My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (22 page)

“I cannot even say what my emotions were. I grew up in the very orderly world of a prosperous middle-class European family. And then, after five years of bliss, this world collapsed overnight. What we thought to be inviolable was violated. What we thought to be the natural order of things was overturned. And it all happened from one day to the next. In the ghetto, one lost one’s human foundation, one’s human identity. One stopped being human. I was no longer a human being. And in this postcollapse world, it was survival at all cost.

“After the first Action came another. It was a hot summer day, and the Germans were once again hunting Jews. It was a real hunt, like a fox hunt or a hare hunt. Then came the order that everyone who did not have a work permit must assemble in a specified ghetto location. My mother and sister went. I remember it as if it happened yesterday. I remember my sister saying to my mother: we are young, we will work, we will survive. They knew they were leaving me. They knew that only God knew what would happen. But they did not want to frighten me. And they wanted to hope. They wanted to believe they would return. And I did, too. It didn’t even occur to me that they wouldn’t return, that
I would never see them again. They hugged me and kissed me and left me with my aunt. I watched them walk away, becoming smaller and smaller in the distance.

“My aunt tried as best she could to make up for my mother’s absence. My uncle was extremely resourceful; he rescued us from the ghetto. But although my uncle and aunt tried hard to soften the blow, from the moment my mother and sister left, I was alone. From the age of seven, I had no one to talk to. I knew I had to survive on my own. Although I was a child, I knew that I could count on no one and turn to no one. It was a life of utter solitude.

“In the next few months something happened that bordered on the miraculous. My uncle found a home owner in Lvov who had been an officer in the Polish army and was willing to assist Jews. In the terrible anti-Semitic climate of Poland at that time, this was one in a thousand. There was also a working-class family that helped us. These two families saved us. Our forged papers said we were Aryan and that our identity was Polish Catholic. So we wouldn’t get caught, my aunt taught me Catholic stories and prayers. It was crucial that the neighbors saw us living as Catholics. Gradually it stopped being a game. I liked it: Easter, Christmas, Christmas presents. The story of Jesus, the image of Mary. Catholicism is genius. You don’t stand alone the way Jews and Protestants do. Jesus sacrificed himself for you, and Mary constantly watches over you. You ask her to save you. And when you are a child in the midst of a horrific war and there is carnage all around you, and your father is dead and your mother is gone, you are easily tempted to believe in all this. You hope it will bring you salvation. And you kneel by the altar and you say what every Catholic child says.

“Postwar Poland was dreadfully anti-Semitic. Even though the Nazis were gone, you could smell the hatred for Jews on every street corner. I remember a woman shouting at Jews: ‘Scum, you’ve come out of your holes, too bad Hitler didn’t finish you off.’ I remember Jews who returned from the camps hiding their identity, and when they were exposed, they were cursed and beaten. There were constant rumors of postwar pogroms. It was crystal clear that Jews had no future in Poland. After all we had been through and all we had seen, we knew that we could no longer be Jewish. We had to replace our old cursed identity with a new one.

“I was officially baptized. My Polish name became Zvigniew Orlowski. I was an altar boy in the Krakow cathedral. I prayed with the priest and helped him with the holy bread. Every day I genuflected. Being the servant of God’s servant gave me proximity to God. But what was even more important than that was not to be Jewish. To be a Jew was to have to run away all the time. To conceal, to lie, to manipulate. And I cut myself off from all that. I ceased to be Jewish. I turned myself into a Catholic in order to live.

“But in 1946, it became clear that even as a Catholic I had no future in Krakow. A Red Cross children’s transport train took me from Poland to France, from one aunt to another. I was eleven, and once again I was totally alone. When I reached France, I buried in my heart everything that had happened in Poland. I didn’t want to remember anything. I erased the Polish language, my mother tongue, from my memory. I also erased my Catholicism. I adopted a new identity, French. Within a year French became my first language. I studied in a prestigious high school in Avignon, and by the time I was fifteen I was immersed in French culture. Even my accent no longer sounded foreign. I was on the fast track to the Sorbonne.

“France taught me liberty, equality, and human rights. I learned to embrace universalism and secularism, and the principle of separation between state and church. But I always knew that France was not home. Although I wanted to erase the past, I didn’t erase the memory of my father, mother, and sister, who were taken from me and died because they were Jewish. I felt I was different; I was from another place. As a Jew, I felt I could never be whole in France. And I was not authentically French. Between France and me there was always a barrier.

“The declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948 aroused enormous excitement. You and people of your generation cannot grasp this,” Sternhell tells me. “Even before the war, in Poland, our family was Zionist. My aunt in Avignon was active in the Jewish National Fund. There were Zionist posters in every room. I used to read three newspapers every day to follow the drama unfolding in Palestine. As a thirteen-year-old boy I feared that the Arabs would slaughter the Jews. But the army of the Jews fought and won and the state of the Jews came to be. It was beyond imagination. Only four years had passed since the Red Army had liberated us. Only six years since the
Nazis had wiped out the ghetto. And now these very same Jews who had been locked up in the ghetto and were hunted down, rose and established a state. Even to someone as secular as myself this was a historic event with a metaphysical dimension. Suddenly there were Jews who were government ministers and Jews who were military officers. A flag, a passport, a uniform. Now the Jews were no longer dependent on gentiles. Now Jews were like gentiles. They stood up for themselves. Even in retrospect, the most thrilling event of my life was the establishment of the State of Israel. I felt an almost religious exaltation.

“In the world of the Holocaust, Jews had no dignity. Jews were human powder, human dust. They were shot as dogs and cats were never shot. They were treated worse than animals. Animals you could pity. Jews you could not pity. The Jew was subhuman. Nothing. Zero. And now, only three years after Auschwitz, the Jew is a human entity. Now, in the Land of Israel, the Jews were fighting back. And they were fighting properly. They fought to win. I saw them in magazine photographs and in cinema newsreels: young and strong and holding guns. Suddenly they were human like all humans. They were capable of fighting for their freedom as the Italians of Edmondo De Amicis’s
Heart
fought for their freedom. They were not creatures one could enslave and hunt down and kill. For me, in the south of France, it was a wonder. It was a miracle taking place in real, concrete history.

“At the age of sixteen, I decided to make
aliyah
. I immigrated to Israel on my own, on a boat with a large transport of children coming from Marseille. It was very crowded but it was fun. I remember us standing on the upper deck, watching Mount Carmel come into view, the Land of Israel approaching. And as we disembarked, a few children knelt and kissed the ground. I didn’t kneel or kiss the ground, but I felt I had arrived. This was the last station—no more wandering, no more transformations, no more false identities. No more fraud and forgery. No more not being myself. For subterfuge and deceit were not needed here. Something artificial and scary fell away from me. Something that had to do with the perpetual need I felt to justify myself. But in the State of Israel I no longer had to justify or explain. It was a great relief. I didn’t speak Hebrew yet, I didn’t know what the future held. I was alone, without possessions or protection. But I was filled with the amazing feeling that the long, excruciating journey had come to an end.”

Aharon Appelfeld is a world-renowned author whose Holocaust-related novels—
Badenheim 1939
,
The Age of Wonders
,
Iron Tracks
—have been translated into many languages. I sit with him in the basement studio of his Mevaseret-Zion home near Jerusalem. He is short, round-faced, and soft-spoken. Every now and then a devilish spark lights up his eyes. As I had listened to Sternhell, I listen to Appelfeld for a few days. Listening to Appelfeld I once again try to comprehend the Jewish-Israeli story of the twentieth century.

“I was born near Czernowitz in 1932,” Appelfeld tells me. “My father was a well-educated industrialist, a former chess champion of Vienna. My mother stayed at home, and she was absolutely beautiful. I was an only child, and my parents spoiled me with ice cream, cakes, toys, books, and folk tales. They wanted me to be a lawyer in Berlin or Vienna. In general, their eyes were always set on Vienna, with its opera, theater, and grand cafés. Judaism was some anachronistic matter of little importance to them. The future was the future of European enlightenment. Our home was spacious and prosperous. We employed a nanny and a cook. We had a piano and many books and fine paintings, multicolored vases, and a masonry stove that warmed the interiors in winter. And when our small happy family left home, we went to Vienna or Prague or the Carpathian Mountains. Wearing Austrian shorts, socks, and high boots, I loved to step on the soft carpet of autumn leaves in the Vienna parks. When we would return home, my mother would play the piano and put me to sleep with snowy tales that seeped into my dreams. On Sundays, when Father and I would play in my room with the electric train he bought me, Mother would call from the other end of the house: ‘Ervin, where are you?’ ‘I am here, Mother, I am here,’ I would call back to her.

“In the summer of 1941, when I was nine, we were vacationing at my grandmother’s country estate in the Carpathian Mountains. I was sick and was asleep in my bed at noon. Suddenly there was shooting. I called out for my parents. There was more shooting. I jumped out of the window and hid in the cornfield behind the house. While in the field, I heard the Germans torturing my beautiful mother. I heard
my mother screaming. I heard the Germans murder my grandmother and my mother.

“At night Father came home. He had managed to hide and come back for me. He found me in the high corn. Together we returned to Czernowitz, where we found our house looted. The books, the fine paintings, the multicolored vases, the piano, the masonry stove. We were taken to the ghetto, where they put ten of us in a room. It was crowded, it smelled, it was degrading. The moans of the dying elderly filled the air. A few days later we were ordered to march to the train station. There was commotion, shouting, dogs barking. Every now and then there was a gunshot. Inside the cattle cars there was no air to breathe. My father lifted me onto his shoulders so I would not suffocate. When the train stopped, there was a commotion again, and more shouting and dogs barking. Thousands of Jews were pushed off the cattle cars and kicked into the Dniester River. The fittest swam, the weak drowned. Most of the elderly and the children drowned. Because I was his one and only son, my father was able to save me.

“When we reached the other side of the river, we were ordered to march. It was the end of summer and it was getting cold. It rained. For two weeks we walked in mud in the daytime and slept outdoors at night. Some disappeared in the marshes. Some collapsed of fatigue. Some succumbed to diseases. But my father was strong and resilient. Although at nine and a half years of age I was no longer a baby, he carried me on his shoulders much of the way. At last we arrived at an abandoned kolkhoz which had become an improvised concentration camp. Children were separated from adults. Father disappeared. Before I was ten I was alone in the world.

“I realized that if I stayed in the camp I would die. I ran away. The Ukrainian farmers whose doors I knocked on turned me away. I was hungry. I felt it was time to leave this world. At home I’d heard that when the end was near, you leaned on a tree, closed your eyes, and waited for death. So I leaned on a tree, closed my eyes, and waited. But hunger and cold and the dampness kept me awake. A few hours later a ray of sun appeared in the woods, and I walked on. I found shelter in the wooden hut of a Ukrainian prostitute. I became her servant. For six months I milked the cow, cleaned the floor, watched the rough farmers
fuck the prostitute in every which way. But when I sensed danger I fled and found refuge with a gang of horse thieves. I was useful to the horse thieves; since I was small, they could smuggle me into barns at night and have me open the gates so the horses could be taken away. But when I sensed danger, I fled again. And so I passed from one underworld to the next. From village to village, from forest to forest. I survived like a field animal. The spoiled bourgeois child I was survived by living for three years like a mouse.