"Only saints were gassed?" is the first note of disquiet that enters into the lives of Effi and Amir. "Only saints were gassed?" Why of course, how could the victims of the gas chambers be bad people? Crazy Hirsh must be crazy; why else does he live in the woods in his hut and wander onto Katznelson St. and yell such a thing?

Effi and Amir may not be "Old Enough" to be told about Shoah (The Holocaust), but they certainly know enough to know that he must be crazy. Look at them, they don't even have real family; they borrow people from here and there who become grandfathers and grandmothers, uncles, nieces, and cousins, because their families have so few of their own left that they have found people to play the parts for them.

If this is what our family is like, and every family similar, what kind of question is "Only saints were gassed?" It's a question that will have to wait until later to be answered because their priorities are to find out what happened first. Grandpa Lolek who fought with the Polish army, first charging tanks on horseback, then fleeing to join a Polish regiment that fought with the allies for the rest of the war; has no problems regaling them with tales of what he did during the war.

But of the camps, nothing, nobody wanted to tell them. Not even Grandpa Yosef, who could tell them the name of the longest river in the world, and arbitrated disputes about everything else on any topic. Like their own personal Talmudic scholar, he could resolve anything on any subject, but not even he could be drawn out to talk about the mysteries of "What Happened?"

In Grandpa Yosef's neighbourhood, Katznelson St. on the outskirts of the Israeli port town Haifa, nearly everyone was a survivor of the camps. One foot in the present and one foot in the past; it was Grandpa Yosef who helped them all straddle the line in safety. But it was also Grandpa Yosef who made sure that no one told the children the stories they wanted to hear.

But have you ever known children to be stopped or have their enthusiasm for a subject curtailed because they've been forbidden or told to wait for later? So it is with Effi and Amir in the recently translated Amir Gutfreund novel Our Holocaust. Being the resourceful types they try any means at their disposal up to and including bribery and theft, but nothing could break through the impenetrable walls erected to keep them from what they considered of vital importance.

On their visits to Grandpa Yosef's they could see the results of the Holocaust on display in the faces and the actions of the people who lived on the street with him. Aside from Crazy Hirsh, who in the end is not so crazy, each of the survivors wears the camps like an extra suit of clothes that they are unable to take off and hang in the closet.