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Tel Aviv, Sunday, September 20, 1942
My Dearest Samuel,
Surely, this scratch is on another’s hand. I stare at it, knowing that it’s mine—just a scratch from some household chore—yet what it reveals is utterly foreign. It’s a window to the raw just below my surface—the raw that now percolates inexorably from within me—and this raw no longer carries the ravishing essence of life, but the putrescence of despair. It simply won’t stop emerging from depths I never knew, nor—now that I’ve made their acquaintance—ever desired to plumb.
Your brother is in crisis, as am I. I send this letter to your care in Aqaba and Bandar Shahpur, in hope that you will receive it on one end of what must be the final leg in your journey to Palestine, and make haste. Although you may not realize it, my darling, you are our lifeline, and we are slowly sinking below the surface without you.
Your brother has suffered some terrible loss, although he adamantly refuses to share its details with me. He disappeared for a week, and returned transformed. His sallow face and thin frame certainly support his alarming story of sudden hospitalization during a business trip to Jerusalem, as do the medical documents chronicling an emergency appendectomy, and his matching bandages. Yet I fear something deeper, a flow that no surgeon’s needle could possibly staunch. For I know—as I know you do too, my love—at what depth the reservoir of raw pain lies. And I know that once this well is tapped, it is far less easily capped.
My own raw, and that of your brother, mixes with the collective raw that has risen to everyone’s surface. Gerhard Riegner’s report to the US State Department, which reached the Yishuv leadership via Chaim Berles, scratched so deep as to leave no possibility of scabbing. There is not yet, I believe, a word for what he describes. Nor could, perhaps, a single word ever aspire to encompass the enormity and horror of systematic mass murder on an industrial scale.
Now, more than ever, the fate of European Jewry is clear. Now, more than ever, the threat from the SS units attached to Rommel’s army is indisputable. And now, more than ever, your brother should be redoubling his efforts with Kofer HaYishuv and the Hagana. The Northern Plan grows more desperately relevant with every passing day, with every British tank destroyed, with every piece of news I read in Davar. His efforts are needed, yet daily he sits, writes, and does nothing.
He does nothing, he says, because he cannot cap his own well. The vitriol simply forces its way to the surface too rapidly—as it does now through this little scratch on my hand. He greets each morning with the tired eyes of dread. Each morning, he thinks, ‘what additional twist of the hot blade, already stuck so deeply in my ribs, will I suffer today? What new betrayal against me, or that I have perpetrated, will I relive? What love that was given to me will be ripped away?’
Yet the answers elude him, as does a bandage that can hope to cover his emotional wounds. Thus, he spends his days reaching out to the one person, he believes, that can help him. He writes—yet never sends—countless letters to the one to whom he is so deeply tied, yet with such a convoluted thread, that he fears he will never succeed in untangling it.
He writes, my love, to you.
And this is what you must know, on this day before Yom Kippur: your brother needs not just your presence, but your true forgiveness. Although neither you nor Aron have shared with me all that passed between you, I am sure that there is much to forgive. Yet forgive you must, my darling. It is the human gesture you must make in this terrible time of inhumanity. It is also, I truly believe, what your mother and father, of blessed memory, would have most fondly desired.
Forgive him, and hurry to us both. I love you with all my heart,
Danuta
