The Story of a Life (12 page)

Every single day, from early in the morning (in winter,
from the dark hours of the dawn) until three in the afternoon, I was trapped with this wild herd. It’s no wonder that I can’t remember even one name, not even the name of the Jewish teacher, who herself had to contend with this mob, which already, at the age of seven, was charged with destructive energy. Like me, she stood helpless, shouting in vain, provoking waves of laughter. I don’t recall faces, but I clearly remember the wide stone staircase, the gloomy, damp corridors, the tide of legs that would sweep over everything and hurtle out. I remember the school janitors who supervised the schoolyard. Cold and cunning, they were the supreme arbiters and would instill fear in everyone. If a child got out of control, they would tie him up and give him ten lashes. After receiving his punishment, the child had to kiss the hand of the one who had lashed him, say, “As you command, Father,” and then leave the area. This ritual was repeated several times a week.

Mother was often on the verge of withdrawing me from this school, but Father wouldn’t let her. He claimed that such was life, and that I’d better toughen up to it. Mother feared that I was suffering too much, but Father stood firm, as if he guessed that experiences harsher than this awaited me.

At the end of my first school year, my formal education came to an end. World War II broke out, turning everything upside down. Within a few weeks, the seven-year-old who had been enveloped in so much love and warmth had lost his mother and became an abandoned ghetto child, and eventually this child wound up trudging alongside his father on a forced march across the Ukrainian steppes. The dying lay beside the dead along the road, and the child limped on with his remaining strength, accompanied by the few who could still walk.

These sights remain within me as very clear memories. Sometimes it seems to me that the march, which lasted for
about two months, has continued for the last fifty years, and that I’m still limping along on it.

After two months of walking we arrived—very few of us, indeed—at that accursed camp. Not many days passed before I was separated from my father and I escaped from the camp. From that moment, I was an orphan, and now began the loneliness and the closing off. Quickly I learned to speak little and, if questioned, to reply as briefly as possible.

During the war, I honed my sense of suspicion into a fine art. Before approaching a house, a stable, or a barn, I would bend down to the ground and listen, sometimes for hours. By the sounds, I could tell if there were people there, and how many. People were always a sign of danger. I spent much of the war flat on the ground, listening. Among other things, I learned to listen to the birds. They are remarkable harbingers, not only of imminent rain, but also of bad people and wild beasts.

From my days of wandering in the fields and in the forests, I learned to prefer the forest to the open fields, stables to houses, the deformed to those who were healthy, village outcasts to supposedly respectable homeowners. Sometimes reality would catch me unaware, but, for the most part, my suspicions proved themselves. Over time I learned that objects and animals are true friends. In the forest I was surrounded by trees, bushes, birds, and small animals. I was not afraid of them. I was sure that they would do nothing harmful to me. I became familiar with cows and with horses, and they provided me with a warmth that has remained with me to this very day. Sometimes it seemed to me that what saved me were the animals I encountered along the way, not the human beings. The hours I spent with puppies, cats, and sheep were the best of the war years. I would blend in with them until I was part of them, until forgetfulness came, until I fell asleep
alongside them. I would sleep as deeply and as tranquilly as I had in my parents’ bed.

I’ve noticed that those of my generation, particularly those who were children at the time of the war, developed suspicious attitudes toward people. People are unpredictable. A man who at first glance may appear calm or rational might turn out to be a savage person, or even a murderer.

After I left Maria, the woman who had taken me in, I worked for a blind old peasant. At first I was glad that he was blind, but it quickly became clear that he was no less cruel than the sighted peasants. Whenever he suspected that I wasn’t doing my work as I should, or that I had been surreptitiously eating when I was supposed to be working, he would call me over to him and slap my face. In fact, whenever I was near him he would lunge forward and hit me with his sinewy hand. Once, when he seemed to think that I had drunk from the bucket of milk into which I had done the milking, he pushed me down to the ground and stomped on me. Yet I noticed that he would approach the animals in the barn quietly and gently, stroking their heads and whispering endearments to them. It was on me that he vented his anger, which was venomous, as if he blamed me for everything bad that had gone wrong with his life.

For about two years I lived out in the fields and surrounded by forests. There are sights that have been etched into my memory, and there is much that I have forgotten, but distrust has remained engraved on my body; even today, I stop and listen every few paces. Speech does not come easily to me, and it’s no wonder: we didn’t speak during the war. It was as though every disaster defied utterance: there was nothing to say. Anyone who was in the ghetto, in the camp, or hiding in the forests knows silence in his body. In time of war you don’t argue, you don’t sharpen differences of opinion. War is a
hothouse for listening and for keeping silent. The hunger for bread, the thirst for water, the fear of death—all these make words superfluous. There’s really no need for them. In the ghetto and in the camp, only people who had lost their minds talked, explained, or tried to persuade. Those who were sane didn’t speak.

I’ve carried with me my mistrust of words from those years. A fluent stream of words awakens suspicion within me. I prefer stuttering, for in stuttering I hear the friction and the disquiet, the effort to purge impurities from the words, the desire to offer something from inside you. Smooth, fluent sentences leave me with a feeling of uncleanness, of order that hides emptiness.

That old axiom that a man is judged by his deeds seemed all the more true during the war. In the ghetto and in the camps, I saw many educated people, including renowned doctors and lawyers, who were prepared to kill for a piece of bread. But at the same time I saw people who knew how to relinquish, to give, to be totally self-effacing, and then to die without harming anyone or making anyone feel guilty. The war revealed more than superficial character traits; it also laid bare people’s basic nature, whose foundation, as it turns out, is not only darkness. The selfish and the evil left me with a residue of fear and disgust; the generous bequeathed to me the warmth of their generosity. When I remember them, I’m overcome with shame for not possessing a fraction of their goodness.

During the war, we got to see the value of different ideologies. Some communists who preached equality and the love of one’s fellow man in the town squares turned into beasts when truly tested. But there were also communists for whom the belief in their fellow man became so purified that up close they seemed like religious people. Everything they
did was with the utter devotion of body and soul. It seemed to me that this rule applied to religious people as well. There were those who followed Jewish traditions but whom the war made heartless and selfish; and there were those who elevated God’s commandments to ever higher degrees of light.

During the war, words had less currency than faces and hands. From the faces you learned to what extent the person next to you wanted to help you or intended to harm you. Words did not help one understand. The senses were what provided you with correct information. Starvation reverts us to our instincts, to a kind of language that precedes speech. Whoever held out a crust of bread or a can of water to you when you’d already fallen on your knees from sheer weakness—his is a hand you’ll never forget.

Wickedness is like generosity: neither needs words. Evil prefers concealment and darkness, and generosity doesn’t like to trumpet its own deeds. War is full of suffering and despair. These are extremely difficult feelings that appear to require detailed explanation, but what can one do—the greater the suffering and the more intense the feelings of despair, the more superfluous words become.

It was only after the war that words reappeared. People once again began questioning and wondering, and those who had not been there demanded explanations. The explanations offered seemed pathetic and ridiculous, but the need to explain and to interpret is so deeply ingrained in us that, even if you realize how inadequate such explanations are, this doesn’t stop you from trying to make them. Clearly, such attempts were an effort to return to normal civilian life, but unfortunately the effort was ludicrous. Words are powerless when confronted by catastrophe; they’re pitiable, wretched, and easily distorted. Even ancient prayers are powerless in the face of disaster.

At the beginning of the 1950s, when I started to write, rivers of words were already flowing about the war. Many recounted, bore witness to, confessed, evaluated. The people who had promised themselves and their dear ones that after the war they would tell everything did indeed keep their promise. That’s how the notebooks, the booklets, and the volumes of memoirs all came about. These pages carry a great deal of pain, but there is also within them much that is clichéd and superficial. The silence that had reigned during the war and for a short while afterward seemed to be swallowed up in an ocean of words.

The really huge catastrophes are the ones that we tend to surround with words so as to protect ourselves from them. The first words that I wrote were a kind of desperate cry to find the silence that had enfolded me during the war. A sixth sense told me that my soul was enveloped in this same silence, and that if I managed to revive it perhaps the right words would come.

My writing began with a severe handicap. The experiences of the war lay heavily and oppressively within me, and I wanted to repress them even more. I wanted to build a new life on top of my previous one. It took me years to return to the way I had been, and even when I did, there was still a long way to go. How does one give form to such a searing flame? Where does one start? How does one connect the links? What words does one use?

What had been written about World War II had been mainly testimonies and accounts that had been deemed authentic expressions; literature was considered a fabrication. But I could not simply bear witness. I could not remember the names of people or places—only gloom, rustlings, and movements. Only much later did I understand that this raw material is the very marrow of literature, and that, from
it, it’s possible to create an interior narrative. I say “interior” because at that time chronicles were considered to be where truth was to be found. “Interior” expression had not yet been born.

My poetics had been formed at the start of my life; by this I mean by everything that I saw and absorbed from my parents’ home and throughout the long war. It was then that my attitude toward people, toward beliefs, toward emotions, and toward words was molded. This relationship has not changed over the years. Although my life has become richer, although I’ve added words, concepts, and knowledge, my basic relationship to the world has not changed. During the war, I saw life naked—plain and unadorned. The good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly—all these were revealed to me as strands of the same rope. Thank God it didn’t turn me into a moralist. On the contrary, I learned how to respect human weakness and how to love it, for weakness is our essence and our humanity. A man who is aware of his weaknesses is far more likely to be able to overcome them. A moralist cannot face his own weaknesses; instead of criticizing himself, he criticizes his neighbor.

I’ve talked about silence and about suspicion, about preferring fact to explanation. I don’t like to talk about emotions. Too much talk about emotions will always lead us into a thicket of sentimentality—to trampling on and flattening true emotions. But emotion that emerges from action is the absolute essence of feeling.

I TURN THE PAGES of my old diary. They are a yellowish-green, some have stuck together, and my uneven handwriting is already blurred. For many years the diary lay in a suitcase, unopened. I was afraid of these notebooks, afraid they would reveal fears and character flaws that I’ve been trying to hide from myself for years.

It is 1946, the year I came to Israel, and the diary is a mosaic of words in German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and even Ruthenian. I say “words” and not “sentences” because in 1946 I was not able to connect words into sentences, and the words were the suppressed cries of a fourteen-year-old youth who’d lost all the languages he had spoken and was now left without language. The diary became a hiding place where he could pile up the remnants of his mother tongue and the words that he had just acquired. A “pile of stuff” is not just a figure of speech; it described my soul.

Without language, everything is chaos and confusion and the fear of things you needn’t be afraid of. Without language,
one’s naked character is exposed. Back then, most of the children around me stuttered, spoke too loudly, or swallowed their words. The extroverts among us spoke too loudly, and as for the introverts, their voices were swallowed up in the silence inside them. Without a mother tongue, a person has a defect.

My mother’s native tongue had been German. She loved the language and cultivated it, and when she spoke it, the words had the sound of a crystal bell. My grandmother spoke Yiddish, and her language had a different ring, or, rather, taste to it, for it always brought to my mind plum compote. The maid spoke Ukrainian, with some of our words and some of Grandmother’s thrown in, too. I spent many hours with her every day. She wasn’t strict with me; all she wanted was to make me happy. I loved her and her language. To this day I carry the memory of her face in me, even though at the crucial moment, when her help was as vital to us as the air we breathed, she fled our house along with our jewelry and cash, which she stashed in the pockets of her dress.