A completely dazed, exhausted crowd, surrounded by soldiers with dogs—this is what we were, when we went through the camp gate, framed by two square brick towers, while above our heads hung the arch-shaped metallic sign with the sacred words: “TO EACH HIS OWN.”
And now, please, save me from the memory, heavy as a hundred-ton cast-iron mold, and allow me not to describe to you the hell in which we ended up! Many people before me have done it, and truly much better, too, than I would do it. The times of the first shattering discoveries have passed, those waves of horror have died down that, like a tsunami, flooded the world’s conscience after the war. Millions of meters of film and photo reels have been rotated, mountains of court files and memories have been accumulated, in which everyone could see his piece of the truth through the keyhole of his own experience. It became a profession to put systematically in drawers the self-admitted guilt of the repentant and the ambiguous blather of unrepentant butchers; filed away and numbered in protocols and shorthand records was the subdued weeping of the survivors, and from it, from this crying, some people erected an impressive and invisible pantheon of the Holocaust, while others built for themselves also impressive, but quite real, villas with swimming pools and two satellite dishes. Words like “Zyklon-B,” “gas chamber,” or “Final Solution” gradually lost their original demonic unreality and became a daily ingredient of indifferent newspaper articles dedicated to commemorations and the like. In short, save me, please, because of the requirement for the completeness of the plot, as we were instructed during our creative writing classes by Eliezer Pinkus, may his soul rest in peace, from repeating to you things that are already painfully familiar, and that you are already maybe even fed up with.
Suffice it for me to say that typhoid had flared up to the scale of a pandemic and that the camp management was faced with a nightmare, because Flossenbürg was not technologically prepared to deal with so many dead, being far from the perfection of the big death factories in Poland. This had necessitated the building of pyres of human bodies whose size would have won the envy of the Holy Inquisition from the most glorious period of its existence. Gasoline, mixed with used motor oil, finished the job, as huge columns of sooty smoke rose up to worlds beyond, so they could also learn how far in its evolution this amphibian had reached, who once upon a time crawled up into the cave and from there, already a two-legged creature, sneaked out again in order to paint the portrait of Mona Lisa and create the Ninth Symphony. The incompletely burnt remnants were shoveled away with bulldozers into huge ditches, the sandy soil discreetly and forever locking within itself destinies, laughter, ambitions, lumbago, I love you, what grade did you get in geography, or to whom is Aunt Bertha writing. Farewell, brothers, and rest in peace!
Together with three Jews from Zagreb, I pushed a wheelbarrow full of corpses, which were in almost skeletal condition, loosely piled every which way. From the wooden partitions of the wheelbarrow legs and arms stuck out like broken branches. The most horrifying thing was that I soon turned into a thick-witted drudge, who stopped feeling terror and got used to his work in the same way as my former fellow campmates from Special Site A-17 got used to pushing wagons with the cast-iron molds.
And still, my soul probably wasn’t completely dead, because there amid the hellish congregation of the sick, the dying, and the dead, amid the moans and the foul stench, I met—and I swear this is exactly what happened—my dear rabbi Shmuel Ben-David and the last seed of emotion, surviving by a miracle in the folds of my desert indifference, bloomed like a peony. The rabbi was playing the role of physician, helpless to heal anyone but capable of alleviating the suffering with either a good word, or a moist compress, or a good old prayer. And so among the doomed, and we ourselves were doomed, we could see each other briefly, and I don’t know if these momentary encounters of ours brought me more joy or sorrow. Such disasters the rabbi had survived, that if I were a writer, to describe them I would have to put them in a separate novel. He’d sneaked into our occupied Kolodetz, to find out that all, literally all our close ones had been deported or shot dead there on the spot, in that ravine above the river which I loved so much. What had happened to Sarah and the children he didn’t know and he couldn’t know, because instead of fleeing east to save himself, he’d made his way to Warsaw, where he tried to steal into the Muranov neighborhood, surrounded and fighting to the death, or in other words the Warsaw ghetto, when he got arrested. What saved him was having a fake ID as a Polish doctor, head intern, and as such he’d ended up here, in order to help those who were dying in his hands.
From Rabbi Ben-David, who was himself nothing but skin and bones, I received strength or, as he used to say, two handfuls of hope like spring water. From him I learned that the Allies were already in Europe, and Soviet troops had crossed the Oder and were following our sometime road that was to lead us to the heart of the thousand-year Third Reich.
“Vengeance,” the rabbi once said, cradling someone who had just died in his arms, “is foreign to faith in goodness and has to be uprooted from the heart of humanity, even though now its unavoidable hour will strike. May God give seven days to our souls, just seven days, so that both the living and the dead will be at peace. Seven terrible days, seven flaming horsemen of retribution, and to each—his own! And I will pray to God to bless and forgive all those who will want an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, life for a life, and death for a death! But seven days! And then—let ashes cover everything and let grass grow over the ashes. Because children will have to be born again in goodness and peace, and sowers will have to sow fresh seeds for the bread of the people. But before that let that which has been said come true—and to each his own. Amen!”
Thus spoke the former chairman of the Atheists’ Club in Kolodetz by Drogobych, Rabbi Shmuel Ben-David, and his good eyes had opened wide and become fierce and evil. In his arms something that resembled a human being lay dead, and these words were maybe a curse and maybe a prayer for the peace of his soul.