Hold on to the Sun Read Online Free PDF Page B

Dozes in the sun in the car.
    And maybe all the questions are not right. For it’s impossible to understand. Not even at the end of the journey to this stage set. Impossible to understand without the fear of death that catches the breath, without the palpable threat on the flesh. Impossible to grasp death from all the hundreds of photos. Maybe only the heaps of empty shoes are still hovering between life and death. There I finally recited the kaddish. 17 Kaddish over heaps of shoes.
    And maybe all the questions start only after the shoes also crumble. Beyond the crazy stage set of death, which will always remain incomprehensible. And maybe all the questions begin, only with the silent emptinesses of now. How to go on living in a world that had turned into the enemy. With the fear stamped in the blood. With the constant paranoia. “ Arbeit macht frei .” 18 How to live within the world and outside it. In the flow of its life and in the flow of other life and eternity. How to go on nevertheless believing in man, how to take the beloved head in the arms.

    In the afternoon light, trivial thoughts pass through the head. Impossible to pretend suffering; that would be hypocrisy. Impossible to go back to the past—clinging or accusing—that would be the triumph of the past. There is no escape from the constant questions to be asked now, impossible to flee from them to the images frozen in the photos.
    And in Warsaw, in the ghetto, there aren’t even any ruins where the imagination can take hold for a moment. There are no stones left from times past. Only concrete blocks built a few feet above the ground, above the ruins and the mounds of corpses that weren’t even cleared away. To hold your head in your hands and shout. Life goes on. Cars in parking lots, a few poplar trees on the sidewalks. And that emptiness. Only the lip service of a memorial with the pathos of socialist realism, and a Jewish museum behind the building of the Communist party. The director of the museum and his secretary, two Jews with bowed heads, show me a building excavation out the window. “Here was the great synagogue of Warsaw.” And the cleaning woman smiles like an accomplice in a crime, and points at the exit to the guest book full of emotional comments. Gray cement boulevards and gigantic statues of soldiers with forged chins. Impossible to believe that there was once a different life here. Only in the nationalized Desa stores 19 are there scores of Jewish objects. Hanukkah lamps, synagogue
menorahs, spice boxes. Objects with price tags. No, there is nowhere to return. The whole thing is only a delusion. Deceptions of the imagination. In my head crushed fragments of all the artistic creations resound, the assemblies, the recitations that tried to convey the other reality to me, and they only increase the distance.
    The rain doesn’t let up. An awful cold penetrates the clothes, makes you shiver. Warsaw—a gray horizon by day, and gray in the pale neon lights at night.The trip back seems like an illusion, like opening the camp gate and being outside. The unbearable loneliness, the unrelenting suffocation.
    Only the friendship of my acquaintances, Polish theater people, supports me in the hours before the departure. Figures between reality and dream. Alicia in her theatrical clothes, waving her hands like a Chekhov character. And Andrzej with ironical humor, in fragments of literary French, with the credo from Communism to the surrealism of Witkiewicz. Fervent confessions in small apartments when tomorrow is unknown, and only the dream is left. Like the awakening appreciation for Bruno Schulz, thirty years after he perished, like worshipping the theater, the word spoken from the stage, received with a sigh. Like the clandestine grasping of Catholicism.
    Childhood memories extend between Mediterranean summers and alleys in northern cities, woven in the dreams of Polish romantic literary heroes, shrouded in the sounds of the language and open