I finish writing, editing and typing the testimonies. I send each member of the family their testimony so they can make comments and corrections.
Uncle Lunkish phones. “Will you be sending me what you wrote about me too?”
“But you didn’t really say much…”
“But what I did say, will you send it?” And on second thought he adds, “Could you perhaps come again? I think I can talk now.” He voice grows stronger. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
The next day, with Yariv, we sit in his little home. Uncle Lunkish talks. First the childhood, the village, the square. Then the war. The hardships, the ghetto, the concentration camp. And finally, Hermann Dunevitz.
“That was the worst. He made me his helper, that bastard. He forced me. I had to write down on lists the people he named. He was Jewish, but he did not have the heart of a Jew. The Nazis liked him, and as soon as he got to the camp they made him half-prisoner half-officer. They didn’t give him a uniform but they let him walk around the camp wherever he wanted and be their detective. He wrote down punishments, gave out punishments himself, and issued all sorts of orders. I wore glasses before the war, but he took them away from me and I couldn’t see a thing. Everything I did with him afterwards, I didn’t see. I could still write. He made sure of that before he took them. He showed me a pile of glasses and laughed, and explained where the glasses came from, and then he threw mine onto the pile and said it was a great privilege for me that my glasses were on that pile but I was still standing. From that day on I was his assistant. He got me off work duty, and that’s why I’m still alive today, because my strength had already run out and I knew I would not make it through the next Selektion, that they would send me where they had sent the people with the glasses. I don’t know why he needed me. Maybe because they wouldn’t let him be a real officer with rank, because he was Jewish, so he wanted to at least have an assistant. I would walk around with him, seeing everything blurred, and when he stopped in front of someone to decide whether or not to punish them, I had to write down his decision. People would stand across from me, I could barely see them, and they would tell me their number and block number and the name of their block leader, who was the only one who had a name. I would hold the notebook up to my eyes and write everything down, afraid he would kill me if I made a mistake or changed their punishments, because for him, killing was nothing. I may have written down people I knew, who I used to know before they took my glasses. Once someone whispered to me, ‘Naftali, it’s me, Gotleib, get him to let me off.’ I wasn’t entirely sure who Gotleib was, as if for a brief moment the glasses of my memory had also been removed. I wrote down his number and the other stuff, and I wrote down thirty lashings, and in the evening he must have got them.
“That was how it went, from the moment he made up his mind to make me his assistant. I ate well and rested and didn’t see a thing. He used to hold roll-calls too, after the regular roll-calls were over and people were about ready to die of exhaustion. But the Germans allowed him to have them, and I remember, before he took me as his assistant, I would also stand in the cold without food, tired. Now his roll-calls were after the regular ones, and people used to collapse. I would stand opposite the group without seeing anything, and he would walk among them and tell me what to write. He was always looking for Jews from his hometown, to write them down for deportations or kill them himself. During work, if he caught a Jew who wasn’t working properly and discovered he was from his town, he would beat him to death just like that, right in front of me. I couldn’t see anything, but if they were from his town, that was the end. It was as if he had decided to be like the Nazis, but instead of going after all the Jews, he wanted only the Jews from his town. I don’t know why he wanted revenge, it was his obsession. And anytime he issued a punishment for some Jew, he would offer him the option of turning in Jews from his town, if he knew any, and then the punishment would be eased. People snitched on each other, and Dunevitz would interrogate them and get the truth out.
“Finally, the camps came to an end, and the Germans took out everyone who was left and sent them on the Death March. Hermann Dunevitz was convinced he would be allowed to go with the Germans, but they laughed and whipped him, and threw him out to walk with all the other prisoners. I walked too, and I was glad that the nightmare of being with Dunevitz and his notebook was finally over. We walked for a few days, and anyone who no longer had the strength to walk was shot immediately. We didn’t get any food or drink. The Nazis took turns riding a wagon, they ate and drank, and they wouldn’t let us stop walking. I still had some flesh left on my bones, so I had more energy, but even I almost collapsed. You cannot believe what torture it is to keep walking without any rest, for no reason, just so we would die. We were saved by the airplanes that bombed us. From the sky they thought we were soldiers, and they shot at us. All the Germans ran away, it was a day or two before the war was over. Dunevitz also ran, because he knew the Jews would kill him even if it was the last thing they did. I stayed with the Jews and at first they didn’t touch me. People simply lay down on the ground with no strength left. There were some who died that way, and others who started walking and looking for food in the wagon the Germans left. After two days some soldiers found us and took us to a camp, where they took care of us. And it was there that people started harassing me, saying, ‘That’s the partner of Dunevitz, the animal.’ They wanted to kill me. I wouldn’t have resisted, I no longer had the strength to live, even though I couldn’t see anything. But one guy said, ‘Leave him alone,’ and they did. They didn’t have the strength in them either. After a few days I got hold of a pair of glasses, and I met a friend from my hometown who had heard stories about me, but he believed me when I told him I hadn’t been able to see, and together we made our way back to our town. That’s it. I didn’t hear anything more about Dunevitz. Some said he was killed, some said he escaped to America, but I don’t know, goddamn him. Because of him, people have been saying I did bad things my whole life. But I couldn’t see anything.”
Dunevitz. Hermann Dunevitz. Something in the name rings a bell in my memory, trying to come through. Hermann Dunevitz. I ask Attorney Perl.
“Dunevitz? No, I don’t know him. But there were quite a few of those characters; the war gave them an opportunity. You can read in my cards about Yakov Honigman, the kapo from the Gräditz and Faulbruck camps. I also have Hanoch Bayski, who was a Jewish policeman. When the Nazis hanged a Jew he would run after them to report if the hanged man was not dead and should be hanged again. And there was Moshe Puczich from the Ostrowiec ghetto, who was charged with many acts of cruelty, including burying a Jew alive, but he was acquitted in an Israeli court. He probably did the things attributed to him, but the testimonies got complicated because of unreliable witnesses. People testified against him, and it turned out that after the war they had sent him friendly letters, asking him to help them buy a pair of shoes. You see, not all the victims stopped being victims when the war was over. That complicated the testimonies. There were other issues too. People informed on each other because of petty grievances. They took advantage of the circumstances to get back at each other over little quarrels, even conflicts from before the war. But there were some whom they didn’t need to do much investigating to convict. Yehezkel Ingster was also a kapo at Gräditz and Faulbruck, the only person in Israel ever sentenced to death at the time he was tried. A Jew, and he was sentenced to death, even before Eichmann. They didn’t implement the sentence because at the time of the trial he was already very ill, a broken man. They incarcerated him for a short while and he died later.”