Daniel Stein, Interpreter

If he was teaching in the evening, she would wait at the workshop for an hour, for two hours, until he came to collect her. He always brought her to Mass, and waited patiently in the garden for the service to end. When I invited him to come in and join us at table after the service he would usually refuse, but sometimes he did come in. He would sit silently and never ate anything. He had an ascetic, very handsome Jewish face. They say he was a very good teacher, and small boys with tiny violins were brought from the surrounding towns to study with him.

Grayna suffered silently for a year, then she arranged the wake, asked the local Jews to assemble the requisite minyan of ten Jewish men, and they read the Kaddish. A week later her daughter went off to the army, and the next day she took something and did not wake up.

I have not encountered suicide for many years now. In the partisan brigade and among the Jews in the ghetto it was not uncommon. People had been hounded into the darkest of corners and rejected the gift of life, preferring death to agonizing ordeals by hunger, fear, the torture and death of those they loved, and the dread of dying hideously at any moment. It was an attempt by desperate people to forestall what was coming. I remember being totally appalled when I heard of the suicide of Goebbels and his killing of his six children. He had no trust in God and believed that neither he nor his children were deserving of grace. He passed sentence and executed it himself.

But poor Grayna! The one thing she needed was her husband’s love and she knew of no other. Or had little knowledge of it. It never occurred to her how cruelly she was treating her daughter. Poor Hanna, first her brother, then her father, and now her mother. The army gave her three days’ leave but she came back only for a few hours, to attend the funeral. She did not want to stay or go into the house. What a trauma that girl will live with now!

We buried Grayna in the local Arab cemetery. It is a small Catholic cemetery belonging to our brothers on the outskirts of town. The Arabs allow me to conduct services in their church and I use the same altar as they do for Mass. We had a joint service on Holy Thursday, celebrating the Mass in Arabic and Hebrew, and on Friday she did not wake up.

It is difficult, dear Brother, for Christians to live in Israel, for many reasons. It is even more difficult for Arab Christians, who are mistrusted and hated by Jews, and even more by Arab Muslims. But how difficult it is to bury a Christian, especially one who is not a monk living in a monastery with its orchards, lands, and cemeteries; not an Arab either, who has settled here better than others; but somebody without roots, who is in Israel more or less at random, and who belongs neither to the clergy nor to officialdom.

There are so many tragedies here. Immigrants arrive with mixed families. They bring their aged mothers, who are often Catholic, or sometimes Orthodox. When these old people die, something unspeakable happens: there is nowhere to bury them. There are Jewish cemeteries where they bury only Jews; there are the cemeteries of Christian monasteries but these, too, refuse to bury outsiders because of lack of space. The unbelievable price of land means that a plot in a cemetery is beyond the means of poor people. Of course, those of us who come from Poland know only too well how many people the land can accommodate.

The Arab priest in charge of the church where we conduct our joint services occasionally allows me to bury someone in the cemetery there, and that is where we buried Grayna. I ask you to pray for her, dear Brother Władek.

I have written you such an inchoate letter that it is only now as I reread it that I see how plaintive it is, not at all the letter of thanks I intended to write. I have indeed received three books from you and one of them has proved invaluable. I am grateful to you also for the total understanding that you express in your letter. I have to confess that in my difficult situation your support is extremely important to me.

Your Brother in Christ,

D.

4. December 1965, Kraków

F

ROM A LETTER FROM

W

ŁADYSŁAW

K

LECH TO

D

ANIEL

S

TEIN

… Really, Daniel, you never cease to amaze me. Your letter is truly inchoate. I understand your grief, I feel sorry for the woman who died, but the Church long ago designated suicide a sin and you are indulging in emotions which can only devastate the soul and weaken faith.

All imaginable questions have long since been posed and answers received to them. It is our problem if we cannot read, and with our excessive cleverness find difficult and perplexing what our predecessors found as clear as God’s day. Do you really think that all divisions and schisms are purely human? Is there not God’s truth in them? Perhaps, to put it another way, what God has put asunder let no man seek to join?

No, I don’t even want to hear about this trend in your thinking. If, as you suggest, we were to create a common liturgy for all Christians, what place are you to find for those Protestants who in their practice have totally rejected the Eucharist as we understand it? I do not know, I really do not know, dear Daniel. If anything of that sort is to come about, it will not be in our lifetime, and most likely only in the Kingdom of Heaven. It strikes me that life in Israel is well and truly addling your clear mind. You never used to come out with this sort of thing.

You have written to me more than once about how great the dissension is between Christians in the Holy Land, but what I would like to know is what relations are like with the Jews. If Christians cannot come to terms among themselves, how are they to talk to the Jews? To say nothing of the Muslims—another issue which is quite beyond resolution.

We have had very heavy frosts this year, and I had a beggar freeze to death beside the church. It is not you in warm countries who should be building shelters for the homeless but we here in the North. We ought to arrange a transfer and send our beggars to you.

Your Brother in the Lord,

Wl.

5. September 1966, Haifa

F

ROM A LETTER FROM

H

ILDA TO HER MOTHER

Don’t be upset that I am not coming home this year, Mother. Ask yourself how could I go on holiday when I am responsible for all the building work? You wouldn’t believe how much we have managed to do over the past year, despite the fact that we meet nothing but obstructiveness at every turn, both from the Church authorities and the state. Our only help is from Germany. Also, one local Arab donated a truckload of stone to us. In Germany it would cost an absolute fortune, but in Israel building materials are cheap. In July a whole brigade of German students arrived. They worked on the building site for two months, excavated the foundations for the church building, and began digging the foundations for the shelter. Nearly all the students were from Frankfurt and they were really special. I never met anyone like them in Germany. They have already tapped into the water from the Druze village.

And what a beautiful church it is! We have restored the walls and hung the doors. We have a roof! The only thing we don’t have is windows. Daniel says we don’t need to insert window frames, and if we just make shutters to keep bad weather out that will be enough. It’s not a large space, he says. In the summer it will be cooler without windows, and in the winter we will heat it with our breath. Although the building is not yet complete, we are already holding services in it. We have an altar and a porch where we can sit in the shade. We found a blocked spring and restored it, not without help from our Druze neighbors. So now we are called the Church of Elijah by the Spring. Doesn’t that sound good?