To turn the page, to start a new chapter, to make a fresh start, all those phrases were torn from the pages of a novel someone else had written. She studied him with a look reserved for people who addressed her in platitudes intended to move her, and he felt her turning to stone, realized she wasn’t grasping what he was telling her, and that there was no point in continuing to encourage her, there was nothing she could do with it, not even weeks later, tucked safely inside a house with two parents and a child, reattached to the heart of a healthy, healing, forgiving humanity. “She doesn’t have much patience for Yoel either,” Hannah told him somewhat bitterly, observing that Elsa played with the baby reluctantly, out of a sense of duty and not joy; she felt sorry for her son, who insisted on fighting a battle his parents had already written off as futile. She felt embarrassed by the way Elsa’s burning, cat-like eyes seemed to look not at them but through them, at hearing the moans that escaped her mouth late at night, mixing with Yoel’s cries, but demanding to be left alone. The room remained shut and Jan adamantly forbade her from entering; “She mustn’t know we can hear,” he ruled. Hannah thought that perhaps they should send her to counseling. “She’s not your enemy,” he said. “Who said enemy? What does that have to do with anything?” “Sometimes I think you view her as an enemy.” “I really think it would bring her some relief to talk to someone,” she insisted. “How do we know that talking brings relief?” He knew Elsa would turn down the suggestion, there was no point in even asking her. Years later, when he decided to uproot his family to Australia, he told her: You don’t know how similar we actually are, we’re like a photo and its negative, your tight grip and my letting go stem from the same feeling of unrest, can’t you see that? She didn’t say a word, but for the first time she felt she understood what he was talking about.
She enrolled in Lewinsky Seminar and commenced her studies toward a teaching certificate. During the same period she also worked to improve her Hebrew, until she gained a certain confidence and gradually eliminated the traces of her foreign accent. Going back to school wasn’t easy. For a while she considered changing careers and switching to biology, but feared that for such a change it was too late, and she knew that teaching languages was her forte. The vast majority of the Lewinsky Seminar students were younger than her, Palestine natives who spoke Hebrew as a mother tongue and didn’t know Europe, either its culture or its carnage. Most were about to get married, or were already married and with their first or second child, and had chosen teaching because it was a “convenient profession for women.” She realized that teaching was the most normative profession here, and that her mere presence had an unnerving effect on them. She sought to spare them the awkwardness—by then she had already come to understand that what they called the Holocaust triggered great unease; she wanted neither their encouragement nor their silence. In the afternoons she tutored English and French, and three nights a week worked as a proofreader at the Hungarian newspaper Új Kelet. She began to save up money, which eventually allowed her to rent an apartment on A. D. Gordon Street, close to Jan and Hannah.
This was the contract she made with herself: a good, predictable routine, without veering right or left; a life without divergence, steady and unchanging, with no twists and turns. No kibbutz (several of Jan’s old friends had tried talking her into moving to the kibbutz, where things would be simpler, more sheltered, but she didn’t want to, she wanted a shut door and a stairway from which she could just nod hello and turn her back without apologizing; she had already gotten used to the functional, reserved, and unintimidating architecture of the white city of Tel Aviv, which posed neither dangers nor mysteries); no Új Kelet editorial board to burden her; no Voice of Israel radio programs in Hungarian. Then what did she want? Five days a week in the company of young people, under no circumstances children, youth at the threshold of life, whom she needed to somehow convince that she still had something valuable to give. That something had to be unconnected to her past. Thus, the idea of teaching English slowly took shape. English marked the limits of her ambition, a safe path, one that would enable her to support herself with dignity, provide for her necessities, and never make her feel dependent. Life was a collection of exercises she perfected, realms of activities and responsibilities that created the confined realm in which she was a teacher, the teacher, a title reserved for those who say what they do and do what they say. Failing to find her place in the post-war world, she delineated this very narrow space, in which she set the rules and everyone played according to said rules. She didn’t want to be touched. She wanted to make her way among the masses, to carve a path like an industrial ant, which she would tread with her head held high, and without anyone brushing up against her, hugging her, or offering gestures of kindness. She had no need for such things. The words Hungary, Kolozsvár, Transylvania, would never again be uttered by her lips. “Do you want to visit?” Jan asked her several years after her arrival. “Are you insane? What for?” “What do you mean what for? To see the house. To see what’s left.” “I can’t.” Was it really possible to put it aside? Everything could be set aside. At first it seemed impossible. It seemed it would never relent. Later it became something cast in her image. It became her essence, in a way that allowed her to live in peace, serious, strong, professional, honest. That was the Weiss we came to know, years later.
There were moments when it seemed she was capable of more, wanted more, the glow of a sunset, a movie she had once seen, a book she had once read, a student she had truly loved, who was like a son to her (she never said that word, son, not even to herself); the memory of a postcard her parents had sent from a trip to Switzerland, waterfalls that resembled two families leading their children to a chuppah on the mountaintop, where the bride and groom would become one; but if she allowed herself to want, at that very moment it would become an excessive, gargantuan desire, a matter of life and death. There were years during which hope had flickered at the edge of her consciousness, making her believe someone might come if she didn’t force it. But she did not fall in love even once. Here and there a spark, soon to be snuffed out. She moved across time like a person leaping at the task of cleaning his home, determined and purposeful, if not passionate. It wasn’t passion that drove her. It was more like stubbornness. She was stubborn, and she insisted, among other things, on persevering. She denied herself all the good that people might bestow. Not because she found it to be false, but because she forgot it existed.
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Had we read the story of another survivor from the Kastner train, we would most likely not have devoted a separate chapter to that public period in which the Kastner trial, and Kastner’s subsequent murder, took place. Because for many of the train’s passengers, those for whom the words “fresh start” or “new chapter” had meaning, those who gave everything they had to create a “new life” after the war, these events had passed them by without leaving an impression, and sometimes without even their full awareness. There were several people I turned to with the obvious question of “Where were you at the time of the trial?” who then opened their homes and hearts to me. “We didn’t know Hebrew. We were busy surviving. We didn’t always listen to the radio. No one had the time. I had three children. Not a trial or anything else could find its way in. And that applies to a lot of people my age from the groups that immigrated with me. We weren’t aware of it. It was some faraway political business. We made it to Israel and tried to survive. Everyone had heard of the Eichmann trial. My daughter was in a stroller and I knew I couldn’t tell the children I didn’t want anything to do with it, you went outside and the radios were on everywhere and it’s all you heard. I remember taking my girl and walking and walking and walking. I didn’t want to hear it. Enough. No more.”—This was recounted to me by a woman, a kibbutz member from Budapest who had boarded the train as a teenager, without her family. Another survivor, a religious man who lived in Jerusalem, also from Budapest, who was a boy when he boarded the train along with parents and several of his s
iblings, told me they, the train survivors, were no different from the other Holocaust survivors, that there was no reason to think they had reacted any differently. “You don’t look back. We didn’t busy ourselves with it. There were historians, legal scholars; the people who were in control here were the native Israelis. But there was serious business, to take care of life, to think of the future. There was no time and no means. I didn’t think it was an essential part of my life. I didn’t want to get into it. My children didn’t know anything. That’s how we were raised. You had to assimilate as quickly as possible and be like everyone else. I haven’t summed up my life yet, haven’t written an autobiography. It was news. I didn’t ignore it, I read the papers, I listened to the radio. I wasn’t capable of more. I haven’t talked about this in decades.”
But these events played out differently for Weiss. Upon her arrival in Israel, her life was split in two. For six years she managed to obtain a certain hard-earned peace. She began working as a substitute teacher in a high school uptown, before receiving a full time teaching position in our high school. Tel Aviv had become her home. She would finish work in the afternoon, come home, change clothes and dart down Ben Yehuda Street toward the boardwalk, equipped with a book she had borrowed from Mira, the librarian of Zamenhof, sit on a beach chair, or go to a matinee at the Eden or Esther cinema. Every so often, on the street or at a movie, she would bump into someone she had seen along her journey, on rare occasions even coming across people she knew from Kolozsvár, and nod, stop for a brief conversation, or gesture that she was in a hurry. They didn’t appear eager to talk either. Every now and then she accepted Jan and Hannah’s invitation to Friday night dinner, sometimes with other acquaintances. For the most part she preferred to stay at home.
She first heard of the trial on the Voice of Israel’s Hungarian broadcast. She had read about Gruenwald’s allegation and Kastner’s libel suit in the newspapers, and thought it looked like a very sophisticated conspiracy, cynical abuse, just like in the Inquisition. When she raised the subject at Shabbat dinner, flushed with fury, Jan told her it was a tempest in a teapot, the controversies hadn’t begun here but had broken out already in Europe; it had its own pace, the storm, ebbing and flowing, and none of it was worth one’s health. She immediately rejected his position. That’s exactly it, she replied, the people who orchestrated this setup have power and the only ones who can disprove it have none, because it has nothing to do with them, and the entire matter will stand or fall on that alone.
Not that it spurred her into action. It hit at the very heart of their helplessness, as Kastner had spared them any involvement from the beginning, unburdening them from the decision and the responsibility, as if it was possible to pull through it without being involved in one way or another. And she knew it was possible to remain uninvolved now, too, that is, to completely detach from it, categorically, as if it had never happened, or in any event, had never happened to her, because those were her options, either letting it possess you or fleeing from it, and she guessed, without having exchanged a word about it with any of her acquaintances, that most would choose detachment, she had enough presence of mind to see that no one had the time to deal with it, we’re all sufficiently versed in complicity by now, she noted to herself cynically, not to lend a hand, not to bother, not to risk it; it’s always been Kastner’s own business, his own bravery, his own boldness, in which it was their privilege—or punishment—to be part of.
She read the headlines with disbelief, of Kastner “the failure who failed his people,” who “sold his soul to the devil,” of Kastner’s defenders who “refute by mere words the hallowed truths and feats of bravery that served as a pillar of fire before the camp,” and of the refusal “to draw a distinct line between the holy and the abominable.” It could be said—she certainly thought it could be expected that one of them would say—that this man acted to save me, this man kept me from dirtying my hands, this man took all the dirt upon himself and got inextricably entangled with people he loathed. It could be expected and yet she didn’t expect it; neither did she expect these questions to suddenly appear on anyone’s lips. She admitted there were questions she had never asked herself—whether more could have been done for them from Palestine, whether they could have facilitated—whether they did anything to facilitate—their rescue. She found entirely perverse the idea that those who didn’t act in fact aided the extermination, whereas the notion that everyone was corrupt was simply meaningless.
She found it odd, the courthouse, that stage, those voices; it was strange that someone else had broached the subject she herself had yet to find the strength to contemplate. It was strange that others thought they could say something about what she had experienced, and not because there was no good and evil in her world. There was. There was responsibility and irresponsibility, trust and distrust, generosity and greed. There was devotion. There was care. And she graded every move. She also didn’t want to say people couldn’t be judged on their past. Of course they could. She always believed reality itself was much more interesting than the judgment of reality, that people tended to judge reality because they feared it, as if seeking to hold onto it tightly so it wouldn’t overwhelm them and their ideas about what ought to happen. It was clear to her that people who could afford to conduct this discussion and ask such questions were only those who were distant from the matter. Only from the outside was it possible to believe that chaos could be controlled, arbitrariness eliminated, order restored. In a sense, and she didn’t dare say this to anyone, it was madness to bring this matter to court, a madness equivalent to the insanity that had brought on the original catastrophe. Obviously, she knew it wasn’t really equivalent. That was precisely the type of sophistry she detested. But if the Revisionists could do it, so could she. So there. She was countering their vanity with her own, a vanity she only seldom revealed. A European, exilic, spiteful vanity, that suddenly made her wonder whom she hated more.
The Teacher Page 12