The American medical authorities transported here a large number of gravely ill, though still breathing, camp inmates from the Oberpfalz region. The others, the lighter cases, stayed there, at the camp itself, inside huge tents, which in my hallucinations I used to see as yellow clouds of light.
There, after the respective medical treatments, the survivors were directed, just like my rabbi Ben-David, to their destination of choice—for some east, to their birthplaces, where very often there was no one left waiting for them, some—as I’ve already told you and they weren’t a small number, those so-called at the time “displaced persons”—to new, unknown shores. We, the more serious and even hopeless cases, had been transported here and situated in the big baroque halls, with those touching plaster angels wearing garlands of roses on the smoky ceilings, which had once probably gladdened the eyes of the Salzburg elders. The beds were positioned so tightly that the poor doctors and nurses could only move through the sick by going sideways. Filled to the maximum was even the small stage, adorned with peeling gold, on which, in better times, His Majesty’s imperial chamber choir, or even my colleague Mozart, had probably played. Those who hadn’t found room there were jammed into corridors and stairway landings and I don’t know who suffered more from this unimaginable discomfort—the sick or those treating them. You may have noticed that I’m reluctantly describing unpleasant or disgusting scenes and am in a hurry to get through them with the biblical strides of a hundred Roman stadii, which I’ve already mentioned to you, because life offers you nasty things in sufficient quantity without my assistance. But I can’t pass by that feature of our Salzburg life, wherein from the far end of the hall the medical workers had to carry a dead body over the heads of the sick, who right at that moment were clicking their spoons against their aluminum bowls, filled with pea-soup, just as I’m completely skipping details from those cases when the inexperienced sanitary workers, volunteers from Minnesota or Ohio, squeezing between the beds, would drop the dead, may they rest in peace, on top of the living. And do let me remind you that a large number of us had been blasted by typhoid marked by the proverbial phrase “Panta rei—everything flows,” so you’ll understand why the rest is silence, to which I, in a most unservile manner, bow my head as a sign of gratitude and respect to the American medical personnel, who, with tight lips and without even realizing the magnitude of their silent heroism, sacrificially fought for the life of every single one of these human remnants.
Probably it was like this as well at many other places, where, staying awake and fighting to save human lives under the protective sign of the Red Cross, there were people in white jackets on top of their Russian, English, and French military uniforms and even without uniforms—just nuns, Samaritans and other organizations of Catholics, Protestants, Adventists, and atheists, to whom, as far as I know, up till now not even a humble monument has been erected anywhere in Europe, though they are no less deserving of memorials than the liberating armies, for whom I also feel unconcealed admiration.
In connection with the people in white I had quite a shock, which threw me off balance for a long time, but about this a little later.
If you’re from the generation that still remembers that time, you must have noted in the matrix of your mind that those weren’t simply days of grief for lost loved ones and villages and towns burned to ashes, but also of hope that the evil had ended once and for all and could never again repeat itself. “Never again!”—these are the words that were pronounced like a chant, without satisfying the thirst to say them again. That’s how it is, naiveté goes with people, just like lice. But these were also days, let’s say it openly, of hatred and fierce craving for revenge. These passions, as you know, make the human soul blind and often unjust; however, don’t judge those by now distant bursts of uncontrollable fury from the perspective today of your table at the Café Sacher, where you’ve just been served your next martini with clinking ice and an olive.
At that time, if you remember, they were shooting fascist butchers and their accomplices all over Europe—sometimes with a trial, other times after a shorter procedure—and among the executioners there were not seldom some ardent truth lovers, who up until the day before had shouted “Heil Hitler,” “Viva Duce,” or whatever they shouted at other places. People exhibited an almost biological revulsion against anything that smacked of fascism; throughout otherwise freewheeling and tolerant Paris, always so accepting of any human weakness and passion, they dragged along the streets shamed and weeping girls with shaved heads, because they had danced with or maybe slept with German soldiers; they denounced and disgraced and even passed sentence on dumb journalists because of some little article praising fascism—as if similar writings don’t pop up to this day. From all parts of Europe post parcels were traveling to Norway, sent by private persons and public libraries, containing the books of the Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun, which the shocked and indignant readers were returning to the author as a sign of protest and contempt for his pro-Nazi inclinations. The concept of “collaborationist” had acquired such fluid and unclear boundaries that in a number of countries it was even forbidden to perform music by the collaborationist Richard Wagner, and Friedrich Nietzsche, considered by some people a first cousin to the circle closest to Hitler, was said to be passing the hat to others, in this case one Zarathustra, who’d said to him, I told you so.
And after all, I repeat, don’t judge with a high hand the passions of that time—some legitimate, some not altogether so, and some even at times tragicomic—from the point of view of today’s well air-conditioned and aromatized criteria and values, but try to go into the worn-out and mangy skin of Europe of that time, in order to understand its tortured soul, which smelled like gunpowder residue, carbolic acid, and the unburied dead.
I’ve said all this not to bore you with old memories, but in order to understand the situation of Dr. Joe Smith, our magnificent physician—one of the not too small group of selfless saviors who dragged so many of us out of the black rectangular ditch toward which we were heading. “Doc Joe”—this is what both the nurses and the medical workers called him too, with that warmth and informality characteristic only of the Americans.
One morning I woke up painfully from the drowsiness into which I had sunk and which was at the customs office on the border between dream and afterlife—because someone was lightly slapping me on the cheek. I opened my eyelids and in the slowly condensing magma of light and shadow and the images starting to take shape within it—as if a photographic plate were being developed in my mind—I saw the concerned face of Doc Joe hanging over me. I moved my eyes, in order to discover in my range of sight that black angel, who once upon a time, if you remember, had come to take my soul and whom I’d been observing from the height of the tower, at which I had spent such blissful moments in quiet discussions with the hanged Zukerl. I’ve already told you that this was the angel’s name—Sister Angela—and at that moment she was sprinkling in the air a transparent liquid from a syringe, with my behind the final goal of this exercise.
Doc Joe waited for the procedure to be completed and asked, “Well, how goes it? Are we alive?”
You know how it is, doctors always speak in the plural, including themselves in the case history out of solidarity, and this one, unlike Sister Angela, was expressing the aforementioned solidarity in a surprisingly beautiful and educated German. I tried to smile with my cracked lips, covered with crusts of peeling skin.
“Probably,” I said. “Because not long ago a relative of mine explained to me that the dead neither ask nor answer questions.”
“You mean the rabbi?” asked Sister Angela. “What a person, oh my God! Till the day he left he managed to tell me a hundred and one Jewish jokes!”
“Yes, that’s how it is,” I whispered, “with a man with no worries, that happy-go-lucky fellow….”
The black-and-white Angela took my words at face value. Little did she know about the tribe of Jewi
sh jokers, the Kolodetz brand, who at life’s most hopeless moments will shoot out some droll story from Berdichev.
“You could sure envy a guy like that! A man with no worries!” she sighed. “I learned you were relatives or something.”
“Or something…,” I said.
Sister Angela started looking in the pockets of her white medical smock, which looked whiter because of the contrast with her face, or maybe her face was becoming more black, framed by the little white starched cap with a red cross on it. She found something, handed it over to me—this was a pressed aluminum button from a piece of camp clothing, painfully familiar, because we’d had to strip the corpses before arranging them on those pyres, which I’ve mentioned to you, while from the next applicants for the pyre we piled up clothes with similar aluminum buttons for steaming and further use.
“Your relative, the rabbi, gave it to me as a memento before he left. Poor dear, he didn’t have anything else and tore it out of his clothes. He said I could offer it as a model for a gigantic memorial to the humane twentieth century, this camp button.”
I took it in my emaciated, yellowish-brown palm, dried as old parchment: a pressed aluminum circle, probably the wartime product of some “Special Site,” because it didn’t “breathe,” the press hadn’t done its job very well, and only two out of the four holes were punched through all the way.
“A strange idea,” quietly said Doctor Joe. “A monument in the form of a button!”
“The rabbi Shmuel Ben-David always has such ideas in storage,” I said. “They come to him while he’s crossing the desert.”
“Which desert?” asked Sister Angela, surprised.
“That one.”
The sister cast a quick glance at the doctor. I had apparently generated in her some vague suspicions, and, moreover, she was familiar with my walks to the top of the tower.
“And for what will be the purpose of this monument?” I asked.
“To be a reminder of what happened in this century and not to forget it. That’s what he said.”
I looked up at her, shaking my head. “It will be forgotten, Sister, it will be. The rabbi is a terrible romantic. Monuments usually turn quickly into decorations, something like brooches on the breast of the town, to which the local people get accustomed and stop noticing them, and the tourists take pictures as souvenirs, using them as background, without knowing who or what is depicted by them. Believe me, this is how it is. Once upon a time in Vienna my Uncle Chaimle and I used to take pictures of ourselves with Shwarzenberg* in the background, without knowing anything about who was this fellow on the horse or what was his contribution.”
And still, while Doc Joe, sitting askew at the edge of my bed, was listening to my chest whistling like an old kettle, I enriched the rabbi’s idea with my own: Why can’t they, I thought, in some museum, for example the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, about which I had read something in Kolodetz, and where behind glass windows they keep the preserved clothes of emperors, Madame Pompadours, and Venetian doges, display my shat-in pajamas from Salzburg? After all, they too are a symbol of a glorious epoch.
I felt shy about sharing my idea with Sister Angela, who was in a hurry anyway, she took the button as if it were made of gold, and went away with her tray, arranged with a rich assortment of tablets, droppers, and syringes for the next patients in pajamas, who, just like me, were expecting her visit with glassy eyes fixed on the ceiling, on which plump, light-winged angels were carrying garlands of roses.
With the tips of his fingers Doc Joe started to press painfully on my stomach and I even moaned. “Does it hurt?” he asked.
A little irritated by the sharp pain, I said, “What do you think?”
“I think the sickness is already going away. It’s time for you to start going out to the park. You’re fine.”
“I’m fine?” I protested almost indignantly. “Do you know that in the Jewish cemetery of Berdichev, there’s the gravestone of the shoemaker Uzi Schweitzer, which says: ‘Leah, you didn’t even believe I was sick!’ ”
Doc Joe laughed: “But still, keep it up and stop contemplating your belly button. Help me and try to exhibit your stubbornness in another area.”
“The fact is, Doc, with the same stubbornness I resisted typhoid for a long time. It’s now also probably paid for.”
“Everything is paid for…” said the doc, falling into deep thought about something else, probably far away from here, because his eyes wandered in space.
With a touch of exaggerated joyfulness, he patted me patronizingly on the cheek—as if he were a pediatrician treating a willful child resisting recovery, and not me, the old fighter, who had lived through two world wars, one May 1st competition, two concentration camps, and, as a garnish for it all—like the parsley that we mentioned already before—the embarrassments of stomach typhoid.
* Karl Philip Shwarzenberg, Austrian general who commanded the united armies against Napoleon during the French campaign. [Mr. Blumenfeld’s note]
TWO
However, my situation soon really improved quite a bit and, sometimes with Sister Angela’s help, other times alone, I would lean on the marble banisters of the stairways and against the walls and go out for a short while and sit in the park of this majestic, half-destroyed building. The linden trees were blooming and flooded us with their sweet fragrance, which tenderly but firmly overcame in waves the sharp hospital smell.
Quite a long time had passed, and I still hadn’t had any news from Rabbi Ben-David. I was looking forward to it, this news, about which I felt both horror and hope, and I kept looking into that secret fold of the human soul, in which the most mindless hopes are hidden. Mindless, groundless, proved by nothing and still longed for: maybe tragedy hadn’t reached Sarah but someone else with the same name, and maybe it wasn’t that sanatorium in Rovno, but the one next door, and maybe the ravine above the small river where the mass shootings had taken place was not in Kolodetz, but…I’m ashamed to admit to you that egotism with which I sacrificed all the others in my thoughts, in order to save my own. I’m ashamed but that’s how it was. The only thing I firmly believed was that our children were alive—Ilyusha, Schura, and Susannah, and maybe they were somewhere close, in Germany or Austria, not as camp inmates but as winners in this grand and formidable Exodus.
The sands of the first month since the end of the war had run through what was sometimes called, in the little local newspapers printed on yellowish wartime paper, the “capitulation” or the “occupation,” at other times the “liberation”—according to the political leanings of the authors. But in any case, the Nazis were being referred to as “those people,” some alien, extraterrestrial mythical monsters from outer space, as if my once-upon-a-time Austrian compatriots had been seized by a heavy amnesia and had completely forgotten the diligence and even enthusiasm with which Kristallnacht here had been conducted, as well as many other not so crystal nights and days. And as if it weren’t here but on some other planet, and as if there the Mauthausen camp hasn’t existed, serviced by a staff speaking in Alpine dialects. Of course, compared to the four million victims of Auschwitz and the two million of Dachau, the one hundred and twenty-three thousand killed in this camp in this musical country were something like a minuet in three-quarter time, with curtsies and bows. Quite some time later, I heard respectable Germans saying both jokingly and half-seriously: “So cunning, these Austrians: they pushed Hitler on us, and took possession of Beethoven.”
It’s a pity, because I like Austria and its life-loving people—a wonderful mix of eastern and western winds and kitchen recipes, with a slight breeze from the Italian south! Now as I’m writing these lines and everything has passed long ago and turned into a memory, a relic, or a boring history lesson at school, I know that there’s a time for throwing stones and a time for gathering stones and building—otherwise how can we all together sow the plowed furrows of Europe? But at that
time—one month after the end of the war—every attempt to keep silent about the crimes and to transfer the guilt echoed painfully in our wounded souls more as a justification than as a generous gesture toward peacemaking. Because when the small village tries to be silent or to conceal the doings of a horse thief, the victims suspect the whole village of horse thievery. I’m sorry about my preachy tone, but that’s how things are.
One day in June, bathed in the dripping fragrance of the blooming lindens, Doc Joe sat down quietly on the bench next to me, visibly tired by the hard work of keeping vigil over the convalescent and the dying. The doctor was a big, not-handsome man, with a meaty nose and heavy glasses, and despite his relative youth—somewhere in his mid-forties—his forehead was dented by two deep wrinkles. Two similar wrinkles vertically lined his cheeks and made him look rather kind and folksy, raising one’s expectation of a smile, which wasn’t long in coming, and revealed the strong but yellow teeth of a serious smoker.
“How’re things? Are we recovering?” he asked, and patted me on the knee with his big hand, which was like a blacksmith’s or a village barrel maker’s rather than a doctor’s.
“I’m getting there,” I said. “But I was just thinking, Doctor, about this building—how’s it going to recover? Just look at it: what a pity, really now! And why did it have to be destroyed? I just don’t get all the military significance, so to say—the strategic benefit of bombing such an old city. Amadeus Mozart was born here, after all!”
“Everywhere someone’s been born. War has its own scale of values and its own needs. It doesn’t choose its victims according to human logic, neither does it distinguish the howl of bombs from the Magic Flute. Is it possible that the bullets will only hit the bad ones, or only the Catholics, only the communists, only the blue-eyed? And why was Dresden senselessly destroyed, can you explain that to me? It didn’t have any military significance, and they had the Zwinger museum with Raphael’s Madonna! And why did we raze to the ground Coventry, Oradour, and Lidice? Or half of Russia?”
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