The Invisible City

When I was two years old I came to this ghetto. At age five, I left it again, headed for the camp. I don’t remember a thing. This is what people told me, this is what is in my papers, and this was, therefore, my childhood. Sometimes I think: What a shame that something else isn’t written there. At any rate, I know the ghetto only from meager hearsay.

My father talked to me about it a few times, reluctantly and seldom. During his lifetime I wasn’t curious enough to outsmart him with subtle questions, and then it was too late. Nevertheless, I wrote stories about the ghettos as if I were an expert. Perhaps I thought that if I could only write long enough, the memories would come. Perhaps at some point I even began to take some of my inventions for memories. Without memories of childhood, it’s as if you’re condemned to constantly carry around with you a box whose contents you don’t know. And the older you get, the heavier the box feels and the more impatient you become to finally open it.

Now the floor of my room is littered with the photos of this exhibition. If I had memories, they would have to be at home there, on those streets, behind those walls, among these people. The women in the pictures interest me most: I don’t know what my mother looked like. No photos of her exist. She died in the camp. I could just choose one of the women, I suppose. My father said that she was strikingly pretty, of course.

Most of the pictures convey a tranquility for which we yearn. They radiate peacefulness. In my eyes, they depict something of the good old days. The photographer seems to have been striving to prove that the ghetto wasn’t as gruesome a place as enemy propaganda might have insinuated, that things happened there as they do among the rest of humanity. Even though these people were a bit peculiar, a bit different. But we knew that before. If we look closely, we might even think that the ghetto was a place of meditation.

The young Jewish policeman, who examines the paperwork of a suspicious-looking passerby, as is the duty of police officers all over the world. The barber, who has taken off his cap before the photographer and waits for customers in front of his wooden house, which is certainly comfortable on the inside. The bearded man, who pulls a wagon with rubber tires over the cobblestones. The worker, who isn’t exactly killing himself. Even the four Jews who carry a dead person alongside a wall don’t deserve more than a brief moment of pity. For four people, carrying a corpse can’t be all that hard, and death happens everywhere. We might actually have more sympathy for the German guard next to the sentry box, standing there so far from home and so lost. It’s so damn lonely at the entrance to the ghetto. No one wants to go in and no one out. The pictures suggest that everything is carefully regulated here, in a manner deeply inherent to the things and people.

In short, I think up theories about the photographer’s objectives. I see through his intentions; the guy can’t fool me. But all of a sudden, something unsettling happens. Individual pictures absorb my gaze. I fall into them, far from any intention to write a text. I see two pictures of children. In the first, they wait for rations to be handed out, pots and little buckets and spoons in hand. In the second, they’re wearing red caps and staring at the photographer. Interrupted at play and nonetheless motionless. No, a child as small as I must have been then is not to be seen. But there are probably children in the pictures who knew me, who took things away from me, or beat me up or ordered me around. Perhaps there is someone standing there who would be my best friend today, had things taken a slightly more favorable course.

I hate sentimentalities. They cloud the mind. I’d prefer to close up all the holes they might crawl out of. Each time my father was overcome by emotion, I left the room until he got hold of himself again. Suddenly, that’s irrelevant. The pictures fill me with emotion, me of all people, and I have to wipe the most ridiculous tears from my eyes. No girls in the photos, just boys, boys, and more boys. Why is that? Is that the reason girls, for as far back as I can remember, have always been special creatures to me?

In one of the pictures, Jewish firefighters drive through the ghetto. What was it about those firefighters? My father told me something, that they existed, that he knew one of them, or that they always came too late, or that there was always something burning. I have forgotten even that. Constantly, I have the feeling that I simply need to make a bit more of an effort to remember, instead of waiting lazily and lethargically for the memories to come to me. But I make an effort until I go crazy, and nothing comes. Only the pictures lie in my room, so incomprehensibly near.

When I received them, when I opened the package and began to spread them out, I soon had the sense that I needed to put them in a different order. But, in what kind of an order? What belonged to what and what should be separated? Do children belong with children and bearded men with bearded men and tradesmen with tradesmen? And police officers with police officers and blondes with blondes? In any case, the order isn’t right. It’s like a crack in a disk that ruins the most beautiful record. I order and reorder the pictures over and over again. I want to solve the puzzle. I put the train station on the outside, the cemetery on the outside, the streets in the center, wooden houses together, stone houses together, the workshops in between, the border on the border. Again and again everything is wrong. The little lamp of memory fails to light.

I stare at the pictures and search for that one decisive piece of my life until my eyes are sore, but only the vanishing lives of the others are recognizable. To what end should I speak of outrage or sympathy? I want to climb down among them and don’t find the way.

Translated by Martin Bäumel and Tracy Graves