“You’re dear to me without a high school diploma,” Ernst said quickly.
At night, when Ernst and the other patients are asleep, Irena sits in a corner and reads. She always liked to read, but since she has been working for Ernst, she has learned how to get more out of books. She especially likes to read books about the Second World War.
The war is a very mystifying chapter in Irena’s soul. Since reading books by Leyb Rochman* and Primo Levi, she understands why her parents didn’t tell her more about it. In her dreams she sometimes sees her mother trudging with the last ounce of her strength from her work to the barracks, swallowing weak soup and trying to reattach the sole of her shoe with two pieces of rope. It’s strange, Irena says to herself. To see my father and mother during their most difficult ordeals, I had to read Primo Levi. The Italian Jew revealed what my parents never revealed to me.
Irena’s mother never told her a thing, not even the names of any of the camps that she was in. Every time Irena asked her about the camps, her mother’s face would close up. It was no wonder that in her childhood Irena thought that her mother had had a love affair during the war and that she was hiding it from her husband and daughter. That was another reason why she loved her father more than her mother. She used to take long walks with him at night, and she went with him to the movies. He was tall and good-looking, and women would follow him with their eyes. Over time she learned to love her mother, too, but not the way she loved her father.
* Leyb Rochman was a Jewish writer and journalist who, while in hiding in Europe during World War II, kept a diary that was published as The Pit and the Trap after the war ended. (Ed.)
40
AFTER TEN DAYS OF TESTS AND OBSERVATION, THE DOCTORS reached a conclusion: nothing more could be done. Though it would be possible to try chemotherapy, in this case it probably wouldn’t work. There were some other, innovative treatments available, but their effectiveness was dubious. Medical science wasn’t raising its hands in surrender, but for the moment it had nothing to suggest. If the patient wanted to try something, they would try it.
The short doctor announced his verdict with some emotion, but he left no doubt as to the majority opinion. The majority left the decision in the patient’s hands. For a moment it seemed to Ernst that the doctor was about to pull a pistol out of his cloak, hand it to him, and say: It’s your decision, to shoot yourself or to bear with prolonged suffering until your death.
Ernst ignores that thought. He asks the doctor how many weeks or months he has left to live. The doctor’s answer is long and detailed, full of medical terms and Latin words, most of which Ernst doesn’t understand. But what he implies is that they can’t estimate how long he has; it varies with the individual, and there are exceptions. He himself had met a patient in Ernst’s condition who lived for a long time after being diagnosed and finally died of another disease. The doctor’s final words sound less like a medical evaluation than like worthless consolation. He stretches out information that could have been conveyed in two sentences.
Ernst returns home that very day and immediately feels better.
Irena leaves the house only to buy medicine and groceries. Now her life is Ernst, only Ernst. She places a folding bed in a corner of the living room, and at night, when Ernst shuts his eyes, she brings her bed close to his. After midnight she gets up to see how he’s sleeping. Ernst sleeps until four and sometimes until five. Irena makes him breakfast and sits at his side.
Since returning from the hospital, Ernst has been telling Irena again about his military service, about the camps that were liberated, and about the soldiers who served in his unit. Even then he had doubts about the path of the Communists and the purity of their intentions, but the war united their hearts. Every advance, every conquered village planted the feeling in the soldiers’ hearts that they were plunging a sharp bayonet into the monster’s scales. That feeling made them drink even more and strengthened their resolve.
They liberated camp after camp. Ernst wanted to love his tormented brethren, but he didn’t allow himself to. He was certain that humanity was marching toward unity and that one day there would be no difference between Jews and non-Jews. But reality slapped him in the face. He ran into anti-Semites everywhere, within the division and outside of it. They liberated the camps, but they were in no hurry to provide the liberated people with basic supplies. After a while, when canned goods from the Joint Distribution Committee began to arrive, he heard the supply officer say, “The whole world takes care of the Jews. The Russian people suffered more.” Ernst heard this and gritted his teeth.
The simple soldiers with whom he fought changed him. They turned him, the commissar-informer, into a fighting man, a devoted officer. When they approached the first camp and he saw his brethren for the first time, pressed up against the fences, Ernst knew how alienated he had become from them. While he was standing there in astonishment, one of the Russian officers whispered, “They look like Jesus of Nazareth. Every one of them looks like Jesus.” The young officer’s display of emotion upon seeing the human skeletons hanging onto the fences gripped Ernst by the throat.
“How do you know they’re like Jesus?” he asked the officer.
“From church,” the officer replied when he had recovered. “In our church the image of Jesus hangs from the cross, thin and tormented, and the thorns on his head are like that barbed wire.”
“Those are Jews,” Ernst said, to test him.
“I know. Jesus was also a Jew.”
Ernst felt as if he had been hit in the face. He stepped back and murmured, “That’s right. That’s right.”
The encounter with the young Russian officer next to the barbed-wire fence was engraved upon him like an accusation. From now on Ernst was fighting on two fronts: against the Germans, of course, and on a second front against the Russian anti-Semites. Every time he managed to steal a food truck, he would drive it to one of the liberated camps.
One night when he entered a camp, some of the wretched inmates were still awake. They had gathered around a small bonfire. Their arms, or rather their bones, were stretched toward the flame. When he spoke to them in Yiddish, they were silent, as if they couldn’t believe their ears. When they recovered, they crawled over to him, hugged his legs and arms, and kissed him. “Take us away from here,” they begged. “Don’t abandon us.”
Ernst felt his flesh crawl, and he wanted to escape. That very night he enlisted the regimental doctor and some medics. They went to the camp, bringing medicine and cans of milk with them. The survivors were so gaunt that they couldn’t even stand on their feet.
The sights of the camp wouldn’t leave him. On several occasions at the nightly roll call, Ernst addressed the company.
“We’re fighting an enemy that built concentration camps and tortured innocent people in them,” he said. He knew that not everyone identified with what he was saying, but most of them, particularly the young, innocent soldiers, knew what he was talking about.
One time one of the soldiers approached him and asked, “What harm did the Jews do, to make the Germans abuse them so badly.”
“It’s hard to know,” Ernst said, to avoid revealing too much.
“They don’t have God in their hearts,” said the young soldier, his innocence evident in his face.