Sweet Heaven When I Die

by Jeff Sharlet

  At the rabbi’s museum Chava met writers and artists, wraiths who gathered to make dioramas of prewar Jewish life and sip the rabbi’s German coffee. Among them was Shayevitch, author of an epic poem of the ghetto. Shayevitch introduced Chava to the secret circles of artists who met in the home of a serene woman who wrote loving verses about the Sabbaths of her childhood, fictionalized in The Tree of Life as Sarah Samet.

  She began to read a poem in her soft thin voice: a conversation between a grandmother and her Sabbath candles. It took a while before the restlessness in the eyes of her listeners quieted and they became attentive. Slowly the red in their faces subsided and a child-like dreaminess spread over them. It was as if they had been offered, like tired crying children, a toy that sparkled, radiant and genuine. As soon as she finished reading, they begged her for more. So she read a poem about her father’s slippers, then one about a little boy who got lost on his way to the heder, and a poem about a well in a shtetl, and a cycle of poems about shtetl brides. Unnnoticed, the evening covered the window with a dark blue screen. The listeners did not notice that Sarah Samet had stopped reading from her black writing book and was reciting by heart. . . . [But one] spoke with a shy whisper, after she had finished. “These are not ghetto poems, Sarah . . .”

  She gave him a cool glance. “And what would you call poems written in the ghetto?”

  After the Germans deported the Sabbath poet, the group met in the hut of a painter who made pictures of Lodz before the war. When he was taken away, Chava and Shayevitch continued their discussions on their own, at first walking through the ghetto streets, then, after Shayevitch’s wife and daughter were deported, by the stove in his barren home. Finally they talked about whatever art they still believed in as they hid in a tiny room of the Rosenfarbs’ apartment, where they and Chava’s family and a few others hoped to wait out the liquidation of the ghetto. They lasted ten days before the Germans discovered them.

  Chava took her poems and stories with her to the camps. As soon as she arrived, a Jewish kapo, a collaborator, seized them and threw them into the mud. Shayevitch, whom Chava had urged to bury his epic poem as others had buried documents and treasures, clutched his writing to him. It died with him in Dachau.

  “LORRY NUMBER FIVE,” the overseer whispered in Chava’s ear. Then he walked away quickly. When the guards left to inspect other building sites, she hurried over to the fifth truck and fell to her bony knees. Beneath the engine lay a thin cotton slip, white as a dove. Her hand—bone and skin, some veins—darted out and snatched it. She crushed it between her fingers, making it as small as possible. Then, as she straightened up, she stuffed the slip into her wooden clog and marched back to the worksite. Later, in the barracks, she raised the slip above her head and let the cool snowfall of cotton cascade over her shoulders, her breasts, her stomach, the bones of her hips. Chava did not worry about the envy of the other women. She had learned the true meaning of privilege in the ghetto. It was not a luxury but a narrow blade, and the one who grabbed it, even for a second, might be the one who survived.

  The cotton was warm as well as cool, protection against the bitter winter winds of Hamburg. She’d been sent there to help build new houses for Germans. Her guards allowed her nothing more than the striped dress all the prisoners wore. Sometimes women would make vests and undercoats out of canvas cement bags. The rough material scratched and shredded their skin, but it kept them warm. When the guards patted the women down, though, they’d discover the bulky undergarments; then they would beat them. The beatings would kill a woman quicker than the cold.

  The guards never felt the cotton slip Chava wore. She owed her life to that slip, to the German overseer who’d whispered, “Lorry number five.” His name was Hermann. He never told her his last name. Every day he carried with him a suitcase he’d packed full of his most prized possessions. He kept it with him always, afraid of the next bombing, of looting. She never saw what he considered his treasures, but she knew that among them were gifts for his prisoners: cotton slips and underwear. And newspapers. Like the slip, he’d drop the newspapers under a truck and whisper their location. She’d stuff them into her wooden shoes and take them back to the barracks, where she and the other prisoners would read between the lines. A newspaper could get them killed, so after they read it they’d use matches stolen from the kitchen to burn the paper, huddling over its warmth.

  She had another source of news as well, an overseer who’d once been a communist. The prisoners called him the church mouse, because he was so poor. He couldn’t afford to bring newspapers. Instead he whispered what he knew, the headlines he’d read and the rumors he’d heard. But he never loved the prisoners the way Hermann did. Hermann told them so little of himself that they never understood his kindness. He revealed nothing. He wanted only to listen during those moments when words could be exchanged, to hear stories of Jews and their lives before the war. He loved hearing Chava’s simple mother most of all; he called her the meisterin, “master craftswoman.”

  Chava’s mother was named Sima, and she was one of the few older women in the camps. Those who had survived the ghetto and all the deportations of the old, the sick, the unlucky—shot in the woods of Chelmno and shoveled into mass graves—had been weeded out at Auschwitz. Sima had arrived there with her two daughters. Leaning on their arms she had slowly moved forward in the line that forked like a snake’s tongue: Left to work, right to gas and ashes. In between life and death stood Mengele; or at least that’s what Chava remembers now. Sima and her daughters came before him. Mengele pointed at Sima: the crematoria.

  “No,” said one daughter. “She’s my sister.”

  “Our older sister,” said the other daughter.

  Mengele stared at the three women. “How old?”

  “She’s thirty-nine,” Chava said, shaving enough years off her mother’s age.

  “He looked at her and let her go,” Chava remembered decades later. “And that’s how we saved our mother.”

  As to how Hermann saved Chava: He gave her a pencil. It was the most precious gift she ever received, a dangerous thing to have and a dangerous thing to give. She’d asked him for it, and he had given it to her. No paper to write on, just the pencil. She hid the pencil in her shoe, and when she returned to the barracks she kept it in her shoe, each step reminding her of her treasure until nightfall. Then she slipped the pencil out and took it to bed with her. She had an upper bunk, close to the ceiling. While the other prisoners froze, starved, and dreamed nightmares no worse than their days, Chava scribbled across the planks of the ceiling. When there was no more pencil left, she read the words she’d written. She read them every night before she slept. Slowly they crept into her mind. Each word became a part of her, until she no longer had to think to remember them. She hid them deep inside herself, and when the Germans sent her to Bergen-Belsen, there to starve among corpses because the crematoria no longer worked, the words recited themselves within her, the beginning of the story of how Chava survived.

  “LIFE,” SAID CHAVA, “is so strange in our times and so complex that you now no longer have to seek a fictitious form for your stories.” We were sitting in her living room, sipping tea and eating cookies. Sunk into the corner cushions of a long, radiantly green sofa, Chava looked small. A chandelier of three spiraling strings of beads cast a cool bluish light upon us.

  “It’s hardly stranger or more complex than during the Holocaust,” I replied.

  “Exactly,” Chava said. Her “now” included the decades since the Holocaust passed. “The whole Second World War,” she added, raising a hand above her head and slicing it back down into her lap. “The shock of all the things which happened, the Holocaust and the atom bomb. All this made us face our reality.”

  Chava sometimes wished she could pluck just one character’s story out of The Tree of Life: cheap to produce for a publisher, short and direct for the contemporary reader. She thought a te
acher named Esther would be her best hope for commercial success, because Esther has brilliant red hair, green eyes, a curvy figure, and would make a great film heroine. Chava’s most widely read story, however, was a translated excerpt about ­Bergen-Belsen from her novel, Briv tsu Abrasha (Letters to Abrasha), published in Yiddish in 1992, which appeared in the Montreal Gazette in 1995.

  The Tree of Life stops in 1944; about the camps the novel contains only a few lines: “WORDS STOP. UNDRESSED NAKED, THEIR MEANING, THEIR SENSE SHAVEN OFF. LETTERS EXPIRE, IN THE SMOKE OF THE CREMATORIUM’S CHIMNEY—” Then follow six blank pages. Briv tsu Abrasha could be described as what took place in those six pages: Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.

  “It’s strange,” Chava said. “I never thought I would write about it. I thought I could not. And then I did. But I did not live through my characters as I did in Tree of Life. Of course, I do not know if I could have lived through Letters to Abrasha like that. I had to keep it a little away from me.”

  Miriam, the heroine of Letters to Abrasha, is a dancer, not a poet. The horror Miriam describes is kept at a distance by the form of her storytelling, letters to a former teacher named Abrasha who, like Miriam, languishes in a displaced persons camp. Miriam, the reader knows from the beginning, has at least survived.

  Writing Letters to Abrasha sustained Chava, but she didn’t find the peculiar joy in it that she had in The Tree of Life. Writing it was not a choice or a duty but a movement dictated by gravity. “A moment comes. Fifty years after liberation, I suddenly felt I must return.”

  Chava has gone back to the physical setting of her youth only once. The Bund reorganized in Poland after the war, hoping that socialism in Eastern Europe could be salvaged. A childhood friend, Bono Weiner, was among those who stayed. But many Poles secretly continued the anti-Semitic killing the Germans had begun, and the communist government cracked down on socialists. By 1947 most Bundists wanted to get out. Western party members arranged for false documents to await their comrades in Paris. The leadership selected Chava to memorize the names of two hundred people for whom papers had been prepared and to relay them to Weiner, in Lodz.

  In Lodz she had Weiner take snapshots of her standing in front of the rubble that had been her friend the poet Shayevitch’s home. She looked up from the street at the apartment where her family had once lived, now occupied by Poles who she feared might kill her if they thought she had returned to reclaim her property. One day she traveled to Warsaw with Weiner, and there the two posed together for a picture in front of the monument to the ghetto.

  Henekh, now Henry, had survived the war; they reunited in Brussels, where Chava taught in a Jewish day school while Henry studied medicine. Both had decided they had no future in Europe. The Montreal representative of the Jewish Daily Forward, H. Hershman, had published Chava’s poems, so she and Henry decided to emigrate to North America, to Montreal, in 1949. They moved first into Hershman’s home, then into a one-room flat beneath the apartment of another Yiddish poet, Rukhl Korn. The poet Ida Maize helped Henry find a place in the medical program of the University of Montreal. At night Henry dreamed of German soldiers. By day the characters in Chava’s growing novel haunted him. He turned his own attention to the question of legalizing abortion in Canada—to his mind, an appropriate channel for one’s energies, a modern question, not mired in the past. He became an outspoken advocate for the cause, then began to perform illegal abortions himself, taking grim delight in the wicked-sounding title “abortionist.” As Henry’s reputation and notoriety grew, so did his estrangement from his wife. By the late 1960s Henry and Chava barely spoke to each other.

  Close to the time The Tree of Life was published in 1972, Henry, by then a national figure embroiled in numerous political and legal battles, left the marriage for good. Before he went, he helped fund the publication of The Tree of Life. It was his last gift to his childhood sweetheart, his good-bye to her and the past in which she still lived.

  “FOR EVERY LIFE SAVED another must be sacrificed,” says Rella, narrator of a novella by Chava called Edgia’s Revenge. “In order for a sum to tally there can only be one correct answer; no ifs or maybes.” The lives Rella refers to are those of the title character, Edgia, and her own; they are survivors of the same concentration camp, and both now live in Montreal, separated only by what each did, and did not do, to survive.

  Edgia’s Revenge was first published in a 1994 celebratory anthology of Yiddish women writers, Found Treasures, that grew out of a Jewish feminist reading club. Chava is, at best, bemused by the association, her loyalty to feminism no more than a default position, a polite nod to the concerns of those who believe that art can save them. Chava’s understanding of salvation, in its literal sense, is more dependent on calculation, compromise as fact, not virtue. Edgia’s Revenge begins in contemporary Montreal as Rella prepares to commit suicide, a death she has planned since liberation. In the camps Rella’s height and beauty had often caught the attention of her guards, who picked her out for beatings—until the day she smiled at a German kapo and made herself his. He elevated her to his side, and made her a Jewish kapo over a woman’s barracks, a position she relished not only for its safety but for the chances it gave her to transform her suffering into punishment for others.

  One day Rella finds a woman named Edgia hiding in a latrine, terrified that in her weakened state she will surely be selected for “scrap”: extermination. Although Rella doesn’t know Edgia and owes her nothing, she saves her from the daily selection. This single act of kindness will plague Rella for the rest of her life. As the war’s end approaches, Rella makes Edgia swear never to say a word of Rella’s identity as a kapo in the camps. “And must I also not reveal that you saved my life?” asks Edgia.

  The two meet years after the war in Montreal. Rella has reinvented herself as a fashionable clothing designer, her tattooed number surgically removed and her accent refined through speech lessons. Edgia, though, remains a Muselmann, one of those who lost their will to live in the camps. Rella no longer fears her; the “beneficiary of Rella’s only heroic act” has kept her silence. When Rella begins a loveless affair with Edgia’s husband, Edgia scrubs the lipstick stains out of his shirts. Edgia’s silence confirms for Rella that Edgia no longer holds anything over her, that Rella’s noble act must have balanced out her collaboration, leaving Edgia with no reason to reveal Rella’s past.

  Or so Rella thinks. But Edgia does not live in a Christian universe, where repentance, and the simple math of a good deed for the bad, can wash away crimes. When Rella meets her again at a theater years later, Edgia has transformed herself into a mirror image of Rella. She has filled out her figure and grown rosy, clothed herself in a style Rella herself might have chosen. She has even dyed her hair black, like Rella’s. Rella feels out of place and yet drawn again to Edgia. But now Edgia is the kapo and Rella the weakling. Rella is enthralled, certain that a friendship between them will ensure her safety and her moral salvation. But Edgia has other plans. Thank you for saving my life, she says to Rella; “good-bye.” Their friendship has been poison for them both. Edgia dispels Rella’s last illusion: that a single act of goodness can redeem an empty soul. There is no redemption, neither in the act itself nor in Edgia’s forgiveness, which only returns Rella to the camps she thought she’d left years ago. “Every criminal craves the moment of judgment, no matter how afraid of it he might be,” she says. “I return to the camp, to the scene of my crime.”

  The great despair of Edgia’s Revenge is that doubling and reinvention don’t necessarily offer salvation. After the war it was Chava’s ability to exist in two worlds that for decades allowed her to live at all. By the 1990s she was one of the last great Yiddish writers alive, and her only topic was destruction. Even as she represented the last breaths of a literary culture, she delivered its eulogy. Now, in her old age, she wonders what will become of her work—whether it will find an audience in English or, like Rella, return to the camp
s. Chava sometimes likes to imagine The Tree of Life in a reader’s hands, a new discovery of her work. But most of her Yiddish readers are dead, her writer friends and Bundist comrades among them. Once she was a celebrity in a small but international Yiddish community. “I am now an unknown, even among Jews,” she said one Shabbes evening while we sat at her kitchen table eating take-out chicken. “For whom should I write?”

  The truth is that she can’t stop. “I won’t go back. I finally know that I won’t go back to the camps in my writing. But now I must write of the survivors, stories in which the Holocaust is not a theme, but a thread.”

  “But in Edgia’s Revenge it was far more than a thread,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, and left it at that.

  I asked her if she had known a Rella.

  “No. Not exactly. I started with Edgia, then I realized that to understand her I had to create Rella.”

  “You knew an Edgia, then?”

  “We were, we are, all Edgias.”

  IN 1965 CHAVA TRAVELED to Australia on a lecture tour sponsored by Melbourne Jewish groups. Chava knew her old Bundist friend Bono Weiner had moved there and that he’d done well for himself, but the man she found startled her: a survivor living in only one world, successful in a present continuous with the past. Bono still believed in the Bund, but he was also active in contemporary Australian politics. Like every other survivor, he carried with him the baggage of his experience—in his case literally, in the form of two boxes of documents and notes he’d kept in the ghetto. He’d buried them near the end, then returned afterward to dig them out of the streets of postwar Lodz. But rather than hide his past, Bono seemed to use it as a source of strength. Since the camps he’d established a career as a travel agent, eventually building one of the largest agencies in Australia. Like Hermann, Chava’s savior in the camps, everywhere he went he carried his ghetto archive with him. He was determined that it should not be lost, intent upon one day forcing himself to publish its contents.