• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2138 0

gathered at one of their homes the night before and decided to kill themselves. The rumor was apparently false, for in Birkenau I ran into our family doctor, Dr. Fisch, who had helped deliver Tsipouka. But thirty years later I found that the story was true after all. I was lecturing at a large university near Boston when a member of the physics department came up to me. “You’re from Sighet, aren’t you?” he asked. “So am I.” He introduced himself, and the name gave me a start: he was the son of a famous surgeon. In Sighet we had evolved in different circles, but we had been brought to Auschwitz in the same convoy. We had a long talk about our town, and at one point I asked him about the rumor. He confirmed it. The doctors had indeed agreed on a collective suicide pact. “But why? Since at the time we didn’t know where they were taking us.” It turned out that his father did know. He had operated on a German officer who told him everything. Afterward he had summoned his colleagues to discuss what to do. The majority voted not to board the trains, deciding they might as well die at home. Some of the suicides did not succeed. They were carried to the cattle cars on stretchers.

My new friend the physics professor died one night in June 1991. A suicide, rumor had it. I was struck by the date. I realized that he too had died on the second day of the month of Sivan, exactly forty-seven years after his missed appointment with death in Birkenau.

Life in the cattle cars was the death of my adolescence. How quickly I aged. As a child I loved the unexpected: a visitor from afar, an unforeseen event, a marriage, a storm, even a disaster. Anything was preferable to routine. Now it was just the opposite. Anything was preferable to change. We clung to the present, we dreaded the future.

Hunger, thirst, and heat, the fetid stench, the hysterical howling of a woman gone mad—we were ready to endure it all, to suffer it all. So much so that a “normal,” structured social life soon took shape in the car. Families stayed together, sharing whatever came their way: hard-boiled eggs, dried cakes, or fruit, respecting strict rules about drinking water, allowing each member a turn near the barred openings or at the waste pail shielded by blankets. People adjusted with disconcerting rapidity. Morning and evening we said our prayers together. I had brought some precious books along in my pack: a commentary by Rabbi Haim David Azoulai (the Hida), the K’dushat Levi of the Berdichever Rebbe. I opened them and tried hard to concentrate. A phrase of the Zohar, a major work of the Kabala, haunted me: When the people of Israel set out into exile, God went with them. And now? I wondered. How far would God follow us now?

On the last day, when the train stopped near the Auschwitz station, our premonitions resurfaced. A few “neighbors” devoured more than their rations, as though sensing that their days were numbered. My mother kept entreating us: Stay together at all costs. Someone, I can’t remember who, asked, “What if we can’t? What if they separate us?” My mother’s answer: “Then we’ll meet again at home as soon as the war is over.”

Certain images of the days and nights spent on that train invade my dreams even now: anticipation of danger, fear of the dark; the screams of poor Mrs. Schechter, who, in her delirium, saw flames in the distance; the efforts to make her stop; the terror in her little boy’s eyes. I recall every hour, every second. How could I forget? They were the last hours I spent with my family: the murmured prayers of my grandmother, whose eyes saw beyond this world; my mother’s gestures, which had never been more tender; the troubled face of my little sister, who refused to show her fear. Yes, my memory gathered it all in, retained it all.

There was sudden trepidation that gripped us when, toward midnight, the train lurched forward again after stopping for several hours. I can still hear the whistle. Elsewhere I have told of what happened next—or rather, I have tried to tell it. But it feels like yesterday. It feels like now. Through the cracks