The Brothers of Auschwitz

by Malka Adler

  The families in the village tried to make us feel good and maybe they didn’t try hard enough. Why else would we have felt so ashamed of what we’d been through. The families didn’t understand what we lacked or why we were leaving. And maybe they refused to admit we brought too many problems with us. And maybe we were tired of hearing whispers about our problems and we also felt bad because we stole food from them, and couldn’t stop stealing.

  Dov was the first to leave. I decided to leave after he did. I didn’t tell anyone. One day I took a bag and went to Nachlat Yitzhak, even though I had a girlfriend, Bracha, who was two years older than me. When I left the village Bracha left too. She wanted to marry a millionaire so we parted.

  Chapter 48

  Dov

  The words a-Jew-who-works-the-land made my heart feel good.

  The words a-Jew-with-a-tractor-and-a-plow gave me hope that maybe we’d be a nation in our country, maybe a small and complicated nation with problems of the dead in our ears, but nonetheless a nation. I had a lot of respect for people who had a connection to the land. They reminded me of the goys in our village in Hungary, and I loved the life of a farmer. When they served me eggs from the farm and home-made cheese and bread with wheat they’d harvested from the fields, I got the shivers. I wanted to hold the bread up high in my hands and say aloud, this is bread made by Jews alone. Jews plowed the field, Jews sowed and harvested with a combine, Jews filled sacks of wheat and barley and stood stacks of hay like a tower in the barn.

  I decided to be a tractor driver.

  On the small moshav I fled to from the collective village there were seven families and one tractor, a tractor that crawled on chains. The farmers took me on as a tractor driver for everyone. I had a regular work schedule. I plowed, sowed, harvested in order. I earned ten sterling a month and was a millionaire. I had as much food as I wanted, a room of my own, and I was happy. At the moshav they gave me a special certificate, that of a tractor driver and a soldier. During the day I drove a tractor, at night I guarded. I had a rifle and I was responsible for a guard post and other Jews. I remember that my beard grew faster at the time and I even grew five centimeters taller.

  I ate lunch with the families on a rotation basis. They gave me four helpings of food at every meal. I waited patiently for each helping and always had eye contact with each one. If they gave me three helpings, or even two, I paid no attention. Why? Waiting in my room for me was food I bought myself: Canned food, sausage, biscuits, wafer cookies, fruit, vegetables, candies, I had at least five loaves of bread even before sunrise. I bought quantities of everything and I bought a motorbike. I rode along the narrow roads and I was happy.

  I found new friends on the little moshav.

  They were all young, my age, and born in the country. In the evenings we’d sit on a eucalyptus log and they’d tell stories. I liked hearing their stories, we laughed a lot. I didn’t tell stories and they didn’t ask anything.

  I remember envying those born in the country. They had a large watch on the hand with a broad strap and a brown leather lid that closed on top. They’d make a tick with the strap, check the time, and tack, to close, I liked hearing that tick-tack, it was the tick-tack of brave men. I envied their courage to do things.

  One day I went with one of them to Tiberias on the tractor, his name was Shalom and he wore a red kaffiyeh wound round his neck, and a thick belt with a design on the buckle. I stood behind Shalom who drove the tractor. Green grass and red anemones grew like a carpet at the roadside. The Sea of Galilee was a bit smooth, a bit rough, with small foaming waves. In the middle of the descent into Tiberias stood a command car. Shalom slowed down. We saw that the command car was British and empty. Shalom said, the command car looks as if it’s broken down, we got down to take a look. He opened the bonnet and began to fiddle with the wires.

  Let’s steal the command car. Huh?

  I swallowed and held my hands behind my back. Said, are you sure?

  He laughed and said, lucky we got here first, in a minute we’ll travel in style, d’you want to?

  I didn’t know what to say.

  He sat on the seat in the command car, connected some wires under the steering wheel and managed to start the engine. Wow. I sat next to him and we turned off the road into the fields. Shalom accelerated, didn’t take his foot off the accelerator, the command car bounced and bounced over the holes in the track. I held onto my seat, and began to sweat. I didn’t have the energy to be sick. I looked back. Saw a command car with two British soldiers chasing us. I shouted stop, stop, they’re chasing us. Shalom stepped on the brakes, we almost flew out of our seats. We jumped out of the command car and began to run through the field. The British soldiers also stopped, got down from the command car and began to chase us. I remember running through the field as I ran from the twenty prisoners with a loaf of bread in my hands. I knew the British soldiers would never catch me. The space between me and Shalom grew. Shalom cut to the right and ran off in another direction. The soldiers stopped. I saw them returning to the command car, each of them getting into a different command car. We circled the field and returned to the tractor.

  Shalom said, Dov, you know how to run, where did you learn to run so fast? I was silent. But my heart swelled and swelled.

  Three months passed and I had an accident.

  The British Mandate came to an end, without my feeling the pain of a stick. The British hurried away from the country. They left their horses at the police station in Tiberias. The young people from the moshav immediately traveled to Tiberias to take the horses. They invited me to join them and having a country of my own gave me a pleasant rush in my body.

  We arrived at the police station, we didn’t see any people, just horses. The horses, noble and beautiful, stood in a long line as if waiting for us to take them home. I almost had diarrhea from the pressure of the currents reaching my belly. I chose a white, particularly beautiful horse. He had a long tail and smooth skin. I jumped onto him and galloped bareback to the moshav. I wanted to sing aloud, shout, look, I have a horse, I have a horse. I was embarrassed in front of the young men riding beside me so I sat straight and arrived at the moshav tall and manly.

  Near one of the cow sheds I stopped to give the horse a drink, I also brought him hay. I stroked him gently, whispering, we’ll be friends, my horse, and I remembered the horses the goys brought to the races in my village in Hungary. I said enthusiastically, ah, life is finally beginning to bless me, and I love Israel. In the meantime a water cut was announced because of a fight. I was dirty, sweaty. I decided to gallop on the horse to the collective village to wash in the building where I lived. I wanted to show off my white horse to my friends in the village, mainly to Yitzhak. I jumped on the horse, made a click-click sound in my throat, hugged his neck and we set out at a gallop to the road. At the entrance to the village is a water tower. There are two roads around the tower. A road on the right and one on the left. The horse galloped to the tower. The horse saw two roads. He didn’t know which road to take. Maybe he was waiting for a sign from me. In my excitement, I forgot to give him a sign. And then, when he was almost at the tower, he swerved right and I flew off, landing on my head.

  The end of British rule and I got a head injury.

  I lost consciousness exactly as I did at the end of the Nazi regime. Members from the village carried me on their backs to the infirmary. They lay me on a stretcher and called the doctor. I lay unconscious for three-four hours. When I came round, I couldn’t remember anything. It took me a whole day to remember the horse. I wanted to get out of bed to go and look for my horse. The doctor refused to let me get up because I had concussion.

  I said to the doctor, but I have a white horse, where is my horse?

  The doctor said, you must rest.

  And then a friend from my group said, your brother Yitzhak asked me to tell you that shots were fired from the direction of the Arab village of M’rar. Your horse got a fright and ran away into the fields.

 
; I sat up at once. I felt as if my brain was floating in a barrel of water. I shouted, and you didn’t go after him?

  The friend was sorry, we didn’t have time, Dov, Yitzhak said they saw the horse galloping towards M’rar. I lay in bed for three days because of the concussion. My heart ached at losing the white horse. I didn’t understand that I could have been killed.

  Chapter 49

  Yitzhak

  I looked for work in Nachlat Yitzhak.

  I remember a winter’s day that came in the fall. It stepped on yellow leaves that lay dead on the ground looking like dirt in the camp because of the mud. I wore a light battledress and trembled in front of a store window. I wanted to tidy my face and messy hair. In the window were flannel shirts, trousers with turn-ups, and three sweaters. On the wall at the side hung a brown coat with a wool lining, a coat in my size. I went into the store and put out a hand to the coat. My hand remained suspended mid-air because of the shout in my mind, idiot, you have no money, and you don’t need a lined brown coat to live. A man with a paunch approached me. I said, excuse me, sir, do you know of any cowsheds in the area? He went to the door, pointed at a tall cypress and said, next to that cypress, you’ll find a cowshed.

  I straightened up and went into the cowshed. Another man with a paunch and small forehead fixed his eyes on me. He asked, what are you looking for, young man? He had the accent of a German Jew.

  I saw that his cowshed was clean and orderly and regretted not wearing a good coat. I said, I’m looking for work with cows.

  He asked, do you know how to milk?

  I said in German, I know how to milk very well, I milked in my father’s cowshed in Hungary and I’ve milked here too. I like milking, and I’ll have a large dairy farm someday.

  He smiled at me. A good sign. He rubbed one boot against the other, removed some mud and said, do you want to start tomorrow?

  I said, today, I’ve nowhere to sleep.

  I milked cows, cleaned up garbage and took full milk containers by horse and cart to the Tara Dairy in Tel Aviv. I slept in a small room next to the house of the orderly farmer, Joseph Stein, and I loved my work at Nachlat Yitzhak. It was a great relief not to have to worry about food and a bed. I had as much food as I wanted. But in the evening, when the sun set and I went into my clean room, the smell of Auschwitz came to visit my nose and sometimes my throat. I was already used to this hour when the scorched, sweet smell didn’t leave without a bottle of wine or vodka that I bought from the store and poured into my heart, which trembled every time Auschwitz entered my mind.

  Mina, farmer Joseph’s wife, invited me to eat lunch with them. A small woman, she was almost hairless and had a thumb with a wart and no nail. She always had a slice of bread in her pocket. Sometimes she said a few words, but most of the time she was silent. She’d put a spoon of mashed potato with a chicken leg on my plate and keep her eye on me until I finished wiping my plate with bread. I always left her with something in my pocket, nuts, an orange, or cookies made by pressing a glass into dough. There were times she said, there’s only bread left, take some for later and she’d give me a slice. I didn’t want to take it because I was earning money. I could easily sit in a chair after a day’s work, take off my shoes, undo my belt and drink a glass or two, and be calm. If I wanted a good coat, I had a good coat. If I wanted to crack seeds, I did. If I wanted to eat a cream cake with sugar sprinkled on top, I did. If I wanted a girl, I had one. I felt good at Nachlat Yitzhak, but I wasn’t at peace. The smell of Auschwitz didn’t leave my tongue or my nose and I sometimes heard evil voices in my ears.

  One day two young men from Hahagana – a Jewish paramilitary organization in the British Mandate of Palestine – arrived in a truck.

  It was raining, I had just finished milking. They were tall young men, one had a deep voice and one had a narrow beard around his jaw. They said to me, Yitzhak, we need you for the Hagana, and I wanted to cry. These tall young men had made the journey to Nachlat Yitzhak on a rainy day especially for me, aah.

  I was moved and said, give me a few minutes to get ready, as if I was used to young men from the Hagana coming to look for me.

  I collected my clothes from the room, parted from the farmer and his wife and went with them. In my pocket were three sandwiches wrapped in a napkin. One with sausage, one with jam, one with margarine and salt, and another three slices of bread without anything.

  I sat in the cabin of the truck between two young men and their strong muscles pressed against my shoulders. We turned onto the road and the windscreen wipers of the truck weren’t adequate for the rain. The driver with the deep voice said, oy, I can’t see a thing, I need to turn left, and he pulled a small handle. I saw he was checking to see if the little arrow-shaped blinker had jumped out to indicate a turn.

  We approached a windowless building on the right. The head of the young man with the beard fell back and rolled onto my shoulder. The head dragged the knee, I was hemmed in on all sides and the building on the right set my nerves on edge. I thought, maybe it’s a small crematorium. And these two, whom I don’t know, are taking me to the Gestapo. I at once hit myself on the forehead, there’s no chimney, no smoke, stop being such an idiot, and mmm, mmm, came out of my mouth.

  The young man behind the steering wheel said, are you all right?

  I said, everything’s all right and in my mind I wrote a Hebrew sentence, without mistakes, Israel is a wonderful country, with many strong Jews but what came out was mmm. mmm. In the meantime we reached the cinema in Ramat Gan and the rain stopped.

  A truck covered with a tarpaulin stood to one side. Standing on the pavement were fifteen, maybe eighteen young men. Most looked over twenty. Some were strong, some thin, like me. They held a backpack or a bag, I saw no bundles wrapped in a sheet and no grandmothers in scarves or small children.

  The young man with the deep voice said, Chaim, get up, let him out. I got down. Both shook my hand, said good luck, young man, and went off. I approached the group near the truck. Asked, anyone know where they’re taking us in the truck? A strong man with red eyelashes said, to Shavei-Tzion, a small place near Nahariya.

  I was last to climb into the truck, on purpose. If I had to jump it was important to get on last in order to jump in time.

  We sat on the floor and set off. I didn’t lose sight of the road, fixed my eyes on the asphalt. Some of the young men spoke among themselves, others arranged their backpack under their heads and fell asleep. We traveled about an hour, maybe longer, and then I saw a eucalyptus wood on the left. I don’t know why but the woods next to Crematorium IV at Auschwitz-Birkenau jumped into my mind and stabbed everywhere. The woods of disaster. Mothers and children sat in those woods as if they were at a picnic and waited their turn for the crematorium because of the overload at the doors, and the lines of people weren’t getting shorter.

  Again I became nervous, and fell upon the sausage sandwich.

  We arrived in Haifa and the first thing I saw was a chimney with smoke climbing upward. I looked at the people in the truck. They looked untroubled, as if a smoking chimney was normal in human beings’ lives. Only one young man with glasses and a runny nose opened a large eye. His glance was fixed on the chimney and he chewed his fingers. I tried to catch his eye, thought, three eyes are safer. I leaned forward and backwards with the turns of the truck on the road, failed to catch his eye. He was like a paralytic with a cold. And then the evil smells came into my mind and everywhere else and I fell upon the jam sandwich and margarine and salt sandwich, and also on the three slices of bread without anything. It was only when we approached the port that I calmed down and breathed normally.

  At Shvei-Tzion they trained us to shoot: hold the rifle straight, put it on your shoulder, yes, don’t move, look through the sight, don’t close your eye, right, both eyes open, put your finger carefully on the trigger, slowly, hold your breath, don’t breathe, don’t breathe, fire! I became a military convoy guard. Yes, yes. I was at Auschwitz, I was at Buchenwald, I was at Zeiss,
two years later, and I’m invited to be an armed soldier in the State of Israel, to accompany convoys from Nahariya to Haifa and Akko and guard Metzuba.

  I walked hungry for kilometers to die on the roads of Germany, and two years later I’m asked to bring food in a backpack to heroic friends on Kibbutz Yechiam. Aah. I’d only hold my rifle for three minutes and my eyes would begin to moisten. I’d hug my rifle hard, hard, and say, oy, oy, oy, my Mamaleh, and then my hands would start to tremble and, in my heart was something like the IDF band on the parade ground that I like to watch on television, pom-pom. pom-pom. prooompompomppom. A trumpet band, and drums, and meter-sized cymbals, and flutes with a button. The band that welcomed us at Haifa Port was meager in comparison with my band. Because I am Yitzhak, son of Leah and Israel, known as Strul, I never dreamed I’d hold a rifle in my hands. The Hungarians had rifles, the Germans had rifles, and what did I have? What? And now, three years later, I have a state. Aah. By the number of trains, and by the number of dead on the roads of Germany, I was sure that my people were finished, best case scenario they’d learn about us out of books. No, no, they burned the books as well. Maybe they’d learn about us in cemeteries, no! They broke headstones to pave roads. Yes.

  The hardest punishment was not being allowed to participate in some operation. I knew, if I didn’t protect myself, who would protect me? And I knew I could be killed. I didn’t care about being killed, I was willing to die for my country, it was a great honor.

  In Eretz-Israel I was the complete opposite of a humiliated Jew. I was a proud Jew, a free Jew. The fact that I, Yitzhak, load a gun, receive an order, and hop, shoot my rifle, aha, if anyone in Germany had said to me, take a gun, shoot, I would have shot all the Nazis who took my people to the crematorium. But I had no gun or water or bread. I was 55484 sewn on my pajamas, and it was only by chance that I didn’t reach the Wisla as dust.