A Tale of Love and Darkness (17 page)

"But what exactly did they do to you?" I asked my father. "What sort of sadistic abuse? Did they hit you? Tear up your exercise books? And why didn't you complain about them?"

"There's no way," Father said, "that you can understand this. And it's better that way. I'm glad, even though you can't understand this either, that is to say, why I'm glad that you can't understand what it was like: I definitely don't want you to understand. Because there's no need, there's simply no need anymore. Because it's all over. It's all over once and for all. That is to say, it won't happen here. Now let's talk about something else: shall we talk about your album of planets? Of course we still have enemies. And there are wars. There is a siege and no small losses. Definitely. I'm not denying it. But not persecution. That—no. Neither persecution nor humiliation nor pogroms. Not the sadism we had to endure there. That will never come back, for sure. Not here. If they attack us, we'll give as good as we get. It seems to me you've stuck Mars between Saturn and Jupiter. That's wrong. No, I'm not telling you. You can look it up yourself and see where you went wrong, and you can put it right all by yourself."

A battered photo album survives from Vilna days. Here is Father, with his brother David, both still at school, both looking very serious, pale, with their big ears sticking out from under peaked caps, both in suits, ties, shirts with stiff collars. Here is Grandpa Alexander, starting to go a little bald, still mustached, nattily turned out, looking a little like a minor Tsarist diplomat. And here are some group photographs, perhaps a graduation class. Is it Father's year or his brother David's? It's hard to tell: the faces are rather blurred. The boys are wearing caps and the girls round berets. Most of the girls have dark hair, and some are smiling a
Mona Lisa smile that knows something that you're dying to know but that you won't discover because it's not meant for you.

Who for, then? It is almost certain that virtually all the young people in these group photographs were stripped naked and made to run, whipped and chased by dogs, starved and frozen, into the large pits in the Ponar Forest. Which of them survived, apart from my father? I study the group photograph under a bright light and try to discern something in their faces: some hint of cunning or determination, of inner toughness that might have made this boy in the second row on the left guess what was in store for him, mistrust all the reassuring words, climb down into the drains under the ghetto while there was still time, and join the partisans in the forests. Or how about that pretty girl in the middle, with the clever, cynical look, no, my dear, they can't deceive me, I may still be a youngster but I know it all, I know things that you don't even dream I know. Perhaps she survived? Did she escape to join the partisans in the Rudnik Forest? Did she manage to go into hiding in a district outside the ghetto, thanks to her "Aryan" appearance? Was she sheltered in a convent? Or did she escape while there was time, manage to elude the Germans and their Lithuanian henchmen, and slip across the border into Russia? Or did she emigrate to the Land of Israel while there was still time, and live the life of a tight-lipped pioneer till the age of seventy-six, introducing beehives or running the chicken farm in a kibbutz in Jezreel Valley?

And here is my young father, looking very much like my son Daniel (whose middle names are Yehuda Arieh, after him), a spine-chilling resemblance, seventeen years old, long and thin as a cornstalk, wearing a bowtie, with his innocent eyes looking at me through his round spectacles, partly embarrassed and partly proud, a great talker and yet, with no contradiction, terribly shy, with his dark hair combed neatly back over his head and a cheerful optimism on his face, Don't worry, pals, everything's going to be fine, we shall overcome, somehow we'll put everything behind us, what more can happen, it's not so bad, it'll all be OK.

My father in this picture is younger than my son. If only it were possible, I would get into the photo and warn him and his cheerful chums. I would try to tell them what's in store. It's almost certain they wouldn't believe me if I told them: would just make fun of me.

Here is my father again, dressed for a party, wearing a
shapka
, a Russian hat, rowing a boat, with two girls who are smiling at him coquettishly. Here he is wearing slightly ridiculous knickers, showing his socks, embracing from behind a smiling girl with a neat center parting. The girl is about to post a letter in a box marked "Skrzynka Pocztowa" (the words are clearly legible in the picture). Who is the letter to? What happened to the addressee? What was the fate of the other girl in the picture, the pretty girl in a striped dress, with a little black handbag tucked under her arm and white socks and shoes? For how long after the picture was taken did this pretty girl go on smiling?

And here is my father, smiling too, suddenly reminiscent of the sweet little girl his mother made him into when he was a child, in a group of five girls and three boys. They are in a forest, but are dressed in their best town clothes. The boys, however, have removed their jackets and are standing in their shirts and ties, in a bold, laddish posture, daring fate—or the girls. And here they are constructing a human pyramid, with two boys carrying a rather plump girl on their shoulders and the third holding her thigh rather daringly, and two other girls looking on and laughing. The bright sky too looks merry, and so does the railing of the bridge over the river. Only the surrounding forest is dense, serious, dark: it extends from one side of the picture to the other and presumably a good deal farther. A forest near Vilna: the Rudnik Forest? Or the Ponar Forest? Or is it perhaps the Popishok or Olkieniki Forest, which my father's grandfather, Yehuda Leib Klausner, loved to cross on his cart, trusting to his horse, his strong arms, and his good luck in the dense darkness, even on rainy, stormy winter nights?

Grandpa yearned for the Land of Israel that was being rebuilt after its two thousand years of desolation; he yearned for Galilee and the valleys, Sharon, Gilead, Gilboa, the hills of Samaria and the mountains of Edom, "Flow, Jordan flow on, with your roaring billows"; he contributed to the Jewish National Fund, paid the Zionist shekel, eagerly devoured every scrap of information from the Land of Israel, got drunk on the speeches of Jabotinsky, who occasionally passed through Jewish Vilna and attracted an enthusiastic following. Grandpa was always a wholehearted supporter of Jabotinsky's proud, uncompromising nationalist politics and considered himself a militant Zionist. However, even as the ground of Vilna burned underneath his and his family's feet he was still inclined—or perhaps Grandma Shlomit inclined him—to
seek a new homeland somewhere a little less Asiatic than Palestine and a little more European than ever-darkening Vilna. During 1930-32 the Klausners attempted to obtain immigration papers for France, Switzerland, America (Red Indians notwithstanding), a Scandinavian country, and England. None of these countries wanted them: they all had enough Jews already. ("None is too many," ministers in Canada and Switzerland said at the time, and other countries felt the same without advertising the fact.)

Some eighteen months before the Nazis came to power in Germany, my Zionist grandfather was so blinded by despair at the anti-Semitism in Vilna that he even applied for German citizenship. Fortunately for us, he was turned down by Germany too. So there they were, these over-enthusiastic Europhiles, who could speak so many of Europe's languages and recite its poetry, who believed in its moral superiority, appreciated its ballet and opera, cultivated its heritage, dreamed of its postnational unity, and adored its manners, clothes, and fashions, who had loved it unconditionally and uninhibitedly for decades, since the beginning of the Jewish Enlightenment, and who had done everything humanly possible to please it, to contribute to it in every way and in every domain, to become part of it, to break through its cool hostility with frantic courtship, to make friends, to ingratiate themselves, to be accepted, to belong, to be loved...

And so in 1933 Shlomit and Alexander Klausner, those disappointed lovers of Europe, together with their younger son Yehuda Arieh, who had just completed his first degree in Polish and world literature, emigrated halfheartedly, almost against their will, to Asiatic Asia, to the Jerusalem that Grandpa's sentimental poems had longed for ever since his youth.

They sailed from Trieste to Haifa on the
Italia
, and on the way they were photographed with the captain, whose name, recorded on the edge of the picture, was Beniamino Umberto Steindler. Nothing less.

And in the port of Haifa, so runs the family story, a British Mandatory doctor or sanitary officer in a white coat was waiting for them, to spray all the passengers with disinfectant. When it was Grandpa Alexander's turn, so the story goes, he was so furious that he grabbed the spray from the doctor and gave him a good dousing, as if to say: Thus shall it
be done unto the man who dares to treat us here in our own homeland as though we were still in the Diaspora; for two thousand years we have borne everything in silence, but here, in our own land, we shall not put up with a new exile, our honor shall not be trampled underfoot—or disinfected.

Their elder son, David, a committed and conscientious Europhile, stayed behind in Vilna. There, at a very early age, and despite being Jewish, he was appointed to a teaching position in literature at the university. He had no doubt set his heart on the glorious career of Uncle Joseph, just as my father did all his life. There in Vilna he would marry a young woman called Malka, and there, in 1938, his son Daniel would be born. I never saw this son, born a year and a half before me, nor have I ever managed to find a photograph of him. There are only some postcards and a few letters left, written in Polish by Aunt Malka (Macia), Uncle David's wife.
10.2.39: The first night Danush slept from nine in the evening to six in the morning. He has no trouble sleeping at night. During the day he lies with his eyes open with his arms and legs in constant motion. Sometimes he screams...

Little Daniel Klausner would live for less than three years. Soon they would come and kill him to protect "Europe" from him, to prevent in advance Hitler's "nightmare vision of the seduction of hundreds and thousands of girls by repulsive, bandy-legged Jew bastards ... With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood ... The final Jewish goal is denationalization ... by the bastardization of other nations, lowering the racial level of the highest ... with the secret ... aim of ruining the ... white race ... If 5,000 Jews were transported to Sweden, within a short time they would occupy all the leading positions ... the universal poisoner of all races, international Jewry."*

But Uncle David thought otherwise: he despised and dismissed such hateful views as these, refused to consider solemn Catholic anti-Semitism
echoing among the stone vaults of high cathedrals, or coldly lethal Protestant anti-Semitism, German racism, Austrian murderousness, Polish Jew-hatred, Lithuanian, Hungarian, and French cruelty, Ukrainian, Rumanian, Russian, and Croatian love of pogroms, Belgian, Dutch, British, Irish, and Scandinavian fear of Jews. All these seemed to him an obscure relic of savage, ignorant eons, remains of yesteryear, whose time was up.

*Hitler, quoted in Joachim C. Fest,
Hitler
, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Har-court, 2002), pp. 40,204,533, and 746 (Hitler's testament); see also Hermann Rauschning,
Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on his Real Aims
(London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd., 1939).

A specialist in comparative literature, he found in the literatures of Europe his spiritual homeland. He did not see why he should leave where he was and emigrate to western Asia, a place that was strange and alien to him, just to please ignorant anti-Semites and narrow-minded nationalist thugs. So he stayed at his post, flying the flag of progress, culture, art, and spirit without frontiers, until the Nazis came to Vilna: culture-loving Jews, intellectuals, and cosmopolitans were not to their taste, and so they murdered David, Malka, and my little cousin Daniel, who was nicknamed Danush or Danushek. In their penultimate letter, dated 15.12.40, his parents wrote that "he has recently started walking ... and he has an excellent memory."

Uncle David saw himself as a child of his time: a distinguished, multicultural, multilingual, fluent, enlightened European and a decidedly modern man. He despised prejudices and ethnic hatreds, and he was resolved never to give in to lowbrow racists, chauvinists, demagogues, and benighted, prejudice-ridden anti-Semites, whose raucous voices promised "death to the Jews" and barked at him from the walls: "Yids, go to Palestine!"

To Palestine? Definitely not: a man of his stamp would not take his young bride and infant son, defect from the front line and run away to hide from the violence of a noisy rabble in some drought-stricken Levantine province, where a few desperate Jews tried their hand at establishing a segregationist armed nationhood that, ironically, they had apparently learned from the worst of their foes.

No, he would definitely stay here in Vilna, at his post, in one of the most vital forward trenches of that rational, broad-minded, tolerant, and liberal European enlightenment that was now fighting for its existence against the waves of barbarism that were threatening to engulf it. Here he would stand, for he could do no other.

To the end.

GRANDMA CAST
a single startled look around her and pronounced the famous sentence that was to become her motto for the twenty-five years she lived in Jerusalem: The Levant is full of germs.

Henceforth Grandpa had to get up at six or six thirty every morning, attack the mattresses and bedding violently for her with a carpet beater, air the bedspreads and pillows, spray the whole house with DDT, help her in her ruthless boiling of vegetables, fruit, linen, towels, and kitchen utensils. Every two or three hours he had to disinfect the toilet and washbasins with chlorine. These basins, whose drains were normally kept stoppered, had a little chlorine or Lysol solution at the bottom, like the moat of a medieval castle, to block any invasion by the cockroaches and evil spirits that were always trying to penetrate the apartment through the plumbing. Even the nostrils of the basins, the overflow holes, were kept blocked with improvised plugs made of squashed soap, in case the enemy attempted to infiltrate that way. The mosquito nets on the windows always smelled of DDT, and an odor of disinfectant pervaded the whole apartment. A thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soap, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and talcum powder always hung in the air, and something of it may also have wafted from Grandma's skin.