“His compliment embarrassed me but filled me with pride. I wished I could be his student at the real university in Lvov. In Bochnia they had said I had the character of a scholar. One day I asked Adler, ‘Why, why this extermination? Why is all this occurring?’
“Adler stopped working and stood bewildered, holding his pick up in mid-air. Then he slowly lowered it. ‘Why the extermination?’ He repeated my question, mulling it over. He went back to work. He hummed the sentence to himself one more time, ‘Why the extermination?’ Then he demanded, ‘The future, we must think only of the future.’
“And so I told him of the future, of Feiga and me holding a son, the baby’s lavish briss ceremony, rabbis gathering from all corners of the land to see the newborn, and blessing him, not explaining why they have convened, but with hints in their eyes. They huddle secretively every once in a while and sip the good wine, khamra taba, and they closely examine the baby’s face in silence. I listed for Adler the names of the rabbis, gather them from all the dynasties of Poland and Lithuania, as if my eyes are passing over a wall of radiance.
“Adler listens, encouraging, and asks, ‘What will you name your firstborn?’
“And my heart cries out, ‘I will name him after you!’
“One day there was an outbreak of typhus in the camp and Adler fell ill. He was simply one among many. At first he kept his strength and tried to join the work group, but he quickly weakened. From then on our roles were reversed. I, the healthy one, took it upon myself to save Adler from the disease, from being finished off with a shot, from some connivance of damned Farkelstein. I called out to him, ‘Be angry! Be bitter!’ and begged our Creator to take pity on this man. I gave him food from my meager allowance, and he ate from my palm like a baby. His kind eyes thanked me, and that was the greatest gift I could have sought from Hashem, blessed be He. But Adler was dying. There was no choice but to take him to the rivier, the infirmary, a place that offered no great cures, only sadistic doctors and reduced food rations; at the end of every week, those who had not recovered were killed.
“For a day or two I was left on my own, and then a sudden boldness took hold of me. I stole an extra portion of bread for Adler and rushed to the rivier with some excuse to visit him. I handed him the bread, proud and embarrassed — but Adler needed food no longer. Instead of the bread he grasped my hand and pulled me to him. He began to mumble in my ears, words that I believed at first came from the shock of his waning mind, but slowly they began to make sense. Adler was trying to tell me about a portion of research he had not sufficiently delved into, a section he had found but had not been able to investigate. One day, he suggested, I might want to look into this line of research. From the force of his excitement he rose feverishly from his bed, attempting to sit up. I tried to hold him down with both hands, afraid he would make a commotion in that rivier of those cursed people, where both the healthy and the sick could find themselves dead. But Adler’s strength was greater than mine, like Jacob our father battling the angel.
“‘You know,’ he said, ‘Jews did not always allow themselves to be killed without taking revenge.’ His voice grew bitter, as if he were practicing the future, not discussing the past. ‘Jews fought. They formed groups to plot against the plunderers. They preferred death by the sword to a pathetic death like ours. And more than anyone, you must know about the Jewish pirates. Subatol Deul was Jewish, he wrote his secrets in Hebrew. And more wondrous than him were the rabbis that went out to sea to take revenge on the Spaniards who expelled the Jews from Spain. Pirate rabbis sailed the seven seas, kept the Sabbath, observed the mitzvahs, and on weekdays they rampaged against their enemies!’ Then he told me, ‘After you are freed, study them.’ His body radiated with a strong force and he was actually shaking me. I could not listen to his words, horrified by his strength and his awful vacant face, which contained both the most beautiful of professorial looks, and the terror of a man about to die.
“The rivier physician, Doctor Gosen, damn him, had begun his evening rounds, God help us, and I grew frightened. I extricated myself from Adler and promised to visit him the next day, but both he and I knew it was a lie. The next day I was told to work in a new group, with the corpse burners, God help us. Adler’s body was at the top of the heap, ready for us to burn in the pits. The Nazis, damn them, had not been able to kill him. Adler had returned his soul to the Creator and I said a kaddish prayer over him, so the Lord of the Universe would know that a Jew still mourned for a Jew. That even here, someone was still dear to someone else’s heart.
“From that day forward I decided to take up my prayers again. Since being deported from Bochnia I had evaded all the duties of a Jew. I ate treif, I did not say the blessings, did not pray. But I made up my mind to pray every day for Adler’s soul, and to go back to saying the three daily prayers: shacharit, mincha and ma’ariv.”
Grandpa Yosef remembers it is time to pray now. He pauses the tale of his journey and is about to go to the end of the hallway, where he has found a corner for his prayers by the vending machine.
“What happened to Farkelstein?” I ask.
Grandpa Yosef stops in his tracks, annoyed. “What happened to Farkelstein? How would I know what happened to Farkelstein? And what happened to every single Jew I met? There were thousands and thousands there — how should I know what happened to them?”
He walks out briskly and prays. Then he uses the coins Anat sent for him (sometimes the thermos isn’t enough) for a cup of “Swiss coffee” from the machine. He comes back with a hesitant look on his face, slightly ashamed of his outburst, and says, “I don’t know about Farkelstein. There’s no way to know. But today I am Shoah-smart, you could say, and I know that people like Adler were marked men from the beginning. Who would live? Who would die? Was there any way to predict? That’s not what I’m saying. But there were those whose fate was marked on them from the beginning. The brazen would live, the pure would die. Adler, there were no two ways about it, was fated to die, as if the Angel of Death himself had seen to it.
“I did not have much time to mourn for Adler. The typhus plague did not subside, the SS themselves began to fear infection, and they started with the transports. At the beginning of March I packed up my belongings again, as they say (nu, it’s a joke, I had no belongings at all), and I was sent with a large group to Sachsenhausen camp. Documents have shown that the men’s camp of Ravensbrück belonged to Sachsenhausen from the beginning. So once again we were transferred, probably to satisfy the cursed Nazis’ quotas and regulations. Sachsenhausen is less than twenty miles northeast of Berlin.
“In Sachsenhausen I learned a profession for the first time in my life. I softened leather boots for German soldiers. How? By walking. Instead of a German soldier getting a pair of painful new leather boots, they used our infinite supply of spare feet. Under the supervision of orthopedic specialists, we marched back and forth through the camp in new army boots, without socks, without rest. We walked and walked. When a boot was worn in and the experts decreed it suitable for the noble foot of a soldier, we were rewarded with a new boot to teach us new pain.