• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2239 0

monopolized me, devoured me. I irritated all my friends with my “serious” discussions. I was considered bizarre, not to mention boring. If I managed to work up the courage to talk to a girl in the garden or on the train, I would ask her about the meaning of life and the purpose of Creation. Did infinity exist? And nothingness? Is the soul immortal? What about God? I knew I was tiresome, that everyone laughed at me behind my back, that my interlocutors found me psychologically immature and socially maladjusted. They were right. “Look,” a beautiful member of the choir once said to me, “maybe absolute evil exists, but not absolute good or absolute truth. What am I supposed to do about it?” I felt increasingly ill at ease. My body yearned for love, and I retaliated by punishing it. I became even stricter with my choir. I knew I was unbearable. Fortunately, I had my sisters. With them I had no need to play the fool.

My sister Bea was in a displaced persons camp near Kassel in the American zone of occupied Germany. I visited her two or three times, and each trip was a bureaucratic hassle. As a stateless person, I had to fill out a stack of questionnaires, submit several photos, and somehow acquire a travel permit, an exit visa, a reentry visa, authorization from the American army of occupation, and enough money for a train ticket—none of which was easy. In Europe all bureaucrats look alike, but the French are the worst. They detest foreigners if they are refugees, stateless, or without resources, and since I fell into all three categories, I was a source of boundless irritation to them. They would stare at me with hostility, treat me as an intruder. I spent countless hours queuing up at nameless windows in police stations, answering question after question. What was I living on (why was I living?), what did I intend to do, why was I so eager to return to France? After many anxious days I finally had accumulated all the necessary documents, duly signed, sealed, and stamped.

I rode through a vanquished, ruined Germany. The trains were packed. Germans were not allowed to sit in the comfortable compartments, and white-helmeted giants from the Military Police kept a very close watch. I felt satisfaction at seeing the conquerors conquered and the torturers terrified, yesterday’s victors on their knees before those they had condemned to death just a few years ago, begging for a cigarette, a chocolate bar, or even just a friendly smile.

Today, as I write this, I think of all those who chided us for our passivity, our resignation, during the war: “Why didn’t you resist?” What about the Germans? What accounts for their obsequious cowardice before foreigners after their defeat? There were endless rumors about parents who sold their wives and daughters to the first American soldier for a pair of nylons, former high-ranking Wehrmacht officers who would shine shoes for any corporal, bankrupt merchants who fought over cigarette butts flicked into the mud by drunken soldiers. Their strength was gone, their power dissipated, their arrogance a memory. Yesterday’s supermen had become subhuman. But no, I don’t like either of those terms, superman or subhuman; both victors and vanquished are no more, no less, than human beings.

A friend of Bea’s was waiting for me at the Frankfurt station. Since I had missed the connection to Kassel, he took me to the home of a German family where I was to spend the night. An indigent old couple lived there with their daughter, a woman in her thirties, probably a war widow. She had a big chest, tousled blond hair, and an angular face with chiseled features and sensual lips: in short, she was an adolescent’s dream. She glanced at me curiously as she made up my bed. She left and then came back a few minutes later, asking me in German whether I needed anything. I told her, “No, thank you,” in Yiddish.

I lay down on the bed, fully dressed, and tried to read, but it was impossible. Too many things were whirling in my head. Back in Auschwitz, if anyone had told me I would one day be treated with so much respect, as