MICHAL GOVRIN
565
how wi th astonishing freedom they maintained their humanity in the
Lagers
of Auschwitz-Birkenau. They and many other women and men
were described in their humanity facing the crematoria. How they suc–
ceeded in putting on makeup to get through the selections, how they
sneaked the weak women out of the line of the condemned, how they
secretly lit candles at Hanukkah and held a Passover Seder, and how, after
the death march from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, they still managed to
laugh together when they got the wrong size prison uniforms. I read,
frozen stiff, how, in Bergen-Belsen, Mother dared to be insolent to the
female SS officer with the pride she still had left, surviving the public
whipping, which few survived, without shouting, "so as not to give the SS
the pleasure." Between the pages, the figure of Mother returned to me,
cheering the women in Auschwitz with stories of her visit to the Land of
Israel, singing them songs of the homeland on their muddy beds, where
they fell exhausted with typhus and teeming with lice, in Bergen-Belsen.
Suddenly I understood one of the few stories Mother had told me about
the camps, how she would sing to herself Tchernihovsky's poem: "You
may laugh, laugh at the dreams, I the dreamer am telling you, I believe in
Man, and in his spirit, his powerful spirit," emphasizing with her off-key
voice the words: "I believe in Man, and in his spirit, his powerful spirit...."
Mother's "story." Discovering it in the heart of the journey to what
was stamped inside me. Discovering it now in the middle of life, when I
myself am a mother, and older than she-the young woman and mother
who was there.
"Mother's story," or maybe only milestones around what will remain
hidden.
Letter from the Regions of Delusion
November
2, 1975,
Paris
My dears,
Back home-what a reliefl
A week in Poland is like a year, like years, like a moment. Ever since
the visa was approved, a week before the trip, I felt as if I were facing an
operation. I was waiting for something to stop me, for an iron curtain to
block the way. And even in the dark, when the bus took us from the plane
to the airport in Warsaw, I still didn't believe that the distance between me
and Poland would be swallowed up just like that, in a few steps.
