Diary of Bergen-Belsen

by Hanna Levy-Hass

  Unlike her, Abraham felt attached to Israel. To the people, landscape, language, local politics. Not a Zionist attachment, rather that of a refugee who had escaped the void in his homeland, Romania, convinced that with “five years, ten at the most,” he would help build socialism in that “other globe.” The dream was his homeland. At the same time, he occasionally defined himself as a “guest” or “tourist” or “foreigner”: at times he meant in Israel, at others in the world. He always bore the minority within him: once that of a Jew in anti-Semitic Romania, now that of a communist in a nationalist society, or of one who, in order to make a living, must sell cheaply his own efforts and energy in a capitalist world. Detached and bound at the same time.

  He was connected to a feeding tube in the hospital. Sometimes he did not remember where he was. But, with a finger he could hardly raise anymore, he pointed to the tube that bothered him, and said, fifteen hours before he died, “Just like the Palestinian prisoners, when they were on their hunger strike” and were force-fed through tubes. I wrote about this in my book, Drinking the Sea at Gaza—he was the first reader of all my drafts and I kept telling him more details that he was eager to hear. So often he told me he could hardly bear the thought that at any given moment, some Palestinian prisoner in some dungeon is being tortured by an Israeli “Shabak” [General Security Services] interrogator.

  Then, from the Palestinian prisoners, it was only natural for the associations of a dying man to revert to his own arrests, to what he wanted me to remember: “I was arrested (by the Israeli police) thirteen times (as a member and activist of the Israeli Communist Party).” (Or sixteen, now I no longer remember and curse my own reluctance to immediately write down his last phrases.) I knew: arrested for demonstrating against the military regime imposed on the Palestinian citizens of Israel (which lasted from 1948 to 1965), for distributing flyers against Ben-Gurion’s policies, against the 1956 war that Israel fought with Britain and France against Egypt, for organizing workers’ strikes. One of the stories I loved listening to as a young girl was about one of these arrests that lasted anywhere from a few hours to a day or two, and ended, as usual, without any indictment. They were simply a part of dissident life and a warning measure. ICP members’ clear instructions were never to have their fingerprints taken by the police. After all, fingerprints are taken from criminals, not political activists. The police insisted on keeping him in custody until he would relent and have his prints taken. He was brought before a judge to extend custody. The judge scolded him for refusing. As the judge talked, my father removed the lace from of one of his orthopedic shoes. In the ghetto, at the age of nineteen or twenty, his toes had frozen. As a result, one foot was toeless and the other had only the first joint of each toe. He placed his toeless foot on the judge’s table and said: “I have already had my fingerprints taken.…” The judge let him go. My mind preserved this story with all the folktales—Romanian, Yugoslav, and Jewish—that my parents used to tell me as bedtime stories, where the weaker good guys eventually tricked the stronger bad guys.…

  But I was less heroic one evening in the early ’60s, when policemen came to our home. They were looking for my mother. At noon she had distributed flyers against the Ben-Gurion government near Jerusalem’s first supermarket. I was scared. The policemen conducted a search—I think it included my room as well—and we thought they had come to arrest her. She said to me aloud, “What are you afraid of? Haven’t you learned in school that Jewish policemen are good?” Her calm cynicism must have reassured me without my realizing it.

  Between 2001 and 2004, as a resident of Ramallah and a frequenter of the Gaza Strip, I personally experienced Israeli attacks against the Palestinian population. And while shrinking to the corner of a room in anticipation of a bombing blast, I always thought of my parents. Every time they heard Israeli fighter planes roaring overhead on their way to bombing targets, they cringed, their faces ashen. “We lived through that, we know what bombs are like,” they said. They knew that within minutes an Israeli pilot would drop his payload over a refugee camp or a Beirut neighborhood, and loathed what they considered their own collaborative passivity as they sat on their kitchen porch. When Rehav’am Ze’evi prepared to run for Knesset with his own Moledet, a transferist party, in the latter half of the ’80s, someone organized a rally for him at Tel Aviv University. Several leftist professors and students came in order to “do something.” But they did not know what to do. When the moderator got up to introduce Ze’evi, and before he even finished his first sentence, Abraham—my father—stood up.

  “I must address the protocol,” he said. The moderator, out of sheer respect for the elderly, or perhaps amazement and lack of experience, let him speak. “Whoever told you it is legitimate to speak about transfer? This is not acceptable. You are discussing a forbidden subject.” He had no inhibitions in this regard: anything connected to transfer—expulsion, murder, racist incitement of any sort—did not merit “freedom of speech and thought.” He sounded more and more agitated. “I’ve already experienced fascism once. I have no strength to go through it again.” It was the cue for those students and professors to do what they had to, namely, to break up the meeting.

  In the background were always comparisons, made by leftists in Israel and abroad, between Israel and Nazi Germany. There always were—and are—those who cannot help but compare anything Jews and Israel do with Nazism. It is a fashion that began even before the First Intifada or the Second. We were of the same mind, that those parallels were wrong and inappropriate, that they were a disservice to the Palestinian struggle for liberation, that more accurate historical parallels do exist, and that an oppressive regime need not resemble the German murder industry for us to oppose it. Still, on one occasion, between newscasts during the First Intifada, Abraham said to me very painfully: “I don’t know what’s worse anymore. True, we Jews were expelled and murdered, but it lasted five years and came to an end. But I see no end to the suffering we inflict on the Palestinians: 1948, then exile, then 1967 and this unending Occupation.” When Iraqi missiles were launched, targeting Tel Aviv, acquaintances complained to him about “Palestinians dancing on rooftops.” He retorted with typical Yiddish irony, “Where else should they dance? They are under curfew, so they can’t quite dance in the streets, now can they?” He thought it wouldn’t do the Israelis any harm to learn their own little lesson in fear, and identified with that short happy outburst (politically short-lived) of people gripped for years in the reign of terror and oppression by the Israeli occupier, and living under curfew for weeks and months on end. How precisely he described for me life under curfew—even without having traveled through the Occupied Territories.

  At the hospital I asked him if he wanted me to inform his family so they could say their farewells. One sister was a Gush Emunim (Israeli colonist movement) sympathizer, and every rare meeting with her ended in a shouting match and fury that lasted for days. Two of his nephews are colonists of the “ideological” kind. Half-paralyzed, sometimes knowing where he was, other times not, holding and constantly caressing my hand in his right hand, he answered me unequivocally: “I don’t want colonies in the hospital.”

  He was mortified with fear when I used to travel in my car to West Bank villages in the early ’90s, as part of my work with Kav La’Oved (a workers’ hotline, protecting Palestinian workers’ rights). He explained his fears to me: “If they throw stones or shoot you, they have good reason.” Hanna saw my activism and then my choice to live in the Occupied Territories as a more abstract issue, especially in the last few years, which enabled her not to worry about me. When she saw photos of Palestinian children and youths throwing stones at soldiers and other Occupation agents, she did not associate this with me. She always responded with her laconic all-purpose expression: “What sweethearts!” (in Yugoslav, slatko), not needing to repeat another banal slogan about rights, etc. She simply expressed her feelings contrary to those normally expressed by most Israelis about stone-throwing Palestin
ians. The right to fight the occupier inside occupied territory was natural, fundamental. “Had the ghetto been hermetically closed like Gaza,” Abraham responded to my reports from the prison that Gaza became in the “Oslo peace years,” after 1994, “we would not have survived.” He, the youngest brother, sneaked out of the ghetto to work for Ukrainian farmers and brought home his daily wage: a sack of potatoes or the like.

  One question about the ghetto; that was the only exception I allowed myself in my decision not to “stage” his dying. It was directly associated with his feeding tube. After he recalled the Palestinian prisoners and his own arrests, he thought of the Yarkon River: the event was that of the Makkabiya (a Jewish olympiad) disaster, where athletes, stepping on a collapsing bridge, fell into the polluted Yarkon River (whose delta Abraham could see from his home). Two victims died and others contracted strange pollution-induced illnesses, possibly from kerosene or oil in the river. “They might find kerosene in my body, as in the Yarkon,” he said. From there his mind wandered to someone we knew several years earlier, a young man who once had lice, was too ashamed to mention it, and went ahead and bought kerosene in order to get rid of them. I am almost certain that at that moment I asked about lice in the ghetto, checking whether that would bring on some last remarks about the ghetto. I recalled a scene he once described for me: his father sitting by the table in a cellar crammed full with seven or eight family members, exhausted, hungry, and ill. The lice fell out of his beard and he sobbed for the first time.

  But Abraham would not be tricked. He confirmed that he had had lice in the ghetto, and how humiliating that was, and that was as far as he went. If other recollections of the ghetto came up in those last hours of his life, he did not share them with me. In any case he was already sinking into ever-longer moments of absence, and his phrases were becoming less and less coherent.

  The previous evening he had still minced his words. He said to me, “You have to show solidarity and get me out of here,” namely, out of the hospital. In other words, not sentiment but rather action was needed. Naturally I could not get him out of the hospital. He refused all the nurses’ pleas to use a bedpan as he lay in his hospital bed. “It will make things easier for you,” I tried as well. “If I were ill you would be telling me the same thing.” “You are still young,” he answered. “You still pay taxes, you are still of use to the system. I am old, dispensable, and all I have left is my dignity.” What could I do other than continue to stroke and kiss him, and have him stroke my head and hug me with his one good arm?

  Just four days earlier we had met as usual in Tel Aviv. I would come to visit them regularly on weekends from Gaza, and then later from Ramallah. I no longer recall what in our conversation had suddenly conjured up for him the vineyards of the Palestinian villages on the way to Jerusalem. He remembered, still shocked, all the Israelis who—in the first summers following the Nakbak—raided the grapevines that went on growing even after their owners and planters and tenders had been expelled and made refugees. “I was stunned,” he told me “at how unashamed they were.”

  I wondered. This was the first time he ever shared this memory with me. Over the years, I noticed, he had not accumulated specifics about the Nakba nor shared with me everything he knew. The contradictions were too painful, I suppose. He opened up more and more to the excruciating details when I had moved to Gaza, as I would always bring with me the stories of my refugee friends and sights of the refugee camps.

  Once, in the early ’90s, Abraham told me a dream of his. He dreamt it after we attended a concert together at Tel Aviv’s Heichal Hatarbut (Philharmonic auditorium). He had received tickets from someone who was away. The First Intifada had come to an impasse, and it was difficult to keep count of the Palestinian lives lost and days under curfew. The audience in that concert hall luxuriated in its cultured finesse. In his dream, Abraham and I were standing on a hill, and people streamed from the east, covering the hills and valleys. “Amira’le, they are back, they are coming back!” he told me he had said in his dream, delighted, relieved.

  But from the balcony of my mother’s room in Motza, the line was drawn again between the dream and the possibility to undo history. A half-ruined stone structure partly covered with soil and growing thorns and weeds had already become an integral part of the hill across the way. In the early ’90s I began to attach to the prickly pear cactus hedges and village ruins the names of more and more families I met—first in Gaza, then in the West Bank—who had come from there. Mustafa and Bassam are from Breir (“Bror Hayil”), Lama from Masmiya. And in Ramallah I made the acquaintance of Mohammad, collector of popular Palestinian music and musician (whose self-made flute at Ketziot prison had been confiscated) who came from Qalunia: the very village on whose land Mevaseret Yerushalayim and Maoz Zion were built, adjacent to Motza. (In 1859 Jews purchased land from Qalunia and began living there in the early twentieth century, I learned from the book All That Remains about the Palestinian villages that went to ruin).

  In one of our last trips together to the Galilee, Hanna ordered me outright: “Just don’t tell me everywhere what village had been there earlier.” I couldn’t resent this—because of her age, because of our desire to enjoy ourselves together for a while, because I realized that she, like my father, was living the contradiction that is inherent to Israel: a refugee state founded after the diaspora had expelled them, on the one hand, and on the other, being a state and society that expels. Certainly in the case of my parents, suppression was not meant to justify personal collaboration. In 1949, when they had just arrived in Israel, both my mother and father—separately, they had not yet met—rejected the Jewish Agency’s offer to occupy for good, like many others, the emptied homes of refugees in Jerusalem. It was their gut feeling that as refugees themselves they could not possess a home of other refugees. A gut feeling that I bless to this day. For not having bestowed upon me an Arab house (code for a large, beautiful, expensive stone house) and an aesthetic-bourgeois dilemma in Jerusalem’s Baq’a or Talbiya neighborhoods.

  During Hanna’s last day alive, when she no longer said a word or responded to my embraces and kisses, not even with a faint squeeze of the hand, I had no idea whether my mother registered anything said around her. The male nurse at the hospital said she was neither registering anything nor suffering. Emotionally I could not part from her, not explicitly, in words or declarations. On Saturday afternoon, June 9, 2001, my friend Michal Levin came to be with us. We sat on either side of her bed in the nursing ward of her home, not knowing what to do, what to say, whether to say anything at all. We decided to sing. It was not easy. Some songs had been forgotten, some childhood songs were inappropriate (as we now understood them to be nationalistic and belligerent), many others would have meant nothing to her. We sang her the song about the hyacinth that she had always loved and sang for me. I sang some French children’s song she once taught me. I thought I noticed her smile faintly when I sang that French song, but didn’t know whether it was my imagination or an actual smile. And then I sang “Avanti Popolo,” which she had taught me in Italian. Michal knew the tune, not the lyrics. I repeated the song and translated it for her. The door was open. Nurses peered in at us curiously, and we went on singing. When we got to the words “bandierra rossa” (red flag), Hanna moved her lips and sang those two words along with us. At 9:00 a.m. the next morning, she died.

  Amira Hass

  Translated by Tal Haran

  Yugoslav Worlds of Hanna Lévy-Hass

  Emil Kerenji

  I.

  The one time I was laughed out of somebody’s office did not ultimately affect my academic career, but I still remember the occasion very well. The year was 2001, and I was at the beginning of my Ph.D. studies in history at the University of Michigan. I wanted to write a dissertation about Yugoslav Jews after the Holocaust, but my ideas at the time were vague and undifferentiated. When I told a professor—who, thankfully, did not end up sitting on my dissertation committee—that I wanted to work on
Yugoslav Jews, he burst out into uncontrollable laughter: Yugoslav Jews! That doesn’t exist! Are you a “Yugoslav Jew” (I could feel the heavy scare quotes in the air)? With that name—Kerenji?

  That was a fair point. “Experts” on things East European usually immediately recognize my name as “Hungarian,” and not infrequently I get complimented on how fluently I speak my own mother tongue—a language that officially used to be called “Serbo-Croatian, that is, Croato-Serbian” when I went to elementary school in Novi Sad, in the Yugoslav province of Vojvodina, in the early 1980s. Today, in post-Yugoslav Novi Sad, the language is called “Serbian”; and in Hanna Lévy-Hass’s native Sarajevo, children go to school and learn “Bosnian” language and literature. We learn from Amira Hass that her mother referred to the language as “Yugoslav”; but in addition to revealing Hanna’s commitment to Yugoslav utopia and, as the flip side of this commitment, her acceptance of the political marginality of this position—which was as marginal, I should point out, during much of the period of Socialist Yugoslavia as it is today—this appellation reveals a larger truth about the delicate connection of Yugoslav Jewishness to the Yugoslav political project.

  For the Jews of the South Slav lands, the “Yugoslav” language became the “language of community,” to borrow the phrase from Hillel Kieval, who studied similar processes in the Czech context.1 Like Yugoslavia, Yugoslav Jewishness was a political project. It was first imagined as a possibility towards the end of the nineteenth century, when a group of Jewish “Yugoslav”-speaking students in Vienna, electrified by the agitation of the prophets of Zionism, Herzl and Nordau, which dominated Central European middle-class Jewish debates of the fin de siècle, started seeing themselves as leaders of a unified, politically conscious, “national” Jewish community. Being in Vienna at the time, and attending talks in overflowing university amphitheaters in which fired-up students raged about a Jewish state and a new, Hebrew culture, must have intoxicated a handful of provincial students who came from the Balkans and spoke a strange mix of south Slavic dialects. Most of them were from towns in Croatia and Slavonia—mostly Zagreb and Slavonski Brod—but several came from Sarajevo, and even Belgrade.