Hold on to the Sun (3 page)

 

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.

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.

An international festival—a few days of devotion to joy, before the regime returns to its everyday gray.

And I, a stranger at the celebration. Only an “alibi” for another mission, which no one in fact has assigned to me. Yes, a few addresses for it’s impossible-not-to-accept-with-a-letter-to-take before setting out. Backs of houses, yards covered with trash and rubble. Staircase supported by boards. Number 72, apartment 9A. Two old people in the doorway. A kitchen black with soot. Examining me, the letter, with a scared look.

Sneaking back to the ongoing celebration, just so they won’t find out.

It’s only because of sloppiness that they haven’t yet arrested me.

And then, early one misty morning, wrapped in a coat, at the railroad station. Among hundreds of people in a line. Buying a ticket to Krakow with black-market zlotys . . . to the regions of my real trip.

 

Getting off the train, and simply walking into the light-flooded square among ancient buildings, whose carved facades are sparkling in the sun. Walking among the other people on the boulevard with the autumn chestnut trees,
on Planty, Mother’s route to the tennis courts. Autumn leaves struggle on my shoes. Entering the Rynek Square resounding around itself. The Renaissance arches, the Sukiennice market in the middle like an island in the heart of a lagoon of light, the breeze rising from the Virgin Mary Church . . . all those names, with a soft “r” as I (“wonderful child!”: the only two words I understood in the foreign language) would accompany Mother to the nightly suppers on an aunt’s balcony with a smell of down comforters and the saltiness of the sea air on hot Tel Aviv nights, when friends from “there” would gather. All those names, when the conversation would climb in the foreign tremolo, and in the café downstairs, the yard of the building, the cards would be shuffled on tables.The places frozen in slides on the wall of the high school, in commemorations held with a sudden frenzy. Places that were stopped in the thirties, with an amazed look of some Jew who came on the camera by mistake ... The warm-cool air caresses the fur of my coat, my face, moves the parasols over the flower vendors’ booths.

The road rises to a high hill overlooking the city and the Vistula River. Above, the Wawel Castle covered in ivy burning with autumn leaves. And here, on the slope, along the banks of the Vistula, the way to Paulinska Street, Mother’s street.

The three o’clock twilight lingers and softens. Mothers with babies in buggies at the river (Mothers and babies? Still? Here?). Paulinska Street. On the secret side of the
street the wall of a convent, and behind it fruit trees. Someone passes by on the corner. A woman in a heavy coat and old boots. Number eight. The staircase floored with blue tiles. A list of tenants in fountain pen. First floor on the left—a strange name. The door is locked. On the first floor a balcony. Closed glass doors, covered with lace curtains.

To throw a stone at them mischievously, a schoolbag on the back and stockings stretched up to the knee? As I used to walk over there, dressed carefully by Mother, among the children giggling at my different clothes. To sit down at a steaming lunch, close to the breath of forefathers I never saw? Only crumbs of medicines and old lipsticks in drawers of the aunt who died.That silence.The quiet of houses.Take a picture. A picture of air? Quiet. Across the street, in the convent garden, a bell rings. Children pour out of the gates of the school, climb on the fences, chew on apples.

Spotted facades and the street spins. Not far from there, Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter. The soot of trams on the doorsills of the houses. In the windows of the reform synagogue, the “Temple,” spiderwebs, and in the yard a tangle of weeds. In the alley of one of the houses is a blurred sign in Yiddish, “Prayer house.” The big synagogue is empty and whitewashed. Turned into a museum. Only a guard passes by like a shadow along the walls, and two fragments of tiles from back then are embedded in the entrance.