"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.
Article comments
1 - leon yudkin
am writing a piece on gutfreund.