— What?
— Yes. I hung on with all my might to Linka, who began running toward him along with the Mohammedans jumping out of the cars — the news had reached every one of them in no time. As if I didn’t know the common people’s lust to stare at the dead and the maimed! The two Turkish soldiers began pushing the crowd back — striking out at it — striking at Linka — letting no one through but me — who was running with his overcoat, screaming and begging to cover the two halves of him before she could get to them… Papa dear — Papa — ah, look! — it is dawn already… I have been talking nonstop… Papa?
— You fell asleep, old man. Look at me… Papa, Papa, answer me… don’t scare me… what is the matter?
— What is the matter? What did I say? Why are you crying?
— But I don’t understand. Dearest Papa! You are crying. Why?
— But for whom?
— For him? Him? How can you? You… what are… oh, Papa…
— To blame? How? I told you we were just a pretext…
— How stayed with him? What are you talking about?
— By myself?
— Summoned you? From where? To where? You do not know what you are talking about…
— The master of what?
— But it was his own self. The demon inside him. You will drive me out of my senses… stayed with him? I like that, ha ha…
— What kind of cynicism?
— Nihilism? No, I have said quite enough… But what are you crying for? For whom? Can’t you see that Mama is very ill? You are blind… she is going to die… if you must cry, cry for those you should cry for…
Biographical
Supplement
Although EFRAYIM SHAPIRO left his parents’ estate as he promised to, it took him a year because of the sudden deterioration in the health of his mother, who died a month after her children’s return from Palestine. It was not until the late autumn of 1900 that Efrayim moved to Cracow, where he took a job as a pediatric physician in a hospital. Linka, who could not bear the loneliness of life on the estate, followed him there and found work as a volunteer nurse in the same hospital. Before long she fell in love with a Catholic doctor and — after a bitter quarrel with her father and brother, who were opposed to the match — became his wife. She converted to Catholicism, moved with her husband to Warsaw, and had a son and a daughter there.
The dramatic estrangement was exceedingly painful, and soon the family was reconciled. Indeed, since Efrayim Shapiro remained a bachelor, he grew greatly attached to his niece and nephew, whom he visited often in Warsaw and saw during summer vacations on his father’s estate, to which Linka usually came without her husband.
After the death of Sholom Shapiro in 1918, Linka sold her share of the estate to local farmers, while Efrayim returned to Jelleny-Szad and settled on his half of the land, which was run by a steward. Although his income from it was not as great as his father’s had been, it was still a respectable amount, enough for him to cut down on his medical practice and limit it to occasional house calls in Oświ[ecedil]cim. In effect, he led a leisurely life of early retirement, the happiest moments of which were the visits of his beloved sister and her children — who, despite their having been baptized, took a lively interest in their mother and uncle’s Jewishness.
With the outbreak of World War II and the German blitzkrieg that overran Poland, Efrayim Shapiro, who was sixty-nine at the time, went to Warsaw to be with his sister. It did not take him long to realize, however, that her home was not a safe hiding place for him and that she, her children, and her grandchildren were in no less danger than he was. Soon he returned to his estate, where — with the help of some loyal servants — he constructed the perfect hideaway and “disappeared.” He remained there from 1939 to 1943, within sight of the nearby concentration camp, whose increasingly technologically advanced features the old doctor had more than an inkling of. When news reached him after the final liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto that his niece had been sent to Auschwitz, he became so distraught that he gave himself up to the Germans for no good reason, thereby spelling the doom of his servants as well. He never reached the camp itself, however. Collapsing at the entrance to it, he was shot and killed on the spot at the age of seventy-three.
SHOLOM SHAPIRO did not have an easy time of it after his wife’s death. Having learned to live with the fact of her poor health, he had never dreamed that she would die so quickly. After his son and daughter left Jelleny-Szad, he tried to cope with his loneliness by intensifying his Zionist activity. He did not attend the Fourth Zionist Congress in London because it was held during the year of mourning for his wife, but he was present at the Fifth Congress, which took place in Basel again, and in 1909 he visited Palestine with a group organized by him from the Zionist Club in Cracow. It was a highly successful tour that strengthened the Zionist convictions of its members. While in Jerusalem, Sholom Shapiro went off one day to look for the Manis, but he did not find any of them. Although he was able to locate the clinic in Kerem Avraham, by then converted into a cheap tourists’ hostel, and to identify it by the faded remains of some mirrors in one of its ground-floor rooms, none of the Mani family lived there anymore. Young Yosef Mani, he was told, had departed two years previously to study in Turkey, had stopped on his way in Beirut, and had vanished there. His sister had married a Moroccan Jew and gone with her mother to live with him in Marseilles. The neighbors who told Shapiro all this remembered well the brother and sister from Poland who had been in Jerusalem in 1899 with catastrophic results for their beloved doctor.
Despite his disappointment at being unable to locate the Manis and offer them financial compensation, Sholom Shapiro was highly satisfied with his trip to Palestine. Although no longer a young man, he formed in the course of it a romantic attachment to a young lady from Cracow, a member of the tour group, which continued after his return to Jelleny-Szad.
Like Efrayim, Sholom was greatly attached to his “Christian” grandchildren. Since his daughter’s home in Warsaw was not kosher, he did not often visit them there, but each year he waited impatiently for their summer excursion to the countryside, during which he taught them some Hebrew and Judaism. He died after a brief illness in 1918, at the age of seventy, having lived long enough to rejoice at the news of the Balfour Declaration.