Shadows in Paradise
Page 37
I returned to an unfamiliar world. At the museum in Brussels no one could tell me what had happened since I had left. People remembered the man who had saved me, but no one knew what had become of him. For several years I searched for him and his murderers. I searched in vain for my father. In the bitterness of my return to Germany. I often thought of Kahn; he had been right It was a return to a strange country, a return to indifference, cowardice, and concealed hatred. No one remembered having belonged to the party. No one accepted responsibility for what he had done. I wasn't the only one with a false name. Hundreds had changed passports and gone scot-free—a new generation of murderers. The occupation authorities were well-intentioned, but there was little they could dp; they depended for their information on Germans who either feared retaliation or whose code of honor forbade them to "soil their own nest" I never found the face from the crematorium; no one remembered the name or what he had done; many had no recollection that concentration camps had ever existed. I came up against silence, against walls of fear and indifference. The people were tired, I was told; they themselves had suffered too much through the war to worry their heads off about others. The one thing they were never too tired to think about was making money. But wasn't that natural? The Germans were not revolutionaries. They were a people who took orders. Orders were their substitute for conscience. How could a man be held responsible for what he had done under orders?
The story of my comings and goings in those years is blurred in my mind and has no place in these notes. Little by little the memory of Natasha gathered strength. I thought of her without regret and without remorse, but now for the first time I fully understood what she had meant to me. In the crucible of my futile searchings and bitter disappointments, the crude ore of memory became purest gold. The farther our time together receded into the past the more shattering became my realization that Natasha had been the most important experience of my life. No sentimentality entered in, not even regret that I had found this out too late. If I had known it then, Natasha would probably have left me. I felt certain that if it had not been for my independence, she would not have stayed with me so long, and if I had not taken her too lightly, I would not have been so independent. Sometimes I reflected that if I had known what awaited me in Europe, I might have stayed on in America. But these were random thoughts; they brought neither tears nor despair, for I knew that if I had stayed, I would not have known what I now knew. But I also knew that there was no going back. One can never go back; nothing and no one is ever the same. All that remained was an occasional evening of sadness, the sadness that we all feel because everything passes and because man is the only animal who knows it.