B. B. | March 1945
Everything we see here, everything that happens under our eyes makes us begin to question our own human qualities. A dark and heavy doubt awakens. Doubt in mankind. And we begin to ask ourselves some strange questions. Just yesterday, in fact, I had a long discussion with Professor K. He’s in the “hospital,” totally exhausted, his limbs and face completely swollen with chilblains and edema. Wounds all over his body do not heal. And along with that, dysentery that torments him, all sorts of other pain. I come to see him regularly to help him out and to alleviate his suffering in some small way. And we discuss the great misfortune that has struck us. We remain perplexed, wondering if it’s possible to believe in a normal life after all that we have lived through here. Nearly impossible.… This is, it seems, our end, a disgraceful, atrociously disgraceful finale to our existence.
We analyze the behavior of certain people.… Everyone “manages” as they can. The question necessarily comes up: could all this be just one enormous test? One way to determine to what extent so and so possesses “a sense of direction,” a “talent for life”? Is that what this is? The talent for life? The struggle with death, an instinct for self-preservation? All these acts of disloyalty and corruption that evince a complete lack of scruples, these acts of cynical pillage carried out in all conscience to the detriment of some famished phantoms…is this an instinct for self-preservation? Is this the criteria for individual strength and vigor? Must man become a brute, a ferocious beast, in order to remain alive?
And so the result would be that those of us who do not know how to “struggle” in this manner and don’t turn to beastly measures are inept at life and doomed to ruin? I have no idea. Could this be the supreme law of nature, of all living creatures? So it would seem, fine, but then what? What about human reason? Doesn’t that count for anything? The human mind created ethical ideas and laws to counteract and strive against animalistic laws dictated solely by instinct. What have these ethical ideas and laws become? Have they no say here?
Oh, but I am firmly and deeply persuaded that those for whom ethical principles represent primordial laws, those for whom these ethical principles are second nature and really have become their “human instinct,” an instinct that has taken the place of animal instinct in the bestial struggle that rages on around them—those people are not doomed to disappear completely, they will not perish, they will not succumb. I am equally convinced that I too will preside over my own situation in the end by maintaining my principles, by allowing my humanity to triumph … as long as my health continues to serve me as wonderfully as it has up to this point. So here we are, it’s a matter of health, of physical resistance; it’s to this objective fact that I owe having been able to maintain a certain moral bearing in human dignity. So it’s not a question of personal merit. I don’t know what to think anymore.…
We continue our discussion. Who is right and who is wrong? How should one behave? Let’s analyze: J. and his morality, L. and his reasoning, Li. and his tactics, R. and his logic, the K. family and their spirit of compromise. Along with all these, let’s broach the subject a little: the art of giving—where does the “right” for some to give out charity and for others to receive it come from? There is good reason, too, to explain a little the root of I.’s truly amazing business skills that, in the present circumstances, become particularly revolting.
Professor K. considers that ethics, such as we conceive of them, are out of place and incompatible with this concentration camp. To hear him tell it, ethics are just useless and you have to disregard them if you want to survive in spite of it all in order to be able to, afterward, contribute to the creation of a world where these ethics will be the rule. The mind is subordinate to matter, it is only its emanation, matter sublimated, the superstructure. Consequently, it is inevitable and bound to happen that matter will reject the mind wherever the mind is out of place and becomes an anomaly.
I don’t know.… It does not enter into my head. Concretely speaking, in the cases we are considering here, what does matter’s victory really mean, in essence? It simply means making compromises with the enemy, betraying your principles, denying your soul to save your body. Pushing this logic even further with concrete examples, it means flirting with the executioners, prostituting yourself and lowering your eyes like a coward in the face of calamity and massive death, eating what you stole from others, and doing the rounds over a pile of corpses. It means selling your human judgment, your dignity, and your principles. It means, in short, saving your skin at the expense of others’ skin.… But after all, is one man’s life of such value that he should be allowed to commit all these horrors to preserve himself?
B. B. | March 1945
We all have typhoid fever and are bedridden. They put a special barbed wire fence around our barracks. Quarantine was put in place. The fever consumed me for two weeks. First my fever was at 41, then 40 degrees, then 39, and 38. No medication. Whoever can make it will. During those two weeks I had dreadful headaches and constant nausea. The feeling of hunger had completely disappeared. I was delirious. The only thing I felt was that death was close by, very close by, not just all around, but right next to me this time. I felt its breath inside me.
I was slowly and consciously dying. My body felt nothing and seemed to quietly cease to function. Persistent, only the idea of death was alive in me. Around me, everyone was dying as well, and they continue to die, each one in turn. I am now in a bed on the second level. Mrs. K. is below me; in one month she lost her husband and her daughter.… full of grief, in silence, she returned to her bed, lay down and is waiting her turn. She moans continuously even though she no longer feels any real pain, of that I am certain. She just can’t take it anymore; she wants nothing more from life. It’s her life, her miserable existence that hurts her. She gets impatient; she wants it to be over with, that’s all.
Above me is C. Completely dazed, all he does is yell, trying at all costs to persuade the others that he is neither sick nor crazy, neither foul-smelling nor infected. On my right, two elderly men, F. and K., passed away. One night, for hours, half awake, I followed the final agony of one of them … And the following night, I clearly heard the death rattle of the other. That’s how it is: the breathing stops, either in this person or that person. No one is in a position to help anyone else. The corpses remain stretched out on the beds next to the living or the half-dead. The living and the dead … all are mixed together. There is almost nothing that distinguishes them from each other; there is almost no difference.
Facing death and the dead … complete indifference. It has become so commonplace. No one thinks about liberation anymore, no one counts the days as we used to.… It’s tiresome.… What good is it knowing when the Allies are supposed to arrive, even though they are known to be only a few kilometers from here? What does it matter? For the moment, only death is our closest and most faithful ally. And if someone does start counting the days from time to time, it’s not to try to calculate the hour of liberation, but rather how long one or another of us will last. It’s like a medical curiosity for everyone. A strange obsession. Not so long ago I claimed I would live another month or two.… But now, after the attack of typhoid fever that I have miraculously survived but that has depleted what was left of my strength, now I don’t expect to live more than one and a half to two weeks at most.
I am spending my remaining semi-existence in the company of other ghosts, living and dead. The corpses—the real ones—are still here with us, in our beds. There’s no one to remove them. And nowhere to put them. Everything is full. In the courtyards, too, the corpses pile up, heaps of corpses. They rise higher and higher each day. The crematory can’t burn them all.
The food doesn’t come at all anymore. From time to time, a vat of sour soup. Sometimes we cut a weed and boil it. We pick potato skins out of the trash. Those who have sold themselves still possess something, but they have no resistance against the contagion, the agony, or death either. It’s a general t
hing, suspended in the air, imminent for everyone.
No one is in charge of us. The Germans don’t show up anymore. We know that their end is near, very near. But so is ours. And they know it, too. They have nothing more to do with this camp, which is why they don’t set foot in it anymore. Once they completed the hellish task they were assigned and that some accomplished quite well, they withdrew leaving us here to die until the last one.
The Kapos continue to strut around and beat people. It’s monstrous. Among them, there are some who take pity on us … at times. I’ve seen it. But it’s only by chance. In general, they only watch us cynically and don’t stop sneering at our expense.
B. B. | April 1945
I am terribly ashamed to have lived through all this. Men are rotting and decomposing in the mud. There are reports that in one of the neighboring blocks acts of cannibalism have arisen. According to a personal statement by a German doctor who finally came to our block to take stock of the “progress” of mass deaths—according to his statement, then, over the past two months, February and March, more than seventeen thousand internees per month died—that is to say, thirty-five thousand out of forty-five thousand internees.
If only they had been simple, humane deaths.… Ah, no, I don’t want to die like this. I don’t want to! It would be better to die right away, as quickly as possible … like a human being. What? Allow your body and soul to putrefy and to wallow in their own filth, to slowly but irrevocably disappear from total starvation, to sink into nothingness, devoured by pus and stench and going through all the stages of decomposition before rotting to death? Because that’s exactly what it is: we don’t die here, we rot to death. Why wait? That would be an affront to human dignity. What a disgrace, what an immense disgrace.…
I look at this gloomy barracks full of ghosts, humiliation, hatred, these motionless sick people reduced to total powerlessness, these living and already putrefied corpses … a dark abyss where an entire humanity founders.… Oh, no, as long as my brain can function normally, I will not allow myself to end like this. It is man’s duty to die like a man, to avoid a death worse than all deaths, a death that isn’t a death.
B. B. | April 1945
It ’s awful, what they have done to mankind. The darkest scenes from the Middle Ages or the Inquisition are reproduced and multiplied here to the extreme. Their monstrous “revival” will forever leave the mark of shame and infamy on the “civilized” and “cultured” Germany of the twentieth century.
This darkest and most degrading slavery imaginable has made it so that life in this camp has nothing in common with life as humans conceive it.
It is indeed a cruel plan aiming to cause the systematic and certain end of thousands of human lives. Of that, there is not the slightest doubt, not the slightest doubt. It requires nothing but to see clearly and to follow attentively everything that goes on in order to deduce, with no hesitation: this camp is not made to hold civilian deportees or prisoners of war for a specific period of time, to temporarily deprive them of freedom for whatever political, diplomatic, or strategic reasons with the intention of holding them and releasing them alive before or after the cessation of hostilities.… No: this camp is consciously and knowingly organized and arranged in such a way as to methodically exterminate thousands of human beings according to a plan. If this continues for only one more month, it is highly doubtful that one single person among us will come through.
AFTERWORD
On my parents
I do not associate my father’s death with the “final solution” years. I was surprised and relieved to discover this after sitting at his bedside for two days as he lay dying. The ghetto—placed as it is on the genocide assembly line, its head in Germany and its far-reaching edges spread apart like an octopus’s tentacles—did not impose itself on me as some sort of prologue to his death.
This was quite the opposite of how I had expected to feel, considering the constant presence of those years in my interactions with my parents during their lifetime.
It was what it was: the death of a seventy-four-year-old man who neglected his health, although in his latter years he did show signs (to my surprise as well) of loving life.
His dying in July 1997 was my dress rehearsal for my mother’s dying four years later, in June 2001. She was then eighty-eight, yearning to die, but death tarried.
This essay was originally written in Ramallah in December 2005. It was first published in Hebrew in February 2007 in Mitaam, an Israeli leftist literary quarterly.
He lay dying for a day and a half after his stroke. My mother’s death came three days after being released from a week at the hospital, although the doctors told me she could live on like that (with oxygen, having trouble breathing) for a long time. But her resolve was different—refusing food, drink, medication, and finally, in her last thirty hours, refusing to speak. (“I am like the French,” she used to quote a French saying in order to tease me when I thought she talked too much and told tall tales. “The fact that I have nothing to say doesn’t mean I have to keep quiet.”) With her Bosnian obstinacy, as I used to call it, she lifted her chin, clamped her teeth shut, and would neither eat nor drink in those last days.
Both of them talked a lot and said much in their last days. Both of them moved back and forth from crystal clarity to vague rambling. Neither of them, again contrary to my expectations, mentioned the ghetto (Shorgorod in Transniestria, where Abraham Hass was exiled from his hometown of Suceava, Romania, with his family and hundreds of thousands of Jews from Bukovina in 1941), nor Bergen-Belsen death camp (where Hanna Lévy was sent in summer 1944, after half a year in a Gestapo prison in Montenegro). With both of them I made the same inevitable mistake: I did not pose urgent last questions, nor did I hurriedly record anything they said in those last moments. Thus, I entrusted their words to memory and remained with questions that would never be answered. Now I realize how reluctant I was to stage the reality, to play a role in a farewell at a deathbed scene, to turn them into objects of a documenting fashion, to do what they themselves had refrained from doing.
For their own reasons, they did not leave behind them neat records of their lives and thoughts. Abraham did try to jot things down here and there, writing in a Hebrew that sounded to me more and more like some longing for Yiddish. He promised himself that I would eventually edit his memoirs, but got stuck. He probably cringed at the prospect of sounding self-important (“He loves himself too much”—this was one of the worst things he would say about anyone). Hanna, who wrote beautifully and was fluent in several languages, refused to write anything beyond the diary she kept in Bergen-Belsen from 1944 to 1945, the writing of which would have been punishable by death on the spot. “So many books are being written,” she countered when I begged her to write. “If one has nothing really extraordinary to say—there is no sense in writing.” For me this was another facet of her utter lack of ambition, giving up any thought of doing something special with her life and talents.
I conclude that her resignation set in after the war, upon her return from Bergen-Belsen to Belgrade. After all, before the war she enjoyed her studies at the university and the independent life she consciously chose as a teacher. What role did depression play in her lack of ambition, the mental condition that haunted her for the rest of her life? How crucial were circumstances? In the Introduction, I already mentioned the several disapointments she encountered upon returning to the “new” Belgrade. There is another incident that might have played a key role in the abrupt decisions she made.
A photo of Tito that fell off the wall as she passed it in the government office where she worked raised a storm of suspicion against the “Jewess” (also ethnically suspected of entertaining favorable sentiments toward the USSR because of Gromyko’s supportive speech on the founding of the state of Israel). Was that seemingly trivial incident the last straw that pushed her to leave her homeland and emigrate? To what extent was her depression exacerbated by the fact that in Israel she found no work as
a teacher at her “advanced age” of thirty-five? Was it because of being a declared communist in McCarthyist times? For all I know, her depression may have set in even before Bergen-Belsen.
The two deaths communicate with each other in my mind, commingling stories in my memory about my parents and their life stories: two Holocaust survivors seeking partnership in their own private abyss, while their closer, inner communist circle dogmatically denied that abyss, just as the outer Zionist circle arrogantly pretended to be their resurrection. Their communicating deaths are bound to their lives and thoughts as represented in my own mind. I almost wrote “complete their image and their content as represented in my mind” but “complete” is misleading in this case. Their images and lives gradually recede like a waning moon with each passing year of their absence, and with every question I raise about them and their pasts, with no one there to answer.
Moon. I allowed myself three exceptions to the inner rule not to “stage” their dying: one with my father, two with my mother. One day at the hospital, several days before she died, I asked her to quote me the Latin epigram that teaches one how to tell whether the moon is waxing or waning. Luna lies, it says. When she is D-shaped, she waxes, and when C-shaped, she wanes. I was embarrassed to ask, lest I seem to be anticipating death. But she immediately recited the epigram, rolling her r’s without protest. I wrote it down in Latin but could not ask her to check my spelling. La luna mendeas est. Si descrecet, crecet. Si crecet, decrecet. (Luna lies. When she seems to wane, she waxes. Seeming to wax, she wanes.) I hope my request pleased her. This epigram used to serve us as a moment of relief, our own private sort of fun—she seemingly showing off her Latin studies and wondering what memory retained, conjuring up a whiff of bygone schooldays, and I, back to being the child who asks her mother to repeat her “tricks” (and she had quite a few of those, in several languages, from various periods of her life).
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