A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [36]
He had done this before the war too. But after the war, with Antwerp awash in camp survivors—this was his moment. He had his children gather flour sacks and stuff them with straw for beds, then run over to the medieval city center to buy olive drab U.S. Army surplus blankets. Survivors would come and stay for a week or a month or several months. There was always floor space for another stuffed sack. They ate potatoes. The children would peel potatoes for two dozen or more people every day. On special days there might be a piece of meat in the potatoes, but the basic diet was just potatoes.
The gaunt strangers, mostly men, would sit around on their sacks and trade spectacularly horrifying stories about brutality and degradation in places called Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Buch-enwald. Israel Kornfeld understood that they needed to talk about it. They would talk to each other or to his wife, but mainly they talked to him. Not only was he a good listener, but he had the perfect job for it, because he cleaved at home. As he listened, Israel, bent over a small wooden box, would carefully place a knife along grooves in the diamond he was working on, and with experienced fingers he would split off pieces along the grain of the crystal. To an outsider, it looked like whittling. He had done it for years, and it was easy for him to listen to people talk while he worked.
The children listened, too, especially the Kornfelds’ son Pinchas. Pinchas was eight years old and curious about everything—about the hole in the floor of the upstairs shul in the big Orthodox synagogue, and about the blackened ruins of the Van Den Nestlei synagogue. He would stand on the sidewalk at Van Den Nestlei and stare at a surviving red-colored wall where a slogan had been written in Yiddish by angry Jewish leftists before the war: “Down with Passover. Long live May Day!” Pinchas wondered about those May Day Jews. He had never heard Jews talk like that. What really aroused his curiosity was the fact that they had misspelled the word for Passover, Pesach. What kind of school had they gone to, misspelling Pesach?
This wide-eyed skinny boy was barely noticed in post-Holocaust Antwerp, but he stole glimpses at a world that was so dark and so twisted, it was beyond all imagining. No monster story, no horror fiction, was like this. At night, in his parents’ small house, everyone had their sleeping place. Pinchas's place was in the big front room on a couch. The room was always full of survivors, and rather than sleep, he lay still and listened to their terrifying stories of how they had lost their parents, their children, their wives. The survivors could not stop talking—and Pinchas could not stop listening. He read books with first-hand accounts of survivors—there was an explosion of such books in Yiddish after the war.
The survivors shared more than their stories. Many of them were ill with contagious diseases, which spread through the little house. All three children developed a skin disease, an itchy rash that plagued them for months. Finally they were taken to the hospital and placed in a sulphurous solution and scrubbed with wire brushes while they screamed in pain. Sometimes the Kornfeld children had to miss a few weeks of school because of these diseases, but they were still ahead of most of the Jewish children because unlike most surviving children, they had gone to school throughout the entire war. Not many Jewish children were left. The first postwar Jewish school had started with only seventeen pupils.
Even with their diseases, it was inconceivable that Israel Kornfeld would close his door to survivors. It was what he believed in doing. Later on, when there were no longer needy survivors, he found other people who needed help. There is always someone who needs help.