We came to the store, Anat and I. (She was the one who asked to come. We’re building bridges.) Yakov the assistant welcomed us.
“Mr. Perl, of blessed memory, left the store to me and to Yakov Zimra, who used to work here, on condition that we help the people he always helped. He left a list. He asked that everything behind the wall be given to you. That means the kettle, the towel, the picture of his wife, of blessed memory, and everything in the drawers.”
He listed all the things lacking from his inheritance with a cautious look of authority on his face, not yet knowing how far he would take it, what was permitted and what was not. He sized me up, somehow believing I had the power to revoke everything, his share too, and waited for me to say something.
“All right,” I said.
I took Anat to the back room. The kettle. The cups. The photograph.
She opened a drawer and took out a little index card. She read it and took out another. “Why was this Hermann Michel called ‘the Preacher of Sobibor’?”
“He was responsible for receiving the new transports of Jews. His job was to gather all the Jews as they stepped off the trains and give them a speech about the rosy future waiting for them in the East, and about the importance of work and all sorts of values. It reassured the Jews, and from the Germans’ point of view it made the process more efficient. It was easier to lead them to the gas chambers. Hermann Michel gave speeches to shipment after shipment, twenty minutes before they started shoving them into the gas chambers.”
“It says here that he disappeared.”
“Yes, they couldn’t find him after the war, in the big land of the Germans.”
She looked at some more cards, taking an interest.
“You know,” I tell her, “they tried out different methods in Sobibor. They suspected the Jews were managing to code warnings into the letters they were forced to write just before being gassed. So in Sobibor they changed the system. When the Jews arrived, they were welcomed at the train platform with light refreshments, cigarettes, hot drinks. They apologized for the difficult transport conditions, explained that the state of war prevented them from using more humane means. They chatted with the Jews, took an interest in their problems and requests. Then they casually encouraged them to go and write postcards to their relatives, for free, before continuing their journey to the East. After the postcards were written, the extermination began.”
Anat sighed. “There’s no limit to what people can come up with.”
“Yes, think of how they looked at the Jews while they wrote their postcards. How they waited for them to finish. Impatiently, but with a gracious expression. They knew they had to restrain themselves just a little longer, just another few moments.”
I’m on fire now — she thinks she has an inkling of what the limit is. There’s no limit, she says, still imagining she knows, more or less, what the limit in fact was.
“You asked about Hermann Michel from Sobibor. Well, I’ll tell you about Sobibor. One day the gas chamber engines broke down in Majdanek. There were dying prisoners there, who were supposed to be gassed that day, but because of the break-down they couldn’t do it. They found a solution. They transferred them on a special shipment to Sobibor. It was already getting dark when they arrived and the camp staff were resting in their rooms. So they just threw them in a heap in the rain and mud, and left them there until the next morning. You know, survivors of Sobibor testified about that night. They thought they’d seen everything in Sobibor. That’s what they thought, but they were wrong. The dying people wailed and sobbed. They were skeletal, ill, without much life left in them, but the rain and cold brought even more suffering. At some point the SS people lost their patience. They went out to the dying people and whipped and whipped and whipped them, until the last whimper died down. Do you still think you have any idea what the limit is?”
“Okay, enough,” Anat says.
But I persist, cruelly struggling on — I want her to understand the drawers. Bridges are built from two sides.
“You know, there were Jews who cleaned out the transport trains, to get rid of everything left by those who died or were dying on the way. They were also used to everything by that time. But one day they were forced to open the doors to some train cars and they found them full of greenish corpses. Piles of bodies whose skin peeled away as soon they touched it. Someone had poured chlorine into the cars while the train was in motion. Try to imagine now, the people who had chlorine poured on them, inside moving train cars…”
“Okay, stop, enough.”
I have to go on, so she understands. (This is our lust for the abyss). So she realizes that she thinks she knows what went on in the concentration camps, but she doesn’t. That only these drawers can bring the truth out. That only through these drawers will she know that Dr. Gohrbandt, in Dachau, investigated how inmates would behave when forced to stand naked for fourteen hours in sub-zero temperatures. She needs to know that because of their screams they could not continue the experiment in Dachau; it was too close to civilian residential areas. And she needs to know that inmates were infected with epidemics and pus was injected under their skin, to see how they would handle the infection. She needs to know that Dr. Mengele pierced the eyes out of little children and he was never caught. She needs to know.
I keep quiet and Anat shuts the drawers, looking pale. “What are you planning to do with all this?”
(Meaning, how far are you intending to go — where are you thinking of arriving?)
“I’m planning to leave it, to quit. I’ll put it all in a sealed box in Grandpa Lolek’s basement.”
(Seventy years from now, someone nosy will find the bloated box and investigate the round handwriting. Hermine Braunsteiner, “the Stomping Mare” of Majdanek.)
She understands — I am quitting for her. Building a bridge. She hugs me.
“Okay…All right, well…” I say. Not only my words are mumbled, but my thoughts too. (We embrace, everything seemingly back to the elemental materials. We will have to refurnish our emotions. Refurnish what is now empty and hard. And the documentation? Should I betray it? Betray Attorney Perl? Should I really quit?)
Anat picks up the photograph of Laura Perl, who was killed in the gas chambers at Belzec, and whose husband taught himself what she had been through in her final moments, and was sad because she had always been so conscientious about cleanliness, even in the harsh ghetto conditions. From the day they took his wife from the house at 7 Leonarda Street, he had launched himself on a route of investigation, pierced a pinhole in the atmosphere and shot off into the distance to watch the ongoing world from high above.