“I’m sorry, Rabbi,” Anne tells him firmly.
The rabbi lifts his eyebrows. “Pardon me? Sorry for what?”
“I’m sorry, but you’re about to waste your time with me.”
A small shrug. “Well. Kind of you to say so, Anne, if I may call you by your given name. But I don’t know what you mean.”
“I know that my stepmother is used to getting her way. I’m sure you think you’re doing her a favor.”
“You’re sure?”
“I don’t need to be tended to.”
He pauses for an instant and sets his plate on the mahogany coffee table. “Perhaps your stepmother is worried about you?”
A short breath escapes her. “That’s a laugh.”
“You resent her concern?”
“You could say that,” Anne replies, staring at the ember of her cigarette.
“I take it that you were close to Mr. Nussbaum, may his name be a blessing.”
“I don’t want to talk about him.”
“No?”
“Maybe you’re not aware, Rabbi. Didn’t anyone tell you the truth about what happened? He jumped into a canal. He committed suicide. Isn’t that a sin?”
“It is, but who can really know what happened?”
“He was going to be deported back to Germany. You don’t need to guess what was going through his head.”
The rabbi shrugs lightly. “One might consider all possibilities, I suppose. You’re feeling hurt, Anne?” he wonders. “Hurt by him?”
She swallows. “‘Hurt’ is not the word.”
“Abandoned?”
She breathes in deeply. “Please. I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Even though it was you who started the conversation? It might help to talk, don’t you think? I think at heart he was a very good man.”
But this sets Anne’s teeth on edge. “I thought so, too, Rabbi. He encouraged me to write. He said he wanted to see my work published. And yet he decided to drown himself instead.” She says this and feels a terrible swell of guilt. “I’m sorry, I must sound very selfish. I am very selfish. If you don’t believe me, just ask anyone. Ask my stepmother. Ask my father. Ask them. They’ll tell you.”
But the rabbi does not seem to be interested in asking anyone such a question. He removes a packet of cheap Dutch cigarettes from his jacket and lights one from the brass table lighter. “We knew each other, Werner and I,” he says. “In Auschwitz.”
Anne raises her eyes at the mention of the name.
The rabbi shrugs. “Four months I spent in that place.” The smoke he expels merges with Anne’s and hangs heavily above them. “We were on the same labor Kommando once, digging drainage ditches outside the wire. When I fell, it was Werner Nussbaum who stood me back on my feet. Saved me from the lash of the Kapo. Shared his bread with me. So I do know something about the man and the content of his heart.”
“I’m sorry,” Anne says, tasting shame. “I’m sorry, no one told me.”
“No need to apologize. It was a place of cruelty. I don’t have to explain that to you. But it was also a place of deep humanity.” He takes in smoke and then releases it. “May I ask you, Anne? Are you also angry with your father?”
Anne stiffens. Says nothing.
“I think you must be,” the rabbi tells her. “Suffering through such hell. Your father should have protected you, correct? I mean, isn’t that what fathers are for? So you blame him.”
“Not just him,” Anne answers tightly.
“Oh, yes.” He nods. “Yes, yes. Would you be surprised if I told you that I, too, know something about assigning blame?” the rabbi wonders. “I lost my wife and my two brothers, zekher kadosh livrakha. My brothers to Mauthausen. My wife to the gas straight off the train into Birkenau, because she was pregnant.”
Anne is sobered by this. The rabbi breathes out smoke.
“Yet you survived,” says Anne.
“I did,” the rabbi admits.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“You think it was God?”
“Maybe.”
“You’re a rabbi.”
“Many rabbis died. Most did.”
“Maybe God just overlooked you.”
“You think God was making the decisions at Auschwitz?”
“You think he wasn’t? Isn’t he the Master of the Universe?”
“I can’t blame the gas chambers on God,” he says. “It was men who built them. Men who operated them.”
“So you don’t think that there was a reason that you survived? When all those other rabbis didn’t? You don’t think it was because there was something important you had yet to do?”
“Perhaps it was to talk with you.”
Anne shakes her head. “That’s not funny.”
“It wasn’t meant as a joke, Anne. How should I know? I would like to think that God saved me. Me, in particular, Armin Souza, for an unseen purpose. It’s very flattering. But I have no proof that my survival wasn’t utterly random.”
“Do you know why I lived?” she asks.
“Are you going to tell me?”
“No. I’m asking a question. What if it was a mistake? What if God picked the wrong Frank girl?”
“Again, I cannot explain his thinking. I cannot comprehend his purposes. It’s not for us to know. But what I can tell you is this: Now that you have survived, you have a duty.”
“To the dead,” she says.
“No. To the living. To yourself. To you. Your family dies, and you blame them for dying. You blame God, you blame your father, you blame yourself. I know. But you cannot keep it up. You cannot live on rage or grief. As much as you’d like to believe it’s possible, it is not. You cannot live with the joy draining out of every day that passes. You survived the camps? Thank God. Now you must survive the rest of your life. More than survive. You must learn happiness, Anne. You must learn forgiveness.”
Anne smokes, says nothing for a moment, until, “My sister,” she says. “Her name was Margot. She wanted to make aliyah. She wanted to become a maternity nurse and deliver babies in the promised land.”
“And you thought that was . . . what? Admirable? Ridiculous?”
“Both, maybe,” she says. “I don’t know. It’s just another reason that she should have been allowed to live.”
“Instead of you?”
Anne has no reply.
“I would have traded my life for that of my wife,” he says. “If I could have snapped my fingers or clapped my hands. I would have done it. How much simpler would it be to be dead. To be relieved of the responsibility of carrying on. But that’s not the way of the world, Anne. As you must know. Others die. We live. The best we can hope for is to make something of ourselves. To help others. To resist anger and fear and guilt and to move forward with the business of living.”
“But what . . .” Anne swallows. She stares into the smoke of her cigarette. “What if I can’t do that, Rabbi? Get on with the business of living? You make it sound like an easy choice.”