The goys needed the Jews to advance in life. Without the Jews’ money they couldn’t have bought a cow or a horse, they couldn’t have bought a plow to plow the field, or wheat seed for bread. The Jews’ money rolled business forward, so what, did it help us? The Germans also needed the Jews for their business, before they decided to throw them into the oven.
Israel, 2001
14:18 at Nahariya Train Station.
I’m on the interurban to Binyamina. On the seaside. The change to the suburban train is in an hour and seven minutes. I look at the window and see a round face in the glass, a silly smile. Maybe because of the Arak in the grapefruit juice. Arak and grapefruit juice goes well with meatballs said Yitzhak and filled my glass for the second time. Dov smiled, saying, very true, drink, drink, let’s make a toast. To the life of the State of Israel. L’chaim. L’chaim. To life. To life.
Beyond the window high risers pass, country homes, a date avenue, a fierce green in tiny plots, diagonal furrows, and sea, sea, sea, sea. The froth on the waves is the color of mud. The Mosque and wall are a soft cream color. And again housing units, again the sea. The air-conditioning on the train is pleasant.
Opposite me sits an old man covered in age spots. One across half his cheek. He’s wearing an Australian cap with the design of a duck. Beside him is a curly-headed little girl with a ponytail tied with a blue band. She’s licking a record-sized candy on a stick with her red tongue. The old man points to a picture in the book and says, kangaroo, that’s an Australian kangaroo, and he swallows a yawn. The little girl puts the book aside. The old man pulls his cap down to the end of his nose, falls asleep.
I need the toilet. Don’t want to get up. I stand. My bladder is bothering me. Taking my bag, I look for the toilet. The cubicle is at the end of the carriage, near the steps. I peep in, it’s like a plane toilet, a large roll of paper under a plastic lid, a tiny sink, a box of hand wipes, it looks clean.
I don’t move.
Well, get a move on, go in. Wait. I check the door. Mentally take the lock to pieces, turn it to the left, turn it to the right, an ordinary lock. I go into the cubicle and am afraid to close the door in case I get stuck going out. And if I shout for help, will they hear me? No one will. If Yitzhak was on the train, he’d say, worst case scenario, you could jump, with a little luck you’d get to a hospital, most important of all, no one dies from that, and in any case, I’ve already said, taxi, taxi. Dov would say, you only die once, best to hold it in.
The nightmare doesn’t end: The toilet door doesn’t open. In a cinema, for instance. The movie ends. The audience leaves the hall, the lights are switched off, I’m inside. A faded, peeling door, behind a gas station. No one around. An office block, top floor, middle floor, the worst is a basement floor, never happened to me? It’s happened, it’s happened. The walls were like a sealed room. Two minutes and your blouse is wet.
If Yitzhak was there, he’d say, at least you’ve got paper to wipe yourself, we had no paper. And there was nothing to wipe. Dov would say, what paper, we had nothing, we’d cut small pieces from the stripes on the trousers and shirt to wipe. In secret. Sometimes we didn’t even have that. We’d walk in a line, with a stinking, sticky drip down our trousers, don’t even want to think about it. Do you have any idea of what it’s like to walk along a road and feel a disgusting drip into your shoes, better you never know. And now, coffee.
Dov: Remember Mermelstein? Tall, with a beard,
recruited by the Czechs in 1939? He was a
gunner, rode a horse, six horses pulled a cannon.
Yitzhak: One of the boys from that family was with you.
Dov: Yes, but we lost each other along the way.
Yitzhak: We lost ourselves along the way,
Dov, look what happened to us. We lost everything.
Dov
I went by truck from Auschwitz to Camp Jaworzno.
It was the middle of summer. Hot. We traveled standing up. Crowded and stinking. I was finished. Two adults fell on me simultaneously. One died close to my eye, one on my shoulder. I carried them both until Jaworzno. The old pain in my groin came back. The place that would swell up and turn blue when I dragged heavy logs to the train track in the village. At night, I’d drag them with father and my brothers.
We got down from the train. Even hotter. Saw rows and rows of brown wooden barracks with thick, white smoke above them, like sand. SSman, two meters tall with a cap and a loudspeaker in his hand yelled, strip, you’re going to shower. I didn’t believe him. I was certain they were taking us to the gas. In my pocket I had a piece of bread. I hid it in my shoe. I thought, if I get out of the shower alive, a piece of bread will be waiting for me. Naked and thin we went into the shower. Tall men, short men. All ugly, disgusting, just like the goys always said about us. Everyone had white skin, sores and a smell. They’d press on their skin and there’d be a hole in the flesh, as if their skin was old. Their bald heads were brown like mud. A thin layer of bristles. Their nails were bitten to the quick. I thought, maybe it’s easier to kill people who look like this. I was sure I looked like that, too, maybe I was also disgusting, ugh, stinking. I started looking for a mirror, didn’t find one. I smelled my skin, it smelled like spoiled cheese.
We stood stinking and crowded under the taps and I didn’t know if they’d give us water and then gas, maybe gas and water together, maybe they didn’t have enough water in that camp and we’d have to wait like we did in the train car, and maybe we’d just stand there until we died.
The air became smellier. Someone near me pooped standing up. Two others in front of me did the same. Maybe out of fear. Silently I asked myself, if they’d put naked Christians in here instead of Jews, no, no, if they’d put naked Germans in here, say, the tall, blond men I saw in the newspaper, the ones who always looked as if they’d just had a good shave. Would they also be as ugly as us after two months in Auschwitz? I had an answer. Yes. It would be easy to kill them, because of the sores and the smell.
Some of them began to call Shema Israel, Shema Israel and to weep. The weeping spread like fire in cotton wool. I also wept. We all wept to someone about someone. They began to move back and forth, as if they had a beard and were in a synagogue, moving in shoes and coat and hat. And suddenly water.
A flow of boiling water hit us on the head. Water without a smell. We couldn’t escape the burning. Nonetheless we screamed water, water, and in a flash, the tap was turned off. We were saved. The men’s weeping turned to roars of laughter. The tears remained. For the first time since leaving home I saw Jewish men laughing. I knew a piece of bread was waiting for me in my shoe. I started to hug someone next to me. We wept together. In the meantime they opened the door. At once we shut up so the Germans wouldn’t change their minds. They gave us clean clothes that didn’t smell. The black stripes looked darker. They put us in a dark bloc with three-tiered bunks. I couldn’t see any windows. The walls were brown. The light bulbs were faint. I managed to get a place farthest away from the floor. I ate my bread lying down; I was happy that day in Camp Jaworzno, higher up than Auschwitz.
The next day we returned to the morning and evening parades. We stood for hours on our feet, sometimes just because of a mistake in the numbers. Those