An international festival—a few days of devotion to joy, before the regime returns to its everyday gray.
And I, a stranger at the celebration. Only an “alibi” for another mission, which no one in fact has assigned to me. Yes, a few addresses for it’s impossible-not-to-accept-with-a-letter-to-take before setting out. Backs of houses, yards covered with trash and rubble. Staircase supported by boards. Number 72, apartment 9A. Two old people in the doorway. A kitchen black with soot. Examining me, the letter, with a scared look.
Sneaking back to the ongoing celebration, just so they won’t find out.
It’s only because of sloppiness that they haven’t yet arrested me.
And then, early one misty morning, wrapped in a coat, at the railroad station. Among hundreds of people in a line. Buying a ticket to Krakow with black-market zlotys . . . to the regions of my real trip.
Getting off the train, and simply walking into the light-flooded square among ancient buildings, whose carved facades are sparkling in the sun. Walking among the other people on the boulevard with the autumn chestnut trees, on Planty, Mother’s route to the tennis courts. Autumn leaves struggle on my shoes. Entering the Rynek Square resounding around itself. The Renaissance arches, the Sukiennice market in the middle like an island in the heart of a lagoon of light, the breeze rising from the Virgin Mary Church . . . all those names, with a soft “r” as I (“wonderful child!”: the only two words I understood in the foreign language) would accompany Mother to the nightly suppers on an aunt’s balcony with a smell of down comforters and the saltiness of the sea air on hot Tel Aviv nights, when friends from “there” would gather. All those names, when the conversation would climb in the foreign tremolo, and in the café downstairs, the yard of the building, the cards would be shuffled on tables.The places frozen in slides on the wall of the high school, in commemorations held with a sudden frenzy. Places that were stopped in the thirties, with an amazed look of some Jew who came on the camera by mistake ... The warm-cool air caresses the fur of my coat, my face, moves the parasols over the flower vendors’ booths.
The road rises to a high hill overlooking the city and the Vistula River. Above, the Wawel Castle covered in ivy burning with autumn leaves. And here, on the slope, along the banks of the Vistula, the way to Paulinska Street, Mother’s street.
The three o’clock twilight lingers and softens. Mothers with babies in buggies at the river (Mothers and babies? Still? Here?). Paulinska Street. On the secret side of the street the wall of a convent, and behind it fruit trees. Someone passes by on the corner. A woman in a heavy coat and old boots. Number eight. The staircase floored with blue tiles. A list of tenants in fountain pen. First floor on the left—a strange name. The door is locked. On the first floor a balcony. Closed glass doors, covered with lace curtains.
To throw a stone at them mischievously, a schoolbag on the back and stockings stretched up to the knee? As I used to walk over there, dressed carefully by Mother, among the children giggling at my different clothes. To sit down at a steaming lunch, close to the breath of forefathers I never saw? Only crumbs of medicines and old lipsticks in drawers of the aunt who died.That silence.The quiet of houses.Take a picture. A picture of air? Quiet. Across the street, in the convent garden, a bell rings. Children pour out of the gates of the school, climb on the fences, chew on apples.
Spotted facades and the street spins. Not far from there, Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter. The soot of trams on the doorsills of the houses. In the windows of the reform synagogue, the “Temple,” spiderwebs, and in the yard a tangle of weeds. In the alley of one of the houses is a blurred sign in Yiddish, “Prayer house.” The big synagogue is empty and whitewashed. Turned into a museum. Only a guard passes by like a shadow along the walls, and two fragments of tiles from back then are embedded in the entrance.
It’s late now. I wander along the track to the cemetery. Here at least I am sent by permission, to an address that does exist, to the graves of the family. The gate is closed. There is no one to ask. Everything is closed.
An evening full of mist. Suddenly the trams are hurrying. The voices of the flower vendors in the Rynek are swallowed up in the fog.To go to the reserved hotel? In Krakow? Like going to a hotel in Tel Aviv instead of returning home. The desk clerk scurries up to help: “Yes, of course, Madam, here’s the bus schedule to Auschwitz. From the town of Oswiecim, you have to go on foot a bit.”
On the table at the entrance of the hotel are old newspapers. Two elderly lady tourists are interested in a jazz festival that may not take place. And there, at the foot of the stairs, on the way to the room, the movement that had swept me up ever since early morning stops. No, just not to return alone to the gigantic radio in the strange room! I buttoned the coat and went out in pursuit of a dubious rumor that I’d heard. Slawskowska Street. Maybe . . .
And indeed, in the dark, in Yiddish, among the artisans’ signs, a small address: “Mordechai Gebirtig15 Culture Club.” A door at the edge of a yard. A doorman sits at the entrance. And in the depths, in the gloom, a few frozen figures are playing cards, gazing vacantly behind the wooden frames of newspapers. “Israel!” the doorman sits up straight, leads me with sudden importance to the “board” room. Five wrinkled faces rise up to me: “Israel!” They sit me down in the middle, following my efforts in a mixture of basic German, a few words in Yiddish, and gestures. They nod at length in deep wonder at every word, assault one another in noisy arguments. Finally, they answer together, in a strange chorus: “Ha! Yes, Poser’s daughter! Poser and Abeles,” they nod: “Buttons, buttons!” “Yes, buttons,” I affirm; “a button factory.” “The Hebrew high school,” I continue. “Yes, the high school. Now a Polish technical school.” The Christian cook serves me a sandwich with a lot of bread and a cup of tea. They dismiss her with the superiority of a bygone age, and urge me: “Eat, eat.” For a moment, they go back to their business. The “chairman” is dictating a petition to the “secretary” about the cultural situation. To whom? On behalf of whom? Still? Like those stenciled pages in cellars and photographs of pale-faced choirs that were presented every Holocaust Memorial Day in the glass cabinets of the school. I attempt to explain; they will certainly understand that it’s impossible to get on a bus and simply ask the driver in a foreign language to tell me where to get off for Auschwitz. They certainly have their own ways of getting there. And indeed, it turns out that tomorrow, a “delegation of rabbis from America” is about to come, and they will go in a special bus. When will they arrive? When will they go? Where are they now? Impossible to know. Got to wait.
I want to sneak away from them now, back to the big square. To go into an anonymous café with drunkards. To be swallowed up there. But they hang onto me, wrapped up in their coats, accompany me to the hotel. Argue with outbursts of rancor, finally declare that the “secretary” will come to “guide me” tomorrow morning. They all press around, shake my hand. Downtrodden faces. So small. In threadbare coats.
In the room the suitcase is waiting, with a few things. Makeup, passport. Will have to go on and move it. Impossible to hide in the suffocation under the blanket.
The next morning, before I have time to ponder the other world in my dreams, the “secretary” is already here, dragging me with soft-limbed domination. Turning me around in dark streets, getting on and off trams, talking incessantly in the incomprehensible language, as if to herself. And I plod behind her, bending down to her, making an effort.
In Kazimierz, on the bench across from the synagogue, the doorman of the “Mordechai Gebirtig Culture Club” and two old men are already waiting for me. It’s not clear if they’re beggars or rabbis. They came to welcome the “American delegation.” The doorman waving as he approaches, “Yes, yes!” One of the old men hurries me, opens the gates of the ancient synagogue of Rabbi Moshe Isserlish. For a minute, a separate hush. The figures that follow in my wake remain beyond the fence. A small building whose heavy walls are leaning, and a white courtyard. Inside the synagogue, there is
still a warmth among the wooden benches, around the Ark of the Covenant. On the tables are old prayer books. Black letters. And in the small enclosure crows land on the ancient tombstones sunk in the mist. For a moment the past seems to continue with all its softness, without any obstacle, in that distant murmur, up to the morning covered with mist, to me.
And the doorman is already rushing me hysterically; he arranged with the gatekeeper of the Miodowa cemetery to be there, to open the gate. Hurry, hurry, got to get back in time for the “delegation of rabbis!” And thus, in single file, the doorman limping, the muscular Christian gatekeeper on his heels, and I behind them, we march between long rows of sunken, shattered gravestones, covered with mold. Names, names. I recite to them the names I’ve managed to dredge up from my memory, “Poser, Mendel, Groner.” Tombstones in long rows whose edges vanish in mist and piles of fallen leaves. Many strange names. Don’t find. A Christian woman with legs swathed in bandages rinses the graves with boiling water, raises her head wrapped in a turban to us: “Yes, Groner, saw it once . . . maybe there.” I still hold on, persist in reading the names, seeking under piles of leaves. But the limping doorman and the gatekeeper behind him are already hurrying out. We didn’t find. No maps. No books. No witnesses. Mission impossible. Only a delusion of mission. And time is limited.
Meanwhile on the bench the number of idlers and “rabbis” waiting for the “American delegation” has grown. According to the doorman, they are already in Krakow and will arrive very soon. Maybe you can find out in the hotel when they’ll arrive? No, impossible to know. I break away from the doorman, tell him I’ll come back in a little while, he should beg the rabbis of the delegation to wait, and I hurry to Wawel Castle, for the visit that was arranged. On the streets people in gray coats, buses, trams.You can even eat an apple. The body goes on functioning over the abyss between the worlds. And when I come back from the royal palace, from the halls with waxed floors whose walls are covered with embroidered tapestries of feast and forest, devoured by torments of treason, I run down the slope carpeted with fallen leaves, back to Kazimierz, to my Jews. From the end of the street, the doorman stumbles toward me. He drops his hands in a gesture of dismissal; “Well, the American delegation . . . a call came that they didn’t leave America. Well, the fog, they didn’t leave America.”
Empty. No one there. Even the idlers who were waiting on the bench have gone home.
Entrusted with the last mission, the doorman rushes me into the community organization offices. Second floor, a smell of boiled potatoes, a few old people with tin plates and spoons. Even the bright light filtering from the shutters doesn’t bring the scene in the room any closer. Around the enormous table sit the activists of the “congregation,” their chins leaning on their hands, and their crutches leaning on the chairs. A few old portraits on the walls. At the head of the table, Mr. Jacobovitch, an irascible Jew, head of the community organization. The mutual curiosity dies out after a few sentences, and after I am given the travel arrangements I slip out impolitely. I also flee from the kosher meal of mashed potatoes on a tin plate and the ritual washing of the hands in a stained sink, to Sukiennice Square, to the light, to the fancy café with red velvet chairs and torte powdered like the cheeks of the Polish women. Here you can shout aloud that maybe everything is a delusion, that maybe there were never Jews here.
And it was as if a shout burst out of me in the evening at the performance of The Night of November Ninth by Stanislaw Wyspianski,16 directed by Konrad Swinarski. Mythic characters singing against a background of a burning horizon. The tricolored flag of the revolution waves over the stage, and the audience is galvanized. A moment of naked yearning for freedom is revealed, of metaphysical emotion, a moment of a personal world despite the constant oppression. Something so familiar, so close in temperament, in gestures. Such belonging. Belonging?
An old car. The shaved nape of the driver’s neck stuck in a cap. Poplar trees, autumn fields. I am in the back seat, huddled in my coat. On the way to Auschwitz.
And perhaps you should be silent about that trip. Not talk about the yellow flowers, the gravel in the sun, the chatter of Polish cleaning women who laughingly point out to me that my trousers are unstitched. My trousers? On what side of the barricade?
How to write you about the strained pacing in an attempt to grasp something about the remnants of constructions—from archaeological digs of thirty, not two thousand years ago.To understand the chasm separating sanity and madness with barbed-wire fences. The house beyond the fence, half a mile away, was always there, with the same smoke in the chimney and the same geranium pots behind the curtains. And here?
How to write about the dark steps with a group of Polish high school students on them. The wall of liquidations between two blocs. A barred window. A few fallen leaves scattered on the sill. Expressionless walls in the gas chambers, the iron doors of the ovens. Polish sky. Between the chambers, in the corridors, photographs and numbers. Printed columns of names. And the silence of another morning now. As when I held my breath, a girl of six or seven, in the schoolyard for a whole minute, through the whole siren, so that I’d be dizzy when I intoned the words, six million.
How to write you about the forced march through the tremendous extent of Birkenau Camp. About the dampness still standing in the abandoned blocs, between those three-tiered wooden bunks, and the straw sacks on the dirt floor. How to imagine Mother with that silent madness. Mother. A shaved head in nights of hallucinations, nights among packed bodies. How to put Mother into one of the gigantic photos placed along the railroad track. How to force myself to imagine her in this emptiness?
Polish earth. Small autumn flowers. The driver waits. Dozes in the sun in the car.
And maybe all the questions are not right. For it’s impossible to understand. Not even at the end of the journey to this stage set. Impossible to understand without the fear of death that catches the breath, without the palpable threat on the flesh. Impossible to grasp death from all the hundreds of photos. Maybe only the heaps of empty shoes are still hovering between life and death. There I finally recited the kaddish.17 Kaddish over heaps of shoes.
And maybe all the questions start only after the shoes also crumble. Beyond the crazy stage set of death, which will always remain incomprehensible. And maybe all the questions begin, only with the silent emptinesses of now. How to go on living in a world that had turned into the enemy. With the fear stamped in the blood. With the constant paranoia. “Arbeit macht frei.”18 How to live within the world and outside it. In the flow of its life and in the flow of other life and eternity. How to go on nevertheless believing in man, how to take the beloved head in the arms.
In the afternoon light, trivial thoughts pass through the head. Impossible to pretend suffering; that would be hypocrisy. Impossible to go back to the past—clinging or accusing—that would be the triumph of the past. There is no escape from the constant questions to be asked now, impossible to flee from them to the images frozen in the photos.
And in Warsaw, in the ghetto, there aren’t even any ruins where the imagination can take hold for a moment. There are no stones left from times past. Only concrete blocks built a few feet above the ground, above the ruins and the mounds of corpses that weren’t even cleared away. To hold your head in your hands and shout. Life goes on. Cars in parking lots, a few poplar trees on the sidewalks. And that emptiness. Only the lip service of a memorial with the pathos of socialist realism, and a Jewish museum behind the building of the Communist party. The director of the museum and his secretary, two Jews with bowed heads, show me a building excavation out the window. “Here was the great synagogue of Warsaw.” And the cleaning woman smiles like an accomplice in a crime, and points at the exit to the guest book full of emotional comments. Gray cement boulevards and gigantic statues of soldiers with forged chins. Impossible to believe that there was once a different life here. Only in the nationalized Desa stores19 are there scores of Jewish objects. Hanukkah lamps, synagogue menorahs, spice box
es. Objects with price tags. No, there is nowhere to return. The whole thing is only a delusion. Deceptions of the imagination. In my head crushed fragments of all the artistic creations resound, the assemblies, the recitations that tried to convey the other reality to me, and they only increase the distance.
The rain doesn’t let up. An awful cold penetrates the clothes, makes you shiver. Warsaw—a gray horizon by day, and gray in the pale neon lights at night.The trip back seems like an illusion, like opening the camp gate and being outside. The unbearable loneliness, the unrelenting suffocation.
Only the friendship of my acquaintances, Polish theater people, supports me in the hours before the departure. Figures between reality and dream. Alicia in her theatrical clothes, waving her hands like a Chekhov character. And Andrzej with ironical humor, in fragments of literary French, with the credo from Communism to the surrealism of Witkiewicz. Fervent confessions in small apartments when tomorrow is unknown, and only the dream is left. Like the awakening appreciation for Bruno Schulz, thirty years after he perished, like worshipping the theater, the word spoken from the stage, received with a sigh. Like the clandestine grasping of Catholicism.
Childhood memories extend between Mediterranean summers and alleys in northern cities, woven in the dreams of Polish romantic literary heroes, shrouded in the sounds of the language and open accounts of the blood of the dead. Life in a pre-time is always present, in the double look at all the places. Always through the other place I belong to, where you don’t come on journeys. A wiped-out place, condemned to delusion, where I will never be able to put to rest the wandering of existences.
With relief I finally board the train. Sleeping cars that came from Moscow with a conductor in an undershirt and a stifling smell of sweat and orange peels. A twenty-four-hour trip to Paris, like a day of fasting. To another world? At midnight, the train passes the East Berlin station. Signs in Gothic script “Welcome to the Democratic Capital.” On the platform is a white line three feet from the cars. Soldiers in riding boots with German shepherds and submachine guns are standing at regular intervals. A patrol of two soldiers goes through the train. Another patrol checks between the wheels with flashlights, and another one marches on the roofs of the cars. Maybe someone has succeeded in escaping. A white line, soldiers, and a train. Only the site of madness or freedom has changed.
Hold on to the Sun Page 3
