Authors: Michel Laub
My father was a fairly keen reader. Yet despite that, I can only remember him mentioning perhaps ten books during my adolescence. Maybe no more than five. And the reason I can only remember the title of one of those five,
If This Is a Man
, which he acquired in a foreign edition, is because he was constantly reading out the descriptions of how a concentration camp worked, the nights Primo Levi had to share his bed with a watchmaker, the stories about high and low numbers, jobs, uniforms, soup.
My father quoted from
If This Is a Man
during the first serious argument we had. It was in the second term of the year in which I had my bar mitzvah, when I told him I wanted to leave the school. By that time, things had already changed, I had severed all ties with my former friends. I didn’t even talk to them and had already become accustomed to being ignored by them too: from one day to the next, people start turning their back on you, they stop phoning or asking you so much as to lend them a pencil and, in the space of a week, you no longer feel able to talk about this with anyone, a state of affairs that can easily last for what remains of
your school life, because there’s nothing more difficult when you’re thirteen than changing your label.
At thirteen I was the student who had been summoned by the coordinator to talk about João’s fall. Before summoning the parents of the other boys involved, she had a talk with each of us, one by one, and I was the last. Her office was decorated with drawings that the younger children had done to celebrate the school’s anniversary. My classmates waffled on to her, praising everything they saw in the room, what lovely drawings, it’s amazing how creative children are nowadays, is that a cross or a plane? My classmates praised her clothes, her hair, her children’s smiles in the framed photos, and nine out of ten times they managed to get away without having to sign the disciplinary card.
Three signatures meant a suspension, but in some cases the punishment was applied immediately: no classes for two days, which wasn’t so bad out of exam time, but obviously that wasn’t the only thing that changed the way I was viewed at school. It wasn’t just
that the others who let João fall were punished. It was what happened at my meeting with the coordinator: I went into her room determined to say nothing, to keep repeating that it had been an accident, but she received me with a smile and offered me a cup of coffee and a piece of cake and started asking questions about João’s party, and I began to remember the party all over again, and she kept talking and I felt no desire to praise the drawings and the photos, and I was troubled by her gentle tone of voice, asking me if I thought that had been a safe, sensible game to play, if it had occurred to me that I might hurt my classmate, if I knew that his family had difficulties paying the school fees, and at a certain point her questions and the memory of João’s father at the party and the thought of him in the park selling cotton candy so that he could throw a birthday party where João would be humiliated by his classmates in front of his family became mingled with a feeling of faintness, and I began to think I was about to be ill, that I needed to lie down, needed air because the windows were all closed, and still she waited for an answer until she saw the blood drain from my face and then, almost at the same time as I was vomiting up the coffee and the cake and everything else I’d eaten during the previous two
days, I told her that the story about the fall being an accident was a lie.
My father asked what was wrong with school, and I felt unable to explain. I didn’t want to tell him that after being sick and then recovering in the coordinator’s office, I had told her all the details, about João being buried in the sand, about the plan to let him fall after we had given him the bumps, about everyone else who had been part of the plan and how we’d carried that plan out at the party. I didn’t want to tell him that the news was all round the school within half an hour, and that the whole of the seventh grade knew I had told on my classmates, and that the coordinator had suspended everyone except me, and that I had got away with just a warning.
In other schools there was an admissions period that began in November, with written exams, an interview, a visit and a chat with the student’s parents. In Porto Alegre there were schools run by priests, by nuns, German schools, English schools, girls’ schools, crammer schools, and João had done really well in the
tests for one particular school that had an excellent record when it came to getting its students through the university entrance exam, and so it was easy for his father to secure him a scholarship with an equally favorable discount.
I never had the chance to go to a school like yours, my father said. I only ever studied in schools where there were no other Jews. I was the only Jew out of five hundred students, he said, and you don’t know what it’s like to spend the whole day studying, knowing that at any moment someone is sure to remember that. One day, someone notices you for the first time and what he sees is that you’re a Jew. Even if you make friends with everyone, that’s what they’ll always say. Even if you’re top of the class in every subject, that’s what they’ll always throw in your face.
My father used to say that Jews should always choose professions that can be practiced in any circumstances, because from one moment to the next you could be forced to leave the country where you’ve always lived and you can’t rely on a language that isn’t
spoken anywhere else, or on a knowledge of laws that don’t apply anywhere else, that’s why it’s good to be a doctor or a dentist or an engineer or a tradesman, because that will guarantee you an income regardless of what the neighbors may say about you, and they’ll say what people will always say about Jews, that you steal other people’s jobs, that you lend money at interest, that you exploit, plot, threaten, oppress.
I studied law at university, then went into journalism, and then became a writer, by which time my father had stopped staring at me, eyes bulging, as he tried to convince me that we were still in the Germany of 1937. When I was thirteen it was different, and because he wouldn’t accept my decision to join João at the new school, because he refused to discuss the matter whenever I brought it up, because our arguments became so fierce that I was permanently grounded, with me telling him that I wouldn’t study at all next term, that I would run away from home if he didn’t change his mind and that he had a deadline by which to make a decision, the date on which enrollment at João’s new school closed, for all those reasons I began to hate everything to do with Nazism and my grandfather.
My father had my grandfather’s notebooks translated because he needed a record of those memories, and because he was the only one who would be interested, a son reading the description of his own birth in his own father’s words, my grandfather saying that
the birth of a child crowns a husband’s decision to seal his union with his wife
, and that there is no happier event in a man’s life than
the day he accompanies his wife to the hospital to give birth to a child
.
My grandmother’s pregnancy was high risk. She suffered from hypertension and had a problem with her cervix. It was fairly common at the time for there to be complications, deaths from eclampsia or a hospital infection picked up immediately after giving birth were far more frequent, and little was known about the effects of diabetes and heart problems and smoking and viruses on the health of the pregnant woman. The way people reacted to such risks was also quite different: it wasn’t uncommon for a pregnancy to be terminated for fear the mother’s life might be in danger, and my grandfather’s descriptions of the time
are all imbued with that subtext, what to do with my grandmother when the doctor recommended that she should spend the final months of her pregnancy at home, in bed if possible, without getting up and preferably without moving.
What decision to take about a pregnancy that could have killed my grandmother? What did my grandfather say to her when he found out about this risk? How did my grandfather deal with the matter, what words did he use to express his wish to have a child at that moment, what did a child mean to him, would he be capable of devoting himself to a child, and because of that child forget about the past and all the dreadful things he had seen and suffered because of it?
The same notebooks that describe a public baths in the center of the Porto Alegre of 1945 as
a place where the most rigorous hygiene regime flourishes
, a butcher’s shop attached to a poultry slaughterhouse in the Porto Alegre of 1945 as
a business where the animals are
treated according to the most rigorous of hygiene regimes
, a kennel in the Porto Alegre of 1945 as a place where
the animals are treated according to the most rigorous and humane of hygiene regimes
, those same notebooks say that the decision to go ahead with my grandmother’s pregnancy was taken
without hesitation and speak of the expectation of a new life that had long been planned by the husband and of his profound desire for continuity and a loving, giving relationship
.
Hospital — a place where doctors patiently explain to the pregnant woman the very low degree of risk involved in any pregnancy and the equally low risk involved in having a Caesarean and the nonexistent risk of infection after the birth given the hospital’s rigorous hygiene procedures which extend to the bathrooms with hot running water and to the toilets, which are cleaned every hour, and to the care assistants who apply these rigorous hygiene procedures throughout the day, using disinfectants, sterilizing agents and quarantine. There is nothing at the hospital that need trouble the husband of the pregnant woman, whose child will put the seal on the continuity of their loving, giving relationship should he choose to walk down the corridor alone or go home in order to be alone
.
My grandfather continues to discourse upon the ideal baby, how to care for the ideal baby, the father’s relationship with the ideal baby,
a small autonomous creature who never cries at night and never contracts diseases such as hepatitis or the common cold
, and the truly alarming thing is that he filled sixteen notebooks, measuring twenty-eight centimeters by nineteen, each with nearly one hundred pages, each page having thirty-one lines, filled with a prose that leaves no doubt as to how my grandfather dealt with his memories.
My father was born at five o’clock on a Monday afternoon, but I don’t know if the day was sunny or gloomy, cold or hot, dry or humid, because my grandfather doesn’t bother to mention it. My grandfather filled sixteen notebooks without once saying what he felt about my father, not one honest, open remark, not one word of the kind one usually finds in the memoirs of concentration camp survivors, about how life goes on after you leave a place like Auschwitz, the renewal of hope when they have a child after leaving Auschwitz, the rediscovery of joy on seeing that child growing up like a riposte to everything they saw in
Auschwitz, and just the horror of knowing that someone survived Auschwitz only to waste all their free time on that sterile enterprise, on the pointless, inexplicable exercise of imagining every real phenomenon as something to be transformed into its exact opposite, to the point that all defects, all features disappear, along with the characteristics that allow those things and places and people to be appreciated for what they really are, that horror must somehow be related to Auschwitz and to the way in which my grandfather always behaved toward my father.
I’ve never asked my father what memories he has of his childhood, if my grandfather sang the lullabies that Jewish parents used to sing to their children before Auschwitz was built, if my grandfather embraced him as Jewish parents used to embrace their children before Auschwitz was opened, if my grandfather defended him as Jewish parents throughout history used to defend their children before Auschwitz was functioning at full capacity, because that is what a father does for a child, he protects and teaches and showers him with affection and with physical and material comforts, and the way in which my father
dealt with the subject of Judaism and the concentration camps must, in some way, be connected to those memories — how he related what he saw and knew and felt about my grandfather with what he read and knew and felt about Auschwitz.
It’s difficult to say what my first memory of my father is. It’s possible that you associate a smell or a taste or a sensation of warmth with the evocation of something you would have no way of holding in your memory, as if you were looking at yourself from the outside, in a cradle beside your father’s bed, and you talk about it because it’s a relatively common scene, and innumerable emotional and cultural references mean that the initial relationship between father and baby should, in some way, be linked to that scene, the cradle and the blankets and the smile of someone whom you sense or know is as close to you as anyone can be.
I’m incapable of remembering what my father smelled like when I was a child. People’s smell changes with age, just as their skin and their voice change too, and when you speak of your childhood it may be that you
associate the image of your father then with the image you have of your father now. And so when I remember him bringing me a tricycle as a present, or showing me how a sewing machine works, or asking me to read out a few words from the newspaper, or talking to me about the things one talks about with a child of three, four, seven, thirteen, when I remember all those things the image I have of him is the image I have of him today, his hair and face, my father much thinner and wearier and more bent than he is in old photos that I’ve only ever seen at most five times in my life.
When I remember my father forbidding me to change schools, the voice I hear is his voice today, and I wonder if something similar is happening with him: if the memory he has of me at thirteen gets confused with the image he has of me now, after everything he has learned about me in the last almost three decades, an accumulation of facts that erase all the stumbling blocks along the road to here, and if what I experienced as a decisive chapter in my life, the argument we had over my wanting to change schools, might for him be merely a banal fact, one of the many things that happened at home and at work and in the life he
had with my mother and with the other people who were around during his son’s adolescence.