All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (5 page)

Then there was the violin. My instructor was an officer of the gendarmerie. I would go to his quarters twice a week, a bottle of
tzuika
in hand. He drank, I played. When the bottle was empty I would stop.

In high school I continued to learn, only to forget. My parents
enrolled me as a special student in Jewish high schools, first in Debrecen and later in Nagyvárad. My mother’s dream was for her son to become a
doktor rabiener
, a rabbi with a doctorate. Private tutors in Latin, algebra, and physics drilled me for a month before I set out to meet the big-city professors. My sister Bea went with me. I can see her now, wearing her beret, leaving me at the gate, smiling and confident, as if to say, I’m here, you’ll be all right. It was an image that came back to me years later in a Montreal hospital, where Bea, ravaged by cancer, knew she was dying, and I knew she knew. I held her hand and smiled as if to say, I’m here, you’ll be all right.

Hilda and Bea attended the girls’ high school in Sighet. One of their problems was to avoid being forced to write on Shabbat. Generally my father worked that out through a method tried and true: he bribed the principal. My little sister Tsipouka was too young to go to school, so she learned alone at home. I loved to watch her bending over a book, serious and intent—with her golden hair she was as beautiful as an angel. I would hold my breath so as not to disturb her. What I felt for her I will never feel for anyone else.

I remember the night she was born. My father sent me to fetch Dr. Fisch, who stayed alone with my mother while Maria and Grandma Nissel came and went, lugging tubs of boiling water. At one point my grandmother told me to knock on the Borsher Rebbe’s window. “But he’s sleeping, Grandma,” I protested. “Then wake him up,” she said. “Ask him to intercede for your mother in heaven.” Naturally, I obeyed. The Rebbe wasn’t sleeping. His lighted window was open, and he seemed to be waiting for me. “Come in,” he said, and then, “Let’s go downstairs to the Beit Hamidrash.” So we went to the House of Study and Prayer. There he opened the Holy Ark, stood before the sacred scrolls, and invited me to recite a psalm with him. “It is impossible that a child like you and an old man like me would not be heard in heaven.” Verse upon verse, we recited the appropriate psalm. “Another,” said the Rebbe, frowning. I obeyed. After the third psalm he fell silent and I went home. Through the closed door I could hear my grandmother begging my mother: “Don’t hold back! Cry! Shout! You have to shout when it hurts, and I know it hurts.”

I went back to the Rebbe. “It’s not working,” I told him. “My mother won’t shout.”

“Very well,” he said. “Let’s open the prayer book.” He found something that spoke to my mother’s condition and recited a verse which I repeated after him. Suddenly we heard a piercing cry from
across the street. The Rebbe leaned over to kiss the book. “You see?” he said. “Our people have just been enriched by a new child. May God bless it.”

My little sister was a blessing. But … No, no buts. Not yet. Everything in its time. My little sister did have a few years of happiness, as did I.

A few years later it was my mother’s turn to rush to the Borsher Rebbe. I had come down with a terrible case of appendicitis, and the doctor felt that I urgently needed surgery. He advised us to leave that very day for Satu-Mare and the Jewish hospital there. “But it’s Shabbat!” my parents cried. The doctor shrugged. “You have no choice.” Desperate, my mother ran across the street to consult the Rebbe, who told her, of course, that the law permitted violation of the Seventh Day when a life was at stake.

Of my hospital stay I remember mainly the ether I had to inhale (if there is a smell that epitomizes hell, it is not sulfur but ether) and the nurse. I know that if there is an angel on high who attends the sick, it is Raphael, but in my case it was a marvelous young woman, beautiful and kind. I was very young but could easily have fallen in love with her. I remember her lovely face, her dark eyes, her gentle fingers. When she smiled at me, that alone eased my pain. I especially liked the way she helped me sit up to drink. Her chest would brush my head as she leaned over me, arousing my body in heretofore unknown ways.

It shames me to admit that I was sorry to leave the hospital after only a week.

I was ten in 1938, the year of Munich, Daladier and Chamberlain, Léon Blum’s “cowardly relief,” and Churchill’s prophetic wrath. The first refugees began arriving from Czechoslovakia, that small country so devoted to democracy, the country of Masaryk and Beneš, of tolerance and liberty, the envy of Central and Eastern Europe.

Among the refugees were disillusioned soldiers and resigned civilians betrayed by the grandiloquent promises of their Franco-British allies. Toward what lands were these exiles headed? They had little to say and asked for nothing. I don’t even know if they spent the night in Sighet. It all came back to me in 1968, the year of the West’s second betrayal of Czechoslovakia. If Václav Havel inspired such support throughout the world in 1989 and 1990, I want to believe it was due in part to the “civilized world’s” feeling of guilt toward his nation.

Tragedy loomed, but life went on. I paid little attention to the outside world. I was growing up, maturing, learning more difficult and obscure texts. Hitler’s howling failed to penetrate my consciousness. The Nuremberg laws, the Olympic Games, the assassination of Von Rath, Kristallnacht? Hadrian and the Inquisition had done worse. We hoped that the Third Reich would crumble of its own weight, that the great powers of Europe would hold the line, that Hitler and his acolytes would founder. We hoped there would be no war.

But there was. It broke out on a Friday in the month of Elul, when we were all preparing for the High Holidays. In the morning the blowing of the shofar called upon sinners to repent. During Elul, they say, even the fish tremble in the waters. In a corner of the Beit Hamidrash my father and his friends, draped in their prayer shawls and wearing their phylacteries, talked about the latest news. Their excited voices rose, and their elders hissed at them to be quiet: “Ssh, we’re praying here!” To this day I can still hear that “Ssh,” and I know so well what it meant: What an idea to chatter and fret when Jews are addressing the King of the Universe. What an idea for peoples and their armies to slaughter one another over a few scraps of land or a few slogans while God was listening to His faithful.

The discussion was halted and the service continued, concluding, as usual, with the prayer for the dead, the Kaddish. Cannon fire could already be heard in the distance. The dying had begun, and the first orphans were learning to bear their grief. Yet my own existence was not disturbed unduly. That Friday I received my usual braided bread from my grandmother. I went to the ritual baths to purify myself for the approach of the Queen of Shabbat. I put on a white shirt, my best suit, and prepared myself for the peace of the seventh day of Creation, which the passions of men must not disturb.

Nothing exceptional occurred that Shabbat. At the morning service I heard that a famous preacher was in town and would deliver a sermon that afternoon. He was so thin you could hardly see him. How could such a tiny man have such a deep, resonant voice? I expected him to talk about current events, but he had other priorities. Using an intonation customary among Lithuanian preachers, he described the fierce, implacable punishment that awaited the wicked, those guilty of sexual transgressions and depravities I was too young to understand. They said he was so nearsighted as to be almost blind, but he seemed to know his way around hell as though he had lived there from birth.

We were at war, but I did not feel threatened. For me life went on
as before. I had to prepare myself for the Jewish New Year, not an easy task. Salvation requires sincerity: cheating is forbidden. On the Day of Judgment an incorruptible celestial tribunal will decide who shall live and who shall die, who shall perish by the sword, who by fire, and who by thirst.

My grandfather came to spend the High Holidays with us. I gave him my bed and slept on a bench, delighted to gain on two fronts: The discomfort would help me expiate my sins while also making my grandfather happy. I remember that he wept more than usual during the arduous Rosh Hashana service, especially during the last part, the Musaf. Perhaps he sensed what I was too young to imagine: that this war, once unleashed, would sweep away thousands upon thousands of destinies in its torrent.

We knew something of what was happening beyond the borders. The Hungarian and Yiddish newspapers offered vague reports, but we knew things were bad. These were trying times for Jews in German-occupied territories. That was only to be expected. Hitler had made no secret of his criminal intentions toward our people, and we knew very well that hatred backed by power always meant catastrophe. And Hitler’s hatred of the Jews was so visceral and his power so absolute that we had to expect the worst. But we could not anticipate the horror of reality. From Polish refugees passing through our town, all bearing bad news, we heard tales of the German army’s invincibility and brutality. We were told of arbitrary arrests, systematic humiliation, collective persecution, and even of pogroms and massacres. And yet.

The truth is that, in spite of everything we knew about Nazi Germany, we had an inexplicable confidence in German culture and humanism. We kept telling ourselves that this was, after all, a civilized people, that we must not give credence to exaggerated rumors about its army’s behavior.

Yes, that’s what many of the Jews in our town thought, including my mother. We all fell into the trap history had set for us. During World War I the German army had rescued Jews who, under Russian occupation, had been beaten, ridiculed, and oppressed by savage Cossacks whose mentality and traditions were steeped in anti-Semitism. When they left, our region enjoyed a spell of calm. The German officers had been courteous and helpful, unlike the Cossacks. Lulled by memories of the Germans of that era, the Jews refused to believe that
their sons could be inhuman. In this the Jews were not alone. Neville Chamberlain reacted in much the same way.

One of the consequences of the Phony War (1939–40), was that Stalin and Hitler redrew the borders of Poland, Hungary, and Romania. The Soviet Union came closer to Sighet, and about a dozen young Jews took the opportunity to slip across the frontier to help build the workers’ paradise. Their Communist “brothers” imprisoned them immediately upon arrival and dispatched them to that empire of oppression that would later be called the Gulag. Leizer Bash and his young fiancée, both distant relatives of my father, spent more than ten years there. I learned of their experience in Canada in 1954. Arrested just after setting foot on Soviet soil, they were accused of spying for the bourgeois fascists. They were sentenced, sent from prison to prison and camp to camp, and finally wound up in Siberia. In his suffering Leizer discovered in himself a vocation as a Yiddish writer. His works are eyewitness accounts of life in the Gulag ten years before Solzhenitsyn.

Another consequence was the German invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Jews nevertheless were optimistic. The beginning of the real war, we felt, would mean the end of Hitler’s Germany.

A third consequence was that Sighet became Máramarossziget again. The population joyfully greeted the first “motorized” units of the Hungarian army: troops on bicycles. My mother, too, was pleased with our change of nationality. For her it was a kind of return to her childhood for which thanks were due to God.

Yet there were many harbingers of evil. Though no one was yet talking of liquidation or extermination, news of massacres in Poland began to filter through. And that should have been enough to awaken us. In 1941 more than a thousand “foreign” Jews—those unable to document their Hungarian citizenship—were expelled from Hungarian territory to Polish Galicia. I remember going to the station to say goodbye. Everybody was there. We thought we would see them again someday, but only one managed to escape, and that was Moshe the beadle. Dazed, madness in his eyes, he told a hair-raising story: Those expelled (they were not yet called deportees) had been slaughtered and buried naked in ditches near Kolomyya, Stanislav, and Kamenets-Podolski. He talked on and on about the brutality of the killers, the agony of dying children, and the death of old people, but no one believed him. The Germans are human beings, people said, even if the
Nazis aren’t. The more convincing Moshe the beadle tried to be, the less seriously he was taken. He has suffered too much, people said, so much that he doesn’t know what he’s saying. Then he would lose his temper. “Listen to me!” he would shout. “I’m telling the truth, I swear it! On my life I swear it, and on yours! If I’m lying, how come I’m alone? Where is my wife and our children? What about the others, your former neighbors? Where are they? I’m telling you, they killed them. If you don’t believe me, you’re crazy.” Poor guy, everyone said. Raving mad. Which only made him angrier: “You’re irresponsible, I’m telling you! What happened to us will happen to you. If you want to look away, go ahead! But if I’m lying, why do I say Kaddish morning and night? And why do you say, ‘Amen’?” That much was true. He recited the prayer for the dead ten times in the morning and ten times in the evening, attending every service, rushing from synagogue to synagogue seeking a minyan so he could say another Kaddish, and yet another. But the people were deaf to his pleas. I liked him and often kept him company, but I, too, could not bring myself to believe him. I listened, staring into his feverish face as he described his torment, but my mind resisted. Galicia is not exactly the end of the world, I told myself. It’s only a few hours from here. If what he’s saying were true, we would have heard.

Besides which, my mother was not entirely wrong. Her optimism was understandable. Things had been relatively quiet for the Jews since Admiral Horthy had taken power in Hungary. He had influential Jewish friends, some of whom had converted. The most outrageous forms of collective harassment ceased, and expulsions to Galicia were suspended. Though allied to Germany, Hungary treated its own Jews as it saw fit. Apart from the
numerus clausus
in the university and the major academies, the Jews had little cause for complaint. The vociferous insults of the Nyilas fascists were troubling, but no more than that, for they were not in power. Exempted from military service, young Jewish males were drafted into the Munkaszolgálat, a kind of auxiliary force that accompanied the troops as quartermasters, digging antitank trenches in summer and cutting wood in winter. They did not complain unduly, nor did their families. Synagogues and Jewish elementary and secondary schools were packed and yeshivas flourished, as did Jewish commerce. Sports clubs, cultural centers, and Zionist organizations conducted their activities openly and legally: there were field trips, seminars, public debates.