The Brothers of Auschwitz

by Malka Adler

  I made a plan regarding the food but I also came to a decision in my heart.

  I decided that I, Yitzhak, son of Israel and Leah, would begin a normal life in Eretz-Israel. Yes, yes. Because I was tired of being angry. Tired of wandering through the world with an ax and chopping people in half. I said to myself, I will build myself in this country, even if I have to eat a lot of shit. I said to myself, I have to succeed in a country of Jews. I have no other place, this is it. And in my heart, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to live the life I wanted in that village.

  Chapter 46

  Dov

  My brother told me, we’ll give it a chance, Dov, and I suffered.

  We felt like slaves. They didn’t like us. And I didn’t like them. We were their strangers and they were our strangers. We were bored by their cello, their talking and their laughing. We missed the simple things we had at home before the camps. I like simple songs and short stories. I wanted to hear stories but there was no time for stories. There was hard work and that was all.

  We started to go wild.

  There were youngsters who had fist fights. They threw out some youngsters in our group for fighting and this didn’t help our boredom. Those who remained and who didn’t fight began to give up. I remember the first day they put black olives on our plates. We weren’t familiar with olives. We thought they were candies on the plate. We put them in our mouths, they tasted bitter, salty. We spat the olives onto the ground. We made vomiting noises, waaach, waaach, and we threw olives at one another, and at the wall. We got into a state of camp-survivor excitement, as they whispered about us. They whispered and whispered and we collected olives from the floor and shot them at the kitchen workers. The women in the dining room put their heads in their hands. We were wasting food during the tzena and it killed them.

  Finally, they closed the dining room and distributed us among the families and so there was more suffering, apart from the cello and their irritating comments. I’d eat everything they gave me and was still hungry.

  One day the woman I ate with said: I’m going away tomorrow. I’ll leave you a pot of soup. Come home, Dov, come into the kitchen and eat by yourself.

  I came at noon.

  It was a hot summer’s day and, like their cello, the flies stung my ears. I breathed with a dry mouth and knocked at the door. There was no answer. I took off my shoes and entered quietly. I looked for a pot of soup. I saw something that looked like soup in a pot on the counter. I lifted the pot and drank what I found. I remained hungry. I scraped at the bottom of the pot with my nails and put it in my mouth. It tasted like burned tin. I put on my shoes and left.

  The next day at noon the woman was waiting for me.

  She said, Dov, why didn’t you eat the soup in the pot, I left you a full pot of soup.

  I said, but I did eat.

  She asked, which pot did you eat from?

  From the pot on the counter.

  She was alarmed, just a minute, did you eat from the pot next to the sink?

  I said yes, that’s the pot I saw, it was standing here. I pointed at the counter.

  The woman put her hand on her chest and said, oy, that was the dirty pot after I cooked, I filled it with water and didn’t have time to wash it. Did you really eat that?

  I said, yes, it was a little salty, not a bad taste.

  The woman raised her eyes to the ceiling and made a cach. cach. cach sound, but the soup I prepared for you was in the airing cupboard, why didn’t you open the cupboard, you know we keep our food there, look, the pot’s been here since yesterday, you probably went hungry, what a pity.

  I was ashamed to tell her that dirty water with a few little bits on the bottom, if I was lucky, was my usual food in the camps. Neither did I tell her about the decision I made on the path in her yard. I didn’t tell her that I, Dov, was done being hungry all the time, done. I, Dov, was done with scraping bits off pots for food. And then I myself began sneaking into the village chicken coop. I held a kilo bread pan I found in the bakery. I collected twenty-eight eggs. I went to the sheep pen. There was an electric stove there. I broke the eggs into the bread pan. I stirred it well with a stick and fried myself a huge omelet. I ate the omelet without leaving a crumb. I felt good. I went to work picking vegetables in the vegetable garden, some went into the box, some I ate in the bushes, tomatoes for instance, cucumbers, cauliflower. I took potatoes to the room. I cooked them in the yard. I took bread from the village bakery. I’d sneak in like a cat, take a fine smelling fresh loaf of bread, hide it under my shirt and leave. I didn’t like going into the bakery. Luckily, someone from our group always worked there and we had an agreement. He would throw three-four loaves of bread out of the window, one of us would wait under the window and we’d share it.

  I didn’t like going into the bakery because of the oven.

  There was a large oven inside the wall. A large fire. And there was a baker in a dirty apron who would use a stick to put the pans of dough straight into the wall. Whenever I entered the bakery I’d remember the SSmen who caught one of our relatives, a woman in her ninth month of pregnancy. The woman was weeping and calling out to God. God didn’t come, only the SSmen, may they rot in hell. One of them caught her by the shoulders, the other by her legs. They managed to pick her up a little and she fell. They cursed and spat on their hands, the woman began to kick, I heard a lot of farts coming from her behind. One of the SSmen slapped her face. She froze for a second. They bent down and lifted her with difficulty. She swung in their hands, and then one of them said, one, two, three, and they threw her into the fire. To this day I can hear her screams, I think I also heard the screams of a baby, or maybe I just seemed to.

  I thought a lot about what the farmer from Budapest said to me at Auschwitz. He said, Bernard, steal, kill, but most of all save yourself, you have a chance, understand? It hurt me that I had to steal food in a village of Jews, but I stole and suffered less when they whispered insults about me or the group. I never stole chickens from the chicken coop, even if the whispers were loud. I didn’t want to kill animals.

  Members of the village knew about our stealing. Eggs were missing from the chicken coop. The baker counted the number of loaves. Issasschar was angry with us, he said we were ungrateful. Yes, ungrateful. We knew they were right and we wanted to be good. We saw how hard they worked to hold onto their young farm. We saw they were hardworking people with beautiful intentions, but we couldn’t help ourselves. To this day I regret throwing olives and taking eggs for omelets in quantities they’d never have allowed themselves because of the tzena.

  In the village they wanted us to learn Hebrew and I was tired from labor that began early in the morning and from wandering about at night in order to feel full. I was most tired on days I worked as a porter. They’d tell us to unload sacks of corn and barley from trucks. I saw that my body was falling to pieces under the sacks. The moshav members were strong. Their muscles stood out under their skin, I didn’t have muscles that stood out. I barely had any flesh at all under my skin. I managed light work, like mixing mush with my hands, or feeding the chickens, or milking cows, work like that. Nonetheless, I was tired at noon and didn’t want to go to their classes that began in the afternoon. Issasschar didn’t give in. We’d go to the classroom and pray our teacher would be ill, but we had a very energetic teacher.

  Safra the teacher knew a little Yiddish and he knew how to knit socks. He’d manage at least nineteen rows while we copied words from the board. He had a round face and his eyes were always smiling. Even when he was counting rows on a sock, his smile remained. He taught us history and Hebrew in funny Yiddish. I didn’t understand anything I wrote in my notebook. Just like cheder in Tur’i Remety when our teacher shifted from Yiddish to Hebrew. Vayomer, gesukt – he said, Vayedaber, geredt – he spoke, nu shoyn – Ok.

  Our teacher wanted us to learn reading and writing, but I found Hebrew difficult. Certain letters don’t exist in Hungarian. I kept confusing the letters. In the end, I despaired,
to this day I write with mistakes. How do I write “weep” in Hebrew? How do I write “piano”? How do I write “lupine” or red “anemone”? Hyacinth? I managed loquat and poppy.

  The teacher gave us Hebrew names. He said, what did they call you at home?

  I said the Christians called me Bernard, at home they called me Leiber.

  He said, Leiber means lion-bear – Arieh-Dov – choose, Arieh or Dov?

  I said, Dov.

  And then he said to my brother, what did they call you at home?

  My brother said, Icho. The Christian neighbors called me Ichco.

  The teacher said you will be Yitzhak, we’ll learn about Yitzhak in the Bible, all right?

  More than history and Bible, the teacher taught us to be human beings. To greet an adult, to say please and thank you. To eat politely and wash our hands before a meal. To wash our ears really well so there’d be no yellow inside them.

  The teacher, Safra, loved us. I agreed to sit in his classroom because of this love. I was willing to sit for four hours straight and hear how to talk to an old man. I was willing to hear ten times over what to say to someone sick, to the weak, to all those sitting Shiva – the seven days of mourning for the dead in Judaism. If this teacher had continued to speak and tell us, I would know how to weep about my life, but the teacher spoke less about the dead and comforting and a great deal about Hebrew grammar, go, went, stroll, was, were, will go, we’ll go, and I wanted to shout, we’ll all go to hell long before we know how to say Kaddish – the Hebrew prayer for the dead. He’d talk about God in Genesis, and I couldn’t bear that God, was he at Auschwitz?

  The evenings in the village broke my heart. The sun would set and I’d feel full of sadness and sorrow. There were no youngsters my age in the village. There were only families with small children. There was no dining room like kibbutz where people could gather, meet someone. The families withdrew into their homes, we were left alone. Sometimes things were good. In the group we had a few regular clowns, mainly Shimon and Eliyahu who came with us on the ship. They made us laugh with their stories and vulgar jokes. They gestured with their hands, imitated members on the farm, like the first milking lesson in the cow sheds, without speaking, yes, or a visit to the doctor in order to get out of work. We rolled on the floor from their descriptions. But most evenings our clowns were silent and we followed suit. We were silent because of our dead, each one carrying his own burden: Longing for grandmother who kept a burned sugar-coated apple in her apron pocket, and a handful of sweet almonds, aah. Longing for a cousin who loved to turn cartwheels and sing aloud, and for his beautiful sister who played the violin. Aah. Missing friends from football games in the street. Sweet Shloimeleh, the neighbor’s son, he was just three years old, Shloimeleh, and wanted to hear a thousand times over the scary story about the lion who liked to gobble up children. He would burst out laughing, particularly when the lion roared, raaaaar, and gobbled up the child. In the end, Hitler gobbled him up. Aah. The noise of firing would reach the village every evening, the smell of the dead, the shouts and hungry dogs, everyone, everyone would gather in my ears, ringing trrrr. Trrrr. Trrrr. Even after we’d finished frying omelets on the stove in the pen and sat down to eat, the dead were waiting for us with their final moments on the road, the path, on the floor of an open cattle car.

  I was tired of this life and of the noise that came from the dead and I was tired of stealing and eating in the dark with SSmen who were suddenly standing there when I opened my mouth wide. I wanted to run away from myself, pretend I’d been born in Eretz-Israel near the Lake of Galilee or Safed. Be like those perfect young men we saw on the ship, at the camp in Atlit, the young men with their crests of hair and a kaffiyeh wound round their necks. I wanted to do things, like walk confidently into a place I didn’t know. And if someone asked me a question, to answer quickly without looking at the floor. I wanted to be happy with all my heart. How I envied their free, open-mouthed laughter with their heads thrown back, slapping one another on the back and feeling as if they’d vanquished the Germans with their own hands.

  And I wanted Betty.

  I missed her flower-like perfume. I missed the kiss, tongue playing with tongue. Hear her whisper mon amour and feel a thousand bees in my ears. Just the thought of Betty made me want to suck something sweet. There wasn’t anything sweet to steal in that village. Sometimes I’d pick at a scab on my hand or leg, let the blood run, for no reason, no reason. And we had couples in our group. They’d meet in the room, each one in turn, sometimes in the fields. Some of them had sex. We all knew the news. Yitzhak had a girlfriend. Don’t remember her name. And there was Sonya with the lipstick. Sonya had three fingers missing from the camps. Sonya followed me everywhere. Walked behind me almost weightlessly. Sometimes with rollers in her hair. Sometimes with dark lipstick that smeared on her teeth. Whenever she laughed I’d get a fright. It looked like blood on her teeth. I fled from Sonya. I had no interest in the girls of our group, not even the nice, pretty ones. I missed Betty mon amour. There was no money to go and visit Betty and no nearby train one could sneak into through the window and travel far away.

  I wanted to run away before I died.

  I said to myself, I have no hope in this village.

  The girls left first and were immediately taken. There weren’t many marriageable girls at the time. A girl who went to Tel Aviv to visit relatives, returned with a wedding date. On her next holiday she stood under the chuppah – Jewish wedding canopy. I remember at least three-four girls who got married in a month. The girls were in a hurry to marry so they wouldn’t have to return to that village. In the village, people didn’t understand these weddings. They suggested the girls wait a bit, get to know their grooms better. The girls didn’t give in and said, if we have to wait, we’ll wait in Tel Aviv. Sonya who pursued me also left. Sonya begged me to marry her. I didn’t want to marry. I wanted to eat well without the noise of the dead in my ears. I wanted to eat a filling breakfast and a four-course lunch, and a full supper, and I wanted money in my pocket.

  The boys left after the girls.

  One by one they left. Stealthily, alone. Without a word, in the morning they simply saw someone was missing at work on the farm. They looked and looked, didn’t find him in the room. Two days later another took off. Three days later, two more left. The village families couldn’t understand why they left them. We couldn’t explain it to them. It was as if our train had stopped at the small village by chance.

  I arrived at the collective village in April, 1946. I was eighteen and a bit. I left the village on my own after less than a year. My brother Yitzhak remained and left after me. I moved to a small private moshav not far from the collective village, on a hill overlooking the Sea of Galilee. It had as much food as I wanted and I had money in my pocket.

  Chapter 47

  Yitzhak: Dov, do you remember the crying of

  the baby girl in the home where I ate?

  Dov: No. I remember the crying of a girl

  in the house near the hall.

  Yitzhak: It was because of the crying baby

  I liked going to the family.

  Her crying reminded me that life exists.

  Yitzhak

  I decided to give life in a collective village a chance.

  I went through a crisis when we stopped eating in the dining room and they divided us among the families. I didn’t want to go to a family. Issasschar came to my room. He said, Yitzhak, they’re waiting for you, everyone’s gone to a family, come on, I’ll go with you to the family. His pocket was full and I also wanted a pocket filled with a sandwich for later.

  I said, I’m not going to a family.

  He sat down on a chair, aren’t you hungry?

  I said, very hungry. Give me money and I’ll buy myself food.

  No, no, I have no money, and you need to be like everyone else.

  I took a step in the direction of the door and grasped the handle. I said, don’t want to be like everyone else, and leave me al
one.

  He left. I fell on my bed and covered my head with a pillow. I wanted my mother and father but saw that I couldn’t remember what they looked like. It alarmed me. I stuck my fists into the pillow, and couldn’t see a thing. I called, papa? Papa? Mama? Nothing. The pillow grew wet. I grabbed the pillow, threw it at the wall and heard a knock at the door. I quickly wiped my face, stood up straight. A member from the farm stood in the doorway. I knew him, I worked with him. He wore dark work clothes and his laugh and yell were the loudest in the village. He had a plate in his hand that was covered with a towel. He said, we waited for you, Yitzhak, eat my friend, good appetite, and come tomorrow.

  I didn’t go.

  Issasschar arrived with the Hebrew teacher. He talked and talked, it was no use. They left. And then a small woman arrived with a plate in her hand. She had green eyes and a round moon-shaped face. She gave me the plate and put a small hand on my shoulder. I felt a pleasant warmth and she said, come tomorrow, the children at home are asking about you, we all want to see you at home.

  I went to them. There were three children, one was a baby. I liked hearing the baby cry, I liked seeing a living baby in a mother’s arms, even when it made my belly turn. Maybe because I saw a mother, a father and beautiful children, sitting together at a table set for a first course, a second course, and a sweet dessert, and a father who kisses the mother and pinches her bottom, and she blushes and giggles and immediately begins to collect the dirty dishes and put them in the sink, and what sticks in my mind are those dirty Passover dishes. And I didn’t know what would happen if Hungarian soldiers came into this collective village and said, one hour, and everyone outside. My heart began to race, and I whispered, shhh. shhh. Calm down, in this village no one will chase Jewish families from their home, fact: There was a large rifle on the cupboard and lots of bullets.

  I ate with the family and remained hungry. I was ashamed to take as much food as I really wanted. The head of the household took three slices of bread, would I, a guest, take six?