The Brothers of Auschwitz

by Malka Adler

  Chapter 57

  Yitzhak

  The camps are in my thoughts.

  I look at my grandchildren and can’t erase what I went through at their age.

  The camps affected my relationship with my children. Our family is not united, why? Because on the ramp at Auschwitz each one in my family went in a different direction. If today my family is not united, it’s because each one is going in a different direction. As if some SSman is traveling above our heads and dispersing us. As if he were saying, you go south, and you go far east, and you stay here in the north, and all these thoughts are because of that ramp and those trains and the loneliness everyone is living with. As if the Nazis have got us accustomed to being each one for himself and that gets on my nerves today as well. Look, I don’t go to visit my daughter who lives in the south of Israel. And I have grandchildren there. Why don’t I go? How can I explain the anxiety of returning and not finding my home? How can I speak about the fear of returning from a trip and instead of my home there’s a train standing there, the one that goes from Haifa to Tel Aviv. How can I explain that every day I am likely to feel that a train is standing on my home with a ramp larger than yesterday’s ramp. I can’t even spend one Saturday with my children, and my wife wants to go. She says to me, Yitzhak, let’s go and see the children. And I am incapable of leaving the house for more than a few hours, not even at Passover, and it burns me up inside, but I can’t move.

  It could be that I can’t move because a large part of myself was left in the camps, damn them to hell. And it could be that not even once, not even at Passover, have we told the children about our own exodus from Egypt, and that may be because a large part of the soul is still there, and there is nobody to tell them how hard it is to be connected to someone who is neither Yitzhak nor Dov. Only Dov and I stayed together. It’s as if we have a mountain to climb. As if we haven’t finished climbing one of the hills on that terrible death march from Buchenwald to nowhere.

  Chapter 58

  Dov: For me, God is earth, air, water, nature.

  Without it I don’t exist.

  Yitzhak: Before the Holocaust I knew there was a God.

  Afterwards, I didn’t know, should I believe or not.

  When things were hard I prayed to God.

  Today, I think my God is the State of Israel.

  If I have the security of Israel, I have God all the time.

  Dov

  In the camps I had a habit of not jumping first.

  I did things according to fate. I didn’t raise my hand and didn’t volunteer to be first. I thought, what needs to happen will happen. It was a sacred rule for me in every camp. Let’s say there was a truck at Auschwitz. They told us to get onto the truck. I never jumped first. I waited at the side. Suddenly the truck left. It was those who jumped first who got to the crematorium and those who moved away were sent to work. From 1944, I decided to take fate as it came, without maneuvering the situation. I let fate lead me, I wasn’t a commentator.

  It was here in Israel that the great change took place.

  I did jump first. In the beginning. Because it was for my country. In fact, I volunteered for dangerous work on the border. Why? Because of Hitler. I said in my heart, the most important thing in life has already happened to me. I beat Hitler. Now all that is left to beat is the possibility of being a living dead man. I am a living Jew, and I love my country, and I am enthusiastic and excited about contributing to my country specifically on a dangerous border, yes. Afterwards I stopped jumping. Look, with my girls, I see them throwing away pita, and I don’t jump. I see that the youth of today have no respect for an adult, and I am silent. I’m glad I have bread to eat and water to drink and that Jews are not sent to the crematorium just because of our father Abraham and circumcision.

  I often talked to God.

  I asked him to help and advise me. Should I go right or left? I looked upward and asked for direction. I think I received direction. I also talk to God today. I ask Him for health and respite from the images tapping in my mind, I ask that we not lack for food, that we never lack for food.

  Sometimes I have images with sound from life in the camps.

  The images and sounds come like thieves in the day. Sometimes I hear the painful noise from the ramp at Auschwitz, and it’s a hard sound because of the searing pain. Here I am, in a convoy on the ramp. And that line is advancing slowly, slowly, one step after another. And soon I approach the point at which SSmen decide with a finger, to the right, to the left. Yes like that, a small movement with a finger, to live or to die. To go to a bloc or become dust in the garbage.

  By chance I didn’t go to the gas chamber. By chance they needed laborers on the day I stood on the ramp, why? Because of the large transport from Hungary, my transport, yes? The Germans needed us to sort through our clothes and so they sent me to Camp Canada. And if I’d been a year younger? The SSmen were looking for children all the time. And what chance did I have of staying alive if I hadn’t met my brother?

  I want to tell you something that happened in my village in the Carpathian Mountains.

  In the village there were Jews who went to the synagogue every day and there were Jews who went only on the Sabbath. On the Sabbath everyone went and who didn’t go? Disabled Friedman didn’t go to synagogue on the Sabbath. He was the older brother of Friedman who threshed the grain for the village farmers. Their family had a threshing machine, a saw mill and a large house near the road.

  Every Sabbath when we’d come out of the synagogue, disabled Friedman, about fifty at the time, would be sitting opposite us on a bench in his cap and smoking. He smoked on purpose. It went on for years. A Jew smoking on the Sabbath. It’s hard to explain. He was an aberration. Out of bounds, unfit.

  Why did Friedman smoke on the Sabbath? I thought about it a lot. Why did that Jew smoke on the Sabbath of all days, in front of people coming out of the synagogue? And two days before they took us to Auschwitz, that Jew died and was given an honorable Jewish burial. It was as if he was telling everyone, don’t waste time on trivialities. There are more important things to do. Save yourselves. And he was an educated man, not a fifteen-year-old. With his behavior, he was telling us, Hitler is screaming on the radio, Europe is smoking Jews, while you go to the synagogue to pray, and weep for the Messiah to come, and call out to God, begging him to save us, save us, and nobody says, Jews, flee, live.

  And that drives me mad. Friedman of all people, who left Adonai, who smoked against God, against everyone, he was blessed. He didn’t lie in the stinking mud in a brick factory and wasn’t pushed in the line for food. He wasn’t thrown onto a stinking cattle train, without water, without air. He didn’t stand on the ramp at Auschwitz and didn’t see his family scattered to hell. He didn’t go in a convoy of weeping elders and children to the crematorium. And he would, of course, have gone with the elders, because he was old and disabled. Feet didn’t trample on him and his head wasn’t crushed in the gas chamber during the last moments of life. Yes, Friedman was blessed.

  Sometimes I think about the death march from Buchenwald.

  When they drove us out of Buchenwald at the end of the war, German families walked with us on the road. Women, children, youth, prams with babies. They fled their homes so they wouldn’t fall into the hands of the Russians. We walked on the very same roads. The roads were full of Flüchtlinge – Refugees – and German families. I saw their convoys, we almost intermingled.

  I looked at them and thought, we are driven out and they are leaving of their own free will. So what was the war about, what?

  Chapter 59

  Yitzhak: I think about this sometimes.

  If I were to meet the German girl who gave me food

  on the way to Camp Zeiss, I’d bring down stars

  from the sky for her and make her a queen.

  Yitzhak

  Sometimes when I’m tired I dream of being young and jumping on a moving train as if it were real. I’m wearing a short coat, gray trousers and a woo
len scarf. I sit on a bench near the aisle and lean against the window. The train rattles, shak-shak, shak-shak, like a tune stuck in your mind, shak-shak-shak, the head gets fuzzy, shaaakkk, boom. The head drops and I wake up. Jump to my feet, open large eyes and go to the end of the car. And return. Go to the other end, return. Sit on the bench and get tired and fall asleep until morning. The train stops at Camp Zeiss, and I get down at the station and don’t know whether to go right or left. Right, to work underground insulating pipes deep in the ground; and right is also preparing for certain death at the hands of the Germans who haven’t yet completed their programs against the Jews. Left is to the village of the girl with the braids and the sandwiches, and the great hope of living.

  Behind my back the locomotive puffs and pants and an old woman with two baskets heavily boards one of the cars. The train left with all the sighs of the old woman with her baskets, I was left alone on the platform. Opposite me, exactly as I remembered, stood little houses with tiled roofs and a chimney on each roof. There was also a yard and a picket fence and dark curtains at the window.

  I put my fists in my pockets, and whispered, now cut to the village by road, nu, walk, but my legs were like lead, stuck in the track. The mind buzzed, do something, man, take one leg and move it, and then another leg, nu, nu, nu. The leg moved forward the other leg following, and I find myself proceeding along the track. The mind shouts, good, have you come to the village to count train sills, and soon another train will come, and then what?

  I go on skipping sills and examining the houses. There were houses with dark stains on the wall, others had been re-painted. The bushes near the houses had grown, the thick tree remained the same, and then, in a moment my heart plummeted. Behind the tree I see the tower with the green point from which hangs a rope ladder. I remember the tower, the girl with the braids always stood in line with the tree and the tower and I fall and get up, straighten up, and wait for the girl to come out to the path so I can hug my savior, but the girl didn’t come out to the path, no one came out to the path.

  I want to go back to the station, but then, in the distance, I see a girl in a red dress with loose hair to her shoulders. She’d come out of the last house in the row of houses and was coming in my direction, stopping a few steps from me. Her blue eyes were brighter than I remembered. Tiny sores covered her forehead and her cheeks. I swallowed, was it her?

  I approached the girl. Put out my hand and stammered in German, hello, I’m Icho. The hand remained in mid-air.

  She took a step back and said, I’m Gertrude, who are you looking for?

  You, perhaps, don’t know.

  Gertrude said, me, excuse me, have we met?

  And I say, Icho. The prisoner during the war two years ago in the convoy to Zeiss, and a girl with braids waited for me on the road with food, was that you?

  Gertrude folded her arms on her chest and said, excuse me, I didn’t understand you.

  And I say, I came to thank you, you saved me, I mean, if it was you.

  Gertrude said, when was this?

  During the war.

  During the war, were you a camp prisoner?

  I was.

  Then I pointed in the direction of the road and said, that’s exactly where you stood, opposite the tower, don’t you remember? You stood there with your mother, wasn’t it you?

  Gertrude said, I’m sorry, I wasn’t here two years ago. I came to this village a month ago. I came from another village, near Berlin, are you a Jew?

  Yes, a Jew, maybe you know a girl with braids, she looks rather like you.

  Gertrude said, I haven’t had time to get to know people. I’m sorry, you came especially.

  No, no, I’m waiting for a train.

  Gertrude said, me too.

  Only when I’m tired do I dream that I got on a train to meet the girl, but in the meantime, in my dream, I also remember the camp and the Germans and the harsh journey, and in the morning I feel bad. I left everybody a full description of the girl as I remembered her, and the nuns and soldiers at the monastery promised to help me find her and send a telegram to me in Eretz-Israel so I could thank her for her concern for me. Thank you for being a tiny light in a forest of darkness and wolves. Thank you very much for overcoming Heil Hitler, yes. The one who screamed on the radio, who dragged millions after him, Heil and Heil.

  At the monastery I asked them to tell her that she’s the queen of a Jewish boy, whose name is Icho-Yitzhak and he’s going to Eretz-Israel. They have to tell her that if he were to meet her, he’d pull stars down from the sky for her, and the moon. They have to find that German girl, and tell her exactly what he, Yitzhak, has requested.

  No one sent a telegram and I always look for her when I get to Zeiss in my dreams. In my dreams I visit almost every camp, but Zeiss most of all, mainly during Passover. Every year when we set the table I put one empty chair at the table. A chair for the girl. I clean her chair thoroughly, straighten it under the tablecloth, and every Passover evening, I say thank you very much. Don’t thank Dov, don’t thank God, don’t thank my son and daughter who’ve come for the holiday, and the grandchildren, don’t thank my son who has taken the grandchildren to celebrate Passover somewhere else, I thank the girl, yes, and wait, maybe the day will come and she’ll sit with us, and we can say it directly to her, thank you, thank you. And maybe she’ll come at New Year when my wife and I are most alone, when we have no desire to set the table, maybe it will be New Year when that girl comes to sit with us, and we’ll eat apple in honey and sing together, Happy New Year, a Happy New Year is coming, maybe.

  Poland, 2003

  Monday 23rd June on the Auschwitz-Birkenau ramp.

  It’s afternoon, and I’m on the gravel of the ramp at Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, first the tower we see in the newspapers, opposite a huge camp that looks like a forest hacked with an ax, only a few barracks remain and a fence being fixed at this very moment by two workers, and a track that divides into three, two alongside the ramp, the third slightly to the side, and I’m trembling, God, this is where Dov and Yitzhak got down from their transport, this is the place, and this is where SSman stood with a long finger in a white glove, a finger that played with the life of a nation, and I stride to the edge of the ramp, and Alex the guide says, now we’ll go to the barracks, and I say, please, I want to see the ramp again, and he agrees, and I take a long stride, stepping forcefully, even though the gravel shouts from below, and I have a wild urge to crush the gravel with the Jewish legs I brought in the plane from Eretz-Israel and scream to the heavens of Auschwitz-Birkenau, I was born to the Jewish people in Eretz-Israel, you saw they wanted to eliminate everyone, nu, what do you have to say about that, huh, and Batya is worried, are you all right, and I say, in a moment, and then I remember Dov and Yitzhak’s instructions, go to the sauna, go, go, see where Camp Canada was, more or less, and go to the woods where mothers and children rested as if on a picnic, you can also rest as if you’re on a picnic, make sure you have something in your bag, a biscuit or an apple, and go to the bloc, you must go into at least one bloc, look at the cubicles, we said they’re crowded, and don’t go anywhere near the crematorium, we heard it was destroyed but, nevertheless, stay away from that place, do you hear, they say there are ghosts of millions and they curse the world for remaining silent, so don’t go near it.

  I said, come with me, we’ll light a candle together for the family.

  No. Absolutely not. They said, we won’t go there, we won’t go anywhere, you light the candles yourself, and take photographs so you’ll remember, we have enough pictures in our minds, and call us from Auschwitz-Birkenau when you leave, we have to know you’ve left.

  You will call, won’t you?

  THE END

  If you were as enraptured by Dov and Yitzhak’s extraordinary journey as we were, you will love The Orphan Thief by Glynis Peters, the beautiful story of a young woman and a street urchin orphaned during the Coventry Blitz. Click here for the UK and here for the US.

  Similarl
y enthralling, All We Could Not Leave Behind by Danielle R. Graham tells the untold story of the Japanese Canadian community of Mayne Island during WWII. Click here for the UK and here for the US.

  You will also love The Last Letter From Juliet by Melanie Hudson, a moving and powerful novel about a daring WWII pilot who dreams of a lost love on the eve of her 100th birthday in Cornwall. Click here for the UK and here for the US.

  And why not try The Secret Messenger by Mandy Robotham, a sweeping tale of the courage of everyday women in German-occupied 1940s Venice. Click here for the UK and here for the US.

  Author’s Note

  The village I lived on was founded in 1936 by a handful of Bulgarian pioneers, my father among the first ten members. It was situated on a hill overlooking the Sea of Galilee.

  In April 1946, a group of teenage Holocaust survivors arrived at our newly found village, most of them were from Poland and had lost their families.

  The newcomers worked the land, learned Hebrew and were appointed families with whom they would have lunch. Yitzhak came to us. Dov was sent to a different family. I was six months old and had two older siblings.