Her talks with Rabbi Gideon Schapiro in Pecs were mostly one-sided. The rabbi would ask questions and Skinny would answer them; often more openly than she might have otherwise out of respect for the rabbi’s authority. Sometimes she remained silent and the rabbi went on asking questions, until he fell silent. Ten days and ten nights. She wondered whether rabbinical authority had undergone a change — she had seen rabbis at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they had been no different from the other inmates. Rabbi Schapiro did not know Czech, and Skinny did not know Hungarian. They talked in German. She felt no surprise at the sequence of events that had brought her to him in Hungary, by a roundabout route, after the war. The war had stirred Europe like a huge spoon stirring a cauldron of soup for 250 million people.
She sensed in him a degree of consideration that she was not accustomed to. He was trying to accept something that went beyond his comprehension, but he was careful that she did not take it personally. He was the only person to whom — for some reason or other, perhaps to get it off her chest — she told everything. She stripped herself bare. She felt relief that it was behind her. Did that mean it was no longer present? It turned out that even what had happened at No. 232 Ost was not irreversible. Nothing was irreversible. She was too tired or too unsure of herself to declare an all-out war on those 21 days. The rabbi was aware of dissonance in her story, but he felt her to be a kindred soul, and they ended up closer than Skinny had originally intended. Rabbi Schapiro had a gentle voice, a little hoarse as if he had a cold, and he felt inside him a second voice prompting him. She noticed that he looked at her as if he were seeing himself. He never raised his voice, but she could hear in it an anger that was not directed at her, an anger that was new to her. It made her believe that he was growing with it. In reality, the rabbi was ducking for cover. He had deep brown eyes which at times seemed wild to her. They had trusted one another from the moment they had met, when she’d been taken to him by two railwaymen whose addresses she had been given in Katowice.
“Child,” he had said. This was his first word to her when the men had gone. He didn’t have to ask her age, he could tell that himself. And he didn’t have to ask how she felt: he only had to look into her face with his brown eyes in which, on several occasions later, she would see tears.
“What are we?” he asked, more into the void than to her, like a rhetorical question. “A lump of flesh and a broken soul.”
From her reaction he realized at once that he had made a mistake. And he made many mistakes — but he did not repeat this one.
“You were in a house that God had abandoned,” the rabbi said.
That determined their relationship. At times she did not know how the rabbi viewed her; she found no answer in his eyes. He was feeling as helpless as the inmates of the concentration camps; assailed by questions to which there was no answer. One question that the rabbi asked again and again was: where was God? He glanced at the bookcase that contained his sacred books. They seemed to him to be running away as though they were made of water, trickling down the shining glass across from the window with its heavy red curtains.
At times she felt that he was expecting her to answer this question, which God did not answer.
“Each one who has survived is a messenger,” he sighed.
“I don’t know,” she said.
She realized that conditions in Hungary had been different from those in Bohemia or Poland. There, the anti-Jewish laws came into force only at the beginning of 1944. Unlike to the Terezin ghetto, Eichmann came to Hungary late, managing to kill only half the Hungarian Jews, some 400,000.
The rabbi had before him a child who spoke of a brothel in the way that a miller might speak of the flour he had milled, filled into sacks and weighed, or a bricklayer of a wall he had built from stones and bricks. Or else she was silent like an animal. He had not seen Skinny on that first Friday in December, when, after her first shift, she had washed off the dried blood from the inside of her thighs. She had been afraid to look at her crotch, which resembled a raw, bleeding gum.
It was all new to him, just as it had been new to her, different then and now. Her erstwhile now refused to transform into a present-day then. She did not know that every one of her words dealt a fatal blow to the rabbi. He thought of concepts like honour, humiliation, violation. He had a vision of scales on which he was trying to weigh that which cannot be weighed or measured. He thought of the right of the stronger and the form into which it had developed before the middle of the 20th century, 40 centuries after his own ancestors had decided to outlaw killing; to outlaw human sacrifice. What had happened to justice, which must be for everyone or else evaporate altogether like the steam from a saucepan? He bore each word she uttered as a reproach, a reproach he accepted for himself. Her experience conflicted with all the sacred and civil codes that he was acquainted with. He searched his mind: what had become of morality? Where did the idea of the worthlessness of human life come from? How did the difference between giving and taking life disappear? How was injustice measured? Fortunately Skinny knew nothing of his thoughts.
They were sitting facing each other. The rabbi had two large comfortable armchairs. She stretched out her legs in front of her, while he tucked his under his chair.
Could he understand the Oberführer, nicknamed The Frog, if he credited him with a twisted brain? With sick ideas? If he likened him to a pig?
“We are like a stone in the swamp,” the rabbi said.
She did indeed feel a little like that.
“It was confusion,” the rabbi said next. “Evil pretended to be good, the filthy disguised itself as clean. Sickness was proclaimed health and the plague was pronounced fresh air. The decayed pretended to be fresh. The low acted as if it were exalted, stupidity as if it were wisdom. It’s all behind you now.”
The word “decay” recurred in the rabbi’s conversation every day. At night he dreamed of it.
“I could not be a just judge, even if I wanted to be.”
“Nor could I,” she agreed.
“No-one like you could.”
“Probably not.”
An understanding grew between them. The rabbi was her confessor and her mirror. She could identify with much of what he said, even though he spoke little. She enjoyed the fact that she didn’t have to watch every word or control her slightest movement.
“At first I didn’t know what was happening. In Terezin we were living almost normally — it was a transit station. But even in the east, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, I knew only a part of what was going on. No-one knew, except the girls they brought in for clerical duties in the Gestapo offices. They gassed these girls, after no more than six weeks, and then brought in new ones. But eventually I got to know. I felt as if I was in a camp in myself. Everyone who was there must have felt the same way. They left us together, but so that we were alone, separated from one another. I felt that I was surrounded by high-voltage wires, as though I was the last person on earth. And if it was a hill, then I stayed at the bottom. I didn’t need a panoramic view, I knew what was waiting for me. Those around me went to the gas chamber, one after another. Sometimes there was a short delay, but all of them in the end. Everything was temporary. There was only the now and the past, nothing that was yet to come.”
“… on our knees,” said the rabbi.
He asked himself whether the soul can refuse something which the body cannot refuse but must accept. In his mind he visited the place Skinny had described for him. He had never been in a brothel and regarded it as a place where men dropped their commitments. He knew what was written in the old books about Sodom and Gomorrah. Now Sodom had acquired a new name — Auschwitz-Birkenau, Feldbordell No. 232 Ost, Germany, Europe. It occurred to him that the Bible should be amplified by what people like Skinny brought back from the camps. Hadn’t the Bible been written by people not much older than Skinny? By ploughmen, carpenters and tanners, after the day’s work that was their livelihood? From the experiences they gathered, which did not lose their significance even after 2,000 years?