6
“Remember How We Were Betrayed”
Remember how we were betrayed.
The day will come when we’ll take revenge
for all the innocent blood that was shed.
He’s not alone, of course. All around him and by his side are wonderful, passionate young people, these boys and girls, resistance fighters like him. All, or nearly all, are members of youth movements, Zionist, socialist, or Bundist2—idealists. Before the war they campaigned for equality and fraternity, dreamed of the Jewish country they’d build in Palestine. They learned Hebrew, read Marx and Trotsky, discussed, argued, demonstrated. Tomorrow would be glorious, their revolution would be in a united world, they would pick oranges on the hills of Zion. No more discrimination or anti-Semitism, no more very poor or very rich, everyone would be brothers and sisters. Until then they would sing and dance and fall in love.
But now that tomorrow has arrived, there’s no revolution or liberation. Instead of the Promised Land they find themselves trapped in a land that is doomed. Dreams of a new world where all would be equal, a new country that would finally be theirs, are all so distant. They wanted to build, but everything they hoped for was destroyed. They wanted everyone to love one another, but the world hates them. Their tomorrows no longer sing, they cry out and moan. And the future that seemed so vast, full, and rich, withers and contorts as it dies in agony.
Yet they don’t despair, they continue to struggle. Shut up in the ghetto in the middle of a suffering people, they devote their too short youth to making life more human—feeding, caring for, educating, and entertaining. And making death more human—getting ready, training, rebelling, resisting.
Around Mordechai there are people who are wonderful and full of life.
But during the great and terrifying Aktion of the summer of 1942, around us it seems as if there are only poor, dying people.
Between July 22 and September 13, the ghetto is emptied of nearly three hundred thousand of its occupants. Every day eight thousand to ten thousand babies, little boys and girls, teenagers, young people, mothers and fathers, men and women, old gentlemen and elderly ladies are deported to Treblinka, sorted, stripped, gassed, and then burned. In a crowd, in a line, and in the end, on fire.
A whole people sacrificed, slaughtered almost entirely. Those who are sent to find out what’s happening return staggering and vomiting with horror, sobbing as they repeat what they saw, what they smelled, what they understood: the silence in the camp, the trains leaving again, and the odor, the odor of abject death. It truly looks as if this is the end of us.
In any case, it’s the end of what remains of my family.
The day when they are rounded up, I’m away on a mission and arrive too late—but too late for what? To save them or go with them? In our overcrowded street, panic-stricken, cornered people stumble and cry out and search. They keep moving, alas, for where are they supposed to go? They obey, of course, because they’re unarmed. And suddenly I see them, my family, the only people I had, the last who loved me, and they’re being taken to their deaths and all I can do is watch, weeping brutal tears that have no right to flow. They walk, my poor people, when they should be running. “Save yourselves! Fight!” I want to shout. My little cousins whimper, my grandmother falls and doesn’t get up, my aunts are dazed and my uncles expressionless. I see my father, so handsome, still tall and shining, he’s leaving without me, Papa, wait! But he’s seen me too and tips his hat in farewell because he wants me to live and is forcing me to stay. So I obey him, I say nothing, I step back, I let them go, never to see them again.
I’ve lost all my kin, and now there’s nobody left who knows what I was like as a child.
The only family I have left is Mordechai and his people.
My people.