Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust Read Online Free PDF

been made with life. But with sur vivors like Frank and Simon, firm in their support of Israel and George W. Bush’s position on Iraq, whatever peace or compromise lies in this life offers utterly no compensation for the peace lost then; for the criminal ripping of children from their parents and the unbearable grief of knowing your parents and those you love are dead but not knowing where, of not being able to find a grave on which to place a stone. Perhaps home, in the unvoiced message of their eyes, had to do with the past and present absorbing each other, emotions as alive now as they were then, the past never leaving, being here and there, an immediacy conveyed through silences and staring through the window of an elegant living room to spaces far beyond the winter cold of a Fifth Avenue park.
    In their recounting, memories possessed immanence, stories full of dilemma, guilt and regret. It was most strongly put to me by Simon at the very beginning of our interview: ‘Whenever I go to a funeral now I feel envious; I never had the privilege of burying my own parents, of saying Kaddish at their graves.’ Being there, with their memories, wanting to tell their stories, remembering the pain and isolation, moving into it without embarrassment, and the sadness in not being able to bring back the ones they loved – this is the irretrievable part of their histories. Perhaps it is this remem brance that lay deep in their eyes, knowing that their parents had not been buried but had been murdered in a dreary village, forest or camp, with no opportunity for these men to say Kaddish . Or perhaps a nagging doubt or a moral lapse lies close to the surface. Simon:
    ‘It’s hard for me to tell you this story. It’s as real now as it was then. We had been chased by the Germans and their collaborators into the swamps. We found a small island with a few huts on it; we hid there for several days. In the hut next to us, we heard the cries of a baby, really a kind of whimpering because it was so weak. The Jewish “wife” of a Soviet commander had given birth to their kid in that hut but her husband insisted she leave the baby. A baby’s crying couldn’t be controlled, so infants presented real dangers to all of us. If the enemy heard the baby, he could find us. We listened to the whimpering for eight days; the baby died on the ninth day. His mother visited him once. Life was not only cheap, it was incidental; the mother moved only a kilometer or two from her child. But she refused to take the baby with her. I imagine she couldn’t bring herself to kill it; so she just let it wither away … and we did the same thing: we refused to save the baby, because we knew the danger. But, we suffered that baby’s death: it was not easy listening all those days to the cries of a dying infant. You see, it was the spirit of the times; life had become so cheap; you could lose it anytime … the priority was survival.’
    Simon seems to be looking far beyond the walls of his apartment as he tells me this: ‘We had no place to go, what were we to do? Take the baby with us? You couldn’t do anything: neighbors who lived next to you for years would hand you over to the Gestapo for a loaf of bread; human sensitivity disappeared. I couldn’t afford to feel anything for that baby; the baby threatened me; in the end I had to choose my own life and those of my comrades.’
    Yet, these are not unhappy men. Frank and Simon seemed to me to be full of life and enthusiasm; sharp and incisive in their observations, engaged with the contemporary world, healthy, and with humor and endless tolerance for my questions. They were proud of their successes in the United States, their children’s accomplishments; and they brought out snapshots of their families back then and now, of groups of fighters in the forests. In their survival they seemed to say ‘we were lucky,’ because they all spoke of luck. But I also sensed another message; ‘maybe we were not so