Sunrise West (14 page)

I had met her as the year 1945 slid toward its end. Esther was thin as a reed, with a thick curly black mane that kept slipping over her forehead, and a shy, somewhat insecure manner. Free but still enslaved in Dachau, she had made her way quietly into her strange new world, and although it was nearly three years since she had escaped death in the Warsaw ghetto, the fires that had engulfed her home were still smouldering in her dark eyes.

Esther had lived through the Jewish uprising in Warsaw, but she was not what you would call a ghetto fighter. She had belonged to a group of runners and messengers stationed in a bunker on Mila 26. Squinting her eyes shut as if refusing to revisit those haunting images, she told me how, at night, as the Germans retreated to safer positions for fear of their lives, she would creep out of the bunker, amid the quarrel of shadows and scorched bodies assailed by rats and mice. And how she could still hear her mother's last scream: ‘Estusia, save yourself! Save yourself!' — and then her father's shattering question on returning home from work outside the ghetto: ‘How come they took mother and you're still
here?' He too perished soon afterwards, gassed by the Germans in the ratinfested underground sewers, trying to reach friends outside the ghetto.

Esther's last tragic encounter with her father had left on her psyche a scar of resentment that could boil up into aggression. It troubled me. I felt a pang in my heart for her, because things like these are impossible to erase from memory. The morning after she told me the story I was horrified when, on opening the shutters, I imagined that the large rainbow trapped between the clouds was tinged with black. How symbolic, I thought, of Esther's guilt-darkened sky.

Her story made it quite clear that the ghetto uprising was doomed to failure from the start. As in times of old, our enemies had endeavoured to ensure that no sword or spear was to be found amongst us, and sadly our neighbours, beside whom we had lived for a thousand years, remained passive in the face of our plight; some of them went out of their way to betray us.

It was difficult for Esther to describe how she had made it through the war. She was not yet ready to excavate all her experiences at once. ‘I guess it was all a matter of chance, or luck, or the caprice of fate,' she told me, ‘and maybe also a kind of strange determination.' She was right. One learns from any survivor's tale that the fight to live is so much more acute when one can see, with one's own eyes, life ebbing away daily like flotsam on the outgoing tide.

Love, loneliness and our physical need for one another soon brought us together under one roof. Survivors had no time to lose. For the moment, a religious ceremony was not on our
mind, but to legitimize the union we did need a marriage licence. This we could only obtain in the town of Nardò, a good twelve kilometres from where we were living. Unable to afford the bus trip, we hired a cart. Early on the morning of 10 January 1946, a happy-go-lucky Italian neighbour, Vincenzo Caramelli, harnessed up his undernourished donkey. There were seven of us: Esther and I, our four male witnesses, and the driver. As the cart made its bumpy way along the rudimentary dust road, I was secretly savouring the euphoria of our forthcoming night. What I had forgotten was that we had no place of our own, for Esther shared a room with three other girls, and I with Singer and Ceprow.

We returned to Santa Maria late in the afternoon. Our wedding feast, held in our room, consisted of two oranges cut in quarters and served on empty fruit-crates. Our four witnesses were the only guests we invited; one of them brought a bouquet of wildflowers from a nearby field. We ate standing up, since we had only one chair. At nightfall Esther and I took a walk, planning to come back when my roommates were fast asleep. Like thieves in the night we sneaked in on tiptoes and slipped beneath the covers of my military American bed. The two wide-awake roommates were snoring. On the cracked windowpane hung a full moon, laughing yellow.

 

 
Homecoming
 

Father sat behind the table reading his newspaper. Mother stood by a dead stove, diligently stirring an empty pot with
a wooden spoon. ‘I'm certain our son will come back,' she said, not lifting her head from the solemn task she was performing.

‘Perhaps, but only for a while,' father replied.

‘Of course only for a while, but at the right time. I'll be serving lunch soon. I'm expecting our two daughters, and our sweet grandchildren, to grace us with their presence too. After all, it's a great occasion. Not every mother has the privilege of seeing her children again from the other side.'

There was no roof over our house, and a thick dirty fog had replaced the glass in the window-frames. Standing invisible in a corner, I listened to mother's voice. ‘You know,' she was saying, ‘children don't visit their parents very often these days. Apparently it's an outmoded custom. So don't be too hard on them, especially on3 Pola — she had a bitter life, so seldom at home.'

‘That's why she was so at home in prisons,' said father.

‘From which she emerged an
intellectual
,' mother countered. ‘Remember her Esperanto?'

‘And her Soviet songs! Overnight
I
was replaced by Lenin; and you, my dear, by the Communist Party. Then she went and fell in love with the wrong man, that party comrade of hers. How was it that we agreed to her choice?'

‘
Shtum
,' mother warned, ‘they'll soon be here!' After a moment, however, she herself resumed the reminiscences. ‘Do you recall, Gershon, how you managed to talk her into breaking off the engagement — and then, in a fit of remorse, you were kneeling beside her bed, begging forgiveness? And how you rushed off and brought back that good-for-nothing
to our home? And yes, she married him. It was a huge wedding — which your new son-in-law, without any consideration for my religious relatives, converted into a political meeting! Soon afterwards the newlyweds attempted an illegal crossing into the land of their hopes. They were caught, deprived of everything, and came back empty-handed. With your last penny you bought that barber a business on Limanowskiego...'

Father, sitting on the bare floor, leaned back in dismay. His wife's outpouring was painful. ‘It doesn't make sense to bring back things from a world that is no more,' he said.

But mother had entered a kind of trance and seemed intent on inflicting more anguish on her broken heart. ‘When my daughter's marriage ran into trouble,' she continued, ‘her husband accused me of interference. Remember that Monday morning, while we were at work? How he came into our home in the company of his two brothers — the older a soldier in military uniform and known for his underworld connections, the younger a mischievous little barber. Remember how they broke up all my china, and then hurled a chair into the big wardrobe mirror?'

‘One doesn't have to be a
goy
to make a pogrom.'

Suddenly there were footsteps, so soft, so thin, as gentle as the whisper of blue smoke from a dozing chimney. Mother held her breath, father peered into the gloom, like an old weaver threading a single strand of cotton into the eyelet of his textile machine.

Clasping her hands, mother called out excitedly: ‘I knew it! I knew they would all come! A mother's heart knows her
children. Our son is here too! We'll have lunch just like in the old days.'

The greatest excitement was on account of my two little nieces, Frumetl and Chayale, who accompanied their mothers, Pola and Ida. Oh, how sweet, how transparent they looked, as light as a summery breeze. Frumetl tugged at my sleeve. ‘Uncle,' she said, ‘last night I heard my dolly Gittele crying, because now she lives in a strange place. But I told her not to cry, to be good, to play with the other dollies and not to tell anyone that Frumetl is her real mamma.'

My mother meanwhile had taken Chayale into her scorched arms. ‘Sweetheart,' she told her, ‘when you were born your mamma, Ida, became very sick, and there were no doctors or medicine, and no food, and no fuel for the stove. When she cried out for a spoon of warm water I couldn't do anything for her, so I asked your uncle, my son Jacob, to go out and try to fetch some help. And he went into the night on his wooden clogs, stumbling through icy fields and snow. The wind and frost cut into his face like a razor, and when he finally reached the ghetto's first-aid station, the two men on duty sitting around a fire laughed and slammed the door in his face. When he came back he was so angry that he smashed your mamma's mandolin to pieces, and with those pieces brought our stove back to life.'

Lunch was served on shards of broken china, we ate emptiness, the fog still hung around our window, the arms of the old clock stood still. Mother's shapeless figure bent over me and her lips uttered a single word: ‘Curfew.' As I
walked over to the opening that had once been a door, father said: ‘If you ever see my comrade Wojciechowski, who used to frequent our home, and marched with me under the same red flag, ask him — Why?'

 

 
Emil
 

Santa Maria's summer lasts ten months, but this didn't make you immune from severe sunburn on any day of the two months remaining. All through the year our women-folk wore only cotton dresses, while the men wore shorts and linen singlets. One exception was moon-faced Emil, a stocky man of about thirty-five who even on the hottest day would not dare to leave his room without his pinstriped jacket, black slacks and shoes, grey felt hat, and a book under his arm. I can't for the life of me recall his surname; I always just called him Emil.

There was a visible demarcation line on Emil's face, perhaps the reason for his moody nature. Only the left side could smile; the right offered the steady gaze of a glass eye and the scar of an old knife-wound. No one suspected that he was a somewhat extraordinary man — not because he carried a legacy any different from most other survivors, but because this erudite survivor was entirely self-educated. His favourite saying was, ‘I wouldn't like to live in a world without books.'

I met him several times in the library, where my young wife Esther was cataloguing some recent arrivals from America. ‘Hopelessness is suicidal, something the Nazis
understood well,' he remarked on one occasion, skimming a book (because of his love for his country, he never referred to them as Germans). ‘But what they failed to grasp is that Judaism and hope are interchangeable.'