Hold on to the Sun Read Online Free PDF

forest, devoured by torments of treason, I run down the slope carpeted with fallen leaves, back to Kazimierz, to my Jews. From the end of the street, the doorman stumbles toward me. He drops his hands in a gesture of dismissal; “Well, the American delegation . . . a call came that they didn’t leave America. Well, the fog, they didn’t leave America.”
    Empty. No one there. Even the idlers who were waiting on the bench have gone home.
    Entrusted with the last mission, the doorman rushes me into the community organization offices. Second floor, a smell of boiled potatoes, a few old people with tin plates and spoons. Even the bright light filtering from the shutters doesn’t bring the scene in the room any closer. Around the enormous table sit the activists of the “congregation,” their chins leaning on their hands, and their crutches leaning on the chairs. A few old portraits on the walls. At the head of
the table, Mr. Jacobovitch, an irascible Jew, head of the community organization. The mutual curiosity dies out after a few sentences, and after I am given the travel arrangements I slip out impolitely. I also flee from the kosher meal of mashed potatoes on a tin plate and the ritual washing of the hands in a stained sink, to Sukiennice Square, to the light, to the fancy café with red velvet chairs and torte powdered like the cheeks of the Polish women. Here you can shout aloud that maybe everything is a delusion, that maybe there were never Jews here.
    And it was as if a shout burst out of me in the evening at the performance of The Night of November Ninth by Stanislaw Wyspianski, 16 directed by Konrad Swinarski. Mythic characters singing against a background of a burning horizon. The tricolored flag of the revolution waves over the stage, and the audience is galvanized. A moment of naked yearning for freedom is revealed, of metaphysical emotion, a moment of a personal world despite the constant oppression. Something so familiar, so close in temperament, in gestures. Such belonging. Belonging?
    An old car. The shaved nape of the driver’s neck stuck in a cap. Poplar trees, autumn fields. I am in the back seat, huddled in my coat. On the way to Auschwitz.
    And perhaps you should be silent about that trip. Not talk about the yellow flowers, the gravel in the sun, the
chatter of Polish cleaning women who laughingly point out to me that my trousers are unstitched. My trousers? On what side of the barricade?
    How to write you about the strained pacing in an attempt to grasp something about the remnants of constructions—from archaeological digs of thirty, not two thousand years ago.To understand the chasm separating sanity and madness with barbed-wire fences. The house beyond the fence, half a mile away, was always there, with the same smoke in the chimney and the same geranium pots behind the curtains. And here?
    How to write about the dark steps with a group of Polish high school students on them. The wall of liquidations between two blocs. A barred window. A few fallen leaves scattered on the sill. Expressionless walls in the gas chambers, the iron doors of the ovens. Polish sky. Between the chambers, in the corridors, photographs and numbers. Printed columns of names. And the silence of another morning now. As when I held my breath, a girl of six or seven, in the schoolyard for a whole minute, through the whole siren, so that I’d be dizzy when I intoned the words, six million.
    How to write you about the forced march through the tremendous extent of Birkenau Camp. About the dampness still standing in the abandoned blocs, between those three-tiered wooden bunks, and the straw sacks on the dirt floor. How to imagine Mother with that silent madness. Mother.
A shaved head in nights of hallucinations, nights among packed bodies. How to put Mother into one of the gigantic photos placed along the railroad track. How to force myself to imagine her in this emptiness?
    Polish earth. Small autumn flowers. The driver waits.