Sunrise West (8 page)

On the eighth of May 1945

I walked out of camp

a homeless tramp.

Out of camp into an open world, but with nowhere to go. Suddenly freedom, but without being free. So much to celebrate, but with whom?

In the small hours of the night I discovered my own corpse, lying on a heap of other corpses outside the crematorium. They were really only bones, covered in a veneer of skin with no flesh to speak of. ‘Who sent for you? Who needs you?' said the bones. ‘We were here first. Where's your respect?'

‘Friends, please,' my corpse replied. ‘Surely we're all one brotherhood. Is it not written somewhere that only by knowing death can one begin to live? Doesn't this put us in an enviable position?'

‘Oho, that damned socialist, I remember him from the ghetto,' scoffed a nearby skeleton. ‘Even there he spoke of brotherhood, how only an exiled nation can understand its true meaning, how only a people in exile can be true children of the prophets. When our Messiah arrives we'll make
sure that your kind, with your rotten jargon, remain outside the gates of our promised land.'

‘You forget,' another pile of bones cut in, ‘that we're too far gone. We ourselves are tired of waiting, and our prophet Ezekiel lies dead.'

I felt my body recoil in alarm. ‘How can you say that? I disagree wholeheartedly with your cynicism. Life is worth living even in the most heinous of circumstances. Remember what a great bard once wrote:
the worst is not, so long as we can say “this is the worst”
. I can see that you dwell on the very brink — only your will, only your imagination can protect you now from sinking into an abyss of iniquity.'

That last remark drove the bony corpses into paroxysms of laughter, a crazy rattling laughter, like a ghostly refrain from deep inside a hollow-throated chorus.

But I was prepared to argue my case. ‘Please, sirs, don't laugh at imagination. Any worthwhile poet will confirm that fantasy outlives death. Trust me, this is a profound truth, on which I have built my whole world.'

‘Stop him, somebody stop him!' shrilled the bony heap. ‘His words, God forbid, might deprive us of our daily bread!'

‘Don't make fun of me,' I replied, trying to remain calm. ‘Don't take fantasy so lightly. Think of Noah. His ark was but a hoax, and so was his white dove. He only dreamt it all, yet the dream saved his life.'

‘Maybe so,' a youngish cadaver retorted, ‘but you still have no place here amongst us.'

‘I have, I definitely have! There is no reason why you should view me as an outcast. I belong to you, not to the
world ruled by bullies and sadists. Yes, I know that the Great Leper himself is dead, but his bequest lives on, and I fear that the wicked will again give birth to a new brood of reigning bandits, fools, despisers of memory.'

‘Well, long live stupidity!' the first skeleton cried. ‘Sages are thinkers not doers. Fools are the ones that build. Look at us — where would we go now if not for the furnace?'

It is early morning. A translucent blue sheet of ice hangs above the town; there is no sun. I am entering a dimly-lit café. No one acknowledges me, yet everyone is strangely aware of my presence. In the tense silence I can hear their condemning eyes, see the deceit on their numb lips.

They wait to find out what I will say, though they know that my words will be irrelevant.

What unsettles them most is my striped uniform. And my previous night's vision, embossed on my forehead forever.

 

 
Everywhere Nowhere
 

We met outside Ebensee, shortly after liberation. ‘Now that the Germans have gone, who will look after us?' he asked with a half-smile.

I didn't answer — I knew that such a question, bizarre as it might seem, afflicted many prisoners who had grown accustomed to a life of slavery. But I could see that he was a sad jester, with a pressing need to talk. Besides, he looked vaguely familiar. So I let him talk.

‘I remember you from ghetto,' he said. ‘My name was Maximilian Zacharski — now I call myself Moshe Zakhor. Before the war we lived in a spacious apartment on Narutowicza Street. My father, Szymon Zacharski, was a wonderful man, a renowned tailor who worked only for the military, mainly high-ranking officers. He wore a Piłsudski moustache, called himself Stanisław — a ferocious assimilator who advocated that Jews should make themselves socially invisible. He refused to speak anything but Polish. “Poland is our fatherland,” he would tell me.'

‘Friend,' I cut in, ‘your father's beliefs were mine as well, though I suffered many disappointments. But I still can't erase from my memory those days when Jew and Pole marched arm in arm beneath the flutter of red flags. I was once a member of the Bund, a party of humble people that believed strongly in integration, though never, ever, at the price of losing their integrity.'

He nodded, impatient to continue. ‘My mother Miriam, known as Magda, was a beautiful, restless woman, much younger than father. She was slim, with sky-blue eyes and a proud bearing. He idolized her. Gentiles didn't know she was Jewish — they couldn't understand why a woman like her had married a Jew. Anyway, before the ghetto was sealed he urged her to run away, perhaps one of his highly-placed clients could assist. There were negotiations, an exchange of money, but at the last moment the sympathetic client had a change of heart. And in the end her Aryan looks didn't help her either. As you know, my friend, betraying Jews became a lucrative source of income. And it wasn't just the financial reward. To my mind, the murder of Jews
through the ages was always the most effective pagan rebellion against authentic Christianity.'

He smiled bitterly and awaited a response, but I remained silent. ‘So, what do you intend to do?' he asked at last. ‘Palestine is closed, the quota for America is as long as the Jewish exile, England has shut her gates, as in the good old days. We're displaced persons now — is that a future?'

‘My friend Raymond is going back home to France. I'll probably go back to Poland, the land of my birth, where our people lived for a thousand years.' And, yielding to a poetic impulse, I added: ‘Where the great Vistula speaks my tongue, where my beloved silver birches pray to God in the silence... Someone over there, Moshe, is surely awaiting my return, ready to welcome me with open arms.'

‘No, no!' he cried. ‘In your old home, people of stone now dwell. You think they await you? — maybe they
lie in wait
for you! Just itching to finish the job.'

‘There are always the hoodlums. Most people over there are not like that.'

‘Please,' he fired back, then shook his head. ‘There is nothing more difficult than to convince a fool.'

‘No, wait! People are people, everywhere — some are good and some are evil.' I was prepared to argue the point vehemently. ‘After all, have
we
always been such angels?'

‘Listen,' said Moshe, gesturing for me to stay calm. ‘I know we're not angels, that we're also capable of evil. But think of what we've been through, think of all the evil
we've
suffered and witnessed. And let's not forget: evil begets evil.'

The day was about to depart and there was a chill in the air. Moshe touched my shoulder and half-turned, as if about to take his leave. ‘You know,' he said, ‘when I was younger I thought very much like you.' He fell silent but seemed reluctant to go. I could tell that something was lingering within him, something he was unable to impart. What a solitary vessel is man, I thought, with language such an imperfect means of navigation, especially when the waters become unnavigable — around camp survivors, for instance. I suddenly felt that our conversation had shaken my new acquaintance.

He nodded distantly, privately, and with a deep sigh began again.

‘Do you remember a man called Joseph Gross in our ghetto, a little fellow with a lugubrious face? His enormous eyes were always tearful. Before the war he was an amateur boxer in Germany; in ghetto he was a steam-presser. I can still recall the song he used to sing. It was enough to break your heart...

‘
Die Welt ist so gross,

Für dich ist sie klein;

Ein Land ist noch frei,

Du kommst nicht hinein;

Ein Tür ist noch auf,

Für dich ist sie zu;

Kein Platz in der Welt,

Ein Jude bist du.'

 

 
Survivors
 

We led a symbiotic existence: shadows on a precipitous rock, holding on to one another, defying night. The ever-talkative Moshe repeated the story about his parents. As for me, I had not yet divulged my own past to anyone — very few people spoke about the past. Why was this? Did we suffer a kind of mental paralysis? Had Germany succeeded in destroying our inner selves? Or was it simply a fear of remembering?

I spent many an hour with Zakhor. His mood shuttled between murkiness and jest, though there were times when I thought the jester within him had died. I had once read that Shakespeare removed the Fool at a critical point in
King Lear
because the great bard understood that true tragedies cannot accommodate jest.

But there was also another reason, gnawing not only at Moshe's heart but eating away at all of us: the question of a kind of shame at being the ones who had made it through the storm. How do you go on living when you know that all your dear ones are dead? How do you continue struggling with such a knowledge, too fearful to articulate? What sort of faith can there be about the future? In the small hours of the night I had a vision: I saw Moshe Zakhor with a cloud of mist around his head, and as he walked towards the sun his shadow preceded him. I was puzzled. How could anyone walk with both the sun and his shadow
before
him?

As with many of my other dreams, I didn't mention this one to Zakhor. I dreaded its sinister meaning. How could I tell my friend about his future shadow? I began to realize,
more than ever, that a man — especially a survivor — is truly a solitary island protected by dangerous, rocky waters. One has to be an extremely skilled sailor to moor one's words safely on the shores of such an island without causing untold damage.