Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
I wrote what came out of his mouth. Today I'm able to relate to those
things as to my great foolishness, because that was how I also turned into
a product of Jewish knowledge. A small payment and a debt of no honor.
What do I have to do with the tractate on Jewish innkeepers in Polish journalism? He quoted and I wrote down, a famous essay (according to him) by
a person named Christof Hilyavski, "Project, or a New Light on Sorrowful
Expressions that Accuse the Jews and that Is Found in Seven Paragraphs
(Kramer) for Increasing the Income of the State Treasury at the Conclusion of the Days of Freedom Stated in the Articles of Confederation Presented to the Honorable Delegates of the Confederation of the Republic
in Warsaw in 1789"!
And here is a part of the libelous document (apparently I was selective):
How to correct that-
That is the remedy,
We have enough trees,
Too few hanging trees.
Hang Jews every year ...
And Makolski's writings on Jewish innkeepers who exploit the peasants and enslave them, and testimony on who exploited whom and when. Ebenezer knows names, dates, indictments, and what he calls with characteristic arrogance: "A few gentiles with a conscience" like Bartolomei
Djakonski, whose essay he quotes: "Principles of Agriculture, Craft and
Commerce" of 1790, which is simply an analysis (expanding the words of
one who fed Ebenezer) on the difficult economic situation of that time,
and devotes his writing to the Jewish tenants, explains the reasons for
their so-called tragic situation, their being surrounded by drunken peasants owning small farms, who are always guilty toward them, and the problem of forced superintendence, flaying the peasants' skin by the Polish
nobility (which the Jews, of course, are accused of) by means of their contracts with the tenant Jews and I hear names of those with nailed ears like
JaczekYszrszki, representative to the Sejm Mattheusz Tupur-Butorimowicz,
spokesmen for the liberal Polish aristocracy ... And the growth of the population of Warsaw from eighteen sixteen (see the adjustment) 13,579 Jews
and 65,641 non-Jews. Later (eighteen twenty-five) 28,044 Jews and 98,399
non-Jews, and by the end (nineteen fourteen) 73,074 Jews and 547,470
non-Jews-the rate of residency, the rate of books of traitors. The rate of
left-handed writings-what wonderful knowledge!
Sometimes I wanted to stop. I was so full of wrath then. But I restrained
myself. I can imagine here in this prison cell, when three countries want
to hang me on their rope with the claim that they aren't fascist countries
like us and the flag is no longer a value but only an asset, but it's important
to them to hang me on a local rope full of values, they need the myth of the
rope wound around my neck, those colors! I can think with perfect equanimity about the white, northern night of late summer in Copenhagen or
Jutland, people drinking beer, outside a white night light, clouds and rain
streaming, a beautiful and gloomy city, canals, ships past the old port, the
stock market building of Copenhagen crowned with giant snakes. Domesticated Viking savagery. And Ebenezer, a jester of death, tells them about
a Polish nobility, teaches them a Polish or talmudic song, the number of
matchboxes sold in Belarus in the nineteenth century, how many depressions can be counted in Tolstoy's War and Peace, how many Jewish witches
were burned at the stake by bored priests in Frankfurt ...
Germanwriter stops reading a moment, he peeps at the bright light
outside, his tired voice, the venomous light stroking the waves of the sea,
the port appears now in its ugliness, the old enclosures reveal their real poverty. And he says: I'm reading because I had to read these things to
Ebenezer. And I wonder why? Why did he need me, why was it necessary
to read this journal to me too? Is there somebody that I, Obadiah Henkin,
can ask for my son?
I want to know how I met Samuel Lipker, said Ebenezer suddenly.
Renate smiled and I looked at Ebenezer. Suddenly he was like a young
boy, his eyes were illuminated, some wild freedom danced wildly in them,
and his skin grew soft, became thinner, transparent. Read, he said, read
from your story.
From Kramer's diary! said the German, unable to hide a thin smile that
capered for a second in his eyes.
Tell me about Samuel!
The writer put his glasses back on and scanned the papers.
... Once we played chess. And I beat Ebenezer in five games. Sometime later he asked me to play with him again. I said to him: We played and
I beat you but you don't remember anymore. We played a little and he beat
me four games in a row. After I racked my brain I discovered that all his
games were copies of the games played by famous grandmasters. Somebody
transferred some more "Jewish knowledge" to him and I laughed. I liked
to look at him, at his hand, at his spirit that moved it. An earthly technical link to a celestial melody. I didn't know but I wanted to be a witness
to creation. A witness to the emergence of art. An exalted character is the
character of the spectator. Who knows how to see. I called him by name.
I also knew Samuel's name and that was almost strange. For us they were
numbers, every single one was a number, and nothing else, just like the
woman who cleans her house, and-here I quote the Reichsfuhrer-doesn't
call the vermin she burns by name. But I couldn't sit for long days with a
number without a name. My generosity to him was so simple in its ardor
that I couldn't aggravate its rarity anymore. Ebenezer met Samuel Lipker
on the day a German civilian, a worker in the camp and a rather decent
man named Hans Taufer, shot an apple he held in the mouth of a girl they
called Bronya the Beautiful. That was at a discharge party for one of the
commanders who was afflicted with a serious liver disease, and in those
days, the days of the shameful and unnecessary retreat from Stalingrad
where the generals betrayed the Fuhrer and brought upon us the most
awful disaster. In those days a party was a plausible excuse to dissipate the amassed gloom a little. It was a lovely dusk, drawn out and reddish, proper
and wild in equal measure. Samuel Lipker was part of the Sonderkommando.
He was burrowing-that fact I don't know from my own eyes but secondhand-in the mouth of a corpse, found a forgotten gold tooth and hid it. At
that time, Ebenezer was standing next to the wire fence whose pillars
curved in (I once told Weiss it would be good to create pillars that would
look like they were crying outside and not inside) and then the shot that
killed Bronya the Beautiful was heard. Hans Taufer didn't kill her on purpose. He was drunk and his hand shook. Ebenezer bent down and Samuel,
who was burrowing in the teeth of the dead, also bent down low. Everybody knows how Jews bend down when they hear shots. Their famous
survival is ultimately a bovine fear. When they bent over and looked at the
window where Bronya the Beautiful was shot each recognized the other.
Maybe they smelled, as a trapped animal smells its companion. Samuel
crawled to Ebenezer. He gave him a piece of greenish bread, spat on it, and
Ebenezer chewed. Samuel evoked longings in Ebenezer, as he told me later.
When he saw that evasive and cunning lad he understood he wouldn't be the
only one who would give up his life. A terrifying sense that surely also excited him. When he told me, I felt a kind of envy I was forbidden as an SS
officer. I envied the love of the beetle for the flea. And because I write only
truth I have to examine that. Maybe in Ebenezer's relation to me I was seeking something denied me, I was always flooded by the chill hard hatred of
those around me. Even the last sight of the Jews wasn't especially likable.
Weiss was busy with his miserable oratorio, drinking wine, and his endless
meditation on the distant landscapes. The Ukrainians and the Germans with
us were dreadfully simple and coarse. None of them had hands that could
shape a box like a Grunwald drawing, a declaration of celestial disbelief in
the cosmos and also a disappointed praise of God, and Ebenezer's love was
kindled at the sight of a lad who was constantly busy rummaging in the
mouths and testicles of corpses that were later burned. Their attraction to
one another was for a past that was fictional but absolute as far as they
were concerned. The spark that engendered love was, as I said, the sight
of the dead Bronya.
And she died very slowly. In the window the sergeants' girl could be
seen bowing as if she were made of iron. Very slowly she bent down, very
slowly she died, when I wrote to Berlin about that whore, a few months before that (she was indeed the most beautiful girl I had ever seen except
for some woman I once saw in a settlement in Palestine, and today I know
she's Ebenezer's mother but then of course I didn't know) I didn't get a
real answer. The reply I did get stated that I deserved praise for strict
preservation of the exalted sexual practices of the German race, but ...
somebody wrote there, a fuck from behind or in front doesn't matter so
much in certain cases of pressure, it said there, an SS sergeant is permitted to relax in one way or another (without specification) that letter was
written to me at the height of the contemptible air attack of the Americans, surely of Jewish origin, who didn't understand what their leaders did,
that what we were doing here was not only for the Third Reich, but for the
whole civilized world. A testimony to their leaders' reconciliation with our
acts and vice versa, how hypocritical the way we're punished now, when
there are no more Jews in Europe and they may roar in public. When there
were a lot of Jews alive they were afraid they'd knock on their locked doors.
They saw Bronya the Beautiful bleeding. The apple (as I understood)
had dropped out of her mouth. She stood naked and the apple was supposed to look amusing in her mouth, and the shot was supposed to pass by
her upstretched hand, but Hans Taufer missed. What amazed Ebenezer,
as he told me later, when he quoted the story from Samuel who saw it along
with him, was that after the shooting Bronya was still standing, even though
she was surely already dead. A soldier started photographing her, bent over
and photographed her from below, an officer named Kassinpoppinger who
once called me "a dark and handsome man," photographed her from the
top of the window where he had climbed earlier, Samuel told Ebenezer:
She's disguised with blood, and Ebenezer remembered those words as
"Jewish knowledge," a wise saying about the disguise of blood, she couldn't
even die as a human being but had to stop time and drop very slowly, permeate with dread the brains of sergeants who fucked her from behind. She
stood, Ebenezer told me, as if the officer who photographed her from on
high was a magnet pulling her up, as a kind of revolt against the law of
gravity of the earth, as if it wasn't possible for her to fall. And only after she
froze in her death did she land and disappear from the eyes of the two
observers, Samuel smiled wickedly and said: Bronya the Beautiful. He loved
her. He didn't want to waste tears where the death of Bronya the Beautiful
was a technical error of a German soldier who, despite everything known about him, was liable to miss his aim, a disaster happened, Ebenezer thought
then (and Samuel remembered and told him), and Samuel doesn't know
who the disaster happened to.
And then Ebenezer took Samuel to our alcove and showed him our
birds, the boxes that were almost done, the grandfather clock, the frames,
and for the first time since the boy Samuel had come to the camp, he said
to Ebenezer (who told me), he felt life inside him, something dim bubbled
up in him, agitation over Bronya's death and joy over the possible flight of
wonderful wooden birds, as if he understood for the first time, he said, that
there was something in imagination to fly away from here, and that there
was someplace to fly to, that is another realm, beyond the fences. In other
words: hope, the last thing somebody could have expressed, was starting to
bubble up in him.
Ebenezer now said: He loved her. And they were shooting pictures all
the time. I recall, that was scary, how much they shot pictures of her dead,
and Samuel loved her. She loved him, too. Wildness, real wildness and joy.
The soldiers and guards also loved Samuel. He had demonic eyes, like a
phony gold ring. When he saw a phony ring he'd get excited and angry. As
if he were looking in a mirror. Like a panther he'd stride there, bury and
burn corpses, and seek in the bodies and find gold teeth or diamonds in
rectums. Even there he bought and sold! As he did with me after the war
when he dragged me to nightclubs and would sell my memory ... When he
got to the camp, maybe a few months afterward, maybe not there but in
Birkenau, he saw his parents. They were naked. He never saw his parents
naked and he was scared. He couldn't believe he'd see them naked. Their
nakedness was too deep a betrayal. They were glazed and always dressed,
impermeable, not connected to their bodies, to toilets, to jokes, to sleeping together, he thought they slept like two glass statues. On his father's
face was a frozen smile as if a split second before his death he still thought,
Ah, what a stupid joke! And so Samuel turned into a cat of corpses. Between his dead father's testicles he found a diamond. That was a strange
gift of a strict father. Samuel knew how to plot, to walk between the drops,
and the guards loved to touch him, he didn't care. Until he saw my birds.
Sometimes they did things to him, he didn't see and he didn't hear. So
they didn't kill him because of their rage, as usual, didn't crush him with
an ax as they did to one child I saw, after they abused him.
Ebenezer stopped all at once, looked at the German who sat with his
glasses still on his nose and the papers in front of him on his lap. The
German wanted to continue, now he'd have to finish. He smiled at Ebenezer
as if he were giving him a grade, as if he loved how Ebenezer filled in the
crossword for him with a small square of knowledge, of words, and he
continued ...
... Samuel found one of his mother's dresses under the ass of a Polish
guard. The guard was sitting in an armchair in the yard, next to the gate to
the latrines and fucking a little girl who looked like a skeleton. Then he got
up and Samuel slipped away, cut out a strip of fabric from the dress, and hid
the fabric in his pocket. I loved-or perhaps the word "love" doesn't suit this
journal-I sympathized with the way Samuel knew how to play the poor
Jew and the soldiers loved the game, too. He knew you had to live another
day. Another day, another two days, and that's how he got to the end. Chaos
reigned. The radio didn't tell us the truth until the last moment. Documents had to be destroyed, burned, purged, and suddenly everything was
over. So it wasn't Samuel's humble and disciplined attitude that saved
him, but the disorder that ruled during the destruction of the camp. But
when he did play it was a beautiful game. I loved to see his downcast look,
his eyes running around like the eyes of a trapped mouse. No, he wasn't
afraid, he wanted them to think he was afraid, it was just as amusing as the
small and doleful choir in torn shoes that came from the eastern front to
entertain us and the people in it stood shocked, split, hungry, and tried to
make us laugh, and they dropped to the ground out of fatigue and hunger
and Samuel stood there, I saw him, and peeped at them. He examined
their acting ability, that beautiful bastard ...