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By Root 2093 0

a victor, by Germans in Germany, I would have replied that the Messiah must have come in the meantime. I certainly didn’t feel like a victor. But in the eyes of the vanquished, we were victors. The widow suddenly reappeared with a glass of wine. “It’ll help you sleep,” she said. I thanked her but told her I wasn’t thirsty, figuring there was no point in trying to explain, in Yiddish, that wine, too, could be ritually impure. At midnight she knocked again. She asked to come in and sit down, and I nodded. When she sat on the bed instead of on the chair near the table, I suddenly felt a knot in my stomach. I was still too religious. Instinctively I drew back, in vain. She reached out and took my hand to caress it. I pulled it away. “We mustn’t,” I said. “Why not?” she asked. “But … your parents are right outside!” That was the best argument I could come up with, and it didn’t seem to carry much weight. “Don’t worry,” she said. “They’re used to it.”

It would be a lie to say my body did not desire hers. I was young, and had never made love. Why not seize the opportunity? But some obscure force held me back. Should the first woman in my life be a German, perhaps the wife of an SS officer or a camp guard? I would never be able to forgive myself. “For ten cigarettes or two Hershey bars I’ll stay all night,” the woman said. I leaped out of bed, opened my suitcase, and took out a pack of cigarettes. “Here,” I said. “Take them.” I had trouble speaking because she had begun to take off her blouse. “No,” I said, “don’t do that.” She didn’t understand. “As you like,” she said with a shrug. “Let me know if you change your mind. My door is the one near the staircase.” She left and I lay back on the bed. My body was angry at me, and I tried hard to think about something else—my presence on German soil, the Jews who once lived in this city, Rabbi Shmelke’s brother, the great Rebbe Pinhas, Meyer Anshel Rothschild, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. I dared to hope I had not shamed them.

The next day I felt uneasy as I put on my tefillin and said my prayers. The door opened and the woman came in with my breakfast. She stared at me, obviously stunned. Surely she had never seen a practicing Jew say his prayers. I wondered whether she had ever seen a Jew at all, other than in anti-Semitic films. She put the tray on the table and left. An hour later she was back. “Can I ask you a question?” Yes, she could. “Is the reason you didn’t want me because I’m German?” “Because I’m Jewish,” I told her. “You hate us, is that it? You want to hurt us, humiliate us, get revenge?” “It’s more complicated than that,” I said, still in Yiddish. I saw fear in her eyes. Was I really so terrifying to her? Suddenly I understood. She had offered herself to me not only for cigarettes but also to appease me. The Germans were afraid of us. The mere sight of a free Jew must have filled them with terror. They must have been afraid that camp survivors and underground partisans would return as avengers and make them pay for the torments they had inflicted. That was why these old people bowed before me, and that was why this woman wanted to spend the night in my bed: if not to redeem themselves, at least to divert and perhaps even disarm my anger.

But they were wrong. Jewish avengers were few in number, their thirst for vengeance brief. I thought about the liberation of Buchenwald. Jewish survivors had every reason in the world to seize weapons and go from city to city, village to village, punishing the guilty and terrorizing their accomplices. The world would have said nothing, everyone would have understood. But with the exception of a few units of the Palestinian Jewish Brigade who swept through Germany tracking down and punishing the murderers of our people, the Jews, for metaphysical and ethical reasons rooted in their history, chose another path. Later, this absence of violence among the survivors, this absence of vengefulness on the part of the victims toward their former hangmen and torturers was widely discussed. Of course, the setting was a Germany barely able to breathe