Authors: Michel Laub
A Jewish school, at least a school like ours, in which some students are dropped off in a chauffeur-driven car and others spend years being ridiculed, one of them having his packed lunch spat in every day, another being locked in the machine room during every break-time, and the student who was injured during his birthday party had already been the victim of such pranks, having in previous years been repeatedly buried in the sand — yes, a Jewish school is much like any other. The difference being that you spend your childhood being told about anti-Semitism: some teachers talk of little else, as a way of explaining the atrocities committed by the Nazis, which were a consequence of the atrocities committed by the Poles, which were an echo of the atrocities committed by the Russians, and you could add to this list the Arabs, the Muslims,
the Christians and anyone else you care to name, a spiral of hatred that had its roots in feelings of envy for the intelligence, willpower, culture and wealth that the Jews had created despite all those obstacles.
When I was thirteen, I lived in a house with a swimming pool, and in the summer holidays I went to Disney World and rode on Space Mountain, saw the Pirates of the Caribbean and the parade and the fireworks, and afterward visited the Epcot Center and saw the dolphins at Sea World and the crocodiles in Cypress Gardens and the river rapids in Busch Gardens and the vampire mirrors in the Mystery Fun House.
When I was thirteen I had: a video game, a VCR, a shelf full of books and records, a guitar, a pair of roller skates, a NASA uniform, a stolen No Parking sign, a tennis racket I never used, a tent, a skateboard, a rubber ring, a Rubik’s cube, a knuckleduster, and a small penknife.
When I was thirteen I had still never had a girlfriend. I had never been really ill. I had never seen anyone die
or have a serious accident. On the night that the birthday boy fell I dreamed about his father, about his aunts and uncles and grandparents, who had all been there, about his godfather, who had perhaps helped pay for the party, even though all they provided was chocolate cake and popcorn and chicken croquettes and paper plates.
I often dreamed about the moment of the fall, a silence that lasted a second, possibly two, a room full of sixty people and no one making a sound, as if everyone were waiting for my classmate to cry out, or even just grunt, but he lay on the ground with his eyes closed until someone told everyone else to move away because he might be injured, a scene that stayed with me until he came back to school and crept along the corridors, wearing his orthopedic corset underneath his uniform in the cold, the heat, the sun and the rain.
If, at the time, someone had asked me what affected me most deeply, seeing what happened to my classmate or the fact that my grandfather had been imprisoned in Auschwitz, and by “affect” I mean to experience
something intensely as palpable and ever present, a memory that doesn’t even need to be evoked to appear, I would have had no hesitation in giving my answer.
My grandfather died when my father was fourteen. The image I have of him comes from half a dozen photographs, in which he is always wearing the same clothes, the same dark suit, the same hair and beard, and I have no idea what his voice sounded like, and I don’t even know if his teeth were white because in none of the photos is he smiling.
I never knew my grandfather’s house, but some of the furniture from there, the armchair, the round table, the glass cabinet, ended up in the apartment where my grandmother went to live afterward. It was an apartment better suited to a widow who rarely went out, at most once a week to have tea at a friend’s house, a habit she kept up until the friend had to move into an old people’s home, where she spent five or ten years, during which time she broke a leg and then her pelvis and suffered at least three bouts of pneumonia, a heart attack and a stroke before she died.
I once visited that home with my grandmother. It was right on the outskirts of the city. The rooms smelled of eucalyptus, and the building was surrounded by a green area with benches and flower beds, and from there we could see the nurses, the visiting relatives, the occasional uniformed care assistant, and sometimes a gentleman in a motorized wheelchair equipped with an oxygen cylinder. My grandmother and her friend discussed the latest TV soap, the violence reported in the newspapers, how people in the street were growing ever ruder and the cold days ever longer, and at no point in the conversation, nor in any conversation I had with my grandmother until she died, more or less as her friend in the home had done, except without a heart attack along the way, and the stroke she had was so massive that it spared everyone having to see her lying in bed during that eternity in which the person can neither speak nor move — at no point in her life did my grandmother mention my grandfather.
I mean, sometimes she would say very obvious things, that my grandfather didn’t talk much, that he slept
in long-sleeved pajamas even in summer, that when they were first married he would do fifteen minutes of exercises when he got up, and that he once fell off the ladder he would use to get into the loft, and I could continue that list until there were twenty items or perhaps even thirty, but at no point in all those years did she tell me the most important thing about him.
In the final years of his life, my grandfather spent the whole day in his study. Only after he died did we find out what he had been doing there, notebooks and more notebooks filled with tiny writing, and only when I read what he had written did I finally understand what he had been through. It was then that his experience stopped being merely historical, merely collective, merely attached to some abstract moral, in the sense that Auschwitz became a kind of landmark in which you believe with all the force of your education, your reading, all the debates you’ve heard on the subject, the positions you’ve solemnly defended, the vehemently condemnatory statements you’ve made without for a second feeling as if any of that experience were truly yours.
If I had to speak about something that was truly mine, I would start with the story of that classmate who fell at the party. About how he reappeared at school months later. About how I found the courage to go over to him and speak and ask a question when the two of us were waiting in the corridor for the next class and make some comment regarding the following week’s test or the teacher’s dandruff-covered jacket, and about the way in which he responded to my comment, as if we were having a perfectly normal conversation and as if either of us could possibly forget that he was wearing an orthopedic corset, and that whenever he stood up it felt as if everyone were watching to see if he walked any differently, raising one foot higher than the other, a slightly irregular rhythm that would stay with him forever, as it would with the other boys who were there at that party.
My classmate’s name was João, and as we grew closer I learned that: (a) his father sold cotton candy in the park because he didn’t earn enough as a bus conductor; (b) his father had brought him up alone because João’s mother had died before she was forty; (c) after
his mother died, his father never married again or had more children or even a girlfriend.
About João I learned that: (a) he never said anything to his father about getting buried in sand every day; (b) he told him that the reason he never phoned up a friend to go out to play was because he preferred to stay at home studying; (c) he never attributed any of his problems at school to the fact that he wasn’t Jewish.
My school had a tradition of getting students into the best universities, the ones that produced industrialists, engineers and lawyers. João’s father thought it was worth the sacrifice to enroll João in such a prestigious school, and through the scholarship program he managed to get an 80 percent discount on the monthly fees. However, he still had to work really hard to pay the remaining 20 percent, plus the uniform, books and transport.
João’s father decided to celebrate his son’s thirteenth birthday because the family had never given a proper
party. Aside from birthdays when João was a child, they usually only invited relatives over for a beer, and João didn’t normally invite anyone apart from a cousin and a boy from the same building who was four years younger than him. But because João was attending a Jewish school and all the boys there were bar mitzvahed at the age of thirteen, and at every party the birthday boy was given thirteen bumps, a kind of initiation into the adult world, when, to use the Hebrew expression that gives the ceremony its name, the boy became “a son of commandment,” for all those reasons João’s father persuaded his son to invite his classmates to the reception room in the building where one of his brothers-in-law lived.
I only found this out months later, when I was already a regular visitor to their apartment. They lived in an even more modest building than the brother-in-law, a place of peeling walls and bare wires, and when I arrived there one afternoon, quite late in the day, João was out. He had gone to pay a bill or post a letter or take something to the registry office, one of the various errands he ran in order to help out at home, and his father opened the door to me and offered me a
glass of fruit juice. We sat down in front of the TV. The local news was on. We sat there for some time, not saying anything, as was perfectly normal, because up until then I had never exchanged more than a few words with him, and when the silence became ever more uncomfortable and the daily soap ever more tedious, and because it was nearly dark and João had still not come back, he started asking me questions — about school, about my father, about my grandfather.
João’s father listened to me with the TV still on, and it was as if he wasn’t interested in anything I was saying, because he kept looking straight ahead, even occasionally changing channels. At one point, he commented on a game show in which the audience begged for money, the toothless, the blind, the deaf, people covered in sores and burns, and João’s father said how absurd to allow those people to appear on TV, how absurd to treat them like that, how absurd that the government did nothing about it. I’m sick of living in this shithole of a country. Don’t you agree that this is a shithole of a country? That everything we do turns to shit? That the people in it are nothing but shit? And then he got up, turned off the TV and started talking
about himself and his son and about life, and then, with the same anger in his voice, fixing me with his eyes as if he had been waiting for this moment for a very long time, he asked if I didn’t feel ashamed about what had happened at João’s birthday party.
In a school like mine, the few non-Jewish students even enjoyed certain privileges. For example, they didn’t have to attend Hebrew classes. Or the classes about Hebrew culture. In the weeks preceding religious holidays, they were excused from learning the traditional songs, saying the prayers, doing the dances, taking part in the Shabbat, visiting the synagogue and the Old People’s Home, and decorating Moses’s cradle to the sound of the Israeli national anthem, not to mention the so-called Youth Movement camps.
At camp we were divided into groups, each with an older boy as a monitor, and part of the day was taken up with the usual activities one would expect at such a gathering: lunch, football, group hugs, treasure hunts and messy games involving talcum powder and eggs. We took a tent, insect repellent, a cooking pot and a
canteen, and I remember carefully hiding anything that might be stolen in my absence, stowing a bar of chocolate at the bottom of my dirty laundry bag, a battery charger in the middle of a clump of nettles.
At night we were divided into two groups, in an exercise known as “camp attack,” with one group hidden in the vegetation and the other in charge of defending the camp. Then, in a clearing in the early hours, we would form into platoons that basically did what patrols are supposed to do, armed with compasses and in columns, crawling through undergrowth and scaling hills, an imitation of what we had heard about in talks the monitors gave about the Six-Day War, the War of Independence, the Yom Kippur War, the Lebanese War.
There were other non-Jews at the school, but none like João. Once, one of them got hold of a Jewish classmate, dragged him along for about forty meters, pinned his victim’s right arm to the wall next to an iron door and repeatedly slammed the door on the boy’s fingers, and when the boy was screaming and writhing
in pain, he grabbed the boy’s left arm and did the same again. João was different: if a classmate ordered him to stand, he would stand. If a classmate flung João’s sandwich across the playground, João would go and fetch it. If the same classmate then grabbed João and made him eat the sandwich, bite by bite, João’s face would remain utterly impassive — no pain, no pleading, no expression at all.
When João’s father asked me if I didn’t feel ashamed about what had happened at the party, I could have described that scene to him. I could have told him more than he was expecting to hear, rather than about how I had apologized to João when he returned to school. Instead of telling him how relieved I felt when I found out that João would make a full recovery, walking normally and leading a normal life, and how knowing this had made our conversation easier, as if my apology had instantly erased everything he had been through after the fall, João lying on the floor in front of his relatives, the breath knocked out of him, João in the ambulance and in the emergency room and in hospital, where not a single one of his
classmates visited him, and then another two months spent at home, where, again, none of us went to see him, and then back at school where, again, none of us spoke to him until I plucked up enough courage to do so — instead of that I could have told him what it was like to see João eating that sandwich watched by his attacker. And how, when he had finished the last mouthful, his attacker had hit him again, hidden behind a tree in one corner of the playground, surrounded by a small group of boys who chanted the same refrain every day.