I pick Yariv up from kindergarten and we walk through his world together. No one will be shot here. Pregnant women need not worry — no one will stab them in the stomach. Women pushing strollers can keep peeking at their babies to make sure they’re not too warm, not too cold. No one will throw a baby in the air, wish the first shot had hit it in flight, and try again. But I know. The monsters are here. The only thing missing is the circumstances, and when the circumstances arise it will all happen here, and it will be directed against me because I will not collaborate. They will emerge, all of them, even the people-who-did-not-hate — although where they will come from I do not know — and the camp-commandants-who-triedto-supply-the-regulated-calorie-quotas-even-during-shortages. In the midst of it all, like a sailboat stuck in the mud of Lake Tiberias, waiting for the tide to go out, waiting for a drought to spread its smooth mantle, Hermann Dunevitz’s name rises up, more than half of him now exposed. I must remember.
In the evening, Grandpa Yosef calls to report cheerfully, “I kept thinking about Hermann Dunevitz all day, and I remembered. Anat’s mother’s maiden name was Dunevitz. Maybe that’s why the name stuck in your mind?”
Anat is making our dinner, Yariv is already asleep in bed. (Anat thinks he’s getting an ear infection again.) I go up and ask her.
“Yes, before she was married my mother’s name was Dunevitz. Why?”
My memory already knows, but still it questions — perhaps it is wrong, perhaps the certainty is a mistake.
“What was your grandfather’s name?”
“My grandfather? Hermann. What are all these questions for?”
Hermann Dunevitz.
First there is a trickle of blood, not a rushing feeling. At first it goes, “So what? So what if it’s her grandfather?” But the “so what” loses out, trampled, and newly disorganized thoughts take its place. She says, “My grandfather? Hermann.” And this is Anat, and I gave him a great-grandson, and it is with me, and what am I going to do? I gave him a great-grandson who is sleeping now and he might have an ear infection and I’m married to his granddaughter. His granddaughter. Who is his granddaughter? Why, it’s Anat! It’s Anat and it’s Yariv, and what difference does it make?
But like a necessary torture, it does make a difference, and I am a breathless, silent volcano. I wait silently for the next emotion, the next thought, an uncontrollable internal torrent. In the accompanying transparent light everything comes out, bursts through from within fantastical treasure boxes and locked dowry chests. Gustav Richter, one of Eichmann’s senior aids, a primary implementer of deportation plans and the organizer of a failed attempt to transfer Rumanian Jewry to the concentration camps, was tried only in 1981 and sentenced to four years. Franz Novak, Eichmann’s assistant, particularly active in the deportation of Hungary’s Jews, hid after the war under an assumed name. In 1957 he began using his real name again, but was not tried. He continued to live his life. Only in 1961, after his name came up repeatedly during the Eichmann trial, was he incarcerated and tried; he was sentenced to eight years. He was retried after an appeal and released in 1966. Anton Streitwieser, commandant of Melk camp, was captured at the end of the war but escaped and lived under an assumed identity. He was caught in 1956. He was free until his trial, which began only in 1967. He was given a life sentence and died in prison in 1972. Alfred Nossig, a Jewish collaborator in the Warsaw ghetto, was assassinated by ZOB, the Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa). Herta Bothe, a female camp guard at Bergen-Belsen, was sentenced for her acts in the camp to ten years in prison in 1945, but released in 1951. George Eliot said, “Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.” On one of the transports to Sobibor, some clown decided to spill chlorine into the moving train cars. The chlorine coated the people in the trains. By the time it arrived at Sobibor, the car was filled with pale green bodies whose skin peeled away when touched. Anat calls me for dinner. How can I eat dinner when Gottlieb Muzikant, SS-Sanitätsdienstgrad at the hospital in Melk camp, admitted at his trial, held only in 1960, that he had killed over ninety prisoners by injecting phenol into their hearts and had strangled at least one hundred patients to death? He was sentenced to life in prison, not death. Anat asks where I am and my thoughts need to stop, they must stop, they do stop. I can exist for now in the form of a breathing volcano. I can get up, eat dinner, keep going through the dark memory. I’ll sit next to her, we’ll eat, we’ll think. “So what? So what? So what? Why did I even get mixed up in all this?”
Dinner. The volcano breathes heavily, absorbing little relief from the air, the omelet, the salad.
“Is everything all right?” Anat asks. She wants to talk. It’s Purim soon and she’ll be busy preparing the gift baskets.
The volcano asks, “What do you know about your grandfather, Hermann Dunevitz?”
“Grandpa Hermann?”
“Yes.”
“Not much. He died in Canada, a long time ago. My mother was five.”
“He came from the Lvov region, didn’t he?”
“Maybe, yes, one of those towns. I don’t know. Why? What have you found out?”
“What have I found out? I’ll tell you what I’ve found out. Your grandfather was a murderer. He murdered Jews in the camps.”
Her expression turns grave. “Really?”
I look at her face. Where will this go?
Anat wonders, “But he was Jewish, wasn’t he?”
I tell her almost gleefully, “Yes, but he was a sadist, he was crazy. He hung around the camps and murdered Jews like the worst of the Nazis.”
Silence. She spreads margarine on a slice of bread. The knife moves over the bread. Salt. Pepper. That’s how she eats. “All right, well what do you want now?”
“Nothing.”
I’m not accusing her, it’s not her fault, is it? There’s nothing to accuse her of. And if what came of Hermann Dunevitz is Anat, then everything must be all right, and the theories don’t hold up. Except that now we have to forgive them too, the grandchildren of Nazis, who come here to plant forests.
Anat won’t let it go. “It doesn’t seem like nothing by the look on your face. Come on, tell me, what do you want?”
“Nothing, really nothing. It’s not your fault.”
We eat in silence. Pass the salt. I spread margarine on a slice of bread. I add salt, pepper. The flammable air above us — will it ignite or not?
“Just don’t say anything to my mother! Even if it’s true!”
“Okay.”
We sit quietly. Drink coffee. Read the paper. We hear a noise and sigh. It’s just Yariv stirring in his bed. We toss and turn on our bed until morning comes. Hermann Dunevitz is Anat’s grandfather.
Grandpa Lolek’s surgery became an urgent matter, something to busy ourselves with, because Grandpa Lolek was beginning to behave oddly. Whether it was old age or the tumor was unclear, but it became apparent that he had to have the surgery, and soon. Little defects flowed through his memory and thoughts. He announced that he was leaving the lands in Gedera to me — me and Joyce the dancer, jointly, as long as we didn’t fight. He asked us all to give her the news when she arrived for her usual evening visit, and hoped she wouldn’t be late this time. He was clearly going senile.
We gathered around him with suggestions and data. We took him to the doctor, and together consulted and recommended having the surgery here in Israel, at Hadassah Hospital — the best department. Grandpa Lolek looked frightened as he sat on his chair trying to understand our franticness and the urgent need to undergo surgery. He closed his light blue eyes for a moment, weighing the important decision. Then he opened them and said, “All right. You can have operation.” And so we had to explain everything again, reintroduce the doctor, the room, the Sick Fund, and that the surgery was for his head, not anyone else’s, and that it would be cheap and successful. The doctor would explain everything, here he was. Anat was among us, urging Grandpa Lolek, reassuring him, introducing him to the doctor. We all encouraged him and the doctor encouraged us, saying we should leave Grandpa Lolek in the room with him and let him explain. And Anat was among us, and we were living a quiet married life, kind to each other (shoving reasons to fight into the abyss). The panic over Grandpa Lolek’s confusion was good for us, it softened our dormant troubles. Besides, I had convinced myself that everything was fine. At first I was angry, unable to tolerate the thought that she was the granddaughter of Hermann Dunevitz. But it all passed and I managed to say, “So what?” and to really feel, “So what?” So what if she’s his granddaughter? We’ve been married for six years and I know everything about her, her love, her capacity to truly love people, to help them. She has a love of humankind. (“She has an ego that lives on the back porch,” Effi said). I said, “So what?” and I felt, “So what?” I had simply been alarmed for a moment by the sound of shattering glass. I wasn’t prepared for it. But nothing was broken, nothing had shattered.