562
PARTISAN REVIEW
I was not ready for what I would find or for what I wouldn't find. I
was not ready for the fear. The fear of returning to the strange hotel room
at night, the primal fear that I would starve to death, which impelled me
to eat nonstop, completely violating the rules of
Kashrut
which I had
observed ever since I came to Paris to study, eating with the dispensation
"allowed during an emergency," that I granted myself (insolently?). Not
ready for the fear that rushed me in a panic straight from the visit to
Auschwitz-Birkenau to meetings with Polish artists and bohemian parties.
I was especially not ready for the complexity of my responses, for their
force . For what was revealed to me in "the living laboratory" I had poured
by myself. The contradictory burst of fascination and revulsion, alienation
and belonging, shame and vengeance, of helplessness, of complete
denial. ...
When I returned, the letter to my parents was a first attempt to look
at what was revealed, to talk. The restrained language of the letter reflects
the difficulty of going beyond the taboo, hoping they would understand
through the silence. That different, new discourse with my parents accom–
panied us throughout the years until their death. A discourse of closeness,
of belonging, of acceptance, beyond the generational differences.
The sense of belonging-along with my parents-to the "other,
Jewish story" revealed in the depths of the journey only intensified in the
following years, as the doors to the centers of European culture opened to
me, as I devoted myself to writing. But at the same time, the understand–
ing that it is impossible to go on telling as if nothing had happened also
grew. Understanding that, after Auschwitz, there are no more stories that
do not betray, there are no more innocent stories.
And what about Mother's shrouded "story"? Details continued to join
together in fragments. For years, here and there, she mentioned events,
some in conversations with me, some in conversations with others which
I chanced upon. I listened when she spoke, and she spoke little. Never did
I "interview" her; never did I ask. I respected her way of speaking, as well
as her way of being silent. Even after I returned from Auschwitz, I didn't
think she had to report or that I had to (or could) "know." I learned from
her the lesson of telling in silence.
I heard the first fragment of a chronological description from my
mother under extraordinary circumstances. In the autumn of
1977,
she was
sumn10ned to give testimony in a German court in Hanover. I accompa–
nied my parents to the trial, sitting with Father in the gallery and seeing
Mother, with her special erect posture, surrounded by the black robes of
the attorneys. In her fluent German, she described the Plaszow camp,
