MICHAL GOVRIN
563
where Jews from the Krakow Ghetto were removed; she pointed authori–
tatively at the maps. Her voice trembled only a moment when she came to
the description of the
Kinderheim,
the children's home in Plaszow, where
children were taken from their parents. In a few words, she dealt with the
Aktsia,
told how all the inmates of the camp were taken out to the square
while an orchestra played lullabies, to see how the SS loaded the children
onto the trucks that took them
to
the gas chambers. She was asked what
was the name of her son, and how old he was at the time of the
Aktsia.
She
replied with an effort, "Marek. Eight years old." The prosecutor asked for
a momentary recess, and then the questions resumed. (That prosecutor
accompanied us when we left, apologizing in shame for the accused, the
deputy of Emon Gantt, the commander of Plaszow, who was absent from
the courtroom "for medical reasons....")
A few years later, Mother tried to dramatize the story of the revolt of
the women in Krakow at the vocational high school where she taught,
wanting to bring the subject close to her women students. She worked
with Father on the script and developed original ideas of staging designed
to increase audience participation. But, during the rehearsals, she developed
such a serious skin disease, clearly as a reaction, that the doctor advised her
to stop the production.
The presence of the Holocaust receded completely in her last months,
as she struggled with the fatal cancer that was discovered in her. Death was
too close to think about its old dread-at any rate, that was my feeling as
I stood at her side, admiring her yearning for life, the audacity, the amaz–
ing black humor, which restored the dimensions of human absurdity even
in the most difficult situations. The day before she lost consciousness, she
spoke a lot, in a stupor, in Polish. What did she say? Was she still living
there? I couldn't go with her. I remained alone, at her bedside. Then, as I
was massaging her feet, those feet that had marched in the death march
through frozen Europe, I was struck with the simple knowledge that it
was to Mother's struggle, there, that lowed my birth.
I heard Mother's "story" only after her death-death that always turns
a loved one into a "story" with a beginning and an end. During the
Shiva,
Rivka Horowitz came to Jerusalem from Bnei-Brak. A woman with bold
bl ue eyes, whom I knew only by name. She was one of nine women, all of
them graduates of Beit Yakov, the ultra-orthodox school for girls in
Krakow, whom my mother joined in the ghetto, despite differences of
education and ideology. The ten women, "The
Minyan,"
supported one
another in the ghetto, during the years in the Plaszow camp, in Auschwi tz–
Birkenau, throughout the death march, and in the final weeks in
Bergen-Belsen. For three years, they hadn't abandoned one another;
