Hostage (9 page)

Three Jews embraced one another as they wept.

My father and Arele were returning from the kingdom of
darkness where humanity had been brought down, crushed, almost annihilated beyond recall.

Auschwitz.

I asked about Mama.

They shook their heads.

She had been trampled on, wounded, humiliated, suffocated and burned on the very night of her arrival. A member of the Sonderkommandos had confirmed it.

My opponent, the count, that bastard, I thought. My German protector had lied to me, misled me, betrayed me. How could I forgive that?

We spent days and nights holding hands in our house, looking tenderly at one another, exchanging our recollections and experiences with inadequate words, and our silences, especially our silences—there were some things we couldn’t say.

One day when we were talking about the war, Father said, “I survived thanks to Arele. He was my support.”

“And you, mine,” said Arele.

“I survived thanks to chess,” I said, “and a German officer.” My father nodded.

“Where is he? What became of him?” Arele asked.

“I was hoping to see him again and tell him what I think of him. I have a score to settle, questions to ask. He should be tried and sentenced, punished. He was an officer of the Sicherheitsdienst, it turns out, not without influence. He could have prevented the hanging of the Jewish boy, Mama’s deportation and
yours. He made a fool of me, of all of us. The only thing that interested him in life was chess. The power to defeat his opponent, to win. Human lives didn’t count for him. He trampled us Jews as if we were scum.”

“I wonder where Pinhas is,” my father said.

“It was such a long time ago. We were so miserable when he left, but he did well to leave.”

“Maybe we’ll know one day,” I said, thinking of the first Jewish Red Army soldier who rescued me at that tragic moment in my life.

“How?”

A spark of joy lit up inside me. It chased away shadows and ghosts and revealed a brother, an older brother in full force.

I told them about my meeting with Piotr.

“He wanted to know everything about me. It seems that Pavel is a very important person over there. He works for …”

“Leon Meirovitch? Our relative?” my father asked.

“Yes. In fact, Piotr promised to come back to see me. I gave him our address.”

“Who knows what happened to him?” Arele wondered. “The war isn’t over yet. Everything is still chaotic.”

“He’ll keep his promise,” I said in an obstinate tone of voice.

Given history’s convulsions, we had every reason not to hold out much hope. Yet my father remarked, “And the fact that we’re here—true, not all of us, but some of us—in our own house, among ourselves, reunited, and the fact that there are still Jews in Europe, isn’t that the sign that miracles can still happen?”

His face darkened suddenly as he no doubt thought of his wife and others who suffered a similar fate. The word “miracle” resonated like a kind of blasphemy.

• • •

Shaltiel summoned memories and faces as a way of protecting himself, shielding himself from the torturers. His moments of complete dejection, the feeling of plummeting into bottomless depths, was thereby mitigated by the glimmers of ecstasy. He shivered with cold, yet was bathed in sweat.

Outside, life triumphs. There are cries and tears of victory, fascism defeated, Nazism humiliated. The horror of the German dictatorship is unmasked. Suffering the worst defeat in its history, Germany has lost all its pride. Europe is liberated. The Jewish people have survived. Shouts of “Hurrah” are heard in Moscow and Kiev. People dance in the streets of Paris and Amsterdam. There are military parades everywhere. The Resistance is jubilant. “Never again” becomes more than a slogan: It’s a prayer, a promise, a vow. There will never again be hatred, people say. Never again jail and torture. Never again the suffering of innocent people, or the shooting of starving, frightened, terrified children. And never again the glorification of base, ugly, dark violence. It’s a prayer.

One autumn day, my father is rereading letters sent to friends in Palestine and America: requests for advice and help. It is our joint decision to leave Europe. It feels urgent to escape from the land and the clouds that witnessed the death of so many of our people, abandoned by God and betrayed by His creation. We want to start a new family life elsewhere, far from the cemeteries embedded in our recollections of ashes and blazing skies.

Arele is engrossed in a history book.

I’m still clinging to the chessboard.

Someone knocks at the door.

“Go see who’s there,” says my father.

When I see who it is, I shout so loudly that it could wake a deaf person on the other side of the ocean. “Piotr!”

I fall into his strong arms. He laughs; his whole body is laughing.

He shouts in a strong, booming voice, “So, little man, you thought I had forgotten you, huh?”

My father and Arele are standing behind me, waiting for the reunion scene to end. I introduce them to Piotr. He removes his rucksack and opens it. It contains coffee, sugar, flour, chocolate, condensed milk—all American products, the riches of our pitiable world. He hands them to my father, who is so overcome with emotion that he doesn’t take them right away.

“Before anything,” he says, “I have to shake your hand. My son told me so much about you that I feel I’ve known you since the beginning of my life.”

Returning home from Berlin, Piotr stays with us for several days. We each talk about our war experiences. “I know Auschwitz,” says Piotr, looking fixedly at my father and cousin. He wants to see their tattooed numbers. He shuts his eyes and opens them, shaking his head incredulously. Some of his comrades liberated Birkenau and other extermination camps. Their thirst for revenge was not to be believed.

“Whatever sufferings we now impose on the Germans,” he said, “they deserve. They deserve much worse. They’re living in fear and, let’s hope, haunted by remorse and shame. Russian soldiers frighten them, and when the Russian soldier happens
to be Jewish, their fear is a thousand times more intense. They see me as a pure avenger, thirsting for their blood. Yet, God is my witness, I didn’t touch a single woman. Seeing them grovel before me is enough. But tell me, Shaltiel, who’s living in the house where I met you?”

“I don’t know. I never set foot there again.”

“Why don’t we go?”

“What for?” my father asks.

“Simple curiosity. Since it used to belong to a German officer, probably a Soviet officer lives there now.”

“Fine. Let’s go there.”

“All of us?”

“Why not?” says my father.

We go there on foot. As we walk, Piotr describes the street fighting in Berlin, one building at a time, and the fanatical Hitler Youth who defended the privileged neighborhoods near the Chancellery. He asks me: “What became of your German?”

“I have no idea. Maybe he’s dead. Maybe he’s in Berlin.”

“Maybe I killed him,” says Piotr.

We laugh while we walk on. A shiver runs down my spine when we’ve arrived. It’s the end of the afternoon. In the coolness of dusk a little wind is blowing in from the mountains. It brought to mind nights tormented by nightmares. Memories of chess games brought anguish. I recalled the fear of winning and the fear of losing: How was I to guess the mood and thoughts of my opponent, my enemy? I remembered waiting for the following day and its uncertainties, and the loneliness, as I brooded over my father. It all came to the surface and swirled around in my memory.

Here we are in front of the house. I had expected to come
upon ruins, but it hadn’t changed. The tree was still there in the garden, carrying yellow leaves. I could sometimes see them from below, in the hideaway. I wished I could touch them, confide in them.

There is light in the windows. I knock on the door lightly. After a moment, it opens. An elderly, stooped woman appears and with a clumsy movement quickly tries to shut the door; the sight of the Russian officer has frightened her. Piotr prevents it. She sees us behind him. In spite of the darkness, I see panic etched on Dorothea’s face.

“We’d like to go inside,” says Piotr in Yiddish.

She doesn’t move. He eases her gently out of the way. Her gaze has not left me. I can read her thoughts, her astonishment, her feelings of helplessness, as though she were facing a great danger: “You … you … what do you want? What are you doing here?”

Suddenly, it becomes clear that she is hiding someone. I point to the secret door leading to the underground hideaway. She almost collapses, stifling a cry.

There he was. The count. He was hiding there in the very place where I had hid, where I had found asylum against crushing misery. He is pale, as I had most likely been several months before, thinner too. He is still dressed elegantly: a white shirt and a black tie.

He is sitting wide-eyed, at “my” table, in front of a chessboard, maybe ours. I wondered whose presence frightens him more, mine or the Russian officer’s.

“That’s him?” Piotr asks.

“Yes. Count Friedrich von Waldensohn, officer of the SD, in person,” says my father.

Piotr asks him a few questions in Russian, which I translate. He doesn’t answer. Piotr becomes incensed.

“He better open his mouth or I’ll take him straight to the Kommandantur! There he’ll be taught respect.”

We are speaking Yiddish, but the count gleans the meaning of the words. He stands up, bows and states his rank. He says I can vouch for his innocence: He has never tortured anyone, killed anyone or arrested anyone. He held only a desk job, he says, far from the scene of action. He merely studied and evaluated the information provided by his subordinates, and later passed it on to his superiors.

“Is this true?” Piotr asks me.

“Yes and no.”

“Explain, please.”

“I never saw him kill anyone, but he lied to me about my mother, my father and my cousin. My mother was already dead and burned, and my father and cousin deported to Auschwitz when he claimed he had run into them in a camp not far from here.”

“Translate,” the count demands of me.

I do, and he shrugs his shoulders.

“I had no choice,” he says. “I had to lie to you. The truth would have driven you to despair. Also, you wouldn’t have been able to concentrate on your game.”

“Yes,” I say bitterly. “I used to play chess with him. In order to survive. I had to.”

My father, Arele and Piotr seem stunned. They can’t understand. While they were suffering in the throes of hell, I was playing chess with a German officer who was more concerned about my powers of concentration than the fate of my loved ones? Piotr
asks him to sit down, while we remain standing. Dorothea nervously says she is sorry she can’t offer us anything, not even tea.

Piotr stares at her with a look of disgust.

“His Lordship isn’t guilty,” she says. “He must not be taken to jail. He merely did his duty. He never hurt anyone.”

Piotr motions to her to stop talking. She retires to a corner of the basement, buries her head in her hands and sobs convulsively.

“I’m taking him in,” Piotr says to me. “I have to deliver him to the Soviet military authorities. His fate doesn’t depend on me. Maybe on you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Since you know him, you’ll have to testify.”

The count cuts in. “You’ll testify on my behalf, won’t you? You’ll tell them I treated you well, that I protected you, that I took a big risk keeping you with me?”

He spoke Russian after all. A thorough man of deceit.

The count stares at me with his cold, penetrating gaze. “Shaltiel, do you remember what I said to you when we separated? I told you to remember that you owed me your life, do you remember?”

“Yes, I remember. And I replied that I owed my life to chess.”

“But you played with me!”

“No. Not with you, with Death.”

Piotr remains pondering. Then he grabs the count. He will deliver him to headquarters. It is his duty as an officer.

At that very moment, I decide never again to look at a chessboard. But with the passing of time, I couldn’t keep my promise.

From all quarters, he is being asked to talk about it. What was it like? His first sensations. The turning points. When did he feel his suffering was intolerable? And was death to be desired or inevitable? And the possibility, if not the certainty, of being rescued, when did that feeling come? And being liberated, what was that like?

He shakes his head: No, not yet. Another time. Later. Oh, he’s well aware of what he owes them. If he’s still alive, if he’s breathing, if he feels able to resume his life, to renew relationships and even deepen them—he will repay his debt to them. But he can’t now fulfill the questioners’ expectations. Or satisfy those of the journalists. Everything in its own time. One day, he’ll talk. He’ll find the words. He’ll write
.

He’ll also talk about the one who is missing
.