were filled only by the remainders of a religion, the small things that were left when the synagogues were burned and the
Torahs spat and shat upon in the main streets and squares
of Europe.
She liked the foreign taste on her tongue, the slightly salty
acidity that greeted her as she chewed. She liked Moshe too
— out of all the volunteers who worked in the museum, he
was the one she felt most at ease with. The only one who
didn’t treat her differently because she was a gentile. Some
days when she couldn’t look at Charlotte’s art any more, she
would pack up her notebooks and pens and sit for a
while with Moshe, listening to his stories of Berlin before
the war.
She remembered him telling her how he’d been a professor
of music at the university until the Nuremberg laws came
into effect. How he’d fought in the trenches during the First
World War. An eighteen-year-old Jewish boy, drafted in
1917, sent in a train to the Western Front, where he spent a
year dodging shrapnel, burrowing and hiding like an insect
and watching his comrades die. After the war he studied,
eventually taking up the teaching post, thinking all the horror
was now behind him, happy to spend the rest of his life
crouching over books and scores, trying to forget what he
saw and felt that year when he had been posted in France.
In 1942 Moshe, his wife and their three daughters, were
put on to another train, with sealed-up windows and the
smell of death lurking in every joint of the metal, every
railroad tie they crossed — heading East this time; to a small
Polish village which the Nazis, having problems with the
native spelling, renamed Auschwitz, easier to pronounce, the
two syllables rolling like honey over German tongues.
They were separated when they got off the train and
stepped into the freezing Polish winter: Moshe and his eldest
daughter were sent to another line, tattooed with a number
and taken to what would be their home for the next two
years; his wife and two youngest went straight to the other
part of the camp, the one named for the birch forest which
surrounded the chimneys that spewed smoke into the sky,
day and night, saturating the air with the smell of history.
He’d told Suze how he and his daughter had settled in
Amsterdam after the liberation with an uncle of his. There
was no blood left in Germany. No house. No university
post. Nothing but bombed-out buildings and bitter people
scavenging through the once great streets of Berlin.
Eating the minced fishcakes, she wondered how he could
live like that. How he could carry on after his wife and two
of his children had been murdered. She was sure that in the
same situation she would have just folded, crushed by hate
and thoughts of retribution. She wanted to understand how
one puts a life back together and the difference between that
life and the one that preceded it.
‘You think about them every day?’ she’d asked him.
‘Most days,’ he’d answered. ‘And even when I don’t, it’s
still here.’ Pointing to his chest. ‘Still with me. It’s always
with us. Not something we can forget or put away.’
He’d celebrated his hundredth birthday earlier that year
and Suze remembered seeing him at the party, his battered
face aglow again like a child’s. It was as if someone had
suddenly wiped the last sixty years from his memory. She’d
asked him then why he looked so happy and he’d replied
that back in Auschwitz there was a game the prisoners played
at night. One man would say ‘I will live to a hundred’ and
men someone else down the block would say ‘I will live to a
hundred and one’ and so on until the Kapos eventually heard
diem and would come steaming in with blackjacks and pliers,
quieting the place back down again.
‘Of course we all knew that we would never live to be a
hundred. Maybe you call it Jewish humour, I don’t know,
but we found it funny back then, saying things like that.
Words
Torahs spat and shat upon in the main streets and squares
of Europe.
She liked the foreign taste on her tongue, the slightly salty
acidity that greeted her as she chewed. She liked Moshe too
— out of all the volunteers who worked in the museum, he
was the one she felt most at ease with. The only one who
didn’t treat her differently because she was a gentile. Some
days when she couldn’t look at Charlotte’s art any more, she
would pack up her notebooks and pens and sit for a
while with Moshe, listening to his stories of Berlin before
the war.
She remembered him telling her how he’d been a professor
of music at the university until the Nuremberg laws came
into effect. How he’d fought in the trenches during the First
World War. An eighteen-year-old Jewish boy, drafted in
1917, sent in a train to the Western Front, where he spent a
year dodging shrapnel, burrowing and hiding like an insect
and watching his comrades die. After the war he studied,
eventually taking up the teaching post, thinking all the horror
was now behind him, happy to spend the rest of his life
crouching over books and scores, trying to forget what he
saw and felt that year when he had been posted in France.
In 1942 Moshe, his wife and their three daughters, were
put on to another train, with sealed-up windows and the
smell of death lurking in every joint of the metal, every
railroad tie they crossed — heading East this time; to a small
Polish village which the Nazis, having problems with the
native spelling, renamed Auschwitz, easier to pronounce, the
two syllables rolling like honey over German tongues.
They were separated when they got off the train and
stepped into the freezing Polish winter: Moshe and his eldest
daughter were sent to another line, tattooed with a number
and taken to what would be their home for the next two
years; his wife and two youngest went straight to the other
part of the camp, the one named for the birch forest which
surrounded the chimneys that spewed smoke into the sky,
day and night, saturating the air with the smell of history.
He’d told Suze how he and his daughter had settled in
Amsterdam after the liberation with an uncle of his. There
was no blood left in Germany. No house. No university
post. Nothing but bombed-out buildings and bitter people
scavenging through the once great streets of Berlin.
Eating the minced fishcakes, she wondered how he could
live like that. How he could carry on after his wife and two
of his children had been murdered. She was sure that in the
same situation she would have just folded, crushed by hate
and thoughts of retribution. She wanted to understand how
one puts a life back together and the difference between that
life and the one that preceded it.
‘You think about them every day?’ she’d asked him.
‘Most days,’ he’d answered. ‘And even when I don’t, it’s
still here.’ Pointing to his chest. ‘Still with me. It’s always
with us. Not something we can forget or put away.’
He’d celebrated his hundredth birthday earlier that year
and Suze remembered seeing him at the party, his battered
face aglow again like a child’s. It was as if someone had
suddenly wiped the last sixty years from his memory. She’d
asked him then why he looked so happy and he’d replied
that back in Auschwitz there was a game the prisoners played
at night. One man would say ‘I will live to a hundred’ and
men someone else down the block would say ‘I will live to a
hundred and one’ and so on until the Kapos eventually heard
diem and would come steaming in with blackjacks and pliers,
quieting the place back down again.
‘Of course we all knew that we would never live to be a
hundred. Maybe you call it Jewish humour, I don’t know,
but we found it funny back then, saying things like that.
Words
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