564
PARTISAN REVIEW
together they fought exhaustion and disease, lived through the selections,
until all of them survived. "There was strength in them. Moral strength,"
Mother explained when she and Father, both of them members of the lib–
eral secular
Mapai,
assiduously attended the celebrations of the friends in
Bnei Brak. At the
Shiva,
I heard from Rivka Horowitz for the first time
about that period. She spoke for a few hours-out of a responsibility to tell
me-and left. And after that, we didn't meet again. Later on, when I was
almost finished writing
The Name
(and after Mother's death, it seemed to
me that, more than ever, the novel spoke of a "there" that was lost forev–
er), came the first information about the family property in Krakow.
Apartment houses, a button factory. . ..Property? There? "In the regions of
delusion?" And then, the name that had been conUl1on at home, Schindler,
which suddenly became a book and then a film, and turned into a general
legacy the story of the rescue of Mother's cousin and his wife, Mother's
refusal to join the list of workers in the enamel factory in order to stay
with Marek.
And then, one evening, the telephone rings in Jerusalem, and on the
other end of the line, in English with a thick Polish accent, another mem–
ber of that
"Minyan"
introduces herself, Pearl Benisch, who published a
book in 1991,
To
vanquish the Dragon,
with the full story of the group (from
the author's religious perspective). A copy arrived on Friday. On the
Sabbath eve, I sat with my two little daughters in the living room and
picked up the book. I leafed through it distractedly, until I came to the
description of the destruction of the
Kinderheim.
And then I fl ed to the
other room so the children wouldn't see me, and there I burst into sobs I
didn't know were hidden inside me. A weeping that arose from there.
Mine? Hers?
Until dawn that Sabbath, I read for the first time the story of Mother,
in chronological order, dated, revealing the few facts I knew situated in
their context. Even the description of the goggle-moggle with sugar that
she had secretly made for Marek in the sewing workshop, where the
women from Plaszow worked, smuggling the treat to the child when she
came back. And how one day the Jewish supervisor discovered her steal–
ing the egg, and threatened to turn her in. And how she stood before him
then in mortal danger, and accused him in front of all the workers of the
sewing shop of being a traitor to his people. I read how in the
Aktsia
of
the destruction of the children's home, against the horrifying background
of lullabies, Mother burst into the square toward the SS men who were
pushing the weeping children onto the trucks. She shouted to them to take
her with the child. And how her friends, the women of the
Minyan,
held
her with all their m.ight, pulled her back. I read about the sisterhood
between the women in the group, about the pride, the unbelievable humor,
