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HERTA’S COMPORTMENT COULD best be described as neutral. She was neither happy nor unhappy to see me. I was simply there. She remembered Uncle Leon, pleased to talk about him, warming up, her eyes alive. Yes, she said, I know who you are, his grandson. This was treated as a point of fact, not accompanied by any hint of emotion. Indeed, at no point in the course of the two days we spent together did she indicate sadness or happiness or any other sentiments that lie between the extremes. There was another curiosity: in the many hours we spent together, Herta didn’t ask me a single question.
Malke and Ruth, 1938
Early in the conversation it emerged that Herta knew nothing about what happened to her parents. She knew they were dead, but not how or when. I asked her if she wanted to know what happened to them.
“Does he know?” The question was put to her son, not to me. She seemed surprised at the prospect of new information.
“He says he knows,” Doron replied. They spoke in Hebrew; I could only infer the gentleness with which he answered.
I broke the silence and asked her son if she wanted to know.
“Ask her,” Doron said, with a shrug of the shoulder.
Yes, she replied, she wanted the details, all of them.
Many years had passed between the events I described and our coming together in Herta’s small apartment in Tel Aviv. Your parents were murdered, I told her, seventy years ago, after you and your sisters left Vienna. The circumstances were terribly unlucky. I discovered that Gusta and Max found places on a steamship, the Uranus, which was to sail down the Danube toward Bratislava, taking them and several hundred other Jewish émigrés toward the Black Sea. From there, they would take another boat to Palestine.
The Uranus left Vienna in December 1939, but the journey was interrupted by a confluence of unfortunate events, natural and unnatural, of ice and occupation. By the end of the year, the boat had reached Kladovo, a town in Yugoslavia (now in Serbia). Further passage was blocked by the ice that came with a freakish, cold winter. Gusta and Max spent a frozen winter on board the crowded boat, not allowed to disembark for several months, until the following spring. They were then taken to a camp near Kladovo, where they remained for several months. In November 1940, they boarded another boat, which returned toward Vienna, back up the Danube, to the town of Šabac, near Belgrade. That was where they happened to be in April 1941, when Germany attacked and occupied Yugoslavia. There they remained, unable to travel on.
In due course, they were detained under the authority of the Germans. The men and women were separated. Max was taken to Zasavica, in Serbia, to a field where he was lined up and shot with the other men from the boat. It was October 12, 1942. Gusta survived a few more weeks, then she was transported to the Sajmište concentration camp, near Belgrade. It was there that she was killed, on a day unknown, in the autumn of 1942.
Herta listened attentively to this account, which I shared with some anxiety. When I had finished, I waited to see if she had any questions, but there were none. She had heard and understood. She chose this moment to offer an explanation of her approach to the past, to silence and remembrance.
“I want you to know that it’s not correct that I have forgotten everything.”
That is what she said, her eyes fixed firmly on mine.
“It is just that I decided a very long time ago that this was a period that I did not wish to remember. I have not forgotten. I have chosen not to remember.”