The Woman from Hamburg Read online

  “You probably think that I am good,” she would shout to the glass. “Please, don’t think that. I am a lot worse than you would like me to be.”

  “You probably think that I am wise,” she shouted another day. “I am getting stupider all the time.”

  “You probably think …”

  For seven years they could not touch each other. They made love with their eyes through the bullet-proof glass.

  For three years they met in the visitation cell, in the Maximum Security Section, under the depictions of Petersburg in the winter.

  One day, she wrote that she was in love with another man. Since they had sworn not to pretend to each other, she would not deceive him and would never write again.

  She kept her word.

  He calculated that she had come to see him over ten years, so she must be thirty-three already.

  He couldn’t count the letters and cards she had written over five hundred weeks.

  18

  Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the leader of the Paris students in 1968, was recently named director of the Intercultural Department attached to the Frankfurt mayor’s office. He has a spacious office with a secretary who brings in coffee and flaky pastry. He said that terrorism derives from the atmosphere of the fifties and the silence at that time about the war. Young Germans wanted to know what it had been like, but their parents had said, “Why open old wounds?”

  Only in 1963, at the trial in Frankfurt of the Auschwitz war criminals, did people begin to speak publicly about those crimes. When the war in Vietnam began, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and their colleagues said, “We will not be silent like our parents.” They started to commit murders. They believed they had the right, in revenge for Vietnam, to murder American soldiers who were stationed in West Germany, and to murder a German judge in revenge for bourgeois justice. They believed they were on the side of right. When someone is on the side of right, everything he does is just and even murder becomes a sacred act. Andreas Baader summoned Cohn-Bendit, the hero of 1968, to join in a common struggle. Cohn-Bendit told Gudrun Ensslin and Baader that it is a crime to entice youth from the reformatories into the RAF. He denounced terrorism. In the first place, he didn’t like murder. In the second place, he didn’t like Andreas Baader and had no intention of building a new, better world with him.

  The government dealt with the terrorists in a cruel fashion. The SPD, the Social Democratic Party, was in power, and it had promised Germans that the year 1933 and the weakness of the social democrats would never be repeated.

  The terrorists said, “You will never accuse us of silence.”

  The Social Democrats said, “You will never accuse us of weakness.”

  “It was a psychodrama,” said Cohn-Bendit. “A German psychodrama, in which both sides were reacting to Nazism.”

  19

  One of the cards sent by the girl in the black sweater was a reproduction of a painting by the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Stefan W. liked it; he wrote to the company that had printed the postcard. The publisher sent him a new reproduction and a letter: “You have a Polish surname. Are you interested in Polish affairs?” In the next parcel there were German translations of a couple of Polish authors.

  From then on Stefan W. started reading Polish books about the Second World War. He became interested in the Warsaw Ghetto. He decided that there was a similarity between the Jews in the Ghetto and the prisoners in the concentration camps. He read a book about the ghetto by Władysław Bartoszewski, and Kazimierz Moczarski’s account of his conversations with Jürgen Stroop, and also Czesław Miłosz’s poetry. He and the girl thought about why there were disparities between Jürgen Stroop’s version of the uprising and Marek Edelman’s in To Outwit God.1 Or, why Edelman doesn’t like communists even though they were the first to send a gun to the ghetto, the one with which the Jewish police commander was shot at. He gave all the books to the girl to read; she hasn’t returned some of them to this day, perhaps out of forgetfulness, perhaps for other reasons. Marek Edelman became the greatest authority for him. It distressed him that a leader of the uprising in the ghetto thinks of the terrorists’ contempt for human life as a posthumous victory of Nazism.

  He said, “It’s a shame that I didn’t know about this before.”

  20

  The best day for Gizela W. is Sunday. She doesn’t work, she doesn’t assist her elderly neighbor lady, and she doesn’t meet with the parents of other RAF prisoners. (She doesn’t like these meetings. Only professors and doctors attend; she is the sole worker among them.)

  First she eats her Sunday breakfast. Then she writes a letter. That her legs are less painful. That she still has enough strength to help the old lady. That the chestnuts by the river are in bloom, and any day now the Japanese cherry blossoms will come out. She seals the envelope and writes the address: Ossendorf, the prison.

  Next, she prays. She starts with thanks: that it’s a new day, that her legs are less painful, that the chestnuts by the river …, after which she presents her plea. Not to God; she wouldn’t dare to burden Him with her concerns. She addresses her plea to Stani, who endured so much, never complained, and went to church every Sunday. He is undoubtedly dearer to God than she is, and if Stani should ask Him God will not refuse and will allow her to remain alive until her son returns.

  She addresses herself to Him directly, and not through Stani, about only one of her concerns.

  When she asks that He forgive their son his terrible sin.

  1. To Outwit God, Hanna Krall’s interview with Marek Edelman, was originally published in Polish as Zdążyć przed Panem Bogiem (1977). The English translation, by Joanna Stasinska Weschler and Lawrence Weschler, first appeared under the title Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation with Doctor Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Henry Holt, 1986) and was reissued as To Outwit God (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992). [Translator’s note]

  Proofs of Existence

  The Dybbuk

  1

  Adam S., tall, handsome, blue-eyed, with a white-toothed smile, teaches the history of architectural design at an American technical college. He’s spent time in Poland. He had an interest in the wooden synagogues that burned down during the last war.

  I asked Adam S. why an ambitious, six-foot-tall American, born after the war, would be interested in something that no longer exists. He answered in a letter. It was composed on a computer. It seems he was in a rush, because he didn’t tear off the perforated edges on either side. His father, he wrote, was a Polish Jew who had lost his wife and son in the ghetto. After the war he moved to France and married again. His new wife was French. Adam was born in Paris, and they spoke French at home.

  “So, what draws me to Poland?” he wrote in that computer printout. “A dybbuk. My half-brother, my father’s son from his first marriage, born before the war and bearing my name, who somehow was lost in the ghetto. He has been inside me for a long time, throughout my childhood, my school years.…”

  The word “dybbuk” is borrowed from Hebrew; it signifies a connection. In Jewish tradition it is the soul of a dead person inhabiting a living human being.

  Adam S. realized quite early that he was not alone. He would be visited by outbursts of inexplicable fury, another person’s fury; at other times sudden laughter, not his own, would overcome him. He learned to recognize these moods, acquired fairly good control over them, and did not betray himself in the presence of other people.

  From time to time this subtenant would say something. Adam S. didn’t know what he was saying, because the dybbuk spoke in Polish. Adam S. began studying the language; he wanted to understand what his younger brother was telling him. When he had learned enough, he came to Poland. That was when he developed an interest in the architecture of the wooden synagogues that had existed only in Poland, for three hundred years. Heavenly gardens, marvelous beasts, the walls of Jerusalem or the river of Babylon were painted on their walls. Their domes, invisible fro
m the outside because they were concealed beneath ordinary roofs, created a feeling inside of infinite, vanishing space.

  Those gardens and walls had long since disappeared; Adam S. viewed them in old, damaged photographs, but he wrote beautiful essays about them. Eventually, he earned a doctoral degree and got a position at a better college. He married. Bought a house. Lived like any normal, educated American. Except for that double life of his—his own life, and that of his younger brother, who had been named Abram, and who, when he was six years old, “somehow was lost in the ghetto.”

  2

  In April 1993 Adam S. came to Poland. He hadn’t been here in several years, so first he visited Połaniec, Pińczów, Zabłudów, Grójec, and Nowe Miasto. Who knows why. Maybe he hoped that this time he would see the river of Babylon in the synagogue in Grójec, and the willow trees upon which “we hanged our harps … in the midst thereof.” Maybe in Zabłudów he hoped to rediscover the gryphons, bears, peacocks, winged dragons, unicorns, and water snakes.

  As was predictable, he found grass and a few pathetic trees.

  He returned to Warsaw. The ceremonies marking the fiftieth anniversary of the uprising in the ghetto were just getting started. We went out for dinner during a break between scholarly panels.

  I congratulated Adam S. on the birth of his first-born son, looked at his photographs, and asked, “What about … him?”

  I didn’t know what word to use—brother? Abram? the dybbuk?

  “Is he still there?”

  Adam S. understood immediately.

  “He is. He sticks with me, although I’d be happier if he left. He butts in, kicks up a fuss, doesn’t know himself what he wants. He’s unhappy living with me and I feel worse and worse with him.

  “I found out,” Adam S. continued, “that there’s a Buddhist monk living in Boston. An American Jew who converted to Buddhism and became a monk. My friend told me, ‘This man might be able to help you.’

  “I went to the monk. He had me lie down on a couch and massaged my shoulders. At first I didn’t feel anything, I just lay there, but after half an hour I suddenly burst out crying. I had never cried like that in my adult life. I listened to that cry and I knew that it wasn’t my voice. It was the voice of a child. It was the child crying in me. The crying grew stronger and I started screaming. The child started screaming. He was screaming. I could see that he was afraid of something, because it was a scream of terror. He was terrified, he was in a rage, he thrashed about, waving my fists. Obviously, he was exhausted; he’d quiet down for a few minutes, but then he’d begin again. This was a child who was out of his mind from exhaustion and terror. Samuel, the monk, tried to speak to him, but he wouldn’t stop screaming. This went on for several hours. I thought I would die; I didn’t have any strength left. Suddenly I felt that something was happening inside me. Something was rocking in my innards. The scream subsided and a shadow flickered over my abdomen. I knew that all this was only in my imagination, yet the monk must have noticed it, too, because he addressed him directly.

  “ ‘Leave here,’ he said calmly. ‘Go to the light.’

  “I don’t know what that was supposed to mean, because all this was taking place in ordinary light, during the day.

  “ ‘Go …’

  “And the shadow began moving off. Samuel didn’t stop speaking; it was just a couple of words, always the same: ‘Go to the light … Go on … Don’t be afraid, you’ll feel better there.…’

  “And he went. He didn’t so much walk, as slip away, further and further, and I understood that in another minute he would be gone completely. I felt sad.

  “ ‘Do you want to leave me?’ I asked. ‘Stay with me. You are my brother; don’t go away.’

  “It was as if he’d been waiting for this. He turned back and with one swift movement he leaped inside me, and I couldn’t see him any more.”

  Adam S. fell silent.

  We were sitting in an Asian restaurant on Theater Square. Outside our window, the day was chilly. All the days of the anniversary ceremonies were permeated with damp and chill. A drizzly grayness had settled on cars; people were rushing somewhere, not bothering to look around. We watched them, thinking the same thought: Does anyone care about ghetto ceremonies, wooden synagogues, and crying dybbuks?

  “No one cares about them in America, either,” I concluded, although Adam S. knew this better than I did.

  Snapshots of Adam S.’s wife and son lay on our table—a happy, bright-eyed boy in the arms of a serious woman, her brown eyes visible through thick lenses.

  “Moshe,” said Adam S. “Like my father. But my father was an actual ordinary Moshe, and we call the little one Michael.”

  “Did you tell your father about the monk and Boston?”

  “Yes, in a phone conversation. He was living in Iowa; I called him after I got back home. I thought he wouldn’t believe me, that at the very least he’d be taken aback, but he wasn’t taken aback at all. He listened calmly, and then he said, ‘I know what that cry is. When they threw him out of the hiding place he stood in the street and cried loudly. That was the cry—the cry of my child who was thrown out into the street.’

  “This was the first time I had talked with my father about my brother. Father had a weak heart; I didn’t want to upset him. I knew that my brother had died, like everyone else; what more was there to ask about? Now I found out that the boy had been hidden somewhere with his mother, my father’s first wife, along with a dozen or so other Jews. I don’t know where, if it was in the ghetto or on the Aryan side. Sometimes I picture a kitchen and people crowded together. They were sitting on the floor, trying not to breathe. He started crying. They tried to quiet him. How do you calm a crying child? With candy? A toy? They didn’t have toys or candy. His crying grew louder and louder, and the people crowded together on the floor were thinking the same thought. Someone whispered: ‘We’re all going to die because of one little kid.’ Or maybe it wasn’t a kitchen. Maybe it was a cellar, or a bunker. My father wasn’t with them; only she was, Abram’s mother. She stayed with the others. She survived. She settled in Israel, maybe she’s still living there, I didn’t ask, I don’t know.… “My father died.

  “My wife went to the hospital to give birth. I went with her and lay down on the bed next to hers. When the midwife told my wife, ‘Push, any minute now,’ I felt something happening inside me. I felt movement, a rocking motion. I guessed who it was. He was getting ready to leave me. He was getting ready to take up residence in my child. I leaped up from the bed. ‘Oh, no,’ I said out loud. ‘Don’t you dare. No ghetto. No Holocaust. You are not going to inhabit my child.’

  “No, I didn’t shout, but I did speak forcefully. I spoke in Polish, so the midwife and my wife didn’t understand. But he understood. He grew calm, and I lay down again. I was so exhausted that I fell asleep. I was awakened by a loud cry, but there was no terror in it. It was the cry of a healthy, normal baby who had just come into the world. My son. Moshe.”

  3

  The Buddhist monk sat on the bed, his legs extended stiffly. Both legs were encased in white plaster pipes; only his toes, long and restless, protruded from them. He was holding a flute that was a yard long. From time to time he raised it to his lips; his toes, protruding from those pipes, would begin to flutter and bend in time to the music, and the room would be filled with high, mournful sounds.

  The monk had two flutes, both of them made of cedar. The shorter one, of white cedar, was a gift from some North Dakota Indians; the longer one, of red cedar, came from Arizona, from the mountains. The two woods can be distinguished by their fragrance.

  “Check it out.” He moved the flute over to me. It was saturated with a dizzying aroma, full of mysteries that aroused no fear.

  In the monk’s room there was a bed, a wheelchair, two crutches, a hotplate, a mug on a little table, and a few books. I thought: I have already been in such a room, in a medieval castle, in Germany. In the home of Axel von dem Busche, a baron and an officer in the W
ehrmacht. He saw how the Jews were being killed in Poland and he resolved to kill Hitler. I recognized the smell of the bedding, the coffee and medicine.

  I said, “I have already been in such a room, but it was a German baron without a leg who was sitting on the bed.”

  The monk grew animated. He, too, had befriended a German, but not a baron. A communist, who had fled Hitler and come to the States. The man taught Buddhist philosophy in Washington. He protested against the war in Vietnam, and in 1968 he supported the young people who were demonstrating against it. He was expelled from the United States for his radical views. For his fascination with Buddhism, Samuel Kerner, a Jewish boy from the Bronx, is indebted to Edward Conze, a German communist.

  It was the sixties. Sam and his college friends had shoulder-length hair and wore sandals on their bare feet; they looked with loathing upon American wealth, especially in their own homes, took LSD, and waited for the revolution. The revolution was supposed to be worldwide, in defense of justice and against the rich. Later they were called the New Age generation, or the Age of Aquarius, which would arrive with the new millennium.