Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale (71 page)

Among the unforgettable experiences of those days I must also mention that some mornings we were obliged to eat rubbish for survival. Food was served on certain days of the week. Sorting out edible rubbish among the heaps of waste material every day just before dawn, believing that it could provide us with enough energy to keep body and soul together, even only for another day, had developed into a habit. One could survive anything except death! Having survived thanks to the energy that the rubbish had provided us with and presenting ourselves to the sight of our employers was the only victory we could dream of. I heard that the living souls waiting their turn to be snuffed out had eaten the livers of their fellow beings, boon companions, for the sake of remaining alive a few hours more. The amateur cannibals were doctors; one time doctors, upon the earth. They were experts in recognizing the edible parts of human flesh and liver apparently outlasted all the other organs of the body. How far this is true or false, I cannot tell. Yet, nothing was impossible there. A man had to be prepared for any contingency imaginable or unimaginable. To be able to find food of some sort was a blessing. Under the circumstances, I think it is high time now that we have to redefine such notions as true or false, right or wrong. Our insights and prescience may guide us in this. As a matter of fact, I had had an unshakable belief in my mind even then. They had also told me that I had to be glad for the sake of the beloved Nesim who had not witnessed this part of our journey. I had felt this satisfaction for others as well. To be glad to witness the death of someone one loved was to be the bearer of a sorrow in another guise. I think I can never explain to you this feeling.

About two months later, we were taken back to Buchenwald. We covered about 100 kilometers in two days, at the end of which a new journey was to begin. The new journey was to last twenty-one days. The food to be served every day would consist of 200 grams of bread and three raw potatoes; ninety-six people were to consume one jerry can of water every three days, of which only the sturdier among us, after brawls, could benefit. At the beginning of the journey, we numbered about five thousand; at the end of the twenty-first day there were only six hundred of us that survived. I had become thin as a rake. My legs hardly supported my skeleton. The name of the camp where we had arrived was Dachau. We knew the name. For the first time I felt that my end had come. “This is the end! This is the end!” I kept repeating to myself, after all that we had endured and suffered. Memories from the past came flooding back to me: visions, human figures, voices, etc. Different localities in my past were fused together which did not follow a chronological order, Teruel, Biarritz, etc. My father, Daniella, and my unborn child, my child who could not enter to the world. The end . . . Sedately I began waiting for my end.

The Americans came to rescue us. I could not believe it. Even now I find it difficult to believe. It was the beginning of May. They took me to a French hospital nearby. I had become infested with lice; I was invaded with fleas. The first thing they did was to disinfect me. The next thing I could not bring myself to believe was the clean, snow-white bed sheets. One and a half years had gone by. For the next ten days I was properly treated before being taken to Constant Island; it was a paradise in the middle of a lake. I weighed forty kilograms. Within six weeks I put on twenty kilos. I was invited for brief interviews by the broadcasting station. My new duty was ‘to bear testimony.’ They were innumerable, the things I had within me; they were inexhaustible. They were to abide within us forever and ever.

I left Constant on June 21 and arrived in Biarritz on June 28. I had been nurturing the hope of finding the members of my family in this city where so many memories lay buried. I had to see at least one of them, I had to. Yet, silence and desertion reigned. Streets, houses, stones, trees, and the beach . . . the city had undergone a complete transformation; or, at least so it seemed to me. My expectations proved to be unrealistic; there were no encounters, no embraces . . . those had remained in other peoples’ movies . . . Unfortunately, no one had come back here, no one that I anticipated to see. Now and then I tried to deceive myself by imagining things. Some may have remained on the Russian side, I said to myself. There, on the Russian front . . . I wonder if I also should have been with them . . . I dreamt of old times. It is evening and we are just out from a hot party, discussing our brighter futures. “We must drink tonight,” says Manuel. So we go out to carouse. The taverns are at our command. We make the rounds . . . raising a toast in each of them and nibbling at a piece of something. That was the custom . . . Manuel was killed with a single bullet to his forehead in Teruel. I had heard it whistling . . . to say that I had experienced all this . . . Daniella asks me to recount the war. “Such things are not for the ears of children,” I say, “When you get older, I’ll tell you all about it, it’s a promise.” She insists: “Just tell me, let’s see if I can understand.” Then I start telling her all about it. She listens to it as though I was telling her a fairy tale. I know, little children are not supposed to hear all this. Wars must remain fiction for them.

I cannot find my return particularly appealing when I go over my recent past. I had put up with all the adversities with great fortitude partly in the hope to be able to be reunited with my people; yet, no one seems to be in sight. I can remember that tale “Little Thumb” and think that we couldn’t keep our word; the word we had given to our children which we have failed to keep. And now . . . here seems so deserted . . .

Enrico Weizman

The letter ended with these words . . . Each of us was to live our respective stories henceforth . . . our respective stories . . . in our distant bearings and alienations.

Unexpected visitor

Enrico Weizman’s failure to find any one of his relatives upon his return to Biarritz was quite natural. Their names on the obituary column published after a couple of years indicated them as missing, ‘lost’ somewhere during transfers between concentration camps. Marie, Daniella, Nesim, Rachael, Paulette, Anette, Isaac, and Liliane were all on the list. Like many whose paths crossed speaking different languages, entertaining different dreams sunken in the depths of despair heading for the same end. Children not yet born did not figure on those lists, naturally.

The list of the ‘missing’ . . . a mistake might have been made, why not? There was still a possibility that they might be found alive. Some might have defected to a foreign territory and still be living there beyond another boundary. In order that he might endure those nightmares, he needed to delude himself. No matter what designation you might use for defining a deeply held conviction, you cannot deny the fact that it is a confirmed belief in another space, in another world. Enrico’s memory was replete with the remains and ashes of bodies exterminated. The dead haunted him. This was not the first panorama he would behold! He had visited those camps, heard those screams, and witnessed those fears and expectations and was prepared for them, unlike his fellow beings. He distinctly remembered; how could he ever forget? There had been another ‘conflict’ that had led him to ‘encounter’ Nesim for a very brief but meaningful period of time. A conflict in another time, risked for the sake of a more correct history, a conflict that had to be remembered always. A conflict that fed upon big dreams, upon the shattering of big dreams; a conflict that the witnesses of those days had to pay a high price for. The days of his childhood in Madrid, the days in which he used to accompany his father, who was a confirmed communist, to party meetings were scenes of paradise. The distant contours of his mother who had shown him some aspects of Judaism and who struggled against heretical attitudes to celebrate the holy days at home came into view somewhere in this setting. Then the frontier days had come . . . the forced escapes and exiles with all their devastating consequences . . . It was then that he had experienced losses, and partings with one’s loved ones without finding the opportunity to bid farewell. Enrico Weizman was one of the many Spanish communists who had taken refuge in France during the post-war period. The days when Teruel stank of blood and putrefaction had been indelibly trained into his brain. When he had crossed the border he was conscious that he would not be able to return to his country for a good many years. Everybody had to remain on one side of the conflict; in other words, they had to choose sides. His father had risked his life and remained in his own land. One had to understand him. One had to try to understand him. For, it meant suicide . . . suicide . . . He was endowed with life for the sake of that conviction; a life had been built on that conviction. When defeated . . . when dreams were shattered . . . opting for death should be understandable under the circumstances . . . One ought to understand. At the beginning of his exile, he had prepared himself for the grim news of the expected murder of his parents by fascist militia, of that sensitive woman who preserved her strength by keeping silent and of that man who was to remain faithful to his ideals to the very end. In order to start life afresh and cut off his umbilical chord, he had to rely on the truth of this story. The Eden he had lost somewhere along the way had not yet been sullied by an inferno during those days. In that friendly atmosphere that Nesim and Rachael had created for him in a Spanish-speaking environment, which had created in him the impression that he had finally been united with a family, there was nothing out of the ordinary. Human beings could not do without being loved and there were things that he believed he loved regardless of all likelihoods, true or false. The entire countries might be razed to the ground, the boundaries might undergo changes, but man had to preserve a haven for himself no matter what it might be called. One had to feel the existence of a haven from a distance or in close proximity, regardless of all ‘one’s connections.’ It appears that Enrico had still been seeking that haven even on his return to Biarritz after the loss of so many lives, joys, and hopes. The conditions had changed in the meantime, of course. Meanings attributed to human beings, streets, houses, and Sundays had all changed. The haven dreamt of was no longer the same. The haven had to enclose new areas in addition to the seas it encircled. The story of refuges, of the desire to take shelter in something with the whole of one’s being, of his past, of his seas, was the same story, more or less . . . However, this return to oneself seemed to be valid for everybody who took up the challenge. I must also take into consideration the fact that people like Enrico Weizman had already been witness to so many things and had gone through unending tribulations and so could not easily be threatened by anybody. The world they had wound up at was a privileged one, exposed to all sorts of eventualities; it was a privileged world, but one surrounded by massive walls. In order to have a glimpse of that world, we had no means other than mere words and the meanings we attributed to them. To make headway in the story, I needed to find answers to further questions. I should like to know for instance the extent that the new visitor, who had entered his small and private world at an unexpected moment after two years, had exercised his influence on this approach. This encounter with the unexpected visitor reminded me of the old films of adventure and romance that fired the imagination of so many people. This chapter might also begin with the resurgence of a figure who seemed to have vanished somewhere along the way. A person gradually found his way into other people’s bosoms, places reserved for others, and went silently, unconsciously toward a more favored time. This time was necessary for the completion of the story, it was chained to a new story. That new time gave access to a new place. Could one explain away the intrusion of ‘that visitor’ by a design of fate? The assorted answers to this question might be subjective, everybody being desirous to exhibit some aspect of it. The difference of opinions did not matter, in other words. What was important, however, was that a given person would, under the circumstances, have to wait as a substitute to fill in gaps in the story. The trace of that person had long been lost. He lived unconscious of the fact that a person would be writing his story in his shelter known only to a handful of people. He was unaware of the real meaning of deaths and separations. A young and lonely child; a small child who had had to create their own world . . . However, this would not be enough to connect with the other heroes of the story. The words had been given and received in real time. Those willing might go and seek that design of fate in the place where the words were exchanged.

Recollections of the communist fisherwoman Angela and the catholic doorkeeper Madame Manzil

It was a Saturday morning. Enrico Weizman, fresh and vigorous, decided to go to the market to buy fish.

A perfectly ordinary sentence for those not initiated to things hidden between the lines. Had I not been familiar with certain details of this part of the story, I might, to be frank, read this sentence without dwelling on it. Yet, conditions led me once more to witness certain confidential things, certain incidents.

This was my fate. A fate I had devised. I could not bring myself to close my eyes and forget that I had borne testimony to certain things. However, this role pleased me, to be honest. I was not confined merely to words. There were things that I had been trying to conceal as well as positions I wanted to occupy, objectives that I aspired to, and experiences that I wanted to enjoy. Moments get mixed in my memory because of this, partly, and I don’t know with whom and in whom I had exactly invested those moments.

The intelligence that was to help with the reconstruction of my story had returned to its true source after a span of many years. Under the circumstances, I had to reopen my door to errors, nay to imperfections. I could not prevent fantasies from ushering in in this context. Fantasies were more often than not much more fascinating than actual realities; they fostered longevity and sought expression. Therefore I would narrate Enrico Weizman’s story by trying to look at it through the angle of what I saw and heard. The pieces that I wanted to patch up had taken me to destinations I had not foreseen. At present, equipped with the limited data I have in hand, I’m heading for those places, in pursuit of other answers.