What I really like about America is the concentration of freedom per square meter, but even here, in this old house built in the English colonial style, in the freest country in the world, we are living on land that used to belong to Wampanoags or Pequots.
Of course, there has long been nowhere on earth a Jew can feel completely at home.
Many years passed and I realized that I was just as far from personal freedom as I had been as a youth. Now, like a man possessed, I worked not only at my day job as a surgeon but also undertook experiments, constantly violating one of the seven commandments of Noah, addressed not only to Jews but to the whole of mankind: to not be cruel to animals. My poor primates. It was not their fault their circulatory system so resembles that of humans. Perhaps it is this ability to be possessed by an idea that is the defining characteristic of Jewishness. Our intensity. I am reminded of an extraordinary youth called Dieter Stein who organized the escape from the Emsk ghetto. First he went to work for the Gestapo on idealistic grounds, to save people from the jaws of hell. Then he became a Christian in order once again to save people from the jaws of hell. The last time I met him we were on a badly damaged train taking us to Kraków. It was night and we were standing at the end of the carriage. He told me he was going there to become a monk. I couldn’t help asking him, “To save people?”
He looked no more than seventeen years old and was emaciated, a stunted Jewish teenager. How on earth could the Germans have thought he was Polish? His smile was childlike. “Almost, Panie doktorze. You saved me so that I might serve the Lord.”
I remembered then having vouched for him to the Russian partisans. Memory expels everything it finds too difficult to cope with. How could I live if I had to remember all the evidence I was obliged to view during the Nuremberg trials?
4. January 1946, Wrocław
L
ETTER
FROM
E
FRAIM
C
WYK TO
A
VIGDOR
S
TEIN
Dear Avigdor,
Did you know I managed to find Dieter back in August last year? He is alive, but stuck in a monastery! When I heard he had become a monk I could not believe it. We were in Akiva together, we were Zionists, we were going to go to Israel, and suddenly this! A monk! After the war there are not that many of us still around. He is one of the lucky few, and all just to become a monk? When someone said he was in Kraków I went straight there. I was sure, and I still haven’t changed my mind completely, he must have been tricked. To tell the truth, I took a pistol along just in case. I captured a good Walther a while back.
Twenty kilometers on from Kraków I found this Carmelite monastery.
They did not want to let me in. Some old geezer was the gatekeeper and he was having none of it. I waved the pistol at him and he let me in. I went straight to the abbot. There was another old fart there in a sort of reception place. I took the pistol out again and the abbot soon turned up. Old, gray, hefty geezer. Come in, Panie. Invited me into his study.
I sat down, put the pistol on the table, and said, “You are to let my friend, Dieter Stein, go free.” He says, “Certainly. Only put your gun away and wait here for 10 minutes.”
Sure enough, 10 minutes later in comes Dieter, not wearing one of those cowls, just a workman’s overalls and with his hands dirty. We embraced and kissed. I said, “I am here to take you back. Let’s go.” He smiled and said, “No, Efraim, I have decided to stay here.” “Have you gone stark, staring mad?” I asked.
I could see the Abbot sitting at his big table smiling. I suddenly felt so angry, like he was laughing at me! How come he was so sure I could not take Dieter away? “What are you grinning at?” I yelled. “You have lured a good man here and you sit there grinning? You know all about tricking people! What is he to you? Are you running out of Jews?” He replied, “We are not detaining anybody here, young man. It is not we who are using force but you who have come with a pistol. If your friend wants to go with you, he is free to do so.”
Dieter just stood there grinning like an idiot. No, really, like a complete fool. I shouted at him, “Come on, get your things together right now and come with me!” He shook his head. That is when I realized they must have drugged him, or put a spell on him. “Let’s go!” I said. “Nobody is holding you here! This is no place for a Jew!”
At that, Avigdor, I saw them exchanging glances, that abbot and Dieter, as if it was me who was the lunatic. What can I say? I stayed there three days. Dieter is nuts, of course, but not in the usual sense. Something has gone wrong in his head. He behaved perfectly normal, he was not eating grass, but he has got some real God mania. He was such an ordinary regular guy, a good companion, really clever. No one had a bad word to say about him. Always ready to help, friends, enemies, and the main thing is—he survived! Then this!
Three days later we parted. Dieter told me he had decided to dedicate the rest of his life to serving the Lord, but why their Lord? It is not as if we do not have a God of our own. Anyway, I did not manage to make him see you can serve the Lord anywhere, not only in a Catholic monastery. We are 23, both of us. We could be doctors or teachers, there is no end of ways you can serve.
All in all, Avigdor, I am sorry for the lad. Come and see us. Perhaps he will listen to you. Bring him some photographs of Palestine or whatever. Perhaps you will be able to talk sense to him. For God’s sake, if he loves the Jewish people so much why is he ditching them for strangers?
For now I have settled in Wrocław. How things will develop I have no idea, but for the time being I have given up the idea of moving to Palestine. I want to build the new Poland. There is so much destruction and poverty. We have to fight that and get the country back on its feet.
My best wishes to you and your wife.
Yours,
Efraim Cwyk
5. 1959, Naples. Port of Mergellina
L
ETTER
FROM
D
ANIEL
S
TEIN TO
W
ŁADYSŁAW
K
LECH
… no staff, only a bag. I stayed for eight days in the monastery hostelry. At four in the morning I got up with everybody else for prayers, then went with the brothers to the refectory. After breakfast the cellarer allocated me my tasks and I performed them to the best of my ability. I lived that way for a week. Everybody was eagerly anticipating a visit from the bishop, and so was I. I had been promised money for the voyage to Haifa. I had no money at all. One morning the cellarer told me I should make a visit to Pompeii. I went to the local bus station and set off. The beauty along the way was almost more than I could bear: the Bay of Naples, Capri, everything dazzling. Our poor Poland, endowed with neither a warm sea nor sunshine! There is such a wealth of plant life and fish here. At the fish market you feel such joy and admiration at the beauty of the fish and all the creatures of the deep. Some are fairly terrifying, but mostly they are just a bit weird.
In Pompeii I encountered my first problem. They wouldn’t let me into the excavations of the city and the museum was closed because the staff were on strike. Well, I thought, what a marvelous country Italy is. I would like to see the staff try to go on strike in Kraków at Wawel! Anyway, I didn’t get in. I went for a walk, looked at the surroundings of the ruined city, admired Vesuvius, a mountain with such a delicate outline, not the least bit intimidating. You would never suspect it of the wickedness it demonstrated 2,000 years ago. I had just enough money for my return journey and a pizza bianca—that is, a piece of bread. As I walked through the modern city I saw a church, recently built, nothing special in terms of architecture. The noonday heat is really intense, so I thought I would go inside and rest in the coolness. It was the Church of Santa Maria del Rosario.