After he started opening up to his past (for example, his recall of Joseph Rayna and his relation to him), it became clear from things he dredged up from inside himself with difficulty (we spent several days on that) that he had wandered in Europe and searched for somebody he thought was his father and on his way he came to Russia. After the signing of the MolotovRibbentrop Pact and the division of Poland, he was expelled (as a Pole) from the Polish territory that had stopped being Russian and was then expelled to Russia as a Ukrainian. In the struggle between the Belarussians and the Ukrainians for German sympathy, he was caught in a maze of schemes and this is not the place to describe them, and in the twists of the cosmos he discovered that the Jews were glad when the Russians came, but were bitterly disappointed. The Poles in the area were landowners who had previously been moved there by the Polish government to hinder the progress of the Belarussians who were expecting the Germans, while as for the Germans, they disappointed them too after they came. Crossing the border to German Poland (along with a group of Jewish youths returning to organize the Pioneer Youth there), he was captured by the Germans. He managed to run away and came to a Polish village. The Poles who thought he was a Ukrainian turned him over to the Belarussians who judged him for what they called "despicable Polish subversion." Naive and uneducated, he didn't understand the delicate subtleties in those relations of nations, and in Operation Barbarossa he was captured again. When he ran away (he was swift and strong), he was tortured by Yugoslavian partisans who were searching for a way out to the Russian forests and thought he was a hostile Jewish-German spy. He was caught in a tight net-and this is not exactly the place to go into detail-of Lithuanian, Russian, Jewish, Belarussian, Ukrainian, and Polish schemers, and at any rate, his Judaism was only one more pretext for abusing him, and a millstone to hang accusations of identity on him of which he was ignorant. Lacking an ideological background, it was easier for him when he was captured by the Germans as a Jew. The Sonderkommando caught him and this time he couldn't run away. Now his pedigree was clear. No importance was ascribed to the fact of his birth in Palestine.
What stands out in Ebenezer is the lack of individuality in the accepted sense of the word. One of our investigators called him "a man without qualities" from Musil's well-known book. But that of course is only one aspect and does not characterize his personality. His love for his wife Dana and for Samuel Lipker is not the love of a man without qualities. His life is made of too many libels for him not to be aware of some of them. After he spent time in several camps, he was taken to Hathausen and was the first prisoner there and even helped build the camp. From what we know, it was his skill in the art of carpentry that kept him alive.
For a few weeks we observed his work and although at first he refused to get involved again with carpentry, he eventually agreed to show us his handiwork. He was ordered by our investigator to build a small pipe rack. For two weeks we observed his production. Clearly the final shape wasn't clear to him; the rack resulted from a need called in this report "particular," that is: to be this rack and no other, and that a metaphor of a wellknown concept. Ebenezer built drawers for pipecleaners, matches, of various sizes, he lined the concavity with green cloth, he used forty-two different lacquers he created from solutions of glue powder and other materials. He skillfully planed tiny pieces of wood and interwove them in a marquetry: the rack was the product of many combined details (things Ebenezer apparently imagined, but didn't know) and the product was a rack of restrained beauty and uniqueness. We sent the rack to four different museums (in Amsterdam, Vienna, Berlin, and London), and the unanimous opinion was that this is an excellent rack, the handiwork of an early nineteenth-century artist. Dr. Rosenberg of Vienna, the greatest expert in European cabinetry of the period 1795–1838, mentioned the names of only two artists who were capable of building that rack and claimed that we had presented him an absurd riddle, since he knew every rack made by those artists, while an imitation of the rack of those artists was impossible. Thus it is hard to argue that Ebenezer Schneerson is a man without qualities.
After we collected other works by Ebenezer, in the homes of former SS officers, we made a small exhibition of his works. The exhibition was presented only in our research institute. We wanted to print a modest booklet in honor of the event, but Ebenezer refused, saying that only Samuel Lipker had the right to do that.
His story in the camp (and his survival as a carpenter, if what he produced can be called carpentry) is told in the expanded research. What can be said positively is that there was a certain moment when Ebenezer decided to give up being the Last Jew in the world. Out of an empathy he developed for his imprisoned companions, fear that many geniuses and scholars, writers, and researchers would die without leaving a trace of their knowledge. In our work with him we have penetrated to only a certain area of investigation of his memory. In his hallucination under hypnosis he told us how he once sat in a woman's house, a woman he apparently respected and maybe even had relations with, and hated himself for what he called his betrayal of Dana. At night he sat in a little room, he told us, and tried to recall Dana. Her precise image eluded him. All he could remember was a vague form of a woman. He felt a need to remember her exactly as she had been, something that's hard for the human memory to do. He had no photos. So he sat, stared at the burning oven, concentrated and very slowly remembered a small dimple in Dana's right cheek. He meditated on the dimple for a long time until it was completely clear in his memory. Then, he left it and meditated on her nose. When the nose was clear, he left it for a while and the mouth began to be drawn in his mind and only then he connected the dimple in the cheek and the cheek to the nose and the mouth and did he connect the throat to the orbits of the eyes and come to the hair, which at first was separated from the other parts of the face and joined to them, and so, very slowly, Dana's image was drawn like a crossword puzzle that became a precise photo he'd see before his eyes. Her legs, for example, he recalled when he thought about the hike they had once taken to the desert and Dana tripped and he smeared the wound with medicinal leaves he had learned from the Bedouins. Ever since then, he said, Dana appears whenever I need to remember her, he shuts his eyes, thinks of the stove and Dana's image rises in his mind. He claims he has many keys he remembers dimly but when he needs them they appear in the back of his mind and through them he remembers things. For example, Einstein's theory of relativity depends on thinking of the smell of roasted coffee. A pince-nez raises before him the entire Pentateuch.
Did he learn to photograph knowledge? It's hard to say since he didn't read the knowledge and if he photographed it, he photographed the voice that recited the knowledge. If so, the word "recorded" will be more appropriate. But that doesn't explain anything. At most it can describe a process whose source remains blocked. According to a representative sample, we measured about nine million words that Ebenezer knew orally. For instance, in nightclubs where he appeared with Samuel Lipker, he often recited lists of those killed in the pogroms of 1915–1919. The knowledge was divided by towns (the key to that knowledge was drummed out by the fire department orchestra in Livorno). Many of the towns he mentioned were wiped off the face of the earth and there is no longer a trace of them on maps. In a forgotten Jewish book titled The Scroll of Slaughter, we found one section he recited almost completely. Of the two hundred pages we copied of our tapes I shall present a few examples: Garbatishi, Kortivo district, Minsk Gubernia, six Jewish families. Granov, Haysen district, Podolia Gubernia (attack of Petlura's Cossacks) eight families, etc….