Letter from the Regions of Delusion<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nNovember 2, 1975, Paris<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My dears,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Back home\u2014what a relief!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t believe that the distance between me and Poland would be swallowed up just like that, in a few steps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Your letter, which reached me just before the trip, was a lifeline in moments when the dizziness intensified; in moments when there was only a definite absence of my imaginary picture of those places, when instead, there were only the long lines in gray raincoats; in moments of awful loneliness, when there was no one to shout at; in moments when I didn\u2019t believe I could finally get on the train and leave that madness behind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How to tell, and wasn\u2019t there any chronology? How to live that over again?
Wroclaw. A dreary city and a theater festival. I was ejected into the darkness in the heart of an empty field. That\u2019s how it began. Night in the hotel. An enormous radio, and voices from Russian, Polish, Czech, and Hungarian stations. Stifling heat from the furnace, the chambermaid, a blond Gentile woman, fills the bathtub for me. In the soap box and in the closet are roaches. A strife-torn night in dreams and a grayish morning. The outside was stopped by the curtains. Crowds of people with rubbed out faces. A few old cars. Awful cold. Fog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How to leave the room and go into that reality? How to be a \u201ctourist\u201d in it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wroclaw. In the display windows rows of laundry soap in coarse packages. Cooperative restaurants smelling of cabbage and sweat. In the festival offices full ashtrays, organizers with sleepless faces. And then a writers\u2019 caf\u00e9, in Kosciuszko Square, and it was as if I had come to a kind of Jerusalem before I was born, from the thirties, a Jerusalem I lived from books. With that blend of provincialism and culture. Waitresses dressed in black with starched aprons, newspapers in wooden frames, cigarette smoke, grave discussions about art, literature, politics, metaphysics. The soft tones of a language that is so familiar, so close. The intonations, the gestures, the excited seriousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An international festival\u2014a few days of devotion to joy, before the regime returns its everyday gray.
And I, a stranger at the celebration. Only an \u201calibi\u201d for another mission, which no one in fact has assigned to me. Yes, a few addresses for it\u2019s impossible-not-to-accept-with-a-letter-to-take before setting out. Backs of houses, yards, covered with trash and rubble. Staircase supported by boards. Number seven\/two, apartment nine A. Two old people in the doorway. A kitchen black with soot. Examining me, the letter, with a scared look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sneaking back to the ongoing celebration. Just so they won\u2019t find out. It\u2019s only because of sloppiness that they haven\u2019t yet arrested me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then, early one misty morning, wrapped in a coat, at the railroad station. Among hundreds of people in a line. Buying a ticket to Krak\u00f3w with black market Zlotys \u2026 to the regions of my real trip.
Getting off the train, and simply walking into the light-flooded square, among ancient buildings, whose carved fa\u00e7ades are sparkling in the sun. Walking among the other people on the boulevard with the autumn chestnut trees, on \u201cPlanty,\u201d Mother\u2019s route to the tennis courts. Leaves struggle on my shoes. Entering the \u201cRynek\u201d Square resounding around itself. The Renaissance arches, the Sukiennice market in the middle like an island in the heart of a lagoon of light, the breeze rising from the Virgin Mary Church \u2026 all those names, with a soft R, as I (\u201cwonderful child!\u201d: the only two words I understood in the foreign language), would accompany Mother to the nightly suppers on an aunt\u2019s balcony, with a smell of down comforters and the saltiness of the sea air on hot Tel Aviv nights, when friends from \u201cthere\u201d would gather. All those names, when the conversation would climb in the foreign tremolo, and in the caf\u00e9 downstairs, in the yard of the building, the cards would be shuffled on tables. The places frozen in slides on the wall of the high school, in commemorations held with a sudden frenzy. Places that were stopped in the thirties, with an amazed look of some Jew who came on the camera by mistake. \u2026 The warm-cool air caresses the fur of my coat, my face, moves the parasols over the flower vendors\u2019 booths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The road rises to a high hill overlooking the city and the Vistula River. Above, the Wawel Castle covered in ivy burning with autumn leaves. And here, on the slope, along the banks of the Vistula, the way to Paulinska Street, Mother\u2019s street. The three o\u2019clock twilight lingers and softens. Mothers with babies in buggies at the river. (Mothers and babies? Still? Here?) Paulinska Street. On the secret side of the street the wall of a convent, and behind it fruit trees. Someone passes by on the corner. A woman in a heavy coat and old boots. Number eight. The staircase floored with blue tiles. A list of tenants in fountain pen. First floor on the left\u2014a strange name. The door is locked. On the first floor a balcony. Closed glass doors, covered with lace curtains. To throw a stone at them mischievously, a schoolbag on the back and stockings stretched up to the knee? As I walked there, dressed carefully by Mother, among the children giggling at my different clothes. To sit down at a steaming lunch, close to the breath of forefathers I never saw? Only crumbs of medicines and old lipsticks in the drawers of the aunt who died. That silence. The quiet of houses. Take a picture? A picture of air? Quiet. Across the street, in the convent garden, a bell rings. Children pour out of the gates of the school, climb on the fences, chew on apples.
Spotted fa\u00e7ades and the street spins. Not far from there, Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter. The soot of trams on the doorsills of the houses. In the windows of the reform synagogue, the \u201cTemple,\u201d spiderwebs, and in the yard, a tangle of weeds. In the alley of one of the houses is a blurred sign in Yiddish, \u201cPrayer House.\u201d The big synagogue is empty and whitewashed. Turned into a museum. Only a guard passes by like a shadow along the walls, and two fragments of tiles from back then are embedded in the entrance.
It\u2019s late now. I wander along the track to the cemetery. Here at least I am sent by permission, to an address that does exist, to the graves of the family. The gate is closed. There is no one to ask. Everything is closed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An evening full of mist. Suddenly the trams are hurrying. The voices of the flower vendors in the Rynek are swallowed up in the fog. To go to the reserved hotel? In Krak\u00f3w? Like going to a hotel in Tel Aviv instead of returning home. The desk clerk scurries up to help: \u201cYes, of course, Madam, here\u2019s the bus schedule to Auschwitz. From the town of Oswiecim, you have to go on foot a bit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the table at the entrance are old newspapers. Two elderly lady tourists are interested in a jazz festival that may not take place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And there, at the foot of the stairs, on the way to the room, the movement that had swept me up ever since early morning stops. No, just not to return alone to the gigantic radio in the strange room! I buttoned the coat and went out in pursuit of a dubious rumor that was given to me. Slawskowska Street. Maybe. \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And indeed, in the dark, in Yiddish, among the artisans\u2019 signs, a small address: \u201cMordechai Gvirtig Culture Club.\u201d A door at the edge of a yard. A doorman sits at the entrance. And in the depths, in the gloom, a few frozen figures are playing cards, gazing vacantly behind the wooden frames of newspapers. \u201cIsrael!\u201d the doorman sits up straight, leads me with sudden importance to the \u201cboard\u201d room. Five wrinkled faces rise up to me: \u201cIsrael!\u201d They sit me down in the middle, following my efforts in a mixture of basic German, a few words in Yiddish, and gestures. They nod at length in deep wonder at every word, assault one another in noisy arguments. Finally, they answer together, in a strange chorus: \u201cHa! Yes, Poser\u2019s daughter! Poser and Abeles,\u201d they nod: \u201cButtons, buttons!\u201d \u201cYes, buttons,\u201d I affirm; \u201ca button factory.\u201d \u201cThe Hebrew high school,\u201d I continue. \u201cYes, the high school. Now a Polish technical school.\u201d The Christian cook serves me a sandwich with a lot of bread and a cup of tea. They dismiss her with the superiority of a bygone age, and urge me: \u201cEat, eat.\u201d For a moment, they go back to their business. The \u201cchairman\u201d is dictating a petition to the \u201csecretary\u201d about the cultural situation. To whom? On behalf of whom? Still? Like those stencilled pages in cellars and photographs of pale-faced choirs that were presented every Holocaust Memorial Day in the glass cabinets of the school. I attempt to explain, they will certainly understand that it\u2019s impossible to get on the bus and simply ask the driver in a foreign language to tell me where you get off for Auschwitz. They certainly have their own ways of getting there. And indeed, it turns out that tomorrow, a \u201cdelegation of rabbis from America\u201d is about to come, and they will go in a special bus. When will they arrive? When will they go? Where are they now? Impossible to know. Got to wait.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I wanted to sneak away from them now, back to the big square. To go into an anonymous caf\u00e9 with drunkards. To be swallowed up there. But they hang onto me, wrapped up in their coats, accompany me to the hotel. Argue with outbursts of rancor, finally declare that the \u201csecretary\u201d will come to \u201cguide me\u201d tomorrow morning. They all press around, shake my hand. Downtrodden faces. So small. In threadbare coats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the room the suitcase was waiting, with a few things. Make up, passport. Will have to go on and move it. Impossible to hide in the suffocation under the blanket.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The next morning, before I had time to ponder the other world in my dreams, the \u201csecretary\u201d was already here, dragging me with a soft-limbed domination. Turning me around in dark streets, getting on and off trams, talking incessantly in the incomprehensible language, as if to herself. And I plod behind her, bending down to her, making an effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Kazimierz, on the bench across from the synagogue, the doorman of the \u201cMordechai Gvirtig Culture Club\u201d and two old men are already waiting for me. It\u2019s not clear if they\u2019re beggars or rabbis. They came to welcome the \u201cAmerican delegation.\u201d The doorman waving as he approaches, \u201cYes, yes!\u201d One of the old men hurries me, opens the gates of the ancient synagogue of Rabbi Moshe Isserlish. For a minute, a separate hush. The figures that follow in my wake remained beyond the fence. A small building whose heavy walls are leaning, and a white courtyard. Inside the synagogue, there is still a warmth among the wooden benches, around the Ark of the Covenant. On the tables are old prayer books. Black letters. And in the small enclosure crows land on the ancient tombstones sunk in mist. For a moment the past seemed to continue with all its softness, without any obstacle, in that distant murmer, up to the morning covered with mist, to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the doorman is already rushing me hysterically, he arranged with the gatekeeper of the \u201cMiodowa\u201d cemetery to be there, to open the gate. Hurry, hurry, got to get back in time for the \u201cdelegation of rabbis!\u201d And thus, in single file, the doorman limping, the muscular Christian gatekeeper on his heels, and I behind them, we march between long rows of sunken, shattered gravestones, covered with mold. Names, names. I recite to them the names I\u2019ve managed to dredge up from my memory, \u201cPoser, Mendel, Groner.\u201d Tombstones in long rows whose edges vanish in mist and piles of fallen leaves. Many strange names. Don\u2019t find. A Christian woman with legs swathed in bandages rinses the graves with boiling water, raises her head wrapped in a turban to us: \u201cYes, Groner, saw it once \u2026 maybe there.\u201d I still hold on, persist in reading the names, seeking under piles of leaves. But the limping doorman and the gatekeeper behind him are already hurrying out. We didn\u2019t find. No maps. No books. No witnesses. Mission impossible. Only a delusion of a mission. And time is limited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Meanwhile on the bench the number of idlers and \u201crabbis\u201d waiting for the \u201cAmerican delegation\u201d has grown. According to the doorman, they are already in Krak\u00f3w and will arrive very soon. Maybe you can find out in the hotel when they\u2019ll arrive? No, impossible to know. I break away from the doorman, tell him I\u2019ll come back in a little while, he should beg the rabbis of the delegation to wait, and I hurry to Wawel Castle, for the visit that was arranged. On the streets people in gray coats, buses, trams. You can even eat an apple. The body goes on functioning over the abyss between the worlds. And when I come back from the royal palace, from the halls with waxed floors whose walls are covered with embroidered tapestries of feast and forest, devoured by torments of betrayal, 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: \u201cWell, the American delegation \u2026 a call came that they didn\u2019t leave America. Well, the fog, they didn\u2019t leave America.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Empty. No one there. Even the idlers who were waiting on the bench had gone home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t bring the scene in the room any closer. Around an enormous table sit the activists of the \u201ccongregation,\u201d 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 died out after a few sentences, and after I was given the travel arrangements, I slipped out impolitely. I also fled 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 caf\u00e9 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 never were Jews here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And it was as if a shout burst out of me in the evening, at the performance of \u201cThe Night of November Ninth,\u201d by Wyspianski, directed by 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An old car. The shaved nape of the driver\u2019s neck stuck in a cap. Poplar trees, autumn fields. I am in the back seat, huddled in my coat. On the way to Auschwitz.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And perhaps you should be silent about that trip. Not talk about the yellow flowers, the gravel in the sun, the chatter of the Polish cleaning women who laughingly point out to me that my trousers are unstitched. My trousers? On what side of the barricade?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How to write you about the heavy marching in an attempt to grasp something through the remnants of constructions\u2014as 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019d be dizzy when I intoned the words, six million.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How to write you about the forced march through the tremendous extents 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 within that silent madness. Mother. A shaved head at 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. Dozes in the sun in the car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And maybe all the questions are not right. For it\u2019s 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 \u201cKaddish.\u201d \u201cKaddish\u201d over heaps of shoes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 has turned into the enemy. With the fear stamped in the blood. With the constant paranoia. \u201cArbeit macht frei.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2014clinging or accusing \u2014that 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And in Warsaw, in the Ghetto, there aren\u2019t even any ruins where the imagination can take hold for a moment. There are no stones that are emitted outside of time. Only concrete blocks built a few feet above the ground, above the ruins and the mounds of corpses that weren\u2019t 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. \u201cHere was the great synagogue of Warsaw.\u201d And the cleaning woman smiles like an accomplice in a crime, 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 \u201cDesa\u201d stores, are scores of Jewish objects. Hanukah 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The rain doesn\u2019t let up. An awful cold penetrates the clothes, makes you shiver. Warsaw\u2014a 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 stifling.
Only the friendship of my acquaintances, Polish theater people, supported 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 accounts of the blood of the dead. Life in a pre-time is always present, in the double look at all the places. Always through the other place I belong to, where you don\u2019t come on journeys. A wiped-out place, condemned to delusion, where I will never be able to rest the wandering of existences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With relief, I finally board the train. Sleeping cars that came from Moscow with a conductor in an undershirt and a stifling of sweat and orange peels. A twenty-four-hour trip to Paris, like a day of fasting. To another world? At midnight, the train passes the East Berlin station. Signs in Gothic script: \u201cWelcome to the Democratic Capital.\u201d On the platform is a white line three feet from the cars. Soldiers in riding boots with German shepherds and submachine guns are standing at regular intervals. A patrol of two soldiers goes through the train. Another patrol checks between the wheels with flashlights, and another one marches on the roofs of the cars. Maybe someone has succeeded in escaping. A white line, soldiers, and a train. Only the site of madness or freedom has changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Back in Paris. The clear sky, department store advertising instead of propaganda slogans. Quiet. The silence of the room. And that drawn orbit of life where you two are so close, at hand. \u201cFlesh of my flesh.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Beloved father and mother, I press you to my heart, and once again am gathered in your arms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nNotes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n- I borrowed the expression, \u201cRegions of Delusion\u201d from the title of a parable attributed to the Ba\u2019al Shem Tov, adapted by Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim<\/em>, tans. Olga Marx (New York, 1947-48).<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Translator\u2019s Note: This is an English rendition of a pun in the original, based on the sound confluence of the Hebrew arim<\/em> [Cities] and Aryan, which leads the child to think that they all \u201cowned cities\u201d over \u201cthere.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- An amazing example of the layers of memory and forgetting was revealed to me as I wrote The Name<\/em>. The only detail I borrowed in the novel from things I had heard from Mother was a story of the heroism of a woman who succeeded in escaping from Auschwitz-Birkenau, and when she was caught and taken to the Appelplatz, she managed to commit suicide. I also borrowed the admiring tone in which Mother spoke of the event. (Only later did I discover how it had served her as a model.) I created a biographical-fictional character of a virtuouso pianist, and \u201cinvented\u201d a name for her\u2014Mala\u2014immortalized in the name of the heroine, Amalia. Only years later, as I was finishing the book, I came across a written description of the event in Birkenau and discovered in a daze that the name of the woman was the same as the name I had \u201cinvented,\u201d \u201cMala,\u201d Mala Zimetbaum.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Pearl Benisch, To Vanquish the Dragon<\/em>, (Jerusalem-New York, 1991).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":5685,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"categories":[156,133,152,112],"tags":[114,103,107],"class_list":["post-5676","m_essays","type-m_essays","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books-and-essays-en","category-essays-en","category-holocaust-remembrance-en","category-non-fiction-en","tag-anti-victimhood","tag-feminine-en","tag-generations"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michalgovrin.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/m_essays\/5676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michalgovrin.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/m_essays"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michalgovrin.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/m_essays"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michalgovrin.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michalgovrin.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michalgovrin.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michalgovrin.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}