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Samuel: Tel Aviv, January 20, 1943
They’re fighting back.
The rumor I heard must have licked at Tel Aviv’s heart like flames, heating hope and igniting optimism. The papers carried no official word, but—had I been listening—I could have felt the street thrum with the news.
They’re not just waiting to be taken anymore, they must have been saying. They’re fighting back.
These rumors, of the first shots fired in the Warsaw Ghetto by Jews on Nazis, must have mixed with the news of Rommel’s continued humiliations at the hands of the British, following his crushing defeat in El Alamein.
If the German war machine could be stopped in North Africa, they probably gushed, if Stalingrad was retaken, and if Jews—our brothers and sisters!—were actually fighting back in Poland....
This is what they must have been saying, but I wasn’t listening—not really.
I was on a different plane of existence, in a universe wherein the fact that Danuta was no more became the sole source of light, heat, and air. No other news interested me except this. I rediscovered it hourly, reminded of her at every turn, even though she’d never even breathed Tel Aviv air. She was here, even in this bed, whose pillow the glorious luxury of her hair had never graced. Over the course of almost two years and 5000 kilometers of misery, I had constructed her life here in minute detail. Now, my mind seemed determined to perpetuate this story—certainly easier to consider than the truth of her suffering and death on a lice-infested wooden bunk in Ravensbruck.
It was easier to see her in Tel Aviv than to recall that her death had been at my hand. It was easier to picture her here than to consider that she would not have been on that ship, had she not been on her way to join me in Palestine. It was easier to imagine her in this kitchen than to recall that they wouldn’t have taken her to Ravensbruck had she not assumed a Jewish identity... for my sake. She may well have still been safe in Vilnius with Adrianna, she may well have survived the war, and she may well have been on her way to Tel Aviv now—if only, if only, if only....
These thoughts circled endlessly in my head, hungry sharks around flailing prey, just waiting for the opportunity to tear at exposed flesh. And oh, I offered so much exposed flesh at which they could rip.
I saw her everywhere. Her shadow flitted from room to room, always just beyond my peripheral vision, as I sat at the still dusty kitchen table cluttered with dirty cups and an overflowing ashtray. Every time I touched the door handle to leave the flat, I felt the warmth where her hand had just rested. She briskly turned each corner, just ahead of me and maddeningly out of sight, every time I went to the kiosk on King George Street to get more cigarettes. I heard her breathing next to me in the depths of the night, and was puzzled anew each time I stretched out a hand to discover cold mattress instead of warm flesh.
In the months following my arrival in Tel Aviv, I preferred this universe, a place in which Danuta still lived. I ignored the outside world, with its burgeoning optimism over Germany’s inevitable defeat and the meaning of this to Jewish national aspirations. Though still a devout Zionist—my conversion during my travels had been complete—I simply had no room for ideology in this parallel universe.
In this warped place, even the telegram from Aron, which had arrived two weeks ago, had barely registered.
Hope you are well. Release January 20. Coming home. Will you be there?
I’d ignored the implications of this missive, but now I reached for it instinctively with my right hand—
When will I learn?
I sent yet another dirty cup to its death on the hard stone floor. Its corpse lay sadly along with its fallen compatriots.
Aron will be here in just days—perhaps today.
Would I be here? Had I ever truly been here? How was I to feel about the man who had nearly killed me as a child, saved me from certain death in the gulag, yet left me alone in a world without the one thing for which I had chosen life? Was I to strike him, embrace him, spit on him? What was he to me, in any case? A brother in name only, who’d not played a role in my life for two of my three decades; a brother who’d never taken me into account in any of his own life decisions, yet presumed to imprison me now in this world without Danuta. He had betrayed me that day on the banks of the Vistula—whatever the origins of his rage—and then abandoned me in 1931. I owed him nothing, and felt for him less.
Tears rose in my eyes, and I looked up at the winter sunshine streaming through the grimy windows of my brother’s flat.
Has he loved here, as I loved in Vilnius?
The January chill traveled up my legs from the cold floor as the sharks circled round and round. I took my head in both hands, and rocked back and forth like an infant in a vain attempt to make them stop.
Then, I felt her breath on the back of my neck. This time, I did not turn to catch a glimpse. Rather, I stayed still, and she leaned closer. I smelled her perfume. A lock of hair brushed my ear, and a warm, soft hand rested lightly on my shoulder. Her voice—glorious, dusky—whispered in my ear.
“Yes,” I agreed out loud, startling myself with the conviction in my own voice. “Yes, of course, I remember. My darling, you’re right, as usual.”
Then I turned, and I could see her smug smile.
Tell me again how right I am, she seemed to say.
***
I was nine years old that day in 1926 when I got lost on the Kozlowski Brothers’ beach, on the banks of the Vistula. Aron was 14. I learned later that this all happened only months after the bloodless coup that brought Jozef Pilsudski to power. Back then, this fact would have, of course, carried far less weight than the excitement of going to the beach with my older brother, the promise of ice cream, and the slap and curse that followed my getting lost and his being paged to retrieve me.
We left the beach through the wooden turnstile. Aron, red-faced and sweating, still grasped me tightly by the wrist. He tugged me forward with such urgency that my shoulder ached. I sobbed breathlessly yet silently, following his slap and vicious reprimand. Tears and snot mingled and ran into my mouth, making me choke.
I was not yet of an age where I could be angry with my revered older brother, despite his behavior towards me. Rather, I simply reeled from the sheer hurt I felt from his cruelty. What had I done to deserve it?
It was a short tram ride back to Praga on the number 17 line. Aron was too impatient to walk. The car was sweltering in the afternoon sun. Aron made me sit by the open window, so as to keep me from bolting.
The smell of sweat, wood polish, and cigarette smoke overpowered me, and the backs of my legs stuck to the leather seats. I tried to count the automobiles that went by—one of my favorite tram games—but in short order we debarked into the fresh air of Wybrzeze Szczecinskie Street.
I didn’t notice the group of boys at first, but Aron’s insistent tugging, which had abated since we’d gotten off the tram, suddenly increased.
What have I done now? Why do you hate me so much?
The raucous voices shook me from my self-pity.
“Hey, here are some Jew Swine, now! Jew Swine, come here for a minute! Come here, Jew Swine!” The biggest of the boys was Aron’s age, or perhaps older. I could see the familiar yellow leaflet clutched in his hand. They’d been all over the city recently, so ubiquitous that even I had noticed. It contained a large caricature of a swine, headlined in capital letters “SWINIA KUPUJE U ZYDA”—only pigs buy from Jews!
“Ignore them,” my father had said about the leaflets, which—I later learned—were part of an economic boycott launched by a political party. “They are the undertow, boys, and we won’t allow ourselves to get sucked down to their level, will we?”
Now the undertow had caught up with us, even though Aron had quickened our pace so dramatically that I trotted to keep up. Despite the effort, I didn’t complain. I was scared, but it was a fruitless effort.
They quickly surrounded us, eight of them, all far bigger than me, and many bigger than Aron.
“Look, it’s a Jew piglet, along with his Jew Swine. Do you suck your swine’s teats, little piglet?” The largest boy leaned close to me and grabbed my face.
Up close, I could see his greasy hair and the wide gap between his front teeth. His breath smelled of garlic. He forced my cheeks into a sucking expression that elicited renewed laughter from the other boys.
Encouraged, he squeezed my face tighter. “What else do you suck, Jew piglet? Huh?”
More laughter.
My cheeks began to hurt, and tears came into my eyes. I looked around wildly for Aron.
Why isn’t he helping me? Does he hate me that much?
Now I started to cry for real, and pawed pointlessly at the strong hand that held my cheeks in a vice grip.
That’s when the cry sounded, a wild thing that would have put Johnny Weissmuller—my idol after I saw him in Tarzan the Ape Man—to shame. It came from nowhere and everywhere at the same time. The boy’s hand released my cheeks suddenly as a beach towel closed over his head. I fell back, and saw the wild thing, which seemed to be wearing my brother’s clothes, land on the boy’s back. The wild thing rode him like a rodeo steer, the ends of the towel, anchored around the boy’s face, its reins.
The rest was a blur. Aron seemed to have four arms. He was thrown clear of the larger boy, who untangled himself from the towel and backed away, clearly shaken. Aron charged back into the circle of confused boys with another wild call, and they scattered. He stood in the middle of the street, elated, and called after them, “That’s right, you shits. Nobody fucks with the Jew Swine’s piglet! Beware the Jew Swine! Fear him!”
Then he turned to me, bent down, and wiped my tears. He took my hand gently, and we walked back in the direction from which we’d just come, away from home.
He bought me ice cream.
This is what Danuta’s soft voice had reminded me. “He bought you ice cream.”
I had recalled the terror of being lost in the crowd. I had recalled Aron’s slap and cruel words. Yet I had never examined my memories further. The partial memory had suited my life’s narrative well, and never warranted further digging. My brother hated me. My brother tried to kill me. My brother abandoned me. This was my life—or so I’d believed.
I wiped the tears from my eyes and lit another cigarette, the match clutched in my left hand, my stump stabilizing the matchbox. The smoke crept towards the ceiling, and I tracked its path with my eyes. Outside, the sun had faded, and the blacked-out city remained unlit. The gloom crept through the cracks between the trisim, permeating the flat and pressing down with all its weight.
I stood and turned on a light, which forced the darkness back and revealed... a flat in a sorry state of cleanliness. In that illumination, I suddenly understood that the essence of any sibling relationship—possibly any human relationship—consisted of four simple, interconnected pillars: Love. Hate. Forgive. Repeat.
Somewhere along the way, I had forgotten three of these four pillars. Danuta’s gentle redeeming wisdom, I realized, had reached me from beyond the grave.
Shall I tell you again how right you were, my darling?
I gathered the cups from the floor, cleared the ashtray, and took the first steps towards cleaning the mess that surrounded me, and for which I was at least partly responsible.
***
Aron: Tel Aviv, January 20, 1943
I exited the El Alamein minefield vastly different than I entered it.
I’d run in with abandon, fleeing demons both visible and unseen. I’d cowered, helpless and trembling, as the anti-tank mines emerged from the sand, shaken free by the shock waves of the artillery barrage that signaled what would be a turning point in the war. The mines had revealed themselves, and the shock of doing so had caused some to self-destruct—nearly taking me with them. Yet after twenty minutes of hell, the barrage had ended, and the deadly mines surrounding me lay on the sand, fully exposed in the faint starlight but utterly intact. They’d been shaken into a parallel universe, one in which they were uncovered but still fully capable of fulfilling the task for which they’d been created.
I stared at them for what seemed like hours, my thoughts awhirl, until Sean’s voice reached me.
“Do you want me to order you a picnic lunch, or are you planning on coming out of there?”
I looked around at the exposed mines one last time, then at the dark figure on the horizon, whom I knew to be Sean, and understood what I needed to do. I stood with confidence, all traces of drunkenness vanquished by terror and revelation. I walked purposefully, cautiously, yet unafraid from the minefield in which I’d been cowering for only thirty minutes but living for over thirty years, and embraced Sean in the gathering darkness, ignoring the stares of the other dark figures around us.
***
The oil-burning steam engine that had pulled us faithfully from El Qantara, the sleepy town by the Suez Canal where we’d switched trains, gave a final hiss and jerked to a halt in Jaffa. I had offered to cover first-class tickets, but Sean insisted we travel like regular soldiers, and bought us an uncomfortable 3rd class wooden bench on which I’d found no sleep for the duration of the nearly ten-hour trip.
He had no such problem. As we stopped, his head—which had fallen repeatedly, sweetly, onto my shoulder as he slept—jolted from the window, onto which I’d gently moved it for propriety’s sake.
I was exposed, but not forgetful that I’d created the parallel universe in which I now lived.
It was late morning, and only a short bus ride from Jaffa to my flat, where I presumed Samuel awaited me. “I’m not ready,” I blurted as we walked out into the hazy winter Tel Aviv sunshine. The smell of the sea, once so familiar as to be indiscernible, now seemed pungent. It smelled of life—rich, luxurious, decaying and vibrant simultaneously.
We each carried an army duffel bag slung over a shoulder, which made walking cumbersome.
Sean found a quiet corner on the platform, and dropped his bag. When I followed suit, he turned and put a hand on my shoulder. “It’s not like you have a choice, my love. He’s in your flat, presumably. There’s also a war on, you may have noticed, so it’s not like there’s anywhere to run. And wasn’t it your wise father who used to say, ‘wherever you go, there you are’? There’s no hiding from this, so let’s go.”
He was right, of course. I was here, and I suddenly grasped that I was eager not only to meet Samuel but—in a very real sense—me. New Aron—the alter ego I’d unconsciously invented even before I’d moved to Palestine—and Old Aron, his ostensible predecessor, had gone. They’d coalesced in the terror of the minefield and had become one Aron—an Aron who no longer needed the dichotomy of New and Old, but was rather the sum total of his experiences, good and bad. I was nearly whole for the first time in my adult life, and eager to reach the one part that I felt would complete me.
Only one question remained: did that part want me?
Sean bought a Palestine Post before we boarded the green Egged bus, and I perused the headlines over his shoulder. In Warsaw, prolonged bursts of gunfire from the Jewish ghetto had given rise to fears of a massacre. Chile, pragmatic and sensing the clearly changing tide of the war, had broken off diplomatic relations with the Axis powers.
Diesel fumes masked the smell of the sea as the bus jolted through the tightly packed houses of the Neve Zedek neighborhood, then emerged onto the slightly wider streets branching off Rothschild Boulevard. Street scenes once familiar seemed foreign after my months in the desert.
Has the city changed, or have I?
“Bloody hell! They’re limiting us to four eggs a month and 500 grams of coffee. Bloody barbarians!” Sean read the new food-rationing announcement and tried to lighten my mood.
I smiled wanly at his effort, and returned to my reverie.
Sean returned to his paper.
My mind raced. He doesn’t want me. He hates me. Why wouldn’t he hate me? What have I ever offered him but rejection, pain born of my own self-loathing, and distance? He will see me only as the person who took Danuta. He hates me. Can I blame him?
Sensing my turmoil, Sean placed his hand on my shoulder in reassurance, without averting his eyes from the newspaper. The quietly supportive, intimate gesture jogged my memory, and my eyes suddenly filled with tears.
What if he does want me?
***
In 1928, I was 15 years old and already so deep in the emotional pit in which I would live for the coming decades, that I had trouble seeing out. I was in Vienna, where my father had been trying to persuade me to allow the eminent Dr. Eugen Steinach to “fix me,” as I understood it, by mutilating my genitals.
“I could force you. I could have you restrained,” he’d finally croaked in consternation, his hoarse whisper breaking the solemn silence of the clinic’s wood-paneled waiting room. His eyes showed the shock of sudden paternal impotence. He’d just realized that he could no longer control me, and would be unable to rectify what he saw as a glaring yet wholly rectifiable injustice.
“You could, Father. I suppose you have the power, legally.” My voice remained preternaturally calm, despite the burning knot in my gut. I could feel the muscles in my jaw, taut and straining with the effort of keeping my voice low. “You could, but you won’t. You won’t, because you’d never be able to face yourself if you did. And you certainly couldn’t face Mother.”
His face was ashen. “But this is your life we’re discussing, Aron. Your entire life. Surely you can understand that. Don’t you want to change?”
My efforts at propriety lapsed, and my voice broke. Heads in the waiting room turned as I blurted, “Do you think I like being different? Do you think it’s easy thinking... what I think? Do you think it’s easy feeling... what I feel? Of course, I want to change, but even if I could, it wouldn’t be like this. Not with some monster cutting me!”
During the long train ride back to Warsaw, I was too numb to think. It was only when I walked into the flat, and saw that smirking face, that I found myself wholly focused on a convenient object of wrath. Samuel had known of Father’s plans, I was sure. He didn’t deny it, seeming instead to revel in my misery. He had betrayed me. He was at fault. More importantly, as always, he was proximate. When I confronted him, he at first cowered, as I expected him to do. Then he rebelled, which surprised me, but I could no longer take comfort in blaming Samuel for my own shortcomings.
I sat in my room that entire next day, alternating between rage and anguish that I was woefully ill-equipped to understand. Samuel was at school, Father at work, and Mother flitted in and out of my room like a moth seeking exit but inexorably drawn back to a candle flame. She left food, but removed it when I didn’t eat. She embraced me, but quickly withdrew when I stiffened at her touch.
The shadows grew long in the afternoon, and still I stared out my window over the Vistula. Clouds had gathered, and rain seemed imminent. I didn’t hear the door to my room, and started when the small warm hand rested on my shoulder. It remained far longer than necessary, hesitantly seeking to comfort. I turned red-rimmed eyes to find my brother looking sheepish. He thrust a folded paper into my hand.
“I brought this for you,” he said. “Antoni Wawrzaszek asked me to give it to you. And I stopped at Mr. Brzezicki’s store on the way home, and bought some of those chocolates that you like. There was a tram accident right in front of his store, and you wouldn’t believe how many people stopped to look... and it was... it was... you know....” His voice trailed off as he recalled that the context of our current dialog remained far removed from the mundane. He turned to leave, and I let him go without a word.
***
I let him go without a word.
How could I have forgotten this? I pressed my cheek to Sean’s hand surreptitiously before he removed it from my shoulder.
The bus grounded to a halt at the corner of Allenby and King George. We shouldered our duffels, and shuffled down the narrow steps into the street.
I let him go without a word.
Moments carry staggeringly disproportionate power. A single fleeting moment in battle, or in parliamentary debate, can change the course of nations. A moment of distraction by a pilot or a surgeon can irrevocably impact—or even end—lives. A glance, a word, a gesture—in just seconds, these can alter the trust built brick by brick over decades.
In that moment, fifteen years previously, Samuel had reached out to me, and I had turned away. His ten-year-old psyche had realized its mistake, and he’d clumsily tried to make amends. The note from Antoni had been a brief, carefully worded missive of encouragement. I read it, then discarded and forgot it. In the fog of my angst, I never wondered how Antoni—the sole person I knew then who could have possibly hoped to understand—had even known of the events in Vienna. Clearly, I realized now, Samuel had told him—not from spite, but rather from love and concern.
And I turned him away.
We trudged down the hill towards Bugrashov Street. On the corner of Ben Tzion Boulevard, they’d already erected a small monument to the 130 victims of the Italian bombing I’d witnessed less than three years earlier. It served as a testament to another single moment of devastating gravity, the destructive ripples of which spread far, far beyond its own temporality.
Suddenly, they were everywhere—reminders of moments that I’d let slip by unexploited, unfulfilled. The post box on the corner of my street, into which I had not placed so many of the letters I’d written in my own name to Samuel. The neighbor’s door, which I’d never knocked on. The countless conversations I’d not had with the people closest to me, who would have been happy at my approach.
We turned onto Buki Ben Yagli Street, and I reached down to squeeze Sean’s hand, my gesture hidden from prying eyes by our bulky duffels. I’d captured this moment, I realized. I looked into his eyes, and mouthed “I love you,” then watched as his puzzled expression morphed into muted pleasure. Another moment claimed. And I silently vowed that it would not be the last.
Even though there will always be moments that escape our grasp, it is in our sole power to minimize their number. Regrets for moments past serve only our own vanity. It is emotionally simpler to bemoan their loss ex post facto than to snare them before they pass. For in the ultimate equation, which carry more weight: moments lost, or moments gained?
The answer was clear, and as I crossed the threshold of my building for the first time in months, I shed two decades of regrets over moments lost. The load on my back lightened despite the duffel, and my step quickened towards the door to my flat, wherein a whole world of moments worthy of capture waited.
