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lice, they succeeded in preserving freedom by clinging to the Hebrew cal–
endar, singing, even laughing-the most anarchic force. And after the
Liberation, despite her exhaustion, she volunteered to work as a nurse
and then as an activist in the illegal immigrant organization. She came to
the Land of Israel in
I948
with a children's transport. She immediately
had plastic surgery to remove the number tattooed on her arm. She
refused to be a victim, refused to be a refugee. As a child, I didn't even
know that my mother was in the Holocaust, the most awful thing they
talked about in kindergarten and school. I was never afraid when
Mother walked around with bare arms in summer dresses; I never
averted my eyes when she took off her blouse in the dressing room at the
seashore. I never saw the number tattooed on her at the gates of
Auschwitz and never was haunted by it in dreams. I didn't even know
what it was. The shadow of the Holocaust was passed on to me, as to
the other members of the second generation, as a legacy. But along with
it, in a special silence, was also the lesson about the strength needed to
choose a life of dignity. Not to live in Displaced Persons camps as
refugees, and not as martyrs. It's a lesson about the struggle to survive
day after day, an ashen, persistent struggle, without a halo of sanctity.
Fear of the prison of victimhood returned to me recently when I read
the story of a Tel Aviv bus driver who got out to help a person who was
hurt as he tried to board the moving bus. The driver bent over the
wounded man with the aid of a nurse whom he had approached to help.
They took off his shirt to let him breathe. After the third button, the
ammunition belt on his body appeared. At that moment, they turned
from a first aid team into a terror-fighting one. They clasped the hand
of the wounded man so he wouldn't activate the explosive and shouted
to the passengers to run away. Simultaneously, the driver tried to per–
suade the terrorist in his fluent Arabic, to save his own life now that all
his victims had fled. But the man was silent, imprisoned in the impulse
to commit suicide and murder. The driver and the nurse decided to save
themselves, counted to three, released his hands together, and escaped .
The terrorist got up, dragged himself to the bus stop, and blew himself
up, along with a great-grandmother who hadn't managed to flee.
AND MEANWHILE? How does one survive in an ongoing war in the heart
of two societies filled with threats of terror? How does one stand
against violence, against fear, against a fragility of the fabric of life more
present than ever?
Recently, my admiration of the subversive genius of Jewish humor
has increased-its anarchic freedom, its power to cut the tragic maze
