An Uncommon Friendship - Bernat Rosner

Скачать книгу

street seemed long. I thought of the three burial grounds in my childhood village of Kleinheubach—the Protestant cemetery, the most prominent and the one closest to the village center, the Catholic graveyard, next to a main road that used to be about a ten-minute walk beyond the last houses, and, finally, up on the east slope of the Odenwald, the Jewish cemetery, located in a forest, not unlike the graveyard in Tab. On my last visit to my village, I had taken a walk past the Jewish cemetery. Partially hidden behind high walls, it was locked up tightly. A German sign posted on the gate read, “Anyone defacing this cemetery will be punished by law.” This warning was signed by a former mayor of Kleinheubach, Herr Lippert, who had been a member of the Waffen-SS during World War II.

      The main street of Tab brought us back to the railroad station. A semideserted, two-story building, its paint was peeling. Cobwebs hung across some of the doors. Printed signs were yellowed with age. This country station, which looked abandoned like so many train stops all over rural Europe, came to life even in 1990 only twice a day. As we approached, the station appeared quiet and forlorn. Just as in Bernie's youth, the building was inscribed with the word “TAB” in capital letters. Our car stood where we left it. The only sounds were the electric humming of summer crickets and the buzz of low-hanging telephone wires. The clouds were gone, and the sun beat down. Nothing moved. Silence enveloped us for a long moment. Cameras ready, the four of us stood there wondering what pictures to take before our departure. We decided to photograph ourselves, in front of the station and next to the partially overgrown railroad tracks.

      After the picture taking, I noticed that Bernie's eyes were fixed on a couple of run-down brick buildings dominated by a tall chimney near a stand of trees to the west. He didn't move except to raise his hands to shade his eyes from the glaring sunlight. Suddenly he said, “That's the brickyard. That's where the horrors began.” No one spoke. As we climbed back into the car and drove away from the village, the fleeting remark hung there in the summer heat.

      After our visit to Tab, various bits of conversations I had with Bernie about his past would run through my mind over the next few years. Despite this visit, I still had only fragmentary knowledge of his early life. He had never told his entire story to anyone, preferring to think that the Nazi terror had happened to a “Bernie” in quotation marks, a different Bernie. Would he someday trust me enough to tell me more? Perhaps our suburban California lifestyle was not conducive to such communication. Or was my German background an unspoken barrier? Yet his untold story, the “other side” of him that was closed to me, did not let go. He wanted it that way at first, because it helped him support the division he had made between his present and past lives. I, however, was left with a desire to build a bridge but few means to do so.

      When you are twelve years old you feel immortal. Bernie and I both felt that way then. He had told me that much. I remember looking through an open air vent on the tiled roof of my grandparents' house, feeling invulnerable as I watched low-flying American Mustangs strafing the countryside. I asked myself whether Bernie felt fearless, even invulnerable, while he was being transported to Auschwitz—at least before he came in close contact with the death machine. Is that sense of immortality a privilege of youth, no matter how great the dangers? The danger to his life was incomparably greater than the danger I faced. After all, no one was out to get me, personally. No one forced me to go up to the attic to watch American planes during air raids. And air raids didn't continue indefinitely. But the threat to Bernie's life was ever present. A chance decision by a guard or a general order involving the group of inmates to which he happened to belong could have meant his death at any moment. Or he could have been chosen to become a human guinea pig in the bestial experiments of the camp doctor, the infamous Josef Mengele.

      How did this twelve-year-old live his daily life in an extermination camp? In another brief allusion to his past, Bernie had compared his experience as a camp survivor to that of a barnacle attached to an underwater rock. I was struck by this metaphor, the hard jagged shell that protects the animal inside. Do analogies help one to understand the life of another person, in particular a life lived inside a factory of death? His analogy was distilled out of his experiences. I drew inferences from what he said, but they were not enough for me to understand the catastrophe that befell him and his family, notwithstanding my years of training as a professor of German and the textbook I had written on the Nazi period.

      It wasn't until the 1990s that I became aware that Bernie had searched for links to his past, to that other life to which he claimed to have cut his ties. In the course of putting down our stories, he told me that before his first trip to Israel in 1995 he had thought long and hard about contacting Simcha Katz, his concentration camp buddy of fifty years before. “Without a buddy you couldn't survive/' Bernie told me after this trip. “With a buddy your chances for survival were a little better, because you could help each other.” But instead of elaborating on their friendship and dependence on each other in the concentration camps, Bernie stressed how the intervening years had distanced him from his former partner. They had corresponded for only six months after Bernie's arrival in America. After much soul searching, Bernie decided to reestablish contact with his old friend as part of his visit to Israel. The result was an emotional reunion at the Jerusalem Hyatt, dampened, however, by trouble communicating. Their native Hungarian had grown rusty, and Simcha spoke no English. Bernie's spoken Hebrew was minimal, and neither of them was fluent in Yiddish anymore. They talked to each other through a Hebrew-English interpreter.

      Simcha had immigrated to Israel after the war and raised a family. He made his living as a self-employed paving contractor, and the Rosners had tried to downplay how well off they were in comparison. Although I wanted to hear details about the “buddy system,” Bernie told me more about present matters—Simcha's current life and the Rosners' impressions of contemporary Israel. Simcha did not want Bernie to talk about their experiences in the concentration camp. The pain, as Bernie told me, remained too raw for him, even after so many years. I, for my part, began to ruminate on this glimpse Bernie had allowed into the buddy system and what might have happened to them decades ago behind the watch towers, barbed wire, and electric fences. Too much time had passed, too much had changed for these two concentration camp inmates to find their way back to the days when they both needed each other for their survival.

      I thought about my own childhood buddy, Ludwig Bohn, with whom I played chess in summer 1944—at the time that Bernie was deported to Auschwitz. We played our game behind shuttered windows to keep out the heat and humidity. Ludwig and I would take long walks through the countryside, and on several of these forays we searched for a specimen of Goethe's Urpflanze, the ideal prototype of perfection in the plant world. We convinced ourselves that we found the Urpflanze in the form of a particularly tall pine tree in the English gardens of the Prince of Lowenstein's castle at the edge of Kleinheubach. I lost track of Ludwig when I came to the United States. But I found out that he married a woman of German descent in Namibia, a German colony before World War I, and I also heard rumors that he had become an anti-Semite.

      Shortly after Bernie told me about Simcha, I dreamed that I telephoned Ludwig in Africa and tried to question him about these rumors. In the dream I reminded Ludwig that we had boycotted some of the meetings of the Jungvolk, the pre-Hitler Youth organization we had to join, preferring to play chess, collect stamps, and look for Goethe's perfect plant. We had considered ourselves better than the clods who ran the Nazi youth meetings. I asked what had happened to him. Why had he changed? But the answer to my repeated questions over the phone was silence. In my dream he did not reply.

      I sometimes thought that Bernie and I should just let go of our pasts. I reasoned that if we would simply forget, we wouldn't be suppressing anything. We were the buddies now, but not to survive a death camp or to search for an Urpflanze in a princely park. Why not just have another glass of wine and listen to music, or discuss philosophy or European literature? After all, the 1990s were not 1944. We might just as well take advantage of suburban American life and the easy escape from history it provided.

      One day, as we lounged at his pool, I was amused to learn that Bernie could barely swim. He not only admitted it but also thrashed across

Скачать книгу