EVENTS PASSOVER, APRIL, 1941. ENTRY APRIL 15, 1941. N.L….and this attitude of concentration on Reb Yechiel Mazur’s part as he conducted the Seder ceremony added to the general serenity.
That evening my attention was drawn yet again to Rachel Apt. It is impossible to dismiss Rachel, as I have heard Berson do in very recent days, as a girl who never learned to live with her face. True, she is not good-looking; but I am reminded how often in the last few weeks I have heard “the Apt girl” discussed—and this phrase always refers to Rachel, not to the pretty nonentity who is her sister. Something about Rachel causes her to be remembered and talked about. The other night she showed real courage, and I must confess I exulted inwardly at the rebuke she handed Benlevi. In passing, she included me in her censure, and I fear that in that, as in almost everything she said, she was absolutely just….
EVENTS PASSOVER, APRIL, 1941. ENTRY APRIL 16, 1941. N.L….Later in the evening, when the ceremonies of the first night of Passover were finished and the guests were sitting around talking, Dolek Berson abruptly asked, with a smile:
—— Professor Benlevi, do you remember how angry you got when Frailin Apt here came to you—when was it, Rachel? late last summer?—about the secret school we were starting up here in our courtyard?
It was hard to tell from what motive Berson had brought this up: apparently not out of malice; the remark seemed merely to be an idle, somewhat humorous recollection.
Benlevi turned his stately head toward Rachel, beside him, and for one indecisive moment he seemed torn between acknowledging the folly of his petty temper or standing upon his dignity; when the moment of assessing his audience had passed, he shook his head and said, crushingly:
—— Foolish girl!
I saw Rachel go on a sudden hunt for help. She looked briefly in my eyes, but I suppose my curtains were drawn. She looked at Rutka. Then I intercepted a strange look, deep and strong, between Rachel and Froi Mazur. It was as if they had some understanding with each other. At once Rachel turned to Benlevi. Her face was slightly pale, but otherwise she was quite natural. Her voice was quiet, untrembling, and confident, as she said:
—— Forgive me. I think the foolishness was yours.
Everybody listened. Ugly little Rachel, in a retort to the Nobel Prize winner!
Benlevi, grandly amused: —— So?
Rachel: —— I think it was foolish of you—not of you, personally, Professor, but of all of you in the Judenrat—to be blind to what was happening here in Warsaw. Instead of hiding behind legality, it should have been your business to make sure that every Jewish child received proper training, even if it meant risking your official lives. I know: you said, and Sokolczyk and Mandeltort said, and even you, Noach, said: There’s no use stirring up the Germans. Every step they took to close in on us, all of you said: Let’s not anger them. Let’s not fight. Let’s not have secret schools. Let’s not endanger the majority for the sake of the minority affected by this decree or that decree….No, Professor Benlevi, I think you were the foolish one, not I.
Well, the look on Benlevi’s face! By God, I even saw Berson look at Rachel gravely and with something like respect, and he said to Benlevi:
—— Do you know, I think she is partly right?
Rutka Mazur, hotly: —— Partly right? Where is she wrong?
Quickly Froi Mazur put an end to a potentially unpleasant situation by saying:
—— Let’s leave the table and go and sing some Pesach songs.
Then I saw Froi Mazur glance again, ever so fleetingly, at Rachel, and in that sidelong blink I thought I noticed once more something compelling and rewarding. Rachel looked as if she were under a spell.
EVENTS PASSOVER, APRIL, 1941. ENTRY APRIL 16, 1941. FROM RACHEL APT. I have already noted here that I detected some kind of accord between Rachel and Froi Mazur that night. Indeed, I had the impression that Rachel got the courage to do what she did mostly from Froi Mazur. I asked her about this. She told me that the harmony I had spied out had been achieved only that night—during and just after the Seder ceremony; as follows:
Rachel was placed beside Professor Benlevi at table. At first this embarrassed her terribly [NOTE. N.L. I had observed that myself.], but the theatrical old gentleman seemed to have forgotten all about the ill-considered visit to him at the Judenrat, and he nodded and spoke to her benignly.
The Mazurs had asked in some friends for the Seder meal: Berson and Symka, Rabbi Goldflamm, Regina Orlewska, the three older Apt children, Benlevi, and N.L. Rachel says she watched Froi Mazur, as she brought her husband his cushions, and then fetched a plate with three pieces of unleavened bread and another plate containing the ceremonial foods—a roasted shank bone of lamb, a roasted egg, ground nuts and cinnamon moistened with wine, some onion, a horse-radish root, and a dish of salted water. She moved, Rachel thought, with the majesty of one in command of thousands of inferiors, and yet she seemed to have humility; she seemed to wish to stay in the background. When all was arranged, she sat down opposite Reb Yechiel Mazur, who had assumed the traditional half-reclining position. Froi Mazur turned to Schlome, the youngest person present, and said:
—— All right, son, your father is ready.
Schlome turned his grave face toward his father. His side-curls shook as he moved his head. He stated the “Four Questions”:
—— Why is this night different from all other nights? On other nights we eat leavened bread, but on this night, only unleavened bread. On other nights we eat both sweet and bitter herbs, but on this night, only bitter herbs. On other nights we dip food in liquid once, but this night we dip twice. On other nights, Father, you sit straight, but this night you sit leaning on cushions.
While Reb Yechiel Mazur answered and then went on with the Hagadah, as if explaining to his delicate son the history of things, Rachel sat watching Froi Mazur gazing into the face of Schlome, inquiring, it seemed, whether he was taking it all in—even though the mother must have known that her son had long since memorized the words and wrestled with the sense of the Hagadah. Rachel saw a look of anxiety and love: a look of absolute, all-absorbing maternity in Froi Mazur’s eyes, and suddenly, remembering her own flighty and temperamental mother, Rachel yearned, she almost ached with yearning, for such a look directed at herself. Or—for she says there was this strange alternative—for a chance to direct such a look at someone else. With the religious words still droning like summer flies about her ears, Rachel became deeply aware of the ambiguous, frustrating desire Froi Mazur inspired in her.
Rachel says she was abstracted by these uneasy thoughts at the time when Berson came out with his question to Benlevi, and Benlevi with his condescending remark to her. Rachel says she looked around for support. She says she looked first at me to bring herself back to earth. She looked at Rutka, who has been more or less coaching her in Zionist beginnings. Then, almost fearfully, she looked at Froi Mazur.
In Froi Mazur’s eyes Rachel saw, full and strong, the look the mother had directed at her pale son, now bathing her. She turned away quickly. She answered Benlevi….
ENTRY APRIL 23, 1941. N.L. I have been thinking about Rachel. I have been remembering things.
I remember something that happened at an earlier Mazur ceremony—at the housewarming where I spoke. [ENTRY MARCH 17, 1940.] I was nervous that day, on account of the part I was playing, but I do remember one brief flurry of conversation after the formalities were over. The younger people were discussing music, and Berson, who as a pianist presumably knew more about the subject than anyone else, said he thought the second movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto was one of the greatest love scenes in music—with the orchestra masculine, the piano feminine. Rachel remarked that her idea of a love scene was not simply a situation where a woman talks a man to sleep. I recall that this dry statement aroused my curiosity to such an extent that I borrowed a recording of the concerto from Felix Mandeltort the next day, played the second movement, and found Rachel absolutely right. I now reflect that the remarkable thing about her observation was not its precision, but the fact that she made it at all—the fact that Rachel Apt, with her unlucky features, should have possessed an idea of a love scene.
I remember also the day of the raid on Goldflamm’s secret prayerhouse, when Fischel Schpunt discovered that he was comical, dancing on the cobblestones. I glanced at her face when we were all laughing: she was not! I cannot be sure whether this indicated a lack of farcical humor in her, or a surplus of unspent compassion; I suspect the latter. She did not even smile at that very funny sight.
Then there is something Berson said, another time. I believe he was speaking of the intensity with which she organized the courtyard school, and I remember that he broke off to say:
—— The curious thing is that although your first impression of Rachel is that she is dreadfully ugly, you find on acquaintance that she isn’t bad-looking at all.
I have been careful to give Rachel every possible chance to vindicate this judgment, but I am afraid I cannot agree. She continues to seem plain—at least, through my thick glasses: I have never thought her “dreadfully ugly.”
Then one night at Berson’s apartment Rachel questioned me in a feverish way—literally, so that I wondered whether she was suffering from grippe—about the subtle gradations of politics in the various Zionist organizations. I have written in this record of her eagerness to learn, of her attentiveness. [ENTRY NOVEMBER 30, 1939.] But this was more than that. There was a kind of desperation in these questions. Perhaps she was looking for an outlet for her energies.
I remember seeing her one day with her little brother David—toward whom, if toward anyone, she can direct looks like Froi Mazur’s; and it seemed to me that Rachel was not entirely in control of the situation. Indeed, at one point David laughed at her, and said:
—— Sister, you are too sober-sided!
Every contact I have had with Rachel Apt has left me in a haze of recollection and reflection: she has always made me think. She has a strange impersonal magnetism.
I have decided this about “the Apt girl”: I think that if I were ever to fall in serious trouble, I should go to her for advice and help. I have seen that she has no wish to mother me, and I am rather grateful, as I have had one mother and one is probably enough. Bolder thoughts enter my mind from time to time, but they drift away, like gentle mists. Yet how comfortable it is to have Rachel there!