All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (24 page)

My sister Bea was in a displaced persons camp near Kassel in the American zone of occupied Germany. I visited her two or three times, and each trip was a bureaucratic hassle. As a stateless person, I had to fill out a stack of questionnaires, submit several photos, and somehow acquire a travel permit, an exit visa, a reentry visa, authorization from the American army of occupation, and enough money for a train ticket—none of which was easy. In Europe all bureaucrats look alike, but the French are the worst. They detest foreigners if they are refugees, stateless, or without resources, and since I fell into all three categories, I was a source of boundless irritation to them. They would stare at me with hostility, treat me as an intruder. I spent countless hours queuing up at nameless windows in police stations, answering question after question. What was I living on (why was I living?), what did I intend to do, why was I so eager to return to France? After many anxious days I finally had accumulated all the necessary documents, duly signed, sealed, and stamped.

I rode through a vanquished, ruined Germany. The trains were packed. Germans were not allowed to sit in the comfortable compartments, and white-helmeted giants from the Military Police kept a very close watch. I felt satisfaction at seeing the conquerors conquered and the torturers terrified, yesterday’s victors on their knees before those they had condemned to death just a few years ago, begging for a cigarette, a chocolate bar, or even just a friendly smile.

Today, as I write this, I think of all those who chided us for our passivity, our resignation, during the war: “Why didn’t you resist?” What about the Germans? What accounts for their obsequious cowardice before foreigners after their defeat? There were endless rumors about parents who sold their wives and daughters to the first American soldier for a pair of nylons, former high-ranking Wehrmacht officers who would shine shoes for any corporal, bankrupt merchants who fought over cigarette butts flicked into the mud by drunken soldiers. Their strength was gone, their power dissipated, their arrogance a memory. Yesterday’s supermen had become subhuman. But no, I don’t like either of those terms, superman or subhuman; both victors and vanquished are no more, no less, than human beings.

A friend of Bea’s was waiting for me at the Frankfurt station. Since
I had missed the connection to Kassel, he took me to the home of a German family where I was to spend the night. An indigent old couple lived there with their daughter, a woman in her thirties, probably a war widow. She had a big chest, tousled blond hair, and an angular face with chiseled features and sensual lips: in short, she was an adolescent’s dream. She glanced at me curiously as she made up my bed. She left and then came back a few minutes later, asking me in German whether I needed anything. I told her, “No, thank you,” in Yiddish.

I lay down on the bed, fully dressed, and tried to read, but it was impossible. Too many things were whirling in my head. Back in Auschwitz, if anyone had told me I would one day be treated with so much respect, as a victor, by Germans in Germany, I would have replied that the Messiah must have come in the meantime. I certainly didn’t feel like a victor. But in the eyes of the vanquished, we were victors. The widow suddenly reappeared with a glass of wine. “It’ll help you sleep,” she said. I thanked her but told her I wasn’t thirsty, figuring there was no point in trying to explain, in Yiddish, that wine, too, could be ritually impure. At midnight she knocked again. She asked to come in and sit down, and I nodded. When she sat on the bed instead of on the chair near the table, I suddenly felt a knot in my stomach. I was still too religious. Instinctively I drew back, in vain. She reached out and took my hand to caress it. I pulled it away. “We mustn’t,” I said. “Why not?” she asked. “But … your parents are right outside!” That was the best argument I could come up with, and it didn’t seem to carry much weight. “Don’t worry,” she said. “They’re used to it.”

It would be a lie to say my body did not desire hers. I was young, and had never made love. Why not seize the opportunity? But some obscure force held me back. Should the first woman in my life be a German, perhaps the wife of an SS officer or a camp guard? I would never be able to forgive myself. “For ten cigarettes or two Hershey bars I’ll stay all night,” the woman said. I leaped out of bed, opened my suitcase, and took out a pack of cigarettes. “Here,” I said. “Take them.” I had trouble speaking because she had begun to take off her blouse. “No,” I said, “don’t do that.” She didn’t understand. “As you like,” she said with a shrug. “Let me know if you change your mind. My door is the one near the staircase.” She left and I lay back on the bed. My body was angry at me, and I tried hard to think about something else—my presence on German soil, the Jews who once lived in this city, Rabbi Shmelke’s brother, the great Rebbe Pinhas, Meyer Anshel
Rothschild, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. I dared to hope I had not shamed them.

The next day I felt uneasy as I put on my tefillin and said my prayers. The door opened and the woman came in with my breakfast. She stared at me, obviously stunned. Surely she had never seen a practicing Jew say his prayers. I wondered whether she had ever seen a Jew at all, other than in anti-Semitic films. She put the tray on the table and left. An hour later she was back. “Can I ask you a question?” Yes, she could. “Is the reason you didn’t want me because I’m German?” “Because I’m Jewish,” I told her. “You hate us, is that it? You want to hurt us, humiliate us, get revenge?” “It’s more complicated than that,” I said, still in Yiddish. I saw fear in her eyes. Was I really so terrifying to her? Suddenly I understood. She had offered herself to me not only for cigarettes but also to appease me. The Germans were afraid of us. The mere sight of a free Jew must have filled them with terror. They must have been afraid that camp survivors and underground partisans would return as avengers and make them pay for the torments they had inflicted. That was why these old people bowed before me, and that was why this woman wanted to spend the night in my bed: if not to redeem themselves, at least to divert and perhaps even disarm my anger.

But they were wrong. Jewish avengers were few in number, their thirst for vengeance brief. I thought about the liberation of Buchenwald. Jewish survivors had every reason in the world to seize weapons and go from city to city, village to village, punishing the guilty and terrorizing their accomplices. The world would have said nothing, everyone would have understood. But with the exception of a few units of the Palestinian Jewish Brigade who swept through Germany tracking down and punishing the murderers of our people, the Jews, for metaphysical and ethical reasons rooted in their history, chose another path. Later, this absence of violence among the survivors, this absence of vengefulness on the part of the victims toward their former hangmen and torturers was widely discussed. Of course, the setting was a Germany barely able to breathe under the weight of its ashes, a nation humiliated as few have ever been.

There were no bloody reprisals, few summary executions, no public beatings. There was no collective vengeance, except for the Nuremberg trials and a few other prosecutions (of criminal doctors and the Einsatzkommandos). De-Nazification wasn’t really serious. The German judicial system was scarcely affected by it. Nazi judges sat in judgment of Nazi defendants, and no one seemed to care, not
even in the international Jewish community, which seems incomprehensible. In 1492, when they were forced to leave Spain, the Jews were quick to excommunicate the country that had expelled them, a ban the entire Jewish people observed for nearly five centuries. There is one very pragmatic explanation for why we didn’t act with equal rigor against Germany, whose crimes were far more monstrous. After the exodus from Spain, the Marranos were the only “Jews” who remained, whereas tens of thousands of survivors were unable to leave Germany in 1945, for they had nowhere else to go. All doors were closed to them. Lodged in camps for refugees and displaced persons, often in the very places they had been held by the SS, they waited for travel permits to Palestine or visas to America. It was a painful ordeal that lasted for some until 1950. It was therefore impossible to impose a public ban on a land where Jews were forced to go on living, even if in a state of misery and humiliation.

Yes, the fate of the “displaced persons” was shameful indeed, as was established in an official American report ordered by Harry Truman and drafted by Earl Harrison, former dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and American representative to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. The September 30, 1945, issue of
The New York Times
devoted a long and devastating article to this report. Some excerpts:

As I read and reread this article, feelings of shame, frustration, and sorrow sweep over me. American Jewish leaders, intellectuals, and humanists must have read this report. They knew—they must have known—that their brothers and sisters were suffering in Germany, yet they did little to relieve their plight. I don’t like to criticize fellow Jews, but their passivity seems incomprehensible.

And what about the Allied governments? In Henri Amouroux’s book
La Page n’est pas encore tournée
(The Page Has Not Yet Been Turned), he recounts with indignation the outrageous conditions as French inmates left Bergen-Belsen, with the bitter memory of having been treated scarcely better by the British than by the Germans. The same for Flossenburg, Dachau, and Buchenwald. For too many deportees, liberation meant no more than the possibility of dying free.

But let us leave all that aside for now, and return to Frankfurt, and to Kassel.

When I visited the camp in which Bea worked in the office of UNRWA (the United Nations agency created to take care of refugees) while waiting for her visa for Canada, I felt a growing anger not only toward the Germans but also toward the “friendly” countries. They were treating the “displaced persons” like lepers or criminals. The situation had improved somewhat since Truman’s letter to Eisenhower, but the sensation of oppression persisted. Every prospective emigrant was subjected to endless requirements and interrogations before being granted a visa. They had to prove that they were in good health both
physically and mentally, that they were able to take their places in a “normal” society, that they would not go on public assistance, that friends or relatives could guarantee them jobs in their adopted countries. So much for our dream, in our rare moments of optimistic delirium, that if we survived we would be treated as long-lost brothers, carried in triumph to show how deeply humanity regretted what had been done to us.

This truth must be stated and restated: The suffering of the survivors did not end with the war; society wanted no part of them, either during or after. During the war all doors were closed to them, and afterward they remained shut. The evidence is irrefutable. They were kept in the places where they had suffered. Granted, after some delay they were housed (in barracks), fed (badly), and clothed (pitifully), but they were made to feel that they were beggars and poor relations, extra mouths to feed. Time does not heal all wounds. Some remain open and raw.

Those who were stupid or naïve enough to return to their countries of origin sometimes faced outright hostility from their former neighbors and countrymen. Instead of greeting them with flowers (as was done in Denmark), instead of hailing their survival, begging forgiveness for their indifference or worse, their compatriots regarded them with suspicion and rancor. “What, you’re back? Auschwitz must not have been so terrible after all.” In many places, they were denied compensation for their homes and property. When Bea went back to Sighet, she found strangers living in our house and had to stay with friends. A sociologist has argued that in Hungary the predominant motive for postwar anti-Semitism was that the populace feared the return of deportees whose apartments and factories they had confiscated. Kielce, in Poland, was the site of a genuine pogrom: more than fifty Jewish survivors were massacred in broad daylight. Elsewhere the number of victims was lower, apparently too low for the press to take notice. But everyone knew the Jews were being subjected yet again to hatred and terror. No, the tragedy of the survivors did not end with the liberation of the camps.

The ordeals Bea endured in the camps left her with damaged lungs, and the United States consequently denied her a visa. Like thousands of other survivors, she was considered “undesirable.” Canada, where there was a labor shortage, was less recalcitrant, its immigration laws more flexible. Bea therefore applied for a visa at the Canadian consulate. Here, too, no one was eager to be burdened by
her lungs, but in the end she got a visa to work as a housekeeper for a Jewish family in Montreal.