Daniel
1983, Haifa
L
ETTER
FROM
D
ANIEL TO
A
LON
Dear Alon,
Two years ago you and I had a long talk about lack of understanding. On that occasion a family conflict was readily resolved and soon forgotten. This time I ask you to try to see your parents’ viewpoint, especially the viewpoint of your mother, and to understand why they cannot bring themselves to support you in your choice and be glad that you succeeded in gaining admission to such a special college. All three of us, your parents and I, at your age found ourselves in the thick of a thoroughly vile war. As you know, I ended up interpreting for the Gestapo, your mother was a courier in the Warsaw ghetto, and for eight months your father made his way through many countries convulsed by war to Palestine. I want to say to you that war, like prison and severe illness, is a great misfortune. People suffer, lose those dear to them, lose arms and legs, and much else besides. Most important, nobody becomes a better human being as a result of war. Do not listen to those who claim that war steels a man, that war changes people for the better. I believe only that war fails to make very good people worse, but more generally war and prison make people lose their humanity. I say this so that you should understand why none of us are delighted to learn that you are entering this special college which is not just for soldiers but for extra special soldiers, intelligence agents, saboteurs, I don’t know what to call them. In my younger years I came into contact with many soldiers, German, Russian, Polish, all sorts, and in all these years the only thing that gladdened me was that I was an interpreter. I was at least enabling people to reach agreement between themselves and I was not shooting at anybody.
Your parents hoped you would choose a peaceful profession, as an engineer or a computer programmer, as indeed you did yourself. I understand them, but I understand you too. You want to defend this country. Israel is like Holland with its dykes which constantly hold back the sea which wants to overrun the Netherlands, the low countries. Every Dutch person, even the children, is ready to block a hole in the dyke with their finger. Israel is in the same situation, except that in place of the sea there is the immense Arab world which wants to inundate our small country.
You expected your parents to be very pleased by your success, but instead they are upset because they love you very much and fear for your life. As for me, Alon, I will do my job and pray for you.
Best wishes,
Your Dodo,
Daniel
1983, Negev
P
OSTCARD FROM
A
LON TO
D
ANIEL
(With a view of the Negev Desert.)
Dear Dodo,
I have no objection to your prayers, but don’t insist on them. Since many others have claims, you can put me last on the list.
Yours,
Alon
1983, Haifa
P
OSTCARD FROM
D
ANIEL TO
A
LON
(With a view of the Golan Heights.)
Dear Alon,
I have put you last, after the cat.
Dodo Daniel
10. November 1990, Freiburg
F
ROM A TALK BY
B
ROTHER
D
ANIEL
S
TEIN TO
S
CHOOLCHILDREN
I was born in south Poland. Until I was seventeen, I had never traveled more than forty kilometers from home, but my first real expedition, imposed upon me and lasting for many years, began when I was seventeen, on the day German troops attacked Poland. I will tell you about that journey, which for me had much the same impact as the forty years the Jewish people spent wandering in the wilderness. I left Poland in early September 1939 as a boy and returned in 1945 as a grown man. During the war, without traveling any great distance, I found myself at one time in west Ukraine, which before that had been east Poland and later became part of the USSR; in Lithuania, both independent and occupied by the Russians and then by the Germans; and later in Belorussia, which used to be part of Poland, and also found itself under the Germans.
The shtetl in south Poland where I was born was neither a town nor even a village. Its inhabitants were Poles and Jews, and panic broke out the day after the War began.
It was only one hundred kilometers to the frontier with Czechoslovakia, and the German army was rapidly approaching from that direction. A great mass of people emigrated northwards. My family hastily gathered our belongings and loaded them on to a cart. We had no horses so I and my brother took the harness, and my father pushed from behind. My parents were elderly and, as my mother was ill, we put her on the cart as well. Our progress was laughable. After a few kilometers we were caught up by relatives and moved only the bare essentials onto their wagon, which was harnessed with horses. We clambered on.
I have this picture before my eyes of a road jammed with carts and crowds of people on foot. Everybody was in very low spirits. We were fleeing from the Germans but did not know where we were fleeing to. Just to the north and the east. My father was particularly depressed. He would have preferred to stay, having served in the Austrian army during the First World War. He had two medals wrapped in a handkerchief in the inside pocket of his jacket. He had brought his uniform, lovingly kept in the wardrobe for twenty years, but had to leave it behind with all the other things abandoned in the cart. He was silent and brooding, as he always was when he had to defer to my mother’s decisions. It was she who had insisted we should flee. Her plan was to reach Kraków and go east from there. My father did not like the idea and would have preferred to remain under the Germans.
What I most remember about that week was the constant worry about the horses. It was difficult even to get water for them. The wells along the road had run dry, and people were queueing to water their horses at any streams we encountered along the way.
There was nowhere to buy hay and my heart was filled with pity at the sight of our suffering nags. They were peasants’ horses which bore no resemblance to the sturdy, well-groomed stallions provided for our exercises at the cavalry regiment’s riding school. When we reached Kraków, I unharnessed them and bade them farewell. We left them in the street not far from the station in the hope that they would find kind owners.
Getting on a train was very difficult. We spent two days at the station before we managed to pile into a goods wagon. It was the last train to leave Kraków because a few hours later the railway station was bombed. A day later an attempt was made to bomb our train. The train escaped damage but the tracks were destroyed and we had to proceed on foot. I don’t think we had come more than two hundred kilometers. The local population were almost nowhere to be seen. Villages had been abandoned, and many destroyed.
A huge crowd of refugees—it was amazing that so many people had managed to fit on to a single train—straggled along the pitted country road. After a few hours we learned that the town of B. which we were heading for had already been taken by the Germans. We had failed to outdistance the invading army. My father kept muttering, “I said this would happen, I said this would happen.”
We decided to skirt the town. There were no Germans in the villages—they were consolidating themselves only in major centers. We turned off the road and set up camp in woodland. My brother and I were experienced campers. In Akiva we had been trained to take over new lands and we put up a small lean-to and somewhere to rest for my parents, made a campfire and started cooking kasha with what remained of the grain.