|
Singer:
(spoken)
Father died in 1989, the day after Passover.
Two months later we got a phone call from Jerusalem.
A young woman, speaking broken English with a heavy Polish accent, asked to speak to my father.
"It's too late," said my Mother.
But the Polish woman insisted. She is a journalist from Poland on a visit to Israel.
They found a manuscript, part of a diary he wrote during the Second World War.
She knows that he'd been trying to get hold of that manuscript for many years
They ask permission to publish parts of the diary.
I decided to take the diary out of Poland, no matter what.
I arrived in Warsaw at night, alone.
It was cold and rainy.
Everything looked gray and gloomy.
There was this peculiar feeling as of a very familiar place, almost like home, yet totally alien and oppressive.
It was as though I had returned to childhood haunts.
I’ve arrived at the world's largest Jewish graveyard..
(music starts)
Father’s manuscript waited for me on a long and narrow wooden table
in two cardboard boxes tied with string.
I was stunned..
I had never imagined there would be so much.
Father had written in school notebooks with a pencil,
his handwriting was crouded but vigorous and clear.
Each page was full from top to bottom with no margins.
He wrote even on the covers.
Narrator:
My real life ended Friday, September 1, 1939.
Singer:
(Paul Celan)
Taken off into the terrain
With the unmistakable trace:
Grass, written asunder. The stones, white
With the grassblades’ shadows:
Read no more – look!
Lookk no more – go!
Go, your hour
Has no sisters, you are –
Are at home. Slowly a wheel
Rolls out of itself, the spokes clamber,
Clamber on the blackened field, night
Needs no stars, nowhere
Are you asked after.
Narrator:
May 1943.
Bloody Aktions.
The Jewish children’s fate was the worst of all.
The killers do not shoot them,
They throw them into the graves still alive.
We flee from place to place.
At night to the villages,
At daytime we come back.
We leave our son with his Grandma
In her safe house in the suburb.
We return home.
Suddenly, at about 2:30, soft knocks at the front door wake us.
“It’s an Aktion!” I shrieked. “We have been betrayed!”
“My child, where’s my son?”
We run away.
Thirty-four hours of terrifying horror under the hay in the attic of a nearby monastery.
“My child, where’s my son?”
Through the crack I could see appalling sights.
There were children, their heads mutilated by fragmentation bullets,
bodies of men and women streaming blood.
It was a massacre.
“My child, where’s my son?”
It's too late.
“No! No, it can’t be!
How can it be that nobody would hide my child?
Is it possible that in the entire town there wasn’t one person willing to protect my sweet child?
I always helped them,
Delivered their children,
I had saved so many sick people, –
And was there not one who would save my beloved child?
We are walking to the cemetery,
Following the victims’ road to death.
Photos, pieces of paper,
Pictures, papers, hunks of hair, clothing, pools of blood... and empty cartridge cases.
Three huge pits.
Beside every pit, they had left the bloodstained truncheon,
A pile of bodies,
In which pit is my family buried...
Singer
(Paul Celan)
Nowhere
Are you asked after -?
The place where they lay, it has
A name - it has
None. They did not lie there. Something
Lay between them. They
Did not see through it.
Did not see, no,
Spoke of
Words. Not one
Awoke
Sleep
Came over them.
Narrator:
Revenge! Just revenge!
I bought an Austrian Steier pistol and a hundred bullets from a Ukrainian peasant.
The pistol has never left my side up to this moment.
We will not be easy prey.
We are running away.
There are five of us:
Me, my wife, my brother in law, his wife and their little boy.
We meet a Ukrainian peasant who will hide us, Mr. B.
We draw up the terms of the contract, setting out our mutual obligations.
June 5, 1943
Part A - Mr. B and his wife
Part B - Dr. Milch and his brother in law
Part A undertakes and gives his solemn word to:
Narrator (speaks the numbers and 2 sentences+ Singer(sings the contract):
1. To hide part B (four adults only) for the entire period that their lives are in danger.
2. To take care of all their needs.
3. To secure their safety.
In return for which part B undertakes the following:
1. Full repayment for any expenses at their market value.
2. Payment for board and lodging including dollar premium.
3. In recompense for defending their lives they will pay for one acre on its value during their concealment for six months.
4. For every further day an extra three morg-or more.
5. Both sides agree to waive the need for notary.
Narrator:
The hiding-place.
An underground pit.
Width and height about one meter twenty-five.
At night we go up to the attic to get some air.
Colorful harvest fields outside - green, yellow, red, violet. A spectacular view.
The smell of the flowers repeatedly awakens the pain.
Sounds of children playing.
Mr. B doesn’t allow the child to stay under any circumstances.
The child might betray all of us and incur disaster.
Mr. B. wants more money.
He says he's under pressure.
The suffering child is getting thinner by the day.
Just think of a three-year-old child, who has to sit still all day,
Mustn’t talk, mustn’t cry...
Mr. B’s children are allowed to play and laugh outside in the fresh air?
Why can't he?
Mr. B doesn’t include the child when he brings us our rations.
He tells us that unless we get rid of the “little bastard” he’d have to be strangled
Or else - they will admit to hidden Jews, if someone asks them.
At night my brother in law goes out in the rain to find a place to hide the child.
He returns despondent and despairing. He has found no solution.
The boy becomes more demanding.
He wants to move, run around and play.
Once again Mr. B orders us to get rid of the child.
We beg him to wait another two days, almost on our knees.
At seven in the evening of June 18,
My sister-in-law comes out of the pit with her son.
The child slips from his mother’s arms and starts to run and jump all over the attic,
Like a bird released from its cage,
We cannot calm him.
Suddenly, my brother in law bolts from his seat.
He puts one hand around the child’s tender neck to still his cries,
But the boy’s eyes roll in their sockets, his tongue protrudes, and he falls silent.
“Shall I let go?” he ask.
“Yes ... no... yes... no...”
I cannot decide.
My brother in law sinks to his knees beside his son, unmoving,
His own face like chalk.
He never takes his eyes off his dying son’s face,
which has become blue-purple.
I took the child's hand.
There was no pulse.
And so,
in less than two minutes,
the child’s life ended in silence
the joy of his parents’ life,
in front of his mothers eyes.
At that moment we felt that we had ceased to be as all humankind.
We are going out to look for another hiding-place.
Heavy hearted, we kiss our wives good-bye.
Mr. B promises he would look after them until we come back.
After three days of searching, we find a place.
I set out at night, alone, to fetch our wives.
As I draw near to Mr. B's house.
It is too quiet.
The dog is not barking.
The cow has gone too.
I call B, but nobody answers.
The house is empty.
I enter the house.
A horrible sight. Everything is a mess.
The hiding place is revealed. No one is there.
I run to the attic.
Not a living soul there.
I go out to the yard.
The dog’s body lies under one of the windows.
It has been shot.
I go on a few steps, strike something and stumble.
I switch on the flashlight and see my sister in law’s body.
The blood has not yet dried.
I am too late.
I don’t know how long I sat beside her...
I didn’t find my wife’s body.
I started to hope that maybe she had managed to get away, and was safe.
But I hoped in vein.
I ran without stopping.
Worn out, I reached a poor shack at the top of a hill.
I stayed in the attic all day in my wet clothes.
I could not cry.
I had no-one to run to to tell my tale.
I started to talk to myself, like a sleepwalker.
Lamentation
(sung by the singer and spoken by the narrator at the same time)
The silence of God - eternal witness to murder...
I'm the one. I,
From the depth I call to Thee,
I lay between you, I was
That you do not darken the evil,
Open, was audible
And have no mercy on the light,
Am still the one, and
of the suffering of mankind
You're sleeping.
of the endless pain
Years, years, years,
Your voice in the highest is unheard,
A finger gropes down and up.
And your angels did not darken the world.
Came, came.
From the depth I call Thee, how did it happen,
Came a word, came,
That that which is crooked cannot be healed,
And a defect cannot be mended,
Came through the night,
And no destruction on the worst evil of all,
Would glisten, would glisten.
While the vile devils of the universe remain unpunished.
Ashes, ashes, ashes,
Reveal a secret to me before extermination.
Night. Night and night.
Can heaven be void?
Can heaven be void?
Can heaven be void?
Narrator:
July 1943.
I am in hiding, in the loft over a stable, in a village, and with good people.
The risk of death is ever present, and any lack of vigilance on my part may cost me my life.
I do not know whether I shall live to finish writing.
And these are my 10 commandments:
Thou shalt have no other god save thyself.
Do only that which shall serve thyself and do not sacrifice thyself for another.
Live life to the full and enjoy every moment.
Love thyself above all.
Do not do unto others that which pleases you.
Do not uselessly burden thy mind.
Harden thy heart, and listen not to it.
Do not get too close to others and do not allow them to get close to thee.
rely on nobody.
Do not believe - heaven is void.
(His voice is fading out slowly as a background to the singer's words)
I was born in 1907 in Podhajce, a small district capital in eastern Galicia most of whose inhabitants were Jews. The countryside around Podhajce is beautiful. To the east, there is a high mountain crowned with a virgin forest of conifers…The River which flowed among the foothills of the mountain, expanded into a fine bathing beach on the outskirts of town. The river’s waters were cold with yellow and white water lilies and other river flowers floating on its surface…
Singer:
(spoken)
On Friday, September 1st, 1939 his real life ended..
It was first when I read Father’s manuscript that I understood.
I grew up in a house of a dead man.
Strong and wise, but dead.
He taught me not to need any emotional support,
Not to cry in public,
Any sign of emotion considered to be a weakness,
Only the strong ones survive,
He thus moulded me in his image.
I kept my promise.
I have finished your book, Father.
From your book I learned to forgive you, to miss you.
Now you may finally rest.
Rest in Piece.
© all rights reserved
The End
|
