Winter Journey

I Remember

t happened because little ltshak was overcome by a fit of coughing. He pressed his face against his mother's body, and desperate, she drew his head to her breast, almost smothering him. But the child coughed, three irrepressible times. Though they were muffled, to the family the coughs sounded like three dreadful cannon shots. And the soldiers who were about to abandon the search heard them too.

The crackle of indiscriminate shooting immediately filled the house and the sound of breaking glass told Miriam that they'd thrown her wedding china against the window. The grandfather began to whimper to himself and Dr. Lodzer clenched his fists impotently. It took them only a moment to find the slit that opened the wall panel hiding the narrow chamber that served as the Lodzer family's hideout. They stood immobile and terrified in chiaroscuro, as if in a Rembrandt painting, lit up by the powerful Wehrmacht flashlights carried by the Ukranian SS patrol. And only the doctor could understand the hysterical shouting of the German officer, but everyone knew what it meant. And the pushing to get them out of the hiding place while Grandfather Lodzer recited the ekahs and said, The greatest among the nations has become a widow who weeps ceaselessly at night; the ways of Zion are in mourning. And to silence him the officer knocked out his three remaining teeth with a casual blow of the butt of his Mauser. Outside, on Novolipki Street, it was already dark though it wasn't yet noon, because the fog, the fear, the screams of panic, the cries of rage and the smoke of the fires were hiding the scant winter light that Adonai, God of armies, deigned to send to the ghetto. And the little ones, holding on to their mother, were saying, Where are we going, Mother?

They made them climb into a covered truck. The Lodzer family looked for the last time at the house where they'd spent the last two terrible years, and the doctor suddenly remembered all the time before the disaster, running around in his father's jewelry workshop as a child, when it wasn't a crime to cough, and the hours and hours spent studying and the days and days spent in the doctor's office on Sienna Street, the patients one after another, the births of Itshak and Edith and the great love of Miriam, now before him thinking of her beloved, powerless and defeated. She was desperately holding onto the two children, afraid that a stray gust would carry them to their death, and she felt alone, bereft, in the cutting wind. They had only the clothes on their backs, they hadn't been allowed to take even an old coat or a suitcase because the officer was so irritated (we don't have time to play hide-and-seek). Doctor Lodzer looked out of the corner of his eye at the grandfather, who was stoically enduring the pain of his damaged mouth and blaspheming silently, which was unlike him, because Elohim had abandoned him even though he was a just man. Little ltshak questioned his father with his eyes and didn't dare to say, Father, why are they doing this to us, what have we done to them? He started to cry silently because they'd been discovered on account of his cough.

The truck, in a caravan of eight or ten vehicles, disgorged dozens of terrified people onto Stawki Street, at the corner of Dzika, where a cattle train was waiting. It departed promptly, leaving the ghetto behind and passing through silent Warsaw, which was trying to look the other way, crossed the Vistula and left the city in the direction of Wolomin and Tluszcz, headed for the happy summer town of Treblinka.

They didn't strip or shave them like the others. They only locked them up with another family from their street in a room that was small, dark and very cold, with windows they hadn't even bothered to put bars on, because the jailers knew they were no longer people and had lost their survival instinct along with their dignity. And they forgot about them, as if they were so busy with the other hordes that they had no time. Or as if they didn't know what to do with them.

They spent the day in silence, their eyes wide, sitting against the wall looking towards the weak light coming in through the dirty windows. And hearing from time to time the vicious barks of the SS officers and the coarse laughter of the Ukranian volunteers. After they opened the door for the first time, to leave some crusts of moldy bread and a jar of dirty water, Doctor Lodzer reacted. He and Mr. Langfus, a jumpy old man who had lost his fabric store on Senatorskaia Street when he was interned in the ghetto, organized life in that burrow with the desperate knowledge that they had no choice but to recognize that once the thing had begun, they were inside a fateful circle, which was getting smaller day by day, and they were trying to adjust to it, giving thanks to God for his goodness, and the circle was getting even smaller until one day they wouldn't be able to praise the Lord because the circle would be as small as death. Meanwhile, though, they were surviving by thinking, by deciding that the back corner would be the latrine, that Ruth Langfus would divide the crusts into equal parts, that any adult who wasn't crying would tell stories to the children for an hour every day. But Miriam didn't participate in the desperate attempt to organize the shrinking circle where they'd been confined. She spent the days with Edith in her arms, trying to bring down her fever by looking at her or by passing her hand over her forehead, and telling stories just for her, stories that reminded her of the happy days on lerussalimskaia Street, when she was a child who loved to hear her mother's stories. Now she had to tell them so her little girl would have a reason not to die at the age of six. Miriam thought she'd like to give her all her blood so that she would survive, so that she and ltshak would survive.

After a week, a sullen corporal entered followed by a Ukranian soldier. He swore at the stink in there and called for the Langfus family. Like silent automatons, Stanislaw Langfus and his family got organized, grandparents mixed with children, but all in line. They left without saying goodbye, without turning their heads to look at the Lodzers one last time, so as not to infuriate the Nazi dogs. Langfus had time to hand to Miriam the wedding ring he'd been able to hide from the search to which they'd been subjected as soon as they reached Treblinka. And the Lodzers were alone, accompanied only by ltshak's little cough, which had narrowed the circle around them. And two more days of silence, wondering what had become of the Langfus family, what had become of Grandfather Stanislaw, with his blue eyes and his rolled-up sleeves, of his granddaughter Ruth, and his son-in-law and the three little ones. And everyone, except for ltshak and Edith, knew that the happy district of Treblinka had become the end of the line which they would leave only by flying up to the gray sky through the stovepipe, through the sinister tube of the chimney, as if they were a dream. They knew it but they couldn't believe it, because it was impossible that reality should be so obscene. When four days had gone by without news of the Langfuses, they understood that they would never see them again, and fell into a thick, dull silence of oblique glances, broken only by the songs that Miriam sang very sweetly to put the little girl to sleep, because she wanted her to spend the days sleeping so as not to experience that horror.

"Everybody up! Josef Lodzer!"

They'd rammed open the door, making it bang against the wall, and Edith, who'd just fallen asleep, woke up with a start but didn't even whimper because, though only six, she'd learned to keep quiet and hide her panic inside. The only thing she did was clutch her mother's hand.

"I'll be right back," the doctor said, to calm them. As he left, he looked tenderly at the grandfather, sitting in his corner, and the two children and Miriam, to take the memory of them to eternity.

"I'm sorry,' said ltshak, who was still thinking about his cough.

"If you survive," the doctor whispered to them, "go to Palestine." And he disappeared, in front of the dogs.

The Hauptfuhrer of the SS was accompanied by a thin, bald man with glasses who scrutinized Dr. Lodzer's face in order to observe his reaction to the proposal made to him.

"And what guarantee do 1 have that you'll keep your word?" he dared to ask.

"None. But I'm afraid you have no choice."

Accustomed to obeying, Dr. Lodzer bowed his head. In a voice of deepest sorrow, he asked:

"Who will live?"

The bald man spoke for the first time, with cultured politeness:

"That you will have to decide," he smiled sympathetically and finished the sentence, "among yourselves."

As he left, the doctor broke the rules of Treblinka by looking with hatred into the eyes of the Hauptfuhrer and the bald man. God does not exist, he thought as they took him back to the cell.

Josef Lodzer talked with Miriam and the grandfather when the two children were sleeping. They had two hours to think about it and come to a decision. The two men allowed Miriam to cry bitterly over such impossible cruelty. When she calmed down, the grandfather insisted on reciting the ekah, as he had been doing daily since death was so close, and he recited, Remember, Jerusalem, the days of your affliction. And Miriam, her voice broken with sorrow, murmured, My soul is far from peace; now I do not know what happiness is. And Dr. Lodzer, his lips stiff, spat, My strength and my hope in Adonai have ended. He said it with such harshness that his praying of the ekah sounded like blasphemy. So that these should not be the last words of believers, the grandfather added, almost unintelligibly, Grant them, Lord, a hard heart; may that be their curse, oh, Adonai.

ltshak Lodzer felt a chill and wrapped himself in the blanket given to him by the dark-eyed girl named Hannah whose smile was like a benediction. He touched the cold barrel of the rifle and looked into the disturbing darkness. The silence of danger, fed by his own silence. All of a sudden, without warning, he had to cough. He couldn't help it. And the sound horrified him and he said, Sorry, sorry…, like a prayer. And in a flash he saw himself in Treblinka, suffering the pain of cruelty, his fault, because it was his fault that Edith and Mother, Grandfather and Father had died. And now who knows where they were, maybe blown by the wind as far as the steppes, or deposited on the ground in a moment of calm. My dear ones, 1 killed you because of my cough. Even though at Raman Gat they'd taught him to forget, to erase the guilty cough from his head. The tears froze on his cheek and he pulled the blanket closer. And he saw himself with his mouth open, at the port of Haifa, holding the hand of an unknown immigrant who'd been his father, mother, sister and grandfather during the journey, and who left him at the door of the Ramat Gan Reception Center. ltshak Lodzer, twelve years old, born in Warsaw, son of Josef Lodzer and Miriam, brother of sweet Edith, grandson of Moishe Lodzer, of the Mattes family of Lodz, and therefore an eleventh-generation descendant of the great Rabbi Chaim Mattes, permanently at odds with God in spite of it all. He'd gone to Palestine in obedience to his father's last wish, along with a wave of the participants in the first aliyah bet who defied the authorities of the protectorate of Palestine and brought in those who wanted to flee in whatever way, at whatever cost, from the Europe still covered in the ashes and smoke of their brothers and sisters. For six years, in Ramat Gan, they helped him to forget, they made him vomit up the demons, and got him to sleep almost all night long, and almost stopped his pupils from fluttering and his facial muscles from twitching. They made him some very thick glasses, too thick, because his vision was aged by the horrors he'd seen. They did all that, and made him learn Hebrew and teach a few words of Yiddish to his fellow students from the Magreb, and learn Arabic and smile once in a while. But they couldn't erase the memory of that small, dark, very cold room in Treblinka.

They were years filled with frenetic activity in the adjoining school, studying violin, languages, typing, cryptography and history, so as not to leave any space in his head for remembering. When he turned seventeen, he had to give up his place in the Center to someone who needed it more. Among the options offered to him, he chose to go and work on the Ain Jarod kibbutz. When he got there he thought they would give him a hoe, but after two days of training, the first tool they gave him was a rifle to hold in one hand and three rounds of ammunition for the other. Touching the metal part of the rifle reminded him of the Luger that his poor father, Dr. Lodzer, had put into his hands after kissing him for the last time. But he didn't say anything because it seemed that at the kibbutz they trusted him with their defense. He just stood there open-mouthed with the rifle and the ammunition, and a black-haired girl came up to him with a blanket, smiling, and said, This blanket is your skin, Itshak. It'll be your only company while you're on watch. And her jet eyes were beautiful, she was named Hannah, she was in charge of supplies and was on watch that night too. And he thought it was unfair to be as ugly and shy as he was, and to have to wear thick glasses, and he didn't know how to thank her. Only after she'd moved away, handing out blankets and smiles, did he say softly, Sorry, sorry. And he looked around to see if anyone had heard. And now he'd coughed in the guard post and given away his position to possible enemies. He tried to pierce the darkness with his weak vision so as to see the flash before anyone else. Then he heard a soft, sweet swish by his ear and after it the monstrous explosion of a shot. He found himself on the ground, sitting up, and breathlessly felt his ear. A warm, sticky liquid. And he was trembling, making no sense of the cries of his companions who came rushing from the guard post. The skirmish lasted for five minutes in an infernal exchange of shots, and he didn't move, rigid, inside himself, reliving the cold dark room of Treblinka. They had to pull him, rigid, in a sitting position, from the hole he was in, and the next day they sent him back with a recommendation that he spend some time in the psychiatric hospital in Tel Aviv. They never told him how many deaths had been caused by his cough in that nighttime skirmish in Ain Jarod.

When after three years they let him live by himself again, he moved to the coastal town of Dor, fifty kilometers north of Tel Aviv, convinced that the view of the sea, the fishermen at work and the few, small vessels going in and out of the oily port would distract him from his lacerating thoughts. The Tzahal once more considered him capable of service to a country that could allow no hands to be idle, especially if they were expert at uncovering the secrets of even the most innocent texts. His medical history and his weak vision had taken him out of the line of fire, but they shut him in a windowless room in Tel Aviv to decipher, like a cryptographer, all of the messages sent or intercepted around the world by the commandos who had just captured Eichmann in Buenos Aires. ltshak attended all the sessions of the trial in the front row, looking at the canary in his glass cage, observing him closely with his tired eyes, examining him almost without attending to the laconic answers to the tribunal's questions and letting his cough echo in his memory as many times as possible until it no longer hurt him. And he breathed easier when they executed Adolf Eichmann, as if he were the torturing Hauptfi hrer of Treblinka. But he still didn't have the heart to visit the crypt of Yad va-Shem, because there was no therapy that could erase his fragment of Shoah from his memory, of the night when his father woke him up and whispered in his ear, You're a very brave boy, ltshak, you're a man because you're nine years old. And wideeyed he looked at his father and behind him his mother, smiling in sorrow with Edith, no longer feverish and finally sleeping peacefully, in her arms, and Grandfather reciting another silent ekah, and being grown up made him very afraid. And his father told him, Don't worry, because we'll all live inside you. Because you're strong, you'll live and be our eyes and our memory, my son. ltshak had gone over his parents' terrible reasoning hundreds of times: to whom, oh God, to whom do we give the opportunity to escape from Hell; who must be our Orpheus? Miriam offered herself immediately in favor of anyone else, as did Josef, and they were both thinking of the children. Old Moishe held out his hands, offering to their service what little life was left to him. And then it was clear that deciding which child had to die was the most terrible of all. Miriam couldn't understand how there could be so much evil in the world; Josef, cloaked in the coolness he'd learned to cultivate as a doctor, reasoned his way from either of them, it doesn't matter, to a decision, refusing to accept that one child should be condemned by a throw of the dice, and insisting on their right to choose, and, without knowing why, he said, ltshak will live. And Miriam heard, Edith will die.

The decision was followed by a holy silence. Then Josef woke ltshak and told him that now he was a nine-year-old man. And the whole family embraced in the darkness and from that moment on ltshak had trouble sleeping at night.

During the Six Day War he was part of the reconnaissance team under the general staff on the Golan Heights. At that time he was acting as a member of the Department of Cryptography. He worked well and tried to assume the coolness affected by his father in the most difficult moments. But he couldn't pull it off, and he realized that at thirty-three (my mother's age when 1 killed her) he was a very weak man. He wanted to leave himself far behind, and he thought that if he moved to America or Australia, everything would be easier. After returning to Dor to put his obsessions in order by looking at the sea, the dwindling number of fishermen and the ships that passed by on the way to the port of Haifa, leaving the town in a kind of insuperable lethargy, he decided that he had to leave Israel. Twice he put his name on the emigration list, but both times his father's voice made him desist. The soft voice of his father who, once the SS had shut the door and opened the little window to observe them in safety, stood up, acting as if the whole thing were a joke, and went towards the pistol they'd left by the door. And I kept saying, Father, no, no, no, no. I won't be able to do it. And he, You have to; that's the condition for staying alive. And he pointed at the door; in Yiddish, so the people on the other side couldn't understand, he said that what the dogs wanted was for him to be a coward, because then they'd kill them all with no excuses. And 1: No, Father, in that case, 1'd rather die. You kill us. And Father embraced me with all the love there could be in the world and whispered in my ear, I'll help you, my love. Neither of them thought that they were completing another terrible circle, which opened the day that Almighty God, in spite of the Alliance, ordered Abraham, so as to test him, to sacrifice his son ltshak on the hills of Moria, and which was closing in a cold, wet, dark room in the hell of Treblinka when evil decided that ltshak Lodzer was to sacrifice his father, mother, sister and grandfather, also to test him. Doctor Josef Lodzer put the pistol in his son's hand delicately, as if it were a scalpel. It was too big for him, but the doctor covered his hand with his own, as if the whole thing were a joke, and with horrifying assurance and coldness, he led ltshak to where his mother and Edith, still asleep, were lying. And Miriam sent a big kiss to her husband and to ltshak, her executioner, and she embraced Edith, who died without knowing that she was taking part in a game observed with interest on the other side of the door by two junior officers, a captain and a bald doctor. The bullet that killed Edith wounded Miriam badly, and then Dr. Lodzer didn't hesitate and made the pistol held by ltshak point at Miriam, and told her, 1 love you, darling, and the second shot sounded in the cold room. Grandfather lowered his head, almost touching his forehead to the ground, offering his neck with the resignation shown by the lamb offered in the ritual sacrifice, and everything in him blew up with the third shot. And Father told me, ltshak, my son, you will survive; you will live for us; you will be our eyes and our memory. Go to Palestine, put down roots, and we'll all live in Israel through you. Get married and have children and we'll all live through you. And he took Itshak's hand and put the pistol in his mouth and smiled at him as if to say, See? It's just a game. And he pulled the trigger accompanied by ltshak's dead hand, as he had done the other times. And ltshak with the Luger in his hand was incapable of thinking that now he could kill himself because at the age of nine it's impossible to think about nothingness. And the jailers came into the room smiling victoriously, and the bald doctor explained to the others that they'd just observed the defensive behavior typical of the inferior races, who were capable of the most horrible crimes in order to survive, like killing their own children and parents instead of facing the nobility of suicide. And he took the pistol that ltshak still had in his hand, ruffled the boy's hair affectionately and told him, Nothing's going to happen to you, you're going to live in the infirmary block and every once in a while you and 1 are going to have a little talk. And he signaled to the soldiers behind him to take him away. ltshak hardly had time to see Edith and his mother and father and grandfather for the last time. The bitter cold outside made him wake up and realize that he'd committed a terrible crime and, though they were in Treblinka because of his cough, it was his wickedness that had made him commit those murders. This idea was corroborated by the bald doctor, who had become my friend and explained to me that 1 was a wicked child because 1'd killed my whole family to save myself, and observed my perplexed silences with infinite patience, took abundant notes in my presence and gave me candies because he was my friend. And he asked me what 1 was thinking and what 1 was dreaming. 1 don't know what 1 told him, but 1 never explained about the cough. And one day my friend the bald doctor disappeared without saying anything, and two hours later the Red Army came into Treblinka.

The second time he took his name off the emigration list, he realized he would never be able to leave Israel, because of the memory of the deaths he'd caused. And then, the day after his birthday, he looked for a long time at the Mediterranean, his adoptive sea, and decided that now he could visit the crypt of the memory of the camps. He chose the day when there was the least traffic, and for two hours he stared at the flame of Yad va-Shem that was the life of his family, broken by him. The name of Treblinka carved in the ground made his head hurt because of that cough, the cough that gave them away, and it was his fault. And he'd been able to carry out only one part of the pact; he'd stayed in Israel. But he had no children; he'd never married; he hadn't had the energy to make his loved ones live on in his children. And he knew that now it was too late to think about such a thing. His soul wept looking at the flame, and not once did his mind turn to the merciful Lord, because he and God hadn't talked for forty years. After he went back to Dor, good citizen ltshak Lodzer looked at the sea from his balcony, picked up the regulation army pistol and, convinced that at his age he could speculate about nothingness, lay down on the bed, waited patiently for the compassionate darkness to cover everything with its discretion, and put the gun in his mouth, as he remembered his father doing. But he didn't smile, because he had no son to deceive. If he was incapable of honoring the whole pact, at least he could join them. Maybe because the metal was cold or because he was afraid of his own act, a cough betrayed him, he had an irresistible attack of coughing. But now he didn't have the body of his mother to press against so Hell wouldn't hear him. Some strange scruple made him wait until the coughing stopped and the silence of great moments was restored. And he fired, forty years after the first cough, with the hope that sorrow could no longer hurt him.