory department called Mehina which has a distance-learning course. You go to lectures for a few days each month, and the rest of the time study on your own. After the first year they transfer you to the first year of the Judaic Studies course. I would really like that.

That’s all. I must go to bed now because I have to get up at five tomorrow.

Lots of love to you and all the family,

Your Hilda

Before I had time to post this, Daniel came back from the Druze very pleased.

The main thing is, they will allow us to divert some of their water. What he had to tell me about them was also very interesting. Their village is quite large with modern houses and everything is extremely clean. An old man, evidently a saddler, was sitting in a courtyard under an awning sewing something with a large needle. Daniel told the first person he met he would like to talk to the elder and that person immediately took him to his home for something to eat. Their village elder is a teacher and just at that moment he was teaching at the school. While they were talking, a young man was making coffee. There was a minor commotion at the back of the house and, as Daniel discovered afterwards, they were slaughtering a lamb for plov. They drank the coffee and the house owner, Salim, took Daniel around the village. The first place he was shown was the cemetery.

Twelve people from this village had died in the fighting. One was a colonel, and there were several officers and private soldiers. Salim was very proud of the cemetery and showed it as if to say, “We are a warrior people.” It was strange, because outwardly they seemed very peaceful people, peasants. They had fine orchards and vineyards. They walked on and Daniel asked him why there was no mosque or anything of the kind. They don’t have mosques but they have a khalwah, a house for prayer meetings. Muslims do not consider them to be believers because they have, apart from the Quran and the Bible, some other sacred books of their own which they keep secret from everybody else. They also have a very strange, special doctrine, called Taqiyya. It is a secret teaching, only for Druze. Their elder is initiated into this secret and conveys it orally only to those who are worthy. Their main principle in life, though, is that they live at peace with the religion of the country in which they are dwelling. They have no homeland apart from their doctrine. Daniel even said sadly, “There, Hilda, that is how it should be for Christians, too, that is what was intended, only it didn’t work out. Now we can see that the Druze have managed it. They accept the external, changing laws of the world but live in accordance with their own inner, immutable laws.”

They believe God has been incarnated in the world seven times: in Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, and their sacred fatimid Sheikh al-Hakim. They preached their doctrine until the 11th century, but then there occurred the “Closing of the Gate,” and since then you cannot become a Druze. They call themselves muwahiddun. You can only be born a Druze. It is truly a closed religion. You can leave it but you cannot enter it. There is no proselytizing. The gate is closed.

Then the uqqal arrived, their elder and teacher. He was very old and courteous, and they sat and ate plov.

They don’t drink wine, only water and juice. At the end, when Daniel said he wanted to restore the church on the mountain but there was no water there, the elder said there was water. In the old days there was a spring. It had dried up but could be found again. He also said that if the spring did not run again, they would donate their own water. The land there is not Druze. It is Arab, but the Arab village which was there until 1948 has all gone. The ruins are very old. It was the Crusaders who built the first Christian church there. The uqqal said the Druze came from Egypt and the village was already in existence at that time. They had seen the church being built. Daniel has doubts about that but says it is quite likely they did come from Egypt, only much later than the Jews. I found the way he spoke amusing, as if he had been there and seen it all himself.

“Build,” the Druze elder said. “We are the enemies of nobody, neither Jews nor Christians nor Muslims, but we are citizens of this country and we will defend it.”

That’s the kind of people they are, Mother. The elder’s name is Kerim. In a few days’ time Daniel will introduce me to the Druze builder who is going to help us restore the church. Like the Arabs, they are good builders. I am to be in charge of the building work! Can you imagine it? I have to prepare the project, draw up the estimates, find the money, and hire the workers. Please tell that to my stepfather and let me know how he reacts!

Love,

Hilda

2. 1961, Kfar Tavor

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IKTORIA

Dear Wiktoria,

I was so pleased to get your letter! My dear schoolfriend. We shared a desk for four years. The happiest memories of my childhood are associated with you. Do you remember the play we put on in primary school? And running away from home and getting lost? And my little brother was in love with you. I was sure your family had been lost in Russia. What a joy that you survived and have returned. I am so glad you have sought me out, so glad you have obtained an apartment after so many years of privation. How I would love to see you! I can only imagine what you must have been through when you were exiled to Russia. Was that at the end of 1944 or already in 1945? We lived in Kielce until the end of 1951.

It is more than 10 years since we emigrated to Israel. It sometimes seems a very long time ago and our old life seems like the distant past. In all those years I have only been back to Poland once, when Mother died. You can imagine what that journey was like, just sorrows and regrets. Mother never did forgive me for marrying Metek. It still upsets me deeply. I sometimes dream that I and my brother are staying with our grandmother in Zakopane. I remember going to Kraków once on a school trip, but I try not to remember Kielce. It is just too painful.

Of course I passed Metek your invitation to come and stay, but he said, “Never, Grayna. I will never go back there. Go on your own if you want to.”

His attitude to Poland is complicated. Culturally he is a Pole. He knows Polish poetry by heart and he worships Chopin, but he cannot forgive the Poles for the pogrom in Kielce. He says the 6 million Jews who died during the war were a cosmic catastrophe, something caused by a misalignment of the planets, but those 42 Jews who were killed after the war, in July 1946 in Kielce, are a stain on the conscience of the Poles. Did you hear about the murders or did it not reach you in Russia?

They say the pogrom was organized by the KGB, Polish or Soviet makes no difference. The police and the army were implicated. What difference does it make? The murders were committed by Poles, all just as in the Middle Ages. Once again a rumor was spread that a Christian child had been abducted—blood, matzah, the “Jewish Easter.”

It happened after nearly all the Jews of Kielce had died in the death camps and only a couple of hundred who had survived returned after the war. They were rehoused on Planty Street. There, in a large apartment block, the upper floors were occupied by Jewish Communists, Chekists, and everybody who welcomed the new authorities. Downstairs were ordinary people and it was on them that the pogrom was unleashed. Metek was not in the town. He was in Warsaw for two days for an audition. I think he had been invited to join an orchestra.

The pogrom began with people breaking into the lower stories of the house. First they looked for the abducted child, and then for gold. What gold? Everybody was penniless. They found nothing and started murdering.

Metek’s entire family died in the camps, only his younger sister Riwka survived. When he returned from Warsaw she too was dead. The victims lay in a shed near the station and he was called to identify her.

She was buried and Metek said to me, “Grayna, I can’t stay here. Let’s go to Palestine.” I agreed, Wiktoria. He is my husband, Andrzej had already been born, and I did not want my son to grow up in fear.

For five years Metek tried to get permission to emigrate. We could not understand why everybody was being allowed out except him, but then Metek guessed it was because he was from Kielce and had been in that shed. The authorities were trying to conceal the truth about the postwar pogroms and Metek was a witness. There were pogroms in Kraków and Rzeszów, too, and Metek later met Kraków Jews who had not been allowed out either. In 1951 permission was finally granted and we emigrated.

I can’t say I find life easy in Israel, but in Poland my heart was shredded by sympathy for my husband. The only thing that justifies the move is that the children are very happy here.

Metek has a difficult personality and has been through so much that his constant depression is readily understandable. I can say to you, dear Wiktoria, that we are a good married couple and bring meaning to each other’s lives. We love our children very much, of course. Metek is particularly attached to our daughter and I, I suppose, am closer to our son, but the two of us are like a single entity. It is only thanks to our love that we have managed to survive, both in the war and now. Life here is very, very difficult.

Sweet Wiktoria, send me your photograph. I am sending you ours so that we will recognize each other if God grants that we should meet. One day, perhaps?

I’m so glad you have reappeared in my life. I hope that this time we will not lose each other again.

Love,

Your Grayna

March 1965, Kfar Tavor

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Hi, Wiktoria!

I’ve been back home for two weeks now and just can’t collect my wits. Before the trip I still thought I might be able to change my life and go back to Poland, but I see now that’s impossible.

After Metek’s death, when I realized that now I could leave Israel, all that held me back was Hanna. Metek adored her. He was never so close to Andrzej. Andrzej was alienated, and now we will never know why he was so chilly toward his father. Andrzej was my favorite, while Hanna was and remains to this day her Daddy’s girl. She has been miserable the whole year since he died. She is at a difficult age and is such a mixture of brashness and vulnerability. How could I leave her alone?

Now that Andrzej has been killed they won’t take her into the army. There is a rule that if only one child is left it is not called up. She dreams every night of joining the army, and goads me by saying she will join the paratroops. She is musical like Metek, has a good figure like I had when I was young, and she is pretty. I don’t know where she gets that from. Metek and I were never very good looking. After Andrzej was killed and Metek died I would have gone straight back to Poland, but Hanna adores Israel. All the young people here adore their country. She will never emigrate. Anyway, what is Poland to her? And what sort of a Catholic is she? I so wanted to keep her in our faith. All through her childhood I took her to church, and she came willingly. Later, though, she dropped it like a brick. She told me she wanted Giur, that is, to become a Jew. As the daughter of a Christian woman she was not considered a Jew under the laws here. She had to convert to Judaism.

“I have no interest in God at all. I just want to be like everybody else.” That is what she tells me. She is a Jewish girl, an Israeli, and her dream is to get into the army as soon as possible and get a rifle in her hands. She used to come with me to see a Catholic priest here. He is from Poland, too. From the very outset he said a person should make a conscious choice, especially here in Israel. The fact that you baptized her means nothing until she has grown up. He told me to take her to church while she was little, but warned that in our difficult situation you have to have the patience to let someone make their own mind up. I can see now he was right. She doesn’t go to church anymore. She has clearly left all that behind. She would never come back to Poland with me and now I have nobody other than her. She is 17. I used to think that when she grew up and married I would go back and live out my last years in my homeland, but when I saw Poland again after so many years, I realized that life would not be good for me there either.

Why have things turned out like this? There seems to be no place on earth where I can feel at home. I am very unhappy in Israel, but I was unhappy in Poland, too. Here so much gets me down: the noise, the over-expansiveness of everybody. The neighbors yell, people on the bus yell, my employer yells in the workshop. I hear Arab music incessantly and just want to turn off the sound. The sun is too bright here and I would like to turn it down a bit, too. I find the heat exhausting, and our house is unbearable in the summer. The heat makes me feel like my blood has congealed. Looking out the window I can see Mount Tabor, the place where the Transfiguration of Jesus occurred, but I would prefer to live in one of the new apartments in Kielce. The trouble is that now, having just come back from our dreary Kielce, I have to accept that I couldn’t live there either. All I have left is two graves in the Holy Land.

I am very grateful to you, Wiktoria, for being so hospitable. You proved kinder than a sister to me, but that is not a basis on which to return to Poland. Everything there is so gray and colorless, and the people are just too dour.

It was a year yesterday since Metek died, two days before his 50th birthday. Andzrej was killed two days before he would have been 20. Yesterday our neighbors and Metek’s colleagues from the College of Music came and brought food and vodka. They said such good things about him. To start with, Hanna laughed to the point of indecency, and then sobbed. She has really quite a hysterical personality. Andrzej was just the opposite. So calm and serene. I realized yesterday what a happy family we were four years ago. I can’t bear it. I can’t pray. I have a stone where my heart should be. Hanna at least cries, but I have no tears.

Wiktoria, my dear, all sorts of dark thoughts come into my mind. I long to fall asleep and never wake up. Waking is dreadful. I am fine while I’m asleep. There are no dreams, there is no me, and that’s so good, when you leave yourself and your thoughts behind. When I first wake up I’m like a baby, everything has been washed and smoothed away, but then comes the blow. The two military men, a colonel and a sergeant, arrive and inform me of Andrzej’s death and everything breaks inside me all over again. Within a minute the whole reel has been run through, right up to the funeral with the sealed coffin. There is such a gaping hole in my heart.

No less unexpectedly, the director of the College of Music came to see me at the workshop, and the elderly lady who taught piano, Elisheva Zak. Here in Israel there is an accepted way of notifying someone of a death. They rarely just telephone, they come to see you. Every morning I relive the death of my boy and my husband. I am 46, in good health. The way it was for Metek, his heart stopping and his life being over, is not how it is going to be for me. I have another 40 or even 50 years ahead of me, waking up like that every morning, then dragging myself to the workshop and the sewing machine to stitch curtains, curtains, and more curtains. I need those curtains. I get a generous pension for the loss of my son, but if I wasn’t stitching I would hang myself. I wouldn’t even notice. I would do it without hesitation, without having to decide or prepare. It’s only too easy.

How bizarre and absurd life is. Thinking back, I can see now that my best years were the years of the occupation when I ran every night to the cellar of the bombed-out house next door along a secret path and through a narrow opening only I could jump through. And I really did have to jump because three treads were missing. I had to jump down into the darkness, into Metek’s arms. We would light a little candle because Metek did not like to hold me in the dark. He wanted to see my beauty. Oh, Wiktoria, all around was death, killing and more killing, but we felt as if we were in paradise, a paradise which lasted one and a half years. One thing Metek didn’t know, and I never told him, was that our neighbor Moczulski had been spying as I went in the night to Metek, and blackmailed me. What did I have? I had nothing except what women have under their skirts. He was old, and repulsive, and a villain, but he would call and I would go to him. He didn’t need me often, he wasn’t that virile. Afterwards I would just give myself a shake and go to Metek to cleanse myself of the vileness. Well, the Lord gave Moczulski his just desserts. He ended up in the labor camps in Russia after the war, somebody else denounced him, and gangsters in the camp cut his throat in 1947 or so.

Metek loved me and music, and of course he loved our children. That was his whole world, and I was at the center of it. It was because of me that he didn’t pursue a musical career. He was offered a place in the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1951 but I said there was no way I would go to America, so we went to Israel instead. That’s fate for you! He always did what I wanted. He said, “You took out so many chamber pots of my shit that you deserve a statue of pure gold.” Well, now I have my monument—two graves. Dearest Wiktoria, I really don’t want to go on living.

I’m writing all this in such detail because I want you to understand, and not be angry or offended that I have decided finally not to return to Poland. Please give my best wishes to Irenka and Wiczek and all or friends when you see them. May God be with you.

Your friend Grayna

3. April 1965, Haifa

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What inexpressible sorrow, my dear Brother. Sic transit everything on this earth. I am deeply despondent and dismayed. I usually don’t have time for moods. A busy man can’t afford to have them, but the last few days have been filled with dismay and grief. I have buried one of my parishioners who committed suicide. I had known her since my first days in Haifa, a quiet Polish woman, more a village than a town person, but very likeable; one of those early risers who are kindly and cheerful in the morning but by evening have wearied and closed up like a flower. I am a great connoisseur of women, uniquely so for a monk. I see you smile wryly, dear Władek. My vows have probably saved the world from a great Casanova, because I like women very much. It is indeed fortunate that I am unmarried as I would cause my wife great anxiety by ogling other women. I find almost all of them attractive, but Grayna, of whom I am writing, was truly delightful. She looked like a vixen, with her russet coloring, her pointed chin, and sharp teeth like a little animal.

The war did dreadful things to people. Even if they survived physically, it crippled their souls. Some became cruel, some cowardly, some barricaded themselves behind a stone wall from God and the world. Grayna and her husband went through a great deal. She hid him in a cellar for a year and a half, endured no end of terror, and gave birth to her elder child before the liberation. She suffered a terrible rupture with her family because of the baby, and then they got married. He was a brooding, artistic man, a not entirely successful violinist. Their firstborn, whom I knew very little because he was killed in the year I came here, died on the last day of his service as a conscript. His vehicle was blown up by a mine on the road he was traveling back to Jerusalem from where his unit was deployed. At that very moment Grayna was preparing his welcome home party, but her son did not make it home. A few years later, Metek unexpectedly died of heart failure and she became totally withdrawn. I spoke to Grayna several times during those years and her conversation was invariably polite but completely without substance. I could see only that the threads which bind a person to life had been greatly weakened.

I know even more about death than I do about women, and again it is through the war. There is nothing more vile and unnatural in this world than war. How it perverts not only life but even death. Death in war is bloody, full of animal fear, always violent, and what I was obliged to witness—mass murder, the execution of Jews and partisans—was fatally destructive also for those carrying out the atrocities. People know very little about those who did the killing, but I was intimately familiar with them. I lived under the same roof as one of them, a Belorussian called Semyonovich, and I saw him drinking himself to oblivion and the terrible way he suffered. His sufferings were not just physical or moral, but an inextricable combination of the two. They were the torments of hell.

When I became a priest in a Polish parish I saw another side of death with the old village women dying after the war. I would be called to administer the Viaticum and there were times when I clearly saw whose hands I was committing them to. They were met by the Powers of Heaven, and departed with happy faces. Not always, but several times I witnessed that and so I know how death should be in a world which has not been perverted.

But suicide, Władek, suicide! The soul itself repudiating its existence. Poor Grayna! Extroverted people rarely resort to this act. They are able to find a way of projecting their suffering outward, sharing it with somebody, distancing themselves from it. She saved her husband’s life but found herself incapable of living after he was gone. They went everywhere together. She never left the house without him. In the morning he would accompany her to the sewing business where she worked, and come in the evening to bring her home.

If he was teaching in the evening, she would wait at the workshop for an hour, for two hours, until he came to collect her. He always brought her to Mass, and waited patiently in the garden for the service to end. When I invited him to come in and join us at table after the service he would usually refuse, but sometimes he did come in. He would sit silently and never ate anything. He had an ascetic, very handsome Jewish face. They say he was a very good teacher, and small boys with tiny violins were brought from the surrounding towns to study with him.

Grayna suffered silently for a year, then she arranged the wake, asked the local Jews to assemble the requisite minyan of ten Jewish men, and they read the Kaddish. A week later her daughter went off to the army, and the next day she took something and did not wake up.

I have not encountered suicide for many years now. In the partisan brigade and among the Jews in the ghetto it was not uncommon. People had been hounded into the darkest of corners and rejected the gift of life, preferring death to agonizing ordeals by hunger, fear, the torture and death of those they loved, and the dread of dying hideously at any moment. It was an attempt by desperate people to forestall what was coming. I remember being totally appalled when I heard of the suicide of Goebbels and his killing of his six children. He had no trust in God and believed that neither he nor his children were deserving of grace. He passed sentence and executed it himself.

But poor Grayna! The one thing she needed was her husband’s love and she knew of no other. Or had little knowledge of it. It never occurred to her how cruelly she was treating her daughter. Poor Hanna, first her brother, then her father, and now her mother. The army gave her three days’ leave but she came back only for a few hours, to attend the funeral. She did not want to stay or go into the house. What a trauma that girl will live with now!

We buried Grayna in the local Arab cemetery. It is a small Catholic cemetery belonging to our brothers on the outskirts of town. The Arabs allow me to conduct services in their church and I use the same altar as they do for Mass. We had a joint service on Holy Thursday, celebrating the Mass in Arabic and Hebrew, and on Friday she did not wake up.

It is difficult, dear Brother, for Christians to live in Israel, for many reasons. It is even more difficult for Arab Christians, who are mistrusted and hated by Jews, and even more by Arab Muslims. But how difficult it is to bury a Christian, especially one who is not a monk living in a monastery with its orchards, lands, and cemeteries; not an Arab either, who has settled here better than others; but somebody without roots, who is in Israel more or less at random, and who belongs neither to the clergy nor to officialdom.

There are so many tragedies here. Immigrants arrive with mixed families. They bring their aged mothers, who are often Catholic, or sometimes Orthodox. When these old people die, something unspeakable happens: there is nowhere to bury them. There are Jewish cemeteries where they bury only Jews; there are the cemeteries of Christian monasteries but these, too, refuse to bury outsiders because of lack of space. The unbelievable price of land means that a plot in a cemetery is beyond the means of poor people. Of course, those of us who come from Poland know only too well how many people the land can accommodate.

The Arab priest in charge of the church where we conduct our joint services occasionally allows me to bury someone in the cemetery there, and that is where we buried Grayna. I ask you to pray for her, dear Brother Władek.

I have written you such an inchoate letter that it is only now as I reread it that I see how plaintive it is, not at all the letter of thanks I intended to write. I have indeed received three books from you and one of them has proved invaluable. I am grateful to you also for the total understanding that you express in your letter. I have to confess that in my difficult situation your support is extremely important to me.

Your Brother in Christ,

D.

4. December 1965, Kraków

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… Really, Daniel, you never cease to amaze me. Your letter is truly inchoate. I understand your grief, I feel sorry for the woman who died, but the Church long ago designated suicide a sin and you are indulging in emotions which can only devastate the soul and weaken faith.

All imaginable questions have long since been posed and answers received to them. It is our problem if we cannot read, and with our excessive cleverness find difficult and perplexing what our predecessors found as clear as God’s day. Do you really think that all divisions and schisms are purely human? Is there not God’s truth in them? Perhaps, to put it another way, what God has put asunder let no man seek to join?

No, I don’t even want to hear about this trend in your thinking. If, as you suggest, we were to create a common liturgy for all Christians, what place are you to find for those Protestants who in their practice have totally rejected the Eucharist as we understand it? I do not know, I really do not know, dear Daniel. If anything of that sort is to come about, it will not be in our lifetime, and most likely only in the Kingdom of Heaven. It strikes me that life in Israel is well and truly addling your clear mind. You never used to come out with this sort of thing.

You have written to me more than once about how great the dissension is between Christians in the Holy Land, but what I would like to know is what relations are like with the Jews. If Christians cannot come to terms among themselves, how are they to talk to the Jews? To say nothing of the Muslims—another issue which is quite beyond resolution.

We have had very heavy frosts this year, and I had a beggar freeze to death beside the church. It is not you in warm countries who should be building shelters for the homeless but we here in the North. We ought to arrange a transfer and send our beggars to you.

Your Brother in the Lord,

Wl.

5. September 1966, Haifa

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ILDA TO HER MOTHER

Don’t be upset that I am not coming home this year, Mother. Ask yourself how could I go on holiday when I am responsible for all the building work? You wouldn’t believe how much we have managed to do over the past year, despite the fact that we meet nothing but obstructiveness at every turn, both from the Church authorities and the state. Our only help is from Germany. Also, one local Arab donated a truckload of stone to us. In Germany it would cost an absolute fortune, but in Israel building materials are cheap. In July a whole brigade of German students arrived. They worked on the building site for two months, excavated the foundations for the church building, and began digging the foundations for the shelter. Nearly all the students were from Frankfurt and they were really special. I never met anyone like them in Germany. They have already tapped into the water from the Druze village.

And what a beautiful church it is! We have restored the walls and hung the doors. We have a roof! The only thing we don’t have is windows. Daniel says we don’t need to insert window frames, and if we just make shutters to keep bad weather out that will be enough. It’s not a large space, he says. In the summer it will be cooler without windows, and in the winter we will heat it with our breath. Although the building is not yet complete, we are already holding services in it. We have an altar and a porch where we can sit in the shade. We found a blocked spring and restored it, not without help from our Druze neighbors. So now we are called the Church of Elijah by the Spring. Doesn’t that sound good?

I was all for moving right now, but Daniel says he won’t let me live here on my own. While the students were staying we had a kind of open-air campsite. We didn’t even put up a tent because it would have been very stuffy inside it. We cooked on an open hearth and ate once a day, in the evening. In the morning we just ate a very little—pancakes with honey and coffee.

Can you imagine it? I am keeping all the accounts, paying the roofers we had to hire. We put on a tiled roof. It was expensive but we got help.

Brother Daniel spent very little time here so I took nearly all the decisions on my own. Even in the summer he has a lot of work, but the main crowds of tourists come in the autumn for the Jewish festivals. He conducts tours all over Israel. I was able to go along with him this summer, although not very far. Only to Zichron Yaakov. Do you remember the Rose of Sharon mentioned in the Bible? It originated in the Sharon Valley. There had been no cultivation there for 1,000 years. There were swamps everywhere, but then at the end of the 19th century, 10 Jewish families came from Bessarabia. They wanted to turn the region into orchards again but were getting nowhere until Baron Rothschild gave them money and sent experts. Then they made real progress and drained all the swamps. They started making the land workable again. Daniel showed us those vineyards and orchards. You can see the luxuriant plantations from Rothschild’s grave, because he directed in his will that he should be buried here. What a fortunate man—how wisely he used his money! Swamps were turned into orchards and now fruit from those orchards is sent all over the world. There is a genetic laboratory there where they perform miracles. The most interesting thing, though, is that Daniel knows all this. He pointed out different cultivars to us and told us about the flowers. He knows exactly which plants have been here since biblical times and which are later introductions. In Zichron Yaakov there is even a small botanical garden with plants mentioned in the Bible. The only tree missing is the Cedar of Lebanon. For some reason it won’t grow by itself. Now in order to grow a cedar they have to go to great lengths. Every tree has to be specially tended. Each one has a special passport, and yet in olden times there were forests of cedars and oaks here.

Can you imagine, there is a science of biblical palaeo-botany! Its scholars have recreated a picture of what grew here 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. As we were looking around the garden, the botanist himself came, Musa, a local Arab. He showed us a plant which didn’t look anything special but which is like the bush out of which God spoke to Moses. The plant has a very high content of volatile oils and even, he said, if you carefully light a match, the oil will burn and there will be flames around the bush, but the bush itself will not be consumed. The burning bush!

Musa is from an old Arab family and was educated in England. They have a lot of land here and they used to own the plot where there is now a prison for Palestinians who are fighting the Jews in all sorts of illegal ways. It is called Damun Prison, but we did not go there because we were short of time. I did manage to see another amazing place, though, along with the rest of the group, out toward Shechem. It was there that Joseph’s brothers were grazing cattle. At first he couldn’t find them, and when he did they threw him into a dry well because they were angry about his interpretation of a dream. Daniel showed us just such a dry well, possibly the very one. Some 20 kilometers away there is another, and it was probably from one of these, within an area of about 20 kilometers, that he was dragged and sold to passing merchants. Not far away, a caravan route passed along a dried-up riverbed—a “wadi.” So the whole story described first in the Bible and later by Thomas Mann quite literally took place here. The merchants bought Joseph as a slave. He cost far less than you would pay nowadays for a sheep, and they took him to Egypt. Such is the story, and in some places you can still see the caravan route. Right beside that dry well we came across two Arab boys grazing goats.

Musa said goats are the worst pests in the country: they ate all of Ancient Greece and Palestine. I listened to him with my ears flapping and realized that what I want most of all in the world is to go and study at Jerusalem University. Daniel says that it is perfectly possible. He had thought about it himself, but it would be difficult for him to do without me. You can’t imagine how pleased I was to hear that. Now I am quickly finishing off this letter and will give it to a German girl who is going back to Germany and will drop it in a mailbox in Munich. I hope your health is all right and that you won’t be cross with me for not coming back this holiday.

If everything gets organized as Daniel intends, I shall start studying at the University in January. I have absolutely no idea how I will get on, but I am very keen.

Best wishes to everybody at home,

Your Hilda

6. September 1966, Haifa

A

NOTE

H

ILDA FOUND THAT EVENING IN HER BAG

Hilda,

If you wouldn’t mind my coming to your building site, please call me on 05-12-47 and just say you have no objection.

Musa

7. 1996, Haifa

F

ROM A CONVERSATION BETWEEN

H

ILDA AND

E

WA

M

ANUKYAN

No, it doesn’t surprise me at all that three days talking to Daniel caused your life to change direction. After all, I myself only survived thanks to him. For many years he tended me like a goat. The story began thirty years back and came to an end long ago. I sometimes feel it was not my life at all but something out of a cheap novel.

In autumn 1966 I found a note in my bag from Musa, I phoned him and he came. I knew his family was very rich and I hoped this meant he wanted to make a donation toward the building work.

I was twenty, and for my age I was exceptionally silly in feminine terms. When a man looked at me I was afraid there was something wrong with my appearance, a stain on my blouse perhaps, or a torn stocking. I always had a very low opinion of myself, and my stepbrothers called me a plank.

As a child I was very self-conscious about being so tall. I wanted to be short and chubby and have a well-filled brassière, but there was absolutely nothing for me to put a brassière on. I was only fit to be trained up for some kind of sport, skiing or racing, something where you need long legs. Unfortunately, I hated races and my lack of competitiveness was instantly detected by every coach whose path I crossed. The sport was my stepfather’s idea. He was a great sports fan, but anything he suggested I automatically disliked. In those years my mother did not take much interest in me because my younger brother, Axel, was sickly and she was constantly fussing over him. Too much height and too little love was how I diagnosed myself many years later.

After I had moved to Israel my mother had an operation for cancer and our relations got better. It’s probably no exaggeration to say they only really began after she became ill. I know much more about her now than I did when I was young and have come to understand her better. Although I only go back to Munich to visit her every two or three years, we correspond constantly and are very close. She has come out here several times in spite of her ill-health. When I was young, though, we were distant and I was a very lonely girl.

When I met Daniel, I stopped being unhappy, because he spread happiness around himself. From the moment I saw him, I knew I wanted to be by his side. He was a father figure for me, of course, and well aware of it. For many people he was a substitute father, or elder brother, a replacement for a child which had died, or even a husband. Half the women parishioners were secretly in love with him. Some made no secret of it. One crazy woman pursued him with her love for a good eight years until he managed to find her a husband.

But I want to tell you about Musa. He came to the building site and I was pleased, expecting a donation, but he brought marvelous Arab sweets. A few days later he came again and helped the workers to drive piles into the ground. The students had left by then. For a month there was no sign of him but then he arrived with a small digger. By evening they had finished digging out the foundations for the staff premises and he paid for the work. I hardly spoke to him. We exchanged only a few words at supper before he left. I thought he was very handsome and admired his hands. Europeans don’t have hands like his. All Arabs, both women and men, have perfectly shaped hands and they are extraordinarily refined. It’s probably because their bodies are so enveloped in clothing and this is the only part of a woman she doesn’t have to keep under a covering, so her hands try to stand in for everything else. Men’s faces are not particularly visible either. There is all that vegetation, the keffiyeh covering their heads, so that only their nose sticks out, like Arafat’s. Arabs do not show their bodies. I was working there in shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, and Musa did not look my way because it “hurt his eyes,” as he told me later. He was consumed by passion and I was completely unaware of it. He was in despair because he thought I did not consider him a man. He was almost right, except that it was myself I did not consider a woman.

One time he said he had planned an orchard which he would plant when the building work was complete, and told me what kind of trees would grow there. He had a sheet of paper in front of him and drew on it with a blue felt tip pen. He left the paper when he went away, and I put it in a folder.

We met for almost a year and I liked him very much, the way you delight in something beautiful: an antique bronze, a picture, or the binding of an old book. He was all gold and brown like the shell of a nut in the forest, but his body was not hard, it was soft and firm, and he could weep for love. These things I learned later. I’m sure I would never have known anything if I had not been bitten by a snake in the springtime. We were sitting under the awning next to our almost completed building and drinking tea he had made. It was the place where we always spent the hottest hours of the day, when it was impossible to work. The ground was flat and well trodden there, so why nobody noticed that a snake had glided in is puzzling. I took a cup of tea from Musa and settled down comfortably, leaning on my left hand. I felt a slight prick in my forearm and fleetingly glimpsed a length of dark cord out of the corner of my eye. Before I knew what had happened, Musa had already wound a towel into a tourniquet and bound my arm tightly above the bite.

“A viper. It was a viper,” he said. I knew that in the spring Israeli vipers are very active. Musa fell upon my arm and seemed to bite me hard. He spat out. The snake bite was so small I couldn’t even see it. He took me in his arms and carried me down to the car.

“I can walk! I’m fine!” I shouted, but he said I needed to move as little as possible until they injected the serum. He laid me down on the back seat and drove me to hospital. My arm was very sore where he had bitten it.

At the hospital I was immediately given an injection and told to lie down for an hour. There was reddening around the wound and bruising caused by Musa’s teeth. The doctor said that if there was no reaction after an hour, Musa must have succeeded in sucking all the poison out. It was very rare to manage that so speedily.

I was laid on a couch and Musa waited for me out in the corridor. Then he came in and said he had almost died of worry. He started crying but I didn’t, because I realized he loved me, and that was even more of a surprise than the snakebite.

After that everything happened very quickly. We had after all been getting ready for this for a whole year. Well, perhaps not exactly, but all year I had been bathing in his lovelorn gaze, and I even got rid of my pimples. In the past I sometimes got small pimples on my chin and forehead, but now my skin looked as if I had been grooming and pampering it in a beauty salon. I rented a little flat in the Middle Town from Arabs. There was one room the size of a large divan and a small kitchen. Musa lived in the Upper Town, in a large house with an orchard. The day came when he did not return home.

No, it is not at all what you are thinking. He knew nothing about me, but intuited everything. He was an emotional genius. He approached me so cautiously, as if I were a spirit or a mirage. I was a wild animal with its femininity completely suppressed. I suspect I am one of those women who find it easy to live out their lives as a virgin. Very gradually I learned to respond to him. It took almost a year before my body could do that, but during that year it was as if a different, quite separate creature was growing inside me.

Then there came the Six-Day War. Everybody was euphoric. East Jerusalem was occupied, part of the Judaean Desert, Sinai, Samaria, the Golan Heights. It seemed as if the only two people with misgivings were Daniel and Musa. Daniel said this was a hostage to fortune and that seizing territory did not resolve the issue but complicated it. Musa, who as an Arab was not taken into the army, said the consequences were unforeseeable.

I remember them talking one morning and Daniel said the Six-Day War was like a chapter in the Bible. Victory had come at the wave of a hand. “And defeat with a wave of the other hand?” Musa asked quickly. I was suddenly afraid.

Outwardly, little changed. I worked from morning till night. We were organizing a kind of crèche at the church. Most of our women were unable to take jobs. There were few crèches, and it was difficult and expensive to transport children. We did have a group for working mothers, and one or two of them would take turns to look after the children. Usually there was a lactating mother. I remember one, Veronica, fed half the children in the community with her breasts. This was the time when we finished building the Church of Elijah by the Spring. The Druze had found the spring for us, but it was such a trickle that it could have provided only enough water for the birds to drink.

We became a real community, even slightly communistic. There were always people with nowhere to go living in the church shelter. Sometimes they were completely random people who were homeless, and a number of drug addicts attached themselves to us. One managed to cure himself of drug taking, pulled himself up, and even finished his studies. Daniel and I bought food and there were charitable aid packages. We boiled, fed, washed dishes, and prayed. He conducted the liturgy, a large part of which was in Hebrew. Musa often came to help. Sometimes he invited me to go on an outing, showing me beautiful places. Whenever he did, I would ask Daniel whether I could take the time off. He would be cross and say, “Why are you asking me? You are a responsible adult. You know Musa is married. If you cannot go, it’s better for you not to.”

Of course I knew that Musa was married, but I also knew he had been married when he was still just a boy of seventeen. His wife was older. She was related to him on his mother’s side and there were some family considerations which obliged him to marry her. Of course, nobody asked his opinion. By now he had three children.

Twenty-one years passed from the day he slipped that note into my bag until the day he died. Twenty-one years of suffering, happiness, breaking up, reconciliation, ceaseless pangs of conscience, shame, and a union as heavenly as anyone could imagine.

At the very beginning I went, confused, to talk to Daniel and for a long time couldn’t say anything. Then I said just one word, “Sin.” He was silent, then took the clasp from my hair. It fell about me. He stroked my head and said, “What beautiful hair you have, and your forehead, your eyes and nose … You were created to be loved. The sin is with the other person. It is he who took the vow, but I can understand him, too, Hilda. In love, women are almost always the victims. Women suffer more from love, but perhaps, too, they gain more. There is no escaping life. It takes what is its due. Do not be hard on yourself. Endure. Try to protect yourself.” I hardly understood what he was saying. It was astonishing the way people would come to him with banal problems, but he never gave them banal answers.

Musa and I tried to split up many times but we just couldn’t do it. Like two drops of mercury we were constantly coalescing. Such was the chemistry of our love, or passion. I remember one other time when I had split up with Musa, I went to Daniel with my mind made up. I would go to a nunnery! I thought that behind the walls of a convent I would be able to hide from illicit love.

Daniel produced beautiful Italian sweets, chocolate-covered cherries somebody had brought him, and he put on the kettle. He infused tea very well, with great concentration, sometimes in the Chinese, sometimes in the Russian manner. He rinsed the teapot with boiling water and covered it with a towel. Later he poured it into the teacups. We were up there on the mountain at the Church of Elijah late one evening. I was waiting to know what he would say, because my desire to go into a nunnery was immense, almost as great as my love.

“My child, it seems to me you want to go to a nunnery to run away from love. That is not a correct decision. You should enter a nunnery because you love God, not because of your love for a man. You should not deceive yourself. It would only make matters worse. When you recover from your love, we will talk about this again.” I kept on and on, “I want to go to a nunnery! I want to go to a nunnery!” At that he got really angry. I don’t think I had ever seen him so angry.

“What do you want to bring to God? Your amorous sufferings? Is that what you want to bring him? What will you do there? Perhaps you are a great prayerful saint? Perhaps with your prayers you will preserve the world like the thirty-six Jewish righteous men? Or can you meditate? Perhaps you are St. Francis de Sales or St. Teresa of Ávila? Perhaps you want that samovar gold halo to gleam above your head which they paint on Eastern icons? Don’t talk rubbish! We have so much to do. Work here!”

I still could not hear what he was telling me. I was even inwardly rather indignant. I suppose I had been half-expecting him to praise me and bless me, to be touched by my resoluteness, but he was angry. His hand flew up and a cup fell from the table and smashed.

“If you cannot change anything, endure. This can’t go on forever. One of the three people always gives in. You should give in, you should remove yourself, but if you can’t, then wait. Do not try to bind yourself with vows. Monasticism is a hard path which few can bear. I, for one, cannot bear it. It is so hard for me to be a monk. Throughout my life I have been in anguish, without children, without a family, without a woman. But my life was given back to me so many times that it no longer belonged to me and I brought it as an offering, because it really no longer belonged to me. Understand, I do not regret having taken the monastic vows. I affirmed them and with God’s help I shall live as a monk to the end of my days, but I would never, never do you hear, bless anyone on their way to this path. If you want to serve God, serve Him in the world. There are plenty of people here who need your service.”

Once more Musa and I found ourselves on the crest of some wave of love and ran away to Cyprus. We lived there for four months. He wanted us to get married. I was so troubled and longed to die just to get all this over with. That was when Daniel told me, “It is time to stop, otherwise somebody will die.” I wanted it to be me. I even prayed that it should happen of its own accord. I did not consider suicide, it was too simple a solution and I knew that for Daniel that would be a terrible blow. He felt responsible for me.

At the height of all this passion a telegram arrived in Cyprus from Musa’s father to tell him that David, his middle son, had been knocked down by a car. He was fifteen then. We got on the ferry and returned to Haifa. The boy underwent a four-hour operation but did not regain consciousness. He was in a coma. Daniel and I prayed in the church for two days without a break.

I vowed at that time that there would never again be anything between me and Musa, and at that same hour he, quite independently, made the same vow. There was no collusion. We both recognized that we had to give this up. The boy recovered.

From that time, Musa and I saw each other only occasionally in church. We stood side by side and prayed together but said not a word to each other.

In 1987, when the first Intifada began, the Muslims murdered Musa’s entire family. His uncle owned a small restaurant by the bus station. It was a busy spot and all sorts of people would come together there because they liked his courtesy and conscientiousness. They were celebrating the birthday of Musa’s father. The whole family had gathered in the restaurant when Muslims burst in and killed everyone. They were terrorists. They wanted to use the café as a meeting place but the uncle had turned them down. Then they ordered him to sell them the café. They said they would pay money but the uncle had to get out. He refused, so they took their revenge. Four men, two women, and three children were murdered. Musa’s son David was in England at that time and had been unable to get back for his grandfather’s birthday. A great deal was written about the tragedy at the time.

But you know, Ewa, nobody said a word about what was the most important aspect of this atrocity. The situation of Arab Christians in Israel is far worse than that of the Jews themselves. The Jews live on an island in a sea of Arab hostility, but the Arab Christians are under suspicion from both sides. Daniel saw that better than anyone here. He had an extraordinary sense of humor. He once told me that a lack of magnanimity on the part of an elderly woman called Sarah and her unreasonable jealousy led to a family conflict which assumed the proportions of a global catastrophe. If she had had a big enough heart to love Ishmael, the elder brother would not have become the sworn enemy of the younger Isaac. I talked to Musa a lot about that. I have kept only three letters from him, one of which is devoted to his experience of what he called “being an Arab.” He didn’t study only botany at university. He was well versed also in philosophy and psychology but abandoned them in order to dedicate himself to what gave him most joy, plants. He came from a good family. His ancestors planted orchards for all the rulers of the East, and the Persian Gardens of the Baha’i Temple in Haifa were designed by his grandfather.

In the last years of his life, Daniel used to call me “daughter.” How about you, Ewa?

8. December 1966, Haifa

R

ECORDING OF A TALK BY

B

ROTHER

D

ANIEL AT THE

C

HURCH OF

E

LIJAH BY THE

S

PRING

Eldar has made a marvelous table at which a multitude of people can sit. Our thanks to you, Eldar. Put the plates in the bowl, we can wash them later, but don’t put the glasses away. Somebody is bound to want to drink. Yes. It is far better now, the table is excellent. Hilda will make us tea and Musa will make coffee. He does that better than anyone else. And a cup for me, okay?

Last week I was guiding pilgrims in Jerusalem and happened on a cemetery near the Old Town where they are conducting archaeological excavations. We were shown some very interesting burials of the second century where Jews and Christians were buried together, all members of one family. It was a time of coexistence for Jewish Christianity and Judaism, when everybody prayed together in the synagogues and there was no conflict between them. Of course, Jews who were the disciples and followers of Christ did not yet call themselves Christians. Of course, early Christianity was intimately connected with the Jewish milieu of that time, if only because that was the milieu from which Jesus himself came. Jesus’s mother was the Jewess Miriam. He spoke the Ancient Hebrew and Aramaic tongues. When he was eight days old, the rite of circumcision was performed upon him. Jesus, as we know from the texts of the New Testament, observed the Sabbath and attended the Temple. As modern specialists in Jewish letters of that time have shown, he expressed his teachings in the same language and used the same examples as the rabbis of that time.

In the first century, many participants and witnesses of events were still alive, the closest relatives of Jesus were alive, as was Miriam herself. After the death and resurrection of the Master, the Apostles Peter, James, and John chose James as their bishop, the brother of Jesus, and he led the Jerusalem community. For the Apostles the resurrection of Jesus was the eschatological event which had been foretold by the prophets of Israel. That is why Christ’s disciples called on all Jews to acknowledge that they were the true Israel, the community of the New Testament. Here, however, they came up against the stubborn, unrelenting hostility of official Judaism. The apostles then formed a special group which existed within Judaism, alongside other Jewish sects, but remained true to the provisions of the Law and the divine service of the Temple.

In the year forty-nine, the Council of Jerusalem legitimated the practice that Gentiles who had converted to Christianity, “Gentile Christians,” need observe only the commandments given to Noah, which were seven in number. They were not obliged to undergo the ritual of circumcision or the other provisions of Judaic law. The Apostle Paul considered that Jewish Christians themselves were not obliged to adhere to the ancient rules, for example, they need not observe the prohibition on eating with Gentiles, or at the same table as Christians who had not been circumcised. Many Jewish Christians objected to his ruling.

This was the reason behind a dispute which arose at Antioch in that same year of AD forty-nine. In the view of St. Paul, circumcision, observing the Sabbath, and attending divine service in the Temple were no longer required even of Jews, and Christianity was set free from the Judaic religio-political milieu to go out and embrace other peoples. Do you remember St. Peter’s vision on the roof of the house of Simon the Tanner in Jaffa? From the heavens a sheet was lowered containing animals considered unclean by the Jews, and this spectacle was accompanied by a loud voice crying, “What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common!”

This was the moment when a parting of the ways began. The Church in Jerusalem did not break with Judaism, but the teaching of St. Paul led toward a schism which occurred after his death.

Hilda, my dear, the kettle is on the edge of the hob and likely to tip over. It’s full of boiling water and there is nobody among us who could instantly heal you.

The schism deepened when the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem in AD seventy, and after the defeat of the bar Kokhba uprising in AD one hundred forty or so, the split became final. Before that Jewish Christians lived in Pella and other trans-Jordanian towns, but now Palestine became hellenized, and Jewish Christians began to leave the Middle East. After the second century AD, Jewish Christianity had died out in the East—in Palestine, Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Mesopotamia. The last remaining Jewish Christian communities were swallowed up five centuries later by Islam. In modern Christianity we find only occasional “archaeological” remains in the liturgy of the Ethiopian and Chaldean Churches.

Thank you, Musa, your coffee is without compare.

A lot of books have been written on this subject and I won’t trouble you with more detail. The most remarkable thing is that the earliest Jewish Christian literary works are very little different from the midrashim, a particular genre of interpretations of text which the rabbis of that time compiled. The Judaic tradition is still there to be seen in the works of such church writers as Barnabas, Justin, Clement of Alexandria, and Irenaeus.

The period of coexistence of Jewish and Greek Christianity ended in the fourth century when the non-Jewish Christian Church became powerful. It assumed a Graeco-Roman form and became the religion of an empire. There is no place in the contemporary Church for the Jewish Church. Christianity as it exists in modern times is Greek Christianity and it repudiated the Jewish influences. The Jewish tradition with its emphasis on strict monotheism is more evident in Islam, which is a kind of interpretation of the Jewish Christian religion. It is the Jewish Christian Church which provides opportunities for a future three-way dialogue between Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.

The Church needs to restore its initial pluralism. Among the world’s many Christian churches, which speak different languages, there should be a place for the Jewish Christian Church. We should go back to the point at which the old division occurred and see what can be put right. Historical Christianity has committed numerous errors. They cannot now be corrected, of course, but understanding what they were and what caused them is something we can do. This new understanding could yield good fruit—reconciliation and love. Christianity is deprived of its universality because of the absence of the Jews. The loss of the Jews is a wound in Christianity which has never healed. The Greek Byzantine component largely distorted the essence of primal Christianity. I would like to return to the source, together with you.

9. December 1966

M

EMORANDUM TO THE

J

ERUSALEM

P

ATRIARCHATE

To Monsignor Mattan Avat

From Brother Elijah

On 11 December 1966, Brother Daniel Stein gave a talk to his community in the recently restored Church of St. Elijah by the Spring. I am placing at your disposal a tape recording of what he said.

Brother Elijah

10. June 1967, Haifa

F

ROM A LETTER FROM

H

ILDA TO HER

M

OTHER

… Daniel had a fever, but I know he can’t bear staying in bed when he is ill. I bought him a lot of medicine and climbed up to the Stella Maris because transportation is unreliable as a consequence of this war. I thought that rather than wait an hour and a half for the bus, it would be better to walk. It would still only take an hour and a half. Would you believe it, when I climbed the mountain, got to the gatekeeper, and handed him the basket of medicine for Daniel, I was told he had gone off early in the morning and wouldn’t be back until evening. I returned to Haifa and had almost reached the town when I saw Daniel whizzing along the road perched on a Vespa motor scooter, his soutane billowing in the wind, with a skinny Hassid being bounced up and down on the pillion. With one hand he was holding on to his broad-brimmed black hat and with the other to Daniel. It was unbelievably funny and the whole street was in stitches. Next day the war came to an end and I cannot describe the scenes here.

There was such joy, such jubilation. They immediately called it the Six-Day War. And then, in the midst of the general rejoicing, Daniel arrived looking out of sorts, sat down, and said, “Happy victory day! This war will figure in every military textbook from now until the end of time. The Arabs will never forgive us for humiliating them like this.” Musa, who had also dropped by, disagreed. “Daniel,” he said, “I know the Arabs better. They will find a way of interpreting their defeat as a great victory. They will not allow the rest of the world to laugh at them.”

Daniel nodded. He really likes Musa. They understand each other at some deep level. He said, “Of course, Musa. Only someone with inner freedom can laugh at himself, and allow others to laugh at him.”

I remembered the side-splitting spectacle of the Hassid on the back of his scooter and said, “Very true. The day before yesterday all of Haifa was laughing at you when you gave that Hassid a lift!” “What, did you see it?” Daniel asked in alarm.

“Of course,” I said, “and it wasn’t just me. The whole town was laughing itself silly!”

He seemed a bit disconcerted, and started giving explanations. “He was late for Kaddish, you see, and there wasn’t a bus or taxi to be had. I saw the rush he was in and stopped and offered him a lift. He got on. It was nothing special. I took him where he needed to go, he said ‘Thank you,’ and that was that. What’s so funny about it?”

Musa clutched his stomach laughing. Daniel was still puzzled. “I was going in that direction anyway!”

“It was because you are both Jews, but Jews will never be going in the same direction as Arabs. I’m telling you that as an Arab. We Arab Christians have no escape, both because of your victories and because of your defeats.”

We had a coffee and before leaving, Daniel said, “Hilda, don’t go telling everyone I gave a lift to a Hassid.”

“Daniel, I promise not to say a word to a soul, but the whole of Haifa saw it!”

“Well, perhaps it wasn’t me but some other priest.”

There isn’t another priest like him.

11. 1967, Jerusalem

H

ILDA’S NOTES FROM A PREEXAMINATION TUTORIAL WITH

P

ROFESSOR

N

EUHAUS

NOTE IN MARGIN: Discuss with Daniel!

1. The Second Temple Period ends in Year 70. The Temple was destroyed and Temple sacrifices ceased. The Period of Synagogal Worship began. Jews are believed to have come to the Temple while it existed three times a year, for Sukkot, Pesach, and Shavuot.

NOTE IN MARGIN: The latter correspond to the Christian Easter and Whitsun. Need to ask about Sukkot.

It is difficult to believe that peasants from Galilee undertook such pilgrimages three times a year. In those times the journey one way took a week and the festivals lasted a further week. Could a peasant leave his farm for three weeks? In the synoptic gospels, Christ is said to have visited Jerusalem for a festival only once during his boyhood.

A more convincing hypothesis is that every Judaean undertook such a pilgrimage once in several years. Shmuel Safrai, a modern scholar, considers that in the early first century, even before the destruction of the Second Temple, there existed synagogues, assemblies of Jews to read the Torah and pray together on the Sabbath. It was at such assemblies that Christ healed the sick.

Although Jewish researchers do not usually use Christian sources, it is interesting in this case to see what the New Testament says. There are numerous references to synagogues in the text of the New Testament. Possibly these were the private houses of rich people who made room available to their neighbors and fellow villagers for communal prayers and the reading of scripture.

I believe the ruins of the synagogue at Capernaum, a Christian holy place still extant, are wrongly dated, but we shall leave that on the conscience of modern archaeologists and the tourist business. It does however suggest that synagogue services were taking place before the Temple was destroyed.

Not all researchers share this point of view. Adherents of a more conservative school consider the synagogal era to have begun only several years after the destruction of the Temple. I incline to the viewpoint of Shmuel Safrai.

I remind you that a relentless struggle to ban all worship outside the Temple began centuries before this time! This gives grounds to surmise that even before the destruction of the Temple, clandestine activity was preparing the way for a new phase in the history of Judaism—post-Temple, synagogal—which took shape in all its diversity during the period of the Exile.

Why were synagogues being created so early? Was it a historical presentiment? An unshakeable faith in prophecies of the destruction of the Temple? Farsightedness on the part of religious leaders of the time who foresaw the catastrophe? There is something for you to reflect on.

How was the Temple viewed by different strata of the population? The charismatic and ecstatic Qumranites shunned the Temple as a sink of corruption. Intellectuals found the Temple’s ideology too inflexible. Pharisees stressed study of the Torah and not services at the Temple. As a result the Temple was the province of priests and the simple people. The former, as always and everywhere, had power and wealth, the latter can be blamed for nothing because of their ignorance.

In the first century of the new era, in a crucial period of transition which was to shape the destiny of the world, the Jews were not yet clearly differentiated from Christians. They were still together in liturgical communion and joint creativity. They were still Jewish Christians venerating the same Torah, the same Psalter, and with the same prayers of thanksgiving and supplication to the Lord. The texts of the Gospels had not even been compiled yet. The new shoot of the olive tree had yet to be severed from the trunk by the sword of St. Paul.

2. A further topic for consideration: at this time the status of the Temple was undermined. The Qumran community had begun creating prayers not associated with the Temple. These texts have now been found.

Around Year 50 of the first century, Philo of Alexandria died, the same Philo who had gone at the head of a delegation of Alexandrian Jews to Rome to petition the Emperor Caligula against erecting statues of the Emperor in the synagogues of Alexandria and the Temple in Jerusalem. His description of his less-than-successful journey has survived. Thanks to the Christians, many of Philo’s works have come down to us in their Greek original. He is an astoundingly bold and talented popularizer of the Torah. From an orthodox viewpoint he is infected with Platonism, Stoicism, and other newly fashionable Greek influences, but it is thanks to his treatise On the Contemplative Life that we know about the existence of the sect of the Theraputae.

NOTE IN MARGIN: Need to look this up!

Philo writes, “If you have not brought your sins to the altar of your heart, it is of no avail for you to go to the Temple. And if you have come to the Temple and are thinking in your mind of some other place, then that is where you are.” Philo readily transfers the material to the spiritual plane. “We do not eat pork because it is a figure of ingratitude as the pig knows not its masters,” he writes. Following the Prophets he spoke of “circumcision of the heart”. He was a contemporary of Jesus and in some matters a fellow-thinker. Under Philo of Alexandria several families in the community did not circumcise their sons, and he chided them mildly: “One should observe tradition in order not to lead others astray.” How agreeable that is! But it would be well for me to stop here. I have a personal weakness for Philo of Alexandria.

NOTE IN THE MARGIN: Must get this Philo out of the library!

Let us return to the religious service. The church service hours of the Christians derive from the Jewish times. In the Torah the Lord God prescribed that Jews should perform a morning and evening sacrifice. Before Solomon built the First Temple, sacrifices were made on altars in the open air. At the time of the Babylonian Captivity, Jews began praying in meetings in set locations. The service came to be a reading of the Torah at particular hours, of psalms and hymns. The blood sacrifice began to be replaced by the “sacrifice of praise.” This kind of religious service, devised during the Babylonian Captivity, served as a prototype for the later liturgy in Christian churches. Here is an excellent subject for independent research: comparison of the historical development of liturgical texts! It is impossible to imagine Christianity without the Torah. The New Testament was born of the Torah.

After that Jews and Christians cease their communal praying and move to separate locations. Gradually texts of a new kind appear among the Christians which are directed against Judaism and Jews. This is a huge area for research. Let us return to this issue when we come to the liturgy.

3. The liturgy. This is a particularly sensitive topic. There is a parallel between the Jewish Passover Seder and the Christian Mass. (A very interesting exercise is to compare the text of the Haggadah of Pesach and the Mass.) The Christian liturgy is linked very closely indeed to the Jewish Passover Seder. I am just touching here on various issues, reminding you of some basic matters, commonplaces, if you like. At the same time, however, I urge you to examine everything critically and creatively.

I urge you to test and question everything. Knowledge obtained without personal effort and concentration is dead knowledge. Only what has passed through your own consciousness will be of value to you.

And so, textological analysis of the Jewish Passover Seder and the contemporary liturgy of both the Western and Eastern Churches indicates a structural link between them, with the exploitation in both services of exactly the same prayers. Look closely at your notes on this topic. I am not going to repeat myself here.

A separate topic, which is constantly researched by both Jewish and Christian authors is the anti-Semitic character of certain Christian texts, particularly of those relating to Holy Week, that is, the days immediately preceding Easter.

The Second Vatican Council of 1962–65 repudiated most of these texts, and in particular those written by the Fathers of the Church, for example, St. John Chrysostomos.

The Eastern Churches view these excisions negatively, and in many Orthodox churches the texts are read to this day.

This is a sensitive topic which undermines several major authorities both of Christian and Jewish theology. In the works of Maimonides, known in Jewish sources as Moshe ben Maimon or Rambam, a Jewish teacher and commentator of the 12th century, we come across virulent attacks on Christians which are just as baseless as the anti-Jewish utterances of some of the Fathers of the Church. Thus was the gulf between the Jewish and Christian worlds deepened. It is immense but does not seem to me to be insuperable. Working with this material requires knowledge, honesty, openness, and boldness. As another Father of the Church, St. Gregory the Great, said, “If truth may cause a scandal, it is better to allow that scandal than to deny the truth.”

My dear students! The final thing I want to say to you today is that it is practically impossible to pass this course. In it religious history and the history of the human race are intertwined. Here is the tragedy of Jewry and the tragedy of Europe. In this place the heart of history beats. There will accordingly be no examination. There will be a discussion. With each of you we shall talk about what has seemed of most significance in my course. If you like, prepare notes for this in writing. That is particularly prudent for students who come from afar. You can carry out a comparative analysis of documents. Arad, as an Ethiopian Jew, might take the texts of the Ethiopian Christians—I have some which are very interesting—and compare them with Jewish texts of the same period. Now we shall say good-bye for a week, and then I will expect you in accordance with the timetable.

NOTE AT THE END: There is an anecdote to the effect that in one of these “discussions” Neuhaus asked a girl student how many canonical Gospels there were. She did not know and he did not ask any more questions. He let her pass. When asked why, he replied that there was only one question she couldn’t answer.

12. 1967, Haifa

L

ETTER FROM

D

ANIEL

S

TEIN TO

W

ŁADYSŁAW

K

LECH

Dear Brother W.,

As you see, I took a long time getting into harness, but then ran very well, and indeed so fast that I have broken my leg. It was set in plaster and I was immediately discharged from hospital, but now it seems it was wrongly set and I have had to have an operation. Accordingly, I am now in the hospital for several days and it has turned out to be the most perfect sanatorium. This frozen moment in the race is totally relaxing, and in addition, my leg hurts, so I have no guilty sense of neglecting my duties. At last I can write to you a thorough letter about my present mood. Immediately before I left Kraków for Israel, the abbot of our monastery told me Israel is an even thornier field of operations for a Catholic priest than postwar Poland, and that Christian missionary activity is impossible among the Jews in Israel. In fact, it is prohibited by law.

He was right. The Jews did not need me. Religious Jews were certain I had come here for the sole purpose of converting Jews to Christianity. The Catholics living here certainly did need me. I do not know how many Catholics there are from Poland. More than 1,000, I imagine, and there are numerous children from mixed marriages whose problems are even more intractable than those of Polish Catholic women. In fact it is not only Poles who are here. There is every living thing, two by two: Catholics from Czechoslovakia and Romania, from France, Lithuania, and Latvia. Almost half my parishioners know no Polish, but everyone who comes here studies Hebrew.

Thus it has come about that my idealistic dream has dovetailed with stern necessity, since Hebrew is the only common language among my parishioners. The paradox is that the Church which speaks the language of the Savior is a Church not of Jews but of displaced persons, outcasts, people the state judges to be of low value or significance. That is Christian linguistics for you: in earlier times a liturgy derived entirely from Judaism passed from Hebrew to Greek to Coptic, and later to Latin and the Slavonic languages. Today, Poles, Czechs, and the French come to me to pray in Hebrew.

Actually, the Jews are fewest of all in the community. In all the years I have been living here I have baptized just three. I baptized them wonderfully, in the River Jordan. They were the husbands of Catholic wives and I hoped they would stay in Israel, but they have all emigrated. They are not the only ones. I know other Jewish Christians who are leaving Israel, and several families of Arab Catholics have gone to live in France and America. I do not know how hospitably they will be received there, but I do understand why they have left.

The baptized Christians in far-off times left Israel and went out into the world, leaving behind only the unbaptized apostles. The Savior baptized nobody, and that is fairly intriguing. Indeed, the relationship between the two great figures of John the Baptist and Jesus is highly intriguing. Not counting the meeting of their pregnant mothers, when the babe leaped in the womb, the only time they met, at least the only meeting described, was at the River Jordan. All their lives they lived on the same scrap of land, a tiny country, but did not meet, and that despite the fact that they were related and without doubt there were shared family events, weddings, and funerals. Not to meet in these circumstances could only have been intentional. They did not want to meet! What secret is behind this? A remarkable person I talked to, a professor of Judaic Studies, David Neuhaus, gave me a glimpse into it. He studies Jewish religious trends of the Second Temple period. For him the two most important figures are “the historical John the Baptist” and “the historical Jesus.” Neuhaus uses sources little known to Christian researchers. I admit I am overcome with emotion when I come into contact with Jewish documents of those years. Here, sealed behind seven seals, lies the answer to what, for me, is the most important question of all: what did our Master believe? Did he believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost? In the Trinity?

Neuhaus analyses the difference between the views of Jesus and John the Baptist, and that lies in their understanding of redemption. John was sure that the world would shortly end and lived in expectation of the Last Judgment, like the Qumran sages before him and St. John the Divine after him in the Book of Revelation. In Neuhaus’s opinion, this longing for speedy judgement and the desire to chastise the ungodly without delay were alien to Jesus. Jesus did not follow John the Baptist despite the high renown and authority of the latter. We may surmise that he was repelled by John the Baptist’s eschatological aspirations and passionate focus on the end of the world. The Master’s subsequent preaching is wholly devoted to life, its value and meaning. A living God for living people.

Historical Christianity subsequently sought to visit judgment on the world, and judgment on the Jews, in the name of Jesus, without delay! That is, divine justice was replaced by human justice meted out in the name of the Church.

David Neuhaus studies Jesus in the context of Jewish history. You can only obtain an answer to the question of what our Master believed through that approach, proceeding from the Jewish context.

Professor Neuhaus invited me to his home, which I considered a great honor. He has a fine house in an old district of Jerusalem which emigrants from Germany began to build many years ago. It is occupied now by rich people, a lot of university professors, famous doctors and lawyers. It is reminiscent of a comfortable suburb in a South European city. When I went in there was a large hallway, a mirror, a table. Everything very respectable and bourgeois, and in the most prominent place was the statue of a rather fine pig. I immediately asked why he accorded such honor to a despised animal and he explained that he was born in Bohemia. When the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia, they initially gave Jews permission to emigrate. “I applied to emigrate to Palestine, but when I went to obtain the permit, the German officer dealing with the paperwork demanded that I should shout out three times, ‘I am a filthy Jewish pig!’ This beast stands there in commemoration of that event.”

I’ve just seen through the window that the consultant in charge of the department I am in has arrived. I shall go and try to persuade him to discharge me. If he does, I shall go about my business and finish this letter at the first opportunity.

D.

13. November 1990, Freiburg

F

ROM A TALK BY

B

ROTHER

D

ANIEL

S

TEIN TO SCHOOLCHILDREN

The chief of the Belorussian district police, Ivan Semyonovich, took me from the village to the town of Emsk and moved me into his house. He wanted me constantly on call. Semyonovich lived with his young Polish wife, Beata. She surprised me by being completely different from the uncomplicated and primitive Semyonovich. She was very pretty. Educated and aristocratic, even. I later discovered that she was indeed from a very good family. Her father was the headmaster of the Walewicz Grammar School and his elder brother was the local priest.

Ivan had been in love with Beata for many years, but she always refused him and had only married him recently, when he became the chief of police. It was her way of trying to protect her family from persecution. The Polish settlers were more educated than the local Belorussians but they were few in number because most of the Polish intelligentsia had been sent to Siberia when the Russians arrived.

The Nazis did not persecute only Jews. They regarded gypsies, negroes, and Slavs as racially inferior, but the hierarchy was such that Jews were first in line for extermination. I claimed to be a Pole.

The local Poles were well disposed toward me. They had heard I was half-German, half-Polish, and when I registered in Emsk, I registered as a Pole even though I could have put myself down as German. My choice was entirely deliberate. The only document left from my previous life was my school identification booklet which gave no indication of my nationality but indicated the town in which I was studying. The Germans could easily have made enquiries and then I would have been exposed. To the Poles, however, my choice demonstrated unambiguously that I was a Polish patriot. Beata’s family were also patriotic.

I soon got to know them all better. Her father and her sisters, Halina and Marysia, were very pleasant. There was such a warm, homely atmosphere that you were reluctant to leave. Occasionally their priestly uncle would come to the house, but when I met him there I was always tense because I had no idea how a Catholic should behave in the presence of a priest. Luckily he was a well-intentioned man and did not expect any special treatment.

The sisters were roughly my age, Halina a year older and Marysia a year younger. They were the only people I could talk to and relax a little from the constant tension I lived under. I went to see them almost every day and would stay until evening. I played cards with the sisters and we kept ourselves entertained. I told them funny stories, since amusing things did occasionally happen even in the police station.

Socializing with Jews away from my work was out of the question. I would have attracted suspicion immediately, and the Jews themselves, as soon as they saw my black uniform, looked away and tried to become invisible.

Of course, I could never come too close to the Walewicz family. I was always acutely aware of the unbridgeable gulf separating me, a covert Jew, from these dear, likeable and well-educated Christians. I was in love with Marysia and knew she liked me, but I also knew I would never cross the boundary, would never develop a serious relationship because that would subject her to terrible risk. I do not know how my life might have turned out if I had met her in peacetime, in a country at peace. Alas, Marysia and her entire family were soon to die, and I was unable to save any of them.

My duties at work were quite varied. In the first place, I acted as interpreter between the German gendarmerie, the Belorussian police, and the local populace. In the second place, I had to investigate crimes and minor offences and collect testimony. I tried to steer clear of political cases involving investigation of the activities of the former Soviet administration, communists, and the partisans who appeared shortly after the occupation. In particular I wanted to avoid Jewish cases, but that was the most classified part of the work and they did not involve me in it.

At first I lived in Semyonovich’s house, ate at his table, acted as his interpreter, and tried to teach him German, if with little success. In the morning I would saddle the horses and we would ride to the office. In the evening when he might have been able to study, Semyonovich usually got drunk.

He was pleased with my work. My predecessor had been a Pole whose German was poor and was also a drunk. Now Semyonovich lumbered me with all his correspondence and record-keeping and I had to compile the endless idiotic reports demanded by his German superiors. I coped and Semyonovich appreciated that.

Quite a long time later, Beata told me that she had immediately suspected I was Jewish, but had realized her mistake when she saw me on horseback. I sat in the saddle like a real cavalry officer, not like a rural Jew. I really was a good horseman. I loved horses and riding and had even won races on several occasions when I competed against my classmates at the riding school.

Beata thought well of me. I lived in her house, helped her in whatever way I could, and more than once had to help her calm Semyonovich down because, when he was drunk, he could be mean and violent. Every time he had been on a binge he was grateful to me. I could feel that. I would even say he respected me. On one occasion his respect put me in a very difficult situation. He knew, of course, that as a Pole I must be Catholic. Under the hierarchy Semyonovich had established, a Jew was beneath a Belorussian but a Pole was higher. As regards the Aryan race, Semyonovich never doubted its superiority. He was an ideal policeman, his heart untroubled by the anti-Jewish operations he was conducting. During these months, they were destroying Jewish farmsteads and small settlements of thirty to sixty souls, and the operations were at first carried out by the Belorussian police. I cannot imagine why Semyonovich suddenly took it into his head that those policemen who had been born Catholics should go to confession, but one fine day he entrusted me with the task of ensuring that Catholic policemen did so.

This was more than absurd. It was a kind of diabolical farce sending murderers to observe religious rituals, go to confession and take communion. I realized he expected me to do the same.

I went to the church accompanied by fifteen policemen. They all waited their turn to confess, and I was the last. I sat apprehensively in the pew, afraid of giving myself away because I had no idea how to behave during confession. It certainly never occurred to me that within a few years I would myself be hearing confession from my parishioners.

When all the policemen had gone, I went to the priest. I had several times dined with him in the Walewicz household, and asked whether he would be going to visit his brother today.

“No,” he replied, “I shall see them in the middle of the week.”

We said good-bye and I left. None of the policemen noticed my ploy.

I did not know then that Father Walewicz was sympathetic to Jews and even, as I later learned, helped them. To this day I do not know whether he guessed I was Jewish. Perhaps he did. I am still greatly saddened that I was unable to save him, although I did try.

One and a half months later, returning home late in the evening after work, I saw a column of trucks parked by the roadside. This time the Belorussian police had received no notification of any imminent anti-Jewish operation, which could mean only one thing: the trucks were intended for Poles. They had not advised the Belorussian police because, as everybody knew, Semyonovich was married to a Pole. I had not been told because I was believed to be a Polish patriot.

I ran to Walewicz and warned him about the trucks and my suspicions. I thought they should hide immediately, take to the forest or flee to some remote farmstead. I asked him to warn his brother and all his Polish friends, but Walewicz did not believe me. He hated Communism and Fascism equally, but believed that as a loyal citizen he could not be subjected to repressions. The entire family was taken away, Father Walewicz, an engineer, a doctor, and twenty other people. The Polish intelligentsia. They were shot that same night. They did not come for Beata.

Sweet Marysia, poor Halina. The list of those we pray for is infinitely long. There was only one Pole I managed to warn that evening that was saved. He left Emsk within the hour.

When Semyonovich brought me to Emsk, the local Jews had already been moved to the old castle. I learned of a tragedy which had been played out two weeks before my arrival. The Jews were ordered to gather in the town square and obediently came at the appointed time, bringing their children and old people, bundles of clothing and supplies for the journey. There, in the town square, between two churches, one Orthodox and one Catholic, a terrible massacre took place. A police unit together with the Sonderkommando shot more than fifteen hundred civilians. The Jews who survived, about eight hundred people, were transferred to the half-ruined castle, which was turned into a ghetto.

It was after this incident that a new chief, Major Adolf Reinhold, a professional policeman with thirty years of service, arrived in Emsk. He found the state of the administration highly unsatisfactory and introduced his own “civilized” measures to establish order. He turned the castle into a real ghetto, establishing tighter security and making this the responsibility primarily of the inhabitants of the ghetto themselves. The Belorussian police were also involved, under German supervision. Major Reinhold began by requisitioning a Catholic nunnery as a police station and moving the nuns to the building next door, which had belonged to a Jewish family killed in the pogrom.

Accompanying Semyonovich as his interpreter, I naturally came to the notice of Reinhold, and a few weeks later he said he wanted to draft me into his department. Semyonovich could hardly refuse and, needless to say, nobody asked me whether I wanted to work for the Gestapo. Semyonovich thought I would see it as a good career move. I looked back at my teaching in the village school nostalgically. Now I was to work for the Germans! There was no escape. I had no option and agreed, well aware that my situation was now even more precarious.

My duties with the Gestapo were little different from what they had been before. As their secretary, I answered the telephone, allocated the policemen’s shifts, and kept the accounts. My duties included translating documents and working with the local population, and this I did conscientiously. I tried to translate matters relating to criminal cases with total accuracy. There were many of these—fights, thefts, murders,—but I was acutely aware that, working for the Gestapo, I had a share of responsibility for what was going on there. I was not directly involved in killing people but had a sense of complicity. I desperately needed to maintain an inner counterbalance to the things I was indirectly participating in. I felt an obligation to do things which would enable me later to look my parents and brother in the eye without shame. If I was not always successful in exploiting situations to help people, I believe I can say I never missed an opportunity to try.

Working in the police station was very unpleasant. I cannot tell whether the people chosen to work there were particularly brutal and stupid, or whether working there brought out the worst in them, but there were some real sadists, and others who were mentally retarded, in a clinical sense. Most of them came to a bad end and I try not to remember that. There is a lot in my memory I would prefer to forget but cannot.

Surprisingly enough, the person most deserving of respect there was Major Reinhold. Although a member of the Nazi Party, he was a perfectly decent individual and conscientious executive. Before the war, he had been a member of the Cologne police force. Having worked under him for a few months, I noticed that he tried to avoid involvement in the operations to exterminate the Jewish population. When he did have to be present, he tried to observe the outward norms of legality and to prevent gratuitous brutality.

Another striking and regrettable feature of the atmosphere of that time and place was the flood of statements landing on my table from local inhabitants. There were denunciations of neighbors, complaints, and accusations, almost always illiterate, often untruthful, and invariably shameful. I was constantly in a state of profound depression but had to conceal the fact at all costs from those I worked with. I suppose it was the first time I had come into such close contact with vile human behavior, ingratitude, and meanness. The only explanation I could find was that the local Belorussian people were dreadfully poor, uneducated, and downtrodden.

Happily, I did often manage to protect people whose neighbors had denounced them. I soon started conducting many of the investigations myself and was able to defend innocent people, deflect suspicion from those seen to have links with the partisans, and simply to facilitate justice. The only thing which gave me strength to get through the day was this constant search for ways of helping people.

The Walewiczes were dead, their property plundered. Several Belorussian families had seized their house and were now arguing about how to share it. Poor Beata, the only survivor, lay for days at a time with her face to the wall and did not want to see anybody. She was in the last month of pregnancy and Semyonovich was getting drunk and going on a rampage. I didn’t see much of him because I spent whole days inside the police station. There was a vast amount of paperwork, bulletins, laws, public announcements. They had to be translated into Polish and Belorussian so the population could be informed of them.

The partisan movement was becoming ever more evident, and greatly worried the Germans. At first I had no direct link with the partisans, but each time I received information from local informers about partisan movements, I did everything I could to delay or stop operational intelligence from reaching my superiors. I was not a member of any organization or resistance group, but after a time managed to establish contact with the Jews in the ghetto.

This contact occurred right in the police station. Jews were not allowed to leave the ghetto except for those working in the town for the Germans. Every day two Jewish cleaning women came to the police station but I did not risk talking to them. Another Jew worked in the stables, but I did not feel he could be trusted. This groom fell ill and his replacement was Moshe Milshtein, a member of Akiva I had known in Vilnius. He did not recognize me at first, the black uniform acting like camouflage. Through Moshe a chain of couriers was organized which enabled me to pass on information about operations being prepared against Jews and partisans.

My first attempt to save a Jewish village from destruction failed. The courier passed a warning about the planned operation to the Judenrat but they demanded to be told the source of the information. The courier refused to compromise me. Everybody was afraid of provocations, but the Judenrat finally sent a warning to the village. Here the story was repeated and the villagers sent a girl to Emsk to check how reliable the information was. When she returned home two days later there was not a living soul left.

This village was the first I was sent to as an interpreter. In order to avoid what he called “brutish behavior,” Major Reinhold required the unit to assemble all the Jews in one place and read out the order declaring them enemies of the Reich. As such, they were then shot. Avoiding personal participation in such operations, he instead sent his sergeant-major who, as ill-luck would have it, was a complete sadist.

I hoped that when we arrived we would find the place empty, but to my horror the villagers had not fled. They were all brought to one room, I read out the directive and the officer then wrote down the names of the adults. The children he merely counted. They were all taken to a shed. I hid behind it until the shooting was over. The memory is still as vivid for me as if it happened yesterday.

After operations of this kind there was usually a drunken binge. I sat at the table, translating the soldiers’ jokes from Belorussian into German and greatly regretting that I had no taste for alcohol.

The Judenrat no longer questioned my information and sometimes people did manage to escape to the forest. It is a great puzzle of human psychology that these old Jews, who in their lives had experienced numerous pogroms and the massacre in the town square, obstinately refused to believe there was a plan to exterminate Jews systematically. They had their own survival plan. They had come to an understanding with one of the top local Belorussian officials that he would prevent destruction of the ghetto if they paid him an enormous sum of money. They did not have enough, the official agreed to staged payments, and had been paid a first instalment. Many of them knew perfectly well that this was the trick of a blackmailer, but went on hoping.

Fortunately, there were people in the ghetto who intended to resist and sell their lives dearly. These were mainly young Zionists who had been unable to emigrate to Palestine. They had almost no weapons and I was able to organize a supply. Often the transfer point I used was Semyonovich’s house.

14. 1987, Redford, England

L

ETTER FROM

B

EATA

S

EMYONOVICH TO

M

ARYSIA

W

ALEWICZ

Dear Marysia,

A week has passed and it is only now that I have gathered up my strength to write and tell you that Ivan is dead. He died on 14 May after a year of terrible suffering. The kind of cancer he had did not respond to painkillers and only vodka partly relieved his agony.

His right leg was amputated a year ago, and that may have been a mistake because afterward that dreadful sarcoma spread like wildfire to his bones and he suffered beyond all measure. He did not want to go into the clinic because till the day he died he was afraid the Jews would kidnap him. For some reason he was convinced they would not take him out of our house while I was there, but would for sure if he went to the clinic. He had a whole file of news clippings about war criminals the Jews had abducted, even from Latin America, and put on trial. Even more than a trial, he feared the children would learn the truth about his past. He never got on well with them. The children attended his funeral but left the next day.

I wander through the house for days at a time. It is quite large, with a dining room and kitchen downstairs and four rooms upstairs. The most comfortable, west-facing one I have mentally reserved for you. I so much wish you would come to England and move into this house. Then we would be as happy as we were as children. Do nuns really not have to retire? You will be 63 soon and I am 68. We have another 10 years or so to live. We will go to Mass together the way we did as children, and I will make bigos stew with English cabbage, which is nothing like Polish cabbage, and draniki potato pancakes.

Ivan has left me a large legacy. His greed, from which I suffered all my life, has generated a very substantial sum which will be enough for you and me to live out our lives without cares or having to stint ourselves. I have nobody in the world closer to me than you are. You belong to the one time in my life which was really happy, before the war, in our beloved home with mother, father and Halina. I so loved all of you that I made the sacrifice of marrying Ivan, hoping that he would protect our family, but in the end I saved nobody and only ruined my own life.

After the funeral, I feel desolate. I have dark thoughts, old and new, and they do not leave me in peace for a moment. When I was young I hated my husband. After our family was killed and Henryk was born Ivan tried his best. He helped me to recover my wits and even stopped drinking for a time. The whole of that first year he almost never let Henryk out of his arms. If there was anything good in him it was his love for me and his sons. In truth it is I who wronged him, because I married without loving him in the slightest, and even hating him, while he loved me very much. When the German retreat began and we left with them, how many times I cravenly prayed to God to free me of him. No matter how great his crimes, he never treated me badly. It is I who wronged him. If anyone can judge him it is not I.

My dear Marysia, perhaps my destiny, too, would have worked out differently if we had found each other earlier, before the war ended. I might have had the strength to leave Ivan, but 10 years had passed before I discovered you had survived. It is a miracle that we managed to find each other. I was not looking for you because Ivan was told for a fact that all the Poles had been shot that night. Who could have guessed you had managed to escape?

My invitation for you to come and stay here is entirely serious. I am not extending it in a state of despair or at all frivolously. I can believe you might not want to move to England, but in that case we could settle down in some other part of Europe. We could buy a little house in a quiet village in the South of France or Spain, in the Pyrenees. It’s very pretty there. I remember it from our dreadful journey through France and Spain. I cannot imagine living in modern Poland, but I would consider even that.

Neither of my daughters-in-law, the wives of Henryk and Teodor, would ever move to this house, and anyway, what would they find to do out here in the back of beyond? There isn’t even a decent school. I shall be living here alone until I die. If you should decide to come we could live very happily together. I beg you not to reply immediately but to think it over carefully.

I’m enclosing some photographs, although they are a bit dated. Ivan took them when he was still well. That is our garden around the house. It is a bit overgrown now. I haven’t done anything to it all year but will pull myself together and sort it out. In one photograph you can see our house from the front and in the second, taken from the balcony, you can see the garden. There were photographs of the rooms, too, but they came out very dark and I put them away somewhere and now can’t find them.

All my love, my dear sister. Remember us in your prayers.

Beata

15. December 1987, Boston

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ANUKYAN’S DIARY

For the first time I told Esther yesterday what has been worrying me so much lately, and felt a great sense of relief. I find she is the only person I can talk to about it, especially because there is really nothing to say, nothing specific. While I was choosing my words, trying to talk to her about these things which matter to me so much, I was also getting my thoughts together. Just having her there, silent, was very helpful. I noticed a long time ago that when you are with a clever, positive person, they seem to transmit those qualities to you, too. It works in reverse when I’m talking to Rita. I become aggressive and rather stupid and hate myself. This last time, though, talking to Esther, I finally managed to express my dreadful suspicions.

It really is a very long story. When I met Grisha, Alex was six and I was married to Ray, although our marriage was barely smouldering. Ray’s career was just taking off. He started giving a lot of guest performances and I already knew various women had appeared in his life. He started getting paid a lot, but it was fly-by-night musician’s earnings, no sooner received than spent. I could not give up work, and sat in my laboratory analysing soil and going crazy. And then there was Grisha! What a boy! He fell passionately in love with me. We met in the street, by chance. He saw me and followed me, and it was just what I needed!

At this point Esther raised her eyebrows slightly. She is not, of course, the kind of woman who makes the acquaintance of men in the street, but I told her everything exactly the way it happened. Grisha and I began seeing each other. He was ten years younger than me. Ray is older and always did have problems with sex. I have a suspicion that all the aggression and dynamism and temperament his admirers so love him for is used up in his music and not much is left over for himself. None of that matters now. The point is that Grisha appeared and I was bowled over. Relations with Ray even improved, because now I didn’t give a damn about him.

My clever Esther looked at me in surprise, put her little hand on my arm, and said, “Ewa, what you are talking about I know only from literature. I have to confess, at the risk of losing your respect, that I am hardly an expert. All my life I had only one man, my husband, and I know very little about lovers. My relations with my husband were so full that I never wanted anything more. Go on, but do not rely on my being able to give you any sensible advice in these matters.”

At this I realized I was taking too long to get to the point about what was really disturbing me. “Yes, yes, I have not come to ask for advice about my relations with Grisha. It is something quite different, and much more painful.”

Alex was six when Ray and I divorced by mutual consent. He was not then as rich and famous as he is now, but the court was favorable to me and Alex and I were well provided for. Alex adored his father, and when Grisha and I married, he found it difficult to accept this new man. He kept pointing at objects, a chair, a plate, a cushion, and demanding that Grisha shouldn’t touch anything because it belonged to his Daddy.

A psychologist advised a change of surroundings so we moved to a new apartment. Alex still would not accept Grisha and didn’t want to go to bed in the evening without Daddy, even though Ray had never tucked him up in bed. In short, for two years Alex was very put out and made life difficult for Grisha and me. Then I was taken into hospital for almost a month, and during that time everything came right. I was no longer there and Alex evidently came to feel that he had Grisha, not only me, to protect him. By now Ray had moved to California and saw very little of his son. Alex was hurt and one time refused to meet his father when he did come to Boston. Ray forgot his birthday and Alex was very upset.

For the last three or four years, relations between Alex and Grisha have been excellent. Alex adores Grisha and Grisha spends a lot of time with him. They have many shared interests. What more could I say to Esther? They get on so well without me that I’m jealous.

She did not understand what I was getting at, and I myself was expressing this nightmare suspicion for the first time. At the moment I said it out loud it was as if something broke inside me. I felt sure it was true. Of course, I don’t know how intimate they are, what exactly is going on between them, but it is suddenly quite obvious to me that they are in love with each other.

Alex is fifteen. He gets on splendidly with his classmates, but has no interest whatsoever in girls. I do not know what to do. I am afraid of knowing for sure what at present is just a vague suspicion. I am at my wits’ end trying to foresee various outcomes. What if my suspicions are suddenly confirmed? What should I do? Kill Grisha with my own hands? Have him thrown in prison? Separate from him immediately?

Of course, it is driving me crazy, and on top of the nightmare there is the jealousy, the dreadful sense of humiliation as a woman. I simply couldn’t handle finding out that my husband and son are homosexuals. Anyway, I blurted all that out to her, and then I was shown what true wisdom is: a slightly detached attitude toward life, a long-term view.

Esther extracted from the depths of a cupboard a dark bottle with no label, which had already been started. She set down two large liqueur glasses and said, “Calvados was Isaak’s favorite drink. It has been there since he died. One of his young colleagues from France brought him a very high proof bottle from a farm in Normandy. You see, it doesn’t even have a label—it’s homemade! Isaak never did finish it. He would drink only one glass at a time, in the evening.”

She poured out a dark liquid which looked like brandy and we drank. It managed to be mild and searing at the same time. Then she said very carefully, “We lived through a dreadful war. All our relatives were killed. We saw villages after massacres. We saw piles of corpses gnawed at by animals, which had been hidden under the snow and thawed out after the winter, children who had been shot. I had forbidden myself to recall these things but now I have to say to you, your boy is alive and happy. If everything is as you say, that is a misfortune, for you but not for him. There are many misfortunes about which I know next to nothing. Of course, I see this as a big problem, but your boy is alive and enjoying life. I don’t know anything about these relations. They puzzle and indeed perplex me, but it is all outside my experience, and outside your experience too. For now, leave things as they are. Wait. It is probably difficult now for you to be around Grisha. You need to think things through, but do not be in a hurry. If the situation is really as you think, then it did not start yesterday. Just remember that nobody has died.”

How lucky I am to have Esther!

There was still half the bottle left and I drank it all. Esther put me in a taxi and I left my car at her house. When I got home Grisha and Alex were sitting in front of the television as good as gold, watching a film.

I went straight to bed but felt so chilled and feverish that only Grisha was able to warm me up, using a tried and trusted method.