In Kraków I went to the abbot of the Carmelite monastery, who received me benignly and asked me to tell him my story. I spoke to him for almost three hours and he listened attentively without interrupting. When I had finished, he asked me the title of the article about Lourdes which had triggered my conversion. I told him the name of the magazine and the author. He had written it himself.
That year there were two candidates wishing to enter the monastery as novices, myself and a certain young actor from the local theater. There was only one vacancy. The abbot chose me, saying, “You are a Jew and it will be far more difficult for you to find your place in the Church.” He proved right. The second applicant was one Karol Wojtyła, who certainly did find his place in the Church.
11. 1970
F
ROM
H
ILDA’S
D
IARY
What happened last night is beyond my comprehension. It had to be when Daniel was away! Our community was attacked. It was a real pogrom, dreadful. Of course, it had been coming for a long time. I have been a complete idiot not to have been more concerned last month when Sister Lydia, who was praying at night in the church, was alarmed by intruders talking nearby. When she went out and asked what they wanted they immediately vanished. She could not see who they were in the darkness, but noticed there were three of them. She thought that one resembled that homeless Serb I took to the hospital.
I thought no more of it, and did not even mention it to Daniel. That was such a mistake! We were attacked last night. Our watchman, Yusuf, a distant relative of Musa’s, is elderly and rather deaf and might seem better suited to be a resident in our old people’s home than employed as a watchman. He is very keen, though, and has been working with us from the outset, almost three years already, in return for board and lodging. I buy him whatever he needs but that is almost nothing. He was asleep in the annex and woke only when the women in the main building began screaming. A fire had been started on the ground floor. Nurse Berta was on duty in the old people’s home last night and she was also asleep on the second floor. After setting fire to the building, the intruders broke into the church, smashed and stamped on everything they could, and ran away. Yusuf put a ladder up to a second-floor window and all who were able to walk climbed down. Someone happened to be driving along the lower road and rushed to help when he saw the fire. He turned out to be an ex-soldier from the renowned Givati Brigade. The first thing he did was to get Rosina out. She has been bedridden for many years. Then he went back for poor Ans Broessels, who by then had severe burns. The soldier, his name is Aminadav, immediately took her to the hospital. He came back this morning and helped us clear everything up. I told him the story of Ans. She is Dutch. She saved a Jewish boy during the occupation and then emigrated to Israel along with him. The boy’s parents were religious Jews and they died in a concentration camp. Ans considered it her duty to bring him up in the Jewish faith. Tragically, after they came to Israel the boy became a soldier and died in the Six-Day War. Shortly after that she went back to Holland but did not feel at home there and returned to Israel. That is the kind of person who lives in our old people’s home.
An interesting detail Ans told us was that the deportation of Jews from Holland began the day after a Dutch bishop publicly expressed his disapproval of the Nazi policy. The bishop’s letter in defense of the Jews was read out in the churches, and the German commissar immediately responded by deporting 30,000 Jews, mainly Jewish Catholics. Ans believes condemnation of Pius XII for failing to rally the Church in defense of the Jews is unjust. He knew only too well that outright condemnation of the Nazis would have likely only worsened the situation for the Jews, as it had in Holland. Well, that was her point of view.
Aminadav, who helped us so much, is very influential in Haifa and promised that the investigation will be conducted meticulously and the villains caught. He came back to examine the results of the pogrom by the light of day and concluded it must have been a gang of thugs but that most probably they had been hired. We discovered they had made off only with the money in the candle box, and had failed to find the rest of it in my table. Perhaps they just didn’t have time. Fortunately, the fire did not get as far as my table. The refectory has been virtually destroyed. We have lost all the furniture, crockery, and food supplies. I spent the whole of today finding homes for the old ladies with parishioners. They are all lovely, and as a result two women even squabbled over which of them Rosina should stay with.
I went to see Ans at the hospital. The doctors say her condition is critical. They weren’t going to let me see her, but did after much pleading. She looks in a bad state. I am not sure she recognized me. How I wish Daniel was back. I couldn’t even phone him. He has gone to Sinai with a group of tourists.
On the other hand, what a pleasant surprise it was that the Druze came to see us and asked what kind of help we needed. They sent up eight young people who did more in a day than our parishioners could have managed in a month. I am hoping we will shortly have a group of students from Holland and Germany and everybody will join in and put things right again.
12. 1970, Haifa
L
ETTER FROM
H
ILDA TO HER MOTHER
Dear Mother,
It is quite a long time since I last wrote because we suffered a great misfortune. Some criminals wrecked the church and one woman was so badly burned in the fire that she has died. We are all very upset. Daniel is beside himself. I have never seen him in such a state. Almost all the property we have been collecting for the past three years was destroyed and the old people’s home we built has been burned down. We worked for two weeks without a break but now we have to admit that it cannot be rebuilt here because it is just too dangerous to keep helpless old people in such an insecure area. We have 12 of them to look after and for the time being they have been farmed out among the parishioners. I am trying to get them into state institutions but the problem is that they have no citizenship or documents and accordingly have no entitlement to anything. The church has been almost completely restored through the joint efforts of our Druze neighbors, the parishioners, and, in part, the hired laborers, but the main problem was the old people’s home. Then, just when I was in complete despair, a miracle happened. German settlers have been living in a small town not far from Haifa since the end of the nineteenth century. They are quite well off because they own chemical factories, and when one of them, Paul Ecke, heard about the fire, he sought Daniel out and offered to buy him a property in Haifa to use as a home for the community.
I had been very depressed all this time until Daniel told me about Paul’s offer. He was so pleased, and comforted me and said that there is another book, apart from the Bible and the New Testament, which it is important to be able to read. That is the book of life of every individual, and it consists of questions and answers. The answers rarely come before the questions, but when a question is asked the right way, a reply is usually not long in coming. The only thing is, it takes a certain knack to read the book. The question being asked was, “What should we do now?” and the answer came in the form of Paul, who offered to buy us a house. The main thing to recognize is that if what you are doing attracts no outside support, your venture may be without foundation. If it is firmly grounded, help comes. It is as simple as that.
Actually, of course, there is nothing simple about it. While we are repairing the church, we have no time to do what we were always doing. We have been neglecting our old people, our homeless people, and all our work with children is impossible without premises. So for the time being we are in a strange situation which goes right to the heart of the life of the community, our church services. As of now we have no place of worship.