One more day, two more days, remain in our stay at the summit. The time grows shorter. The coffee has run out. We drink tea and roll tobacco in newspapers. Whoever is not treating the sick and wounded is building stretchers.
The disquiet that we had suppressed all along now rises to the surface. Stinging words never heard before unsettle the atmosphere. Felix asks for restraint and reminds us that during our entire time here, we had never vented our anger. Every fighter must do exactly as Kamil ordered. Now that he is gone, we must follow his orders with even greater diligence. Nobility means obligation, says Felix, repeating a motto of Kamil’s. In recent days Felix has often relied on Kamil’s words. Truth to tell, they don’t suit him and sound awkward. Felix should stay Felix, even when there’s a need for words and maxims.
We already have the stretchers that will take the first people down tomorrow morning. What will happen? How will we carry on? I can’t form a picture in my mind.
Emil is on his feet and feeling well, but he won’t be among the first to make the descent. His hope of finding his blind parents has not abated. He speaks of them all the time, as if trying to inform them that he’s not far away.
Tsila doesn’t budge from the kitchen. Hermann Cohen brings her whatever he still has in storage, and she makes tasty meals from it. The fighters help and encourage her and continue to promise that no one will ever forget her cooking; it is stamped into every cell in our bodies. It seems to me that a secret has been conveyed to her. “I know. I understand,” she mutters to herself, which is more frightening than her weeping.
Felix speaks to her tenderly. “Your job is not yet over,” he says. “You will stay with us for many days to come. We cannot do without you. When we go down, we’ll still be together. We have the sick and wounded, and we all depend on one another.”
She looks up. “And we won’t split up?”
“Absolutely not. We’ll stay together. We have a great responsibility. Kamil spoke of this a lot. Our togetherness is ingrained in us.”
“When will we go down?”
“Soon. We’ll go down carefully, and within a few days we will again be together, and with all the equipment we’ve used. What we did here we will do down there. Life at the summit was a preparation for the days to come. Kamil left us a great legacy, wonderful teachings, and we will protect it vigilantly.”
“And we won’t split up?” she asks again.
“God forbid. Our strength is our togetherness. The summit lifted us up from the dunghill. We will descend together as people who did what they had to do.”
I’ve never heard Felix speak so fluently, and I strongly feel that Kamil’s words have attached themselves to him. I long for the silence locked inside him. Now it’s gone, and he will never be what he was.
I look around and try to collect the vessels of life, which are hard to pack: Danzig hugging Milio. Milio not speaking as we’d hoped, but his face aglow with the will to absorb what surrounds us. Danzig speaks to him as to a son that he raised. “You will remember more than we do,” he says to Milio. “We were busy with raids and stakeouts and didn’t preserve what we saw. You, my dear boy, sat and watched and packed vision after vision into your soul. When the time comes, you will tell us everything you saw.”
Not far away, on a pile of twigs, sit Maxie, Michael, and Edward the dog. Ever since Edward’s sudden arrival, our togetherness has had a secret ingredient. Michael’s progress in the past month has been remarkable. Now he’s learning French with the same diligence that he applied to his study of arithmetic and geometry.
Karl always stands ready to lend a hand or to run and pick up a person who has fallen down. If all communists were like him, the world would be redeemed without delay. In the ghetto there were greedy people who hoarded food, deaf to the cries of those dying of hunger. The evil and malice that surrounded us penetrated every one of us, and only a few, the chosen ones, remained unblemished.
Karl remains at his post. He exudes good-heartedness, but we do not feel inferior to him. On the contrary, each contact with Karl elevates us. Sometimes he sits down, but even when he’s seated, his stature is high.
So the eye drifts from image to image: from those who are with us to those who have gone on to another world.