Hold on to the Sun Read online

  Distance also allowed a different discourse with my parents, especially with Mother. In the weekly letters, without the daily tension of life at home, a new bond was formed, between people who were close, who were beginning to speak more openly with one another. Even my clothes in the European winter, in the “retro” style, began to look like the clothes in Mother’s old pictures from Poland, like her hairdo in the photo next to the jeep from Hanover, when she served after the war as a commander in Aliyah B,8 the Brikha,9 camouflaged in a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration uniform. Poland, Hanover, suddenly turned into places that were much closer, more present than the little state on the shores of the Mediterranean.

  On the first Holocaust Memorial Day in Paris, I decided to stay in my apartment all day and to cut myself off from the street that lived by its own dates, for example, Armistice Day of World War I, the “Great War” that took place at the same time of year. I spent the day reading works on the sources of Nazism, on the roots of anti-Semitism, on the German nationalism of Wagner, rehearsals of whose Parsifal I had attended at the Paris Opera.

  That summer, on a tour of Europe, an accident forced me to stay unexpectedly in Munich for three weeks. And then the blank spot that filled the heart of the European map for me—Germany—the blank, untouchable spot that sucked up all the evil, also fell. Here, next to the beer hall of “the Nazi buds,” where some Israelis had taken me, in what was obviously a sick gesture, there was also an opera, where Mozart was performed, and there were wonderful museums, and parks.

  The forced stay in Germany and the Yom Kippur War the following autumn, which I spent in Paris facing the brightly lit Champs-Elysées while my dear ones were in mortal danger, proved to me that there is no refuge in the soothing distinctions between “then” and “now,” between “there” and “here.” And I also understood that there is no racial difference, imprinted at birth between “them” and “us,” nor can we Jews hide behind the fences of the Chosen People. And that, in every person, the murderer and the victim potentially exist, blended into one another, constantly demanding separation, every single day, with full awareness. I understood that I could no longer hide behind the collective, ready-made definitions of memory. That there would be no choice but to embark on the journey that is obstinate, lonely, and full of contradictions.

  Germany, France, Europe: What is in that culture, in its roots, mixed with the gold of the baroque and the flickering brasses of symphonies; what is in the squares, in the churches, in the ideologies that allowed what happened? Prepared it? Didn’t prevent it? What inflamed the hatred? What repressed it under pious words of morality? What fostered it in the heart of religious belief? What prepared it in the tales of God that man told himself to justify the outbursts of his evil instincts under the disguise of imitatio dei?10

  And what still exists right before my eyes? Keeps on happening?

  How to draw the borders between good and bad with a thin scalpel under a microscope? How to distinguish anew, here and now? All the time?

  And what is the terrorizing persuasive force of tales and of their metamorphoses into theologies, ideologies? How to struggle with forgetting, with denial, without whitewashing, but also without reiterating the same stories, without inflaming the same evil instincts? How to tell responsibly?

  Jarring questions that filled me, that nourished my research, my theatrical productions, my literary writing, but did not yet touch Mother’s hidden place.

  I spent the summer of 75 between Princeton and NewYork, collecting material for my doctorate, reading the works of Rebbe Nahman of Bratzlav in the old Jewish Theological Seminary library, and in the evenings, swallowing the plethora of fringe theater, jazz, and transvestite clubs in the international bohemian life of Manhattan. And thus I met that young violinist who had fled Poland, and was working as a cabdriver. A handsome young man from Krakow. Krakow? A place where people live?! The summer romance was a way to confront the profound seduction of the past stamped in me, as well as the depths of my femininity.

  One day that summer, my aunt, Mother’s sister-in-law, came to my apartment in midtown Manhattan. I knew her vaguely from a visit she had made to Israel years before: After the death of Aunt Tonka in Tel Aviv, this aunt from Queens, the widow of Mother’s second brother who perished in the camps, was her last living close relative. She had survived Auschwitz and her young son was hidden with a Christian woman. After the war, my aunt and her son emigrated to NewYork.

  That day, on the balcony on the thirtieth floor, facing the roofs of midtown Manhattan, my aunt spoke in broken English only about “then” and “there,” a here and now didn’t exist, as if we had never left there. She and the Polish pop music at night melted the last wall of resistance. Now I had no excuse not to translate my preoccupation with the subject into action, no excuse not to go to Poland.

  In late October, after the administrative alibi was concocted in Paris, I left. Ready. And not ready at all.

  I was not ready for what I would find or for what I wouldn’t find. I was not ready for the fear. The fear of returning to the strange hotel room at night, the primal fear that I would starve to death, which impelled me to eat nonstop, completely violating the rules of kashrut which I had observed ever since I came to Paris to study, eating nonkosher with the dispensation “allowed during an emergency,” that I granted myself (insolently?). Not ready for the fear that rushed me in a panic straight from the visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau to meetings with Polish artists and bohemian parties. I was especially not ready for the complexity of my responses, for their force. For what was revealed to me in “the living laboratory” I had poured by myself. The contradictory burst of fascination and revulsion, alienation and belonging, shame and vengeance, of helplessness, of complete denial . . .

  When I returned, the letter to my parents was a first attempt to look at what was revealed, to talk.The restrained language of the letter reflects the difficulty of going beyond the taboo, hoping they would understand through the silence. That different, new discourse with my parents accompanied us throughout the years until their death. A discourse of closeness, of belonging, of acceptance beyond the generational differences.

  The sense of belonging—along with my parents—to the “other, Jewish story” revealed in the depths of the journey only intensified in the following years, as the doors to the centers of European culture opened to me, as I devoted myself to writing. But at the same time, the understanding that it is impossible to go on telling as if nothing had happened also grew. Understanding that, after Auschwitz, there are no more stories that do not betray, there are no more innocent stories.

  And what about Mother’s shrouded “story”? Details continued to join together in fragments. For years, here and there, she mentioned events, some in conversations with me, some in conversations with others, which I chanced upon. I listened when she spoke, and she spoke little. Never did I “interview” her; never did I ask. I respected her way of speaking, as well as her way of being silent. Even after I returned from Auschwitz, I didn’t think she had to report or that I had to, or could, “know.” I learned from her the lesson of telling in silence.

  I heard the first fragment of a chronological description from my mother under extraordinary circumstances. In the autumn of 1977, she was summoned to give testimony in a German court in Hanover. I accompanied my parents to the trial, sitting with my father in the gallery and seeing Mother, with her special erect posture, surrounded by the black robes of the attorneys. In her fluent German, she described the Plaszow camp, where Jews from the Krakow ghetto were taken; she pointed authoritatively at the maps. Her voice trembled only a moment when she came to the description of the Kinderheim, the children’s home in Plaszow, where children were taken from their parents. In a few words, she dealt with the aktzia,11 told how all the inmates of the camp were taken out to the square while an orchestra played lullabies, to see how the SS loaded the children onto the trucks that took them to the gas chambers. She
was asked what was the name of her son, and how old he was at the time of the aktzia. She replied with an effort, “Marek. Eight years old.” The prosecutor asked for a momentary recess, and then the questions resumed. (That prosecutor accompanied us when we left, apologizing in shame for the accused, the deputy of Amon Göth,12 the commander of Plaszow, who was absent from the court-room “for medical reasons . . . ”)

  A few years later, Mother tried to dramatize the story of the revolt of the women in Krakow at the vocational high school where she taught, wanting to bring the subject close to her women students. She worked with Father on the script and developed original ideas of staging designed to increase audience participation. But, during the rehearsals, she developed such a serious skin disease, clearly as a reaction, that the doctor advised her to stop the production.

  The presence of the Holocaust receded completely in her last months, as she struggled with the fatal cancer that was discovered in her. Death was too close to think about the old dread—at any rate, that was my feeling as I stood at her side admiring her yearning for life, the audacity, the amazing black humor, which restored the dimensions of human absurdity even in the most difficult situation. The day before she lost consciousness, she spoke a lot, in a stupor, in Polish. What did she say? Was she still living there? I couldn’t go with her. I remained alone, by her bedside. Then, as I was massaging her feet, those feet that had marched in the death march through frozen Europe, I was struck with the simple knowledge that it was to Mother’s struggle, there, that I owed my birth.

  I heard Mother’s “story” only after her death—death that always turns a loved one into a “story” with a beginning and an end. During the shiva, Rivka Horowitz came to Jerusalem from Bnei-Brak. A woman with bold blue eyes, whom I knew only by name. Rivka Horowitz was one of nine women, all of them graduates of BeitYakov, the ultra-orthodox school for girls in Krakow, whom my mother joined in the ghetto, despite differences of education and ideology. The ten women, the zenerschaft,13 supported one another in the ghetto, during the years in the Plaszow camp, in Auschwitz-Birkenau, throughout the death march, and in the final weeks in Bergen-Belsen. For three years, they hadn’t abandoned one another; together they fought exhaustion and disease, lived through the selections, until all of them survived. “There was strength in them. Moral strength,” Mother explained when she and Father, both of them members of the liberal, secular Mapai party,14 assiduously attended the celebrations of the friends in Bnei-Brak.

  At the shiva, I heard from Rivka for the first time about that period. She spoke for a few hours—out of responsibility to tell me—and left. And after that, we didn’t meet again. Later on, when I was almost finished writing The Name (and after Mother’s death, it seemed to me that, more than ever, the novel spoke of a “there” that was lost forever), came the first information about the family property in Krakow. Apartment houses, a button factory . . . Property? There? “In the regions of delusion?” And then, the name that had been common at home, Schindler, which suddenly became a book and then a film, and turned into a general legacy the story of the rescue of Mother’s cousin and his wife, and Mother’s refusal to join the list of workers in the enamel factory in order to stay with Marek.

  Then, one evening, the telephone rings in Jerusalem, and on the other end of the line, in English with a thick Polish accent, another member of that zenerschaft introduces herself, Pearl Benisch, who published a book in 1991, To Vanquish the Dragon, with the full story of the group (from the author’s religious perspective). A copy arrived on a Friday. On the Sabbath eve, I sat with my two little daughters in the living room and picked up the book. I leafed through it distractedly, until I came to the deportation of the children of the Kinderheim. And then I fled to the other room so my daughters wouldn’t see me, and there I burst into sobs I didn’t know were hidden inside me. A weeping that arose from there. Mine? Hers?

  Until dawn on the Sabbath, I read for the first time the story of Mother, in chronological order, dated, revealing the few facts I knew situated in their context. Even the description of the goggle-moggle with sugar that she had secretly made for Marek in the sewing workshop, where the women from Plaszow worked, smuggling the treat to the child when she came back to the camp. And how one day the Jewish supervisor discovered her stealing the egg for the drink, and threatened to turn her in. And how she stood before him in mortal danger, and accused him in front of all the workers of the sewing shop of being a traitor to his people. I read how, in the aktzia, the liquidation of the children’s home, against the horrifying background of lullabies, Mother burst into the square toward the SS men who were pushing the weeping children onto the trucks. She shouted to them to take her with the child. And how her friends, the women of the zenerschaft, held her with all their might, pulled her back. I read about the sisterhood between the women in the group, about the pride, the unbelievable humor, how with astonishing freedom they maintained their humanity in the camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau. They and many other women and men were described in their humanity, facing yet finding ways to elude the crematoria. How they succeeded in putting on makeup to get through the selections, how they sneaked the weak women out of the line of the condemned, how they secretly lit candles at Hanukkah and held a Passover Seder, and how, after the death march from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, they still managed to laugh together when they got the wrong-size prison uniforms. I read, frozen stiff, how, in Bergen-Belsen, Mother dared to be insolent to the female SS officer with the pride she still had left, surviving the public whipping, which few survived, without shouting “so as not to give the SS the pleasure.” Between the pages, the figure of Mother returned to me, cheering the women in Auschwitz with stories of her visit to the Land of Israel, singing them songs of the homeland on their muddy beds, where they fell exhausted with typhus and teeming with lice in Bergen-Belsen. Suddenly I understood one of the few stories Mother had told me about the camps, how she would sing to herself Tchernihovsky’s poem: “You may laugh, laugh at the dream, I the dreamer am telling you, I believe in Man, and in his spirit, his powerful spirit,” emphasizing with her off-key voice the words: “I believe in Man, and in his spirit, his powerful spirit . . . ”

  Mother’s “story.” Discovering it in the heart of the journey to what was stamped inside me. Discovering it now in the middle of life, when I myself am a mother, and older than she, the young woman and mother who was there.

  “Mother’s story,” or maybe only milestones around what will remain hidden.

  PART II: LETTER FROM THE REGIONS OF DELUSION

  Paris, November 2, 1975

  My dears,

  Back home—what a relief!

  A week in Poland is like a year, like years, like a moment. Ever since the visa was approved, a week before the trip, I felt as if I were facing an operation. I was waiting for something to stop me, for an iron curtain to block the way. And even in the dark, when the bus took us from the plane to the airport in Warsaw I still didn’t believe that the distance between me and Poland would be swallowed up just like that, in a few steps.

  Your letter, which reached me just before the trip, was a lifeline in moments when the dizziness intensified; in moments when there was only a definite absence of my imaginary picture of those places, when instead, there were only the long lines in gray raincoats; in moments of awful loneliness, when there was no one to shout at; in moments when I didn’t believe I could finally get on the train and leave that madness behind.

  How to tell, and wasn’t there any chronology? How to live that over again?

  Wroclaw. A dreary city and a theater festival. I was ejected into the darkness in the heart of an empty field. That’s how it began. Night in the hotel. An enormous radio, and voices from Russian, Polish, Czech, and Hungarian stations. Stifling heat from the furnace, the chambermaid, a blond Gentile woman, fills the bathtub for me. In the soap box and in the closet are roaches. A strife-torn night in dreams and a grayish morning. The outside was stopped by the curtains. Crowds
of people with rubbed-out faces. A few old cars. Awful cold. Fog.

  How to leave the room and go into that reality? How to be a “tourist” in it?

  Wroclaw. In the display windows, rows of laundry soap in coarse packages. Cooperative restaurants smelling of cabbage and sweat. In the festival offices, full ashtrays, organizers with sleepless faces. And then a writers’ café, in Kosciuszko Square, and it was as if I had come to a kind of Jerusalem before I was born, from the thirties, a Jerusalem I lived from books. With that blend of provincialism and culture. Waitresses dressed in black with starched aprons, newspapers in wooden frames, cigarette smoke, grave discussions about art, literature, politics, metaphysics.The soft tones of a language that is so familiar, so close. The intonations, the gestures, the excited seriousness.