Then came the order to get ready to leave; fortunately, I hadn’t returned my clothes to the storeroom after the last raid. Kamil thinks we ought to wear lighter clothes and not the gendarmes’ uniforms, which slow down our walking. But this time he doesn’t insist, owing to the bitter cold.
When Kamil is excited by an action or mission, he easily passes his excitement on to us. He seems to shove aside his darker, depressing thoughts and doesn’t show them.
So it was this time. We lined up to be counted; there were sixteen of us. The password for the operation was hayahid, the individual. This is a precious word; the world depends upon it.
Kamil sometimes uses lofty language, but his words, as we’ve learned, are not for show. Every sentence is quarried from deep within. People here are attuned to words; even the ones who for years spoke in slogans now try not to rely on them. Kamil sometimes qualifies what he says. “Forgive me if I sound flowery,” he would say. “I haven’t yet found the right words, so I need to dress them up a little.”
In the gymnasium we learned: style makes the man. Kamil is allergic to an excess of words. Also to wisecracking and feigning innocence, not to mention hypocrisy. He bites his lip over every extraneous word. His language is clear but always seems to hide a secret. Before we go on a mission, he will sometimes intone, “Remember, there is no earth without heaven.” Felix knows him going back to their time at university. Even then Kamil saw the world with different eyes. He didn’t take part in ideological debates, but his whole manner affirmed that this life, be it ever so evil and ugly, has meaning. There is beauty and tenderness on the inside. The wicked must be vanquished, and the inner beauty must be zealously protected.
When Kamil was a student, he learned fencing and boxing, and Felix often heard him say, “We’ll beat the hell out of the bad guys so they won’t ruin our lives.” He gained his first religious insights from a monk named Sergei. He would visit his monastery once a week. Kamil never denied those visits. On the contrary, he would often say, “Sergei taught me what religion means, but I also searched for the Jew in me—for the books that would nourish the Jew in me and for the people I could connect with.” Later on he discovered Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. He wanted to follow Rosenzweig’s path toward religious observance, but it just didn’t work out.
Before each mission, a new Kamil is revealed. This time he wore a thick cap with a visor that made him look like a fisherman. Many dangers await us, and we do not take our mission lightly. If we manage to save a handful, our battle against evil will not have been in vain.
Kamil recited the psalm “The Lord is my shepherd.” His reading was charged and tense, like a strike on hot metal. I asked Isidor if Kamil’s reading is traditional or his own version. Isidor didn’t know how to answer; he said only, “In the synagogue of the Hasidim they didn’t read it like Kamil does.”