The Story of a Life (16 page)

This was how we lived—side by side. We knew her daily schedule and she knew ours. Sometimes she would ask me if I was bored. “I’m never bored,” I would truthfully reply, and she would look surprised. When we were being expelled from our house and sent to the ghetto, she stood in her doorway holding her cat, staring at us as if they weren’t sending us to our deaths, but as if we had somehow taken leave of our senses.

Then came the hungry days of the ghetto, already without Mother and only with Father, who for most of the day was worked like a slave. Our neighbors, the pharmacist Stein and the accountant Feingold, had for some reason not been conscripted for labor, and they were always pushing to the front wherever food was being distributed. These respectable people had changed beyond recognition. Father was angry with them, but I would simply stand and contemplate them. The time they spent in the ghetto had really changed them. Their narrow faces grew broader, and a strange ruddiness bloomed on their cheeks. They became ghetto animals, undeterred by anything. Father’s tendency was always sentimental, in Schiller’s sense. If he didn’t like something, he would condemn it or get rid of it. Father hated the ugly, the warped, and the immoral. He considered mere observation of these things to be a sign of acquiescence to them, of in some way countenancing or even finding pleasure in them. To him, contemplation meant not taking a firm stand. A man is judged by his deeds, not by his thoughts; that was the rule according to which Father lived. He refused to accept reality with equanimity. He always wanted to correct things or, at the very least, to improve them.

I must have inherited the tendency toward contemplation from my mother. She loved to observe. I would often find
her standing by the window, completely lost in thought. It was hard to know if she was gazing at the landscape that could be seen from our window or if she was listening to something that came from within her soul. Never did I find her scrutinizing people. She would make distinctions, and often very subtle ones, as regards the appearance of one person, or the posture of someone else, but she would never stare directly at people. She considered staring to be intrusive, an invasion of someone else’s privacy.

As a child during the hungry days of the ghetto, when I was already on my own, I would sit for hours on the steps of abandoned buildings, or next to puddles, or in the town square with the elderly, just gazing at a triangular balcony, at an old man who suddenly shook his cane and struck a dog, or at a woman sitting and playing cards by herself. Observation always gave me the pleasant sense of being immersed in myself. An hour of observation doesn’t bring one new ideas. It does, however, fill you with colors, sounds, and rhythm. Sometimes an hour of contemplation provides you with a reservoir of feelings that will last for many days. Genuine observation, like music, is devoid of substantive content.

I was eight years old during the time I spent in the ghetto, and I didn’t think about things much; if I thought at all, it was about immediate necessities. I would sit, observing, for hours. The sights flowed toward me and filled me with happiness. At night, what I’d seen during the day would loom enormous and frightening. On one of the last days I spent in the ghetto, I was sitting in the town square and gazing at a group of elderly people who were warming themselves in the sun. All of a sudden one of them got up, came over to me, and gave me a slap on the cheek. I was so astonished that I didn’t stir. And he, seeing that I didn’t move, slapped me again and shouted, “Now you won’t stare anymore. Now you’ll know you shouldn’t stare.”

These unexpected slaps were a step in the budding of my consciousness. For now I knew: observation was not just a matter between me and myself; it also affected other people, and perhaps even hurt them. “Now you won’t stare anymore.” The words echoed within me, as if I had been caught stealing or cheating. Up to then I had been unaware of my secret passion for observation.

This kind of intense desire is not quenched by a mere slap on the cheek. But since receiving those slaps, I have lost the ability to observe spontaneously, to stand right next to something, contemplate it, and absorb it—sometimes for hours on end. From then on, opportunities for observation had to be snatched and stolen. To overcome my fear, I adopted another stratagem: I began to eavesdrop. But when you eavesdrop you can only picture the face of the person, whether he’s tall or short, pleasant or bad. If before that time observation had been one of my sources of happiness, now the happiness became mingled with a sense of sin.

I RETURN TO my days in the army, a difficult time for me. I had already been in Israel for four years, and yet everything was still confusing. The languages that I had brought with me were steadily receding, but I was far from fluent in the Hebrew that I had acquired with so much effort. Harder than this, however, was not having a sense of belonging: living in a country where it was always summer, and stuck in those long barracks during basic training—who was I, and what was I? Although there were quite a few new immigrants among those who had enlisted with me, they seemed to be more involved in what was going on, and, more important, they were stronger than I was. The war years were still coiled within me, and army life seemed to be a continuation of those years, though somewhat transformed: instead of fearing the
forest or the Ruthenian peasants who might suddenly recognize me as a Jewish child, there came another fear: the fear of the sergeant major who made my life miserable day and night.

I survived the war not because I was strong or because I had fought for my existence. I was more like a small animal that had found a temporary shelter in a burrow, that fed on whatever it chanced upon. Danger made me into a child who was attentive to his surroundings, but not into a strong child. I would sit for hours in the forest and observe the underbrush, or sit by the side of a stream and watch the current. Contemplation made me forget about the hunger and the fear, and visions of home would return to me. These hours were perhaps the most joyful ones, if one can use this description to describe life during a war. The little boy who was on the verge of getting lost—or even killed—in that savage foreign land could go back to being the child of his father and his mother: walking with them along summer streets, an ice-cream cone in his hand, or swimming with them in the River Prut. These hours of grace preserved me from spiritual extinction at the time, and afterward as well, when I traveled through Europe after the war and during my years in the youth village. I would sit in contemplation, wrapping myself in sights and sounds, connecting with my previous life, and feeling happy not to be just another one of the anonymous thousands who surrounded me.

In the army I was suddenly deprived of this quiet, secret experience. I did not have so much as an hour to myself. To stave off my misery, I learned how to be contemplative even when in the midst of a bustling crowd. It was not the kind of contemplation that awakens one’s soul, brings happiness, or expands the mind, but it was a highly practical form of observation: who’s good and who’s bad, who’s selfish and who’s generous.

During my army service, I learned to what extent the
experiences of my childhood in the ghetto and in the camp had been ingrained in me. At the youth village there were the written and unwritten watchwords: “forget,” “set down roots,” “speak Hebrew,” “improve your appearance,” “cultivate your masculinity.” These messages did their work. Anyone who internalized them, adopted them, and lived by them found army life easier. But with me it was quite the opposite: during my service, visions of the ghetto and memories of the camp resurfaced, perhaps because I once again found myself enclosed and threatened. I envied my friends who had also come from the camps; it seemed as though their memories had been erased. It was as if they were free of the past and rooted in this new reality, relishing the food and the sunshine, even the daily and nightly army maneuvers. But for me, as if deliberately to spite me, my time in the ghetto and in the camp seemed to become clearer, and more tangible. If, for a while during my years in the youth village, it seemed that the past was dead and buried, during my army service images that I hadn’t seen for years were brought to the surface. To my astonishment, these events were absolutely clear, as if they had taken place yesterday and not earlier.

The army didn’t toughen me up. On the contrary, it only intensified my contemplative tendencies. When you are engaged in contemplation, you retreat from yourself, you envelop yourself in a melody that rises up from inside you. You build yourself a shelter, or sometimes elevate yourself, in order to observe from afar. At the time I didn’t yet know that this contemplation was quietly equipping me for the role that fate had intended for me.

I learned that a person sees only what he has already been shown. In the ghetto and in the camp I saw people at their lowest levels. I saw untrammeled selfishness, but, again, I also saw tremendous generosity. True, selfishness was more frequent and generosity rarer, but what have in fact been
engraved into my memory are those moments of clarity and humanity, when a doomed man was able to set aside his petty and narrow self-interest and sacrifice himself for another. Such rare moments not only showed that man is better than a lowly insect—they also brought some light into the darkness.

During my army service, I met many generous soldiers who helped me. I lost my canteen and would have been put on trial for loss of equipment but for an anonymous soldier who came by and handed me another one. My last pennies had been spent, and I had no money to buy a pack of cigarettes, when another soldier came by and offered me a banknote. In those years there was no one I was close to in Israel, but these good people appeared on just those occasions when despair might have engulfed me.

I made a survey and a reckoning: every person I knew who was saved during the war was saved solely by the grace of someone who, at a time of great danger, extended a hand to him. It was not God that we saw in the camps, but good people. The old Jewish saying that the world continues to exist only by virtue of a few righteous people is as true today as it was back then.

My army service was important for me not because it forged my character or instilled in me new values, but because it led me back to that which was the source of my life. The life that I had lost during the war and my memory of it had begun to disappear, but it was in the army that it came alive, and it was in the army that I came to understand that the world I had left behind—parents, home, street, and city—was alive within me. Everything that had happened to me or that was about to happen to me was connected to the world from which I had sprung. The moment I realized this, I ceased being an orphan dragging his orphanhood behind him and became someone who was able to confront the world.

THERE ARE DEMONS everywhere, but in some places they can be seen. During one of my army leaves, I was accosted by a man who claimed that I had done him an injustice after the war.

“In what way?” I asked. I tried to defend myself. “When the war broke out I was seven years old, and when it ended I was barely thirteen.”

“Age is irrelevant.”

“What are you accusing me of?”

“I shouldn’t have to tell you, you know exactly what.”

“But why not tell me?”

“This time the wrongdoer should speak, not the victim,” he declared cryptically, and seemed pleased with what he had just said.

“That’s not fair.”

“You’re
looking for fairness—
you
?!
”
he retorted, and was gone.

This outlandish accusation, in the heart of Netanya,
made me furious, but I didn’t do anything. I was very much alone that year. In fact, I felt consumed by loneliness. On weekends and holidays, the other soldiers would return to their homes while I remained at the base. The heat and the training overwhelmed me. When I got leave for an evening, I would sit in a café and watch the women pass by. I knew not a single man or woman in the town, and any attempt at striking up a conversation was rebuffed. “Piss off!” one woman lashed out at me. “Find yourself a whore, and don’t bother us passersby.”

The heat and the exhausting training left no room for thought, only for vague fears. I would sit in the café, drink a couple of glasses of lemonade and a cup of coffee, take a walk along the beach, and return to the camp. My loneliness must have been apparent even in the way I walked, because people distanced themselves from me, with the exception of the man who kept accosting me. I was beginning to resent him, and I feared he’d provoke me to violence.

Once I confronted him. “Beat it! If you don’t beat it—I’ll beat you.”

“I’m not afraid,” he said, and it was plain that he wasn’t.

To my repeated question as to what kind of injustice he was referring to, he refused to respond. Yet I could tell that he had been born in my region, because he spoke the same type of German that we spoke at home.

“When and where did this happen?” Again I tried to get to the bottom of it.

“It’s not for us to testify,” he insisted, using the plural.

I avoided him and went on my way. Our training was at its most intensive, and even on those nights when they allowed us to leave the camp, I would stay in, because I was exhausted.

One evening, while I was strolling along the beach, my
accuser showed up and again began making his false accusations. I told him to leave me alone but, out of stubbornness or stupidity, he refused to budge. To get him to go away, I stepped right up close to him. He retreated a few paces, and then stood there. I could see how skinny and slight he was, so I held myself back and did not touch him. But when he continued to accost me with his mumblings, my patience vanished, and I grabbed him. He was as light as a sack of straw. I could have picked him up and sent him flying, but for some reason I forced him down, till he lay sprawled on the sand. Though he thrashed about with his arms and legs, he still would not shut up. I could have trampled him with my army boots.