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3. Encountering the death of beloved figures:
My mother fell ill and her entire left side was paralyzed. She was taken to the Jewish hospital in the ghetto. We stayed with Aunt Stefa. The night before my mother lost consciousness she was lying in bed and her head was hurting her more than usual. They thought I was asleep and were talking between themselves. My mother said: "What will happen to the children if I don't pull through?" "Don't worry, Zofia," said Aunt Stefa. "I will take care of the children." Then my mother said: "Stefa, keep them with you always, for better or worse." Aunt Stefa made this promise to my mother and was as good as her word. In January 1943 the Germans killed all the patients in the hospital who could not make it to the trains. Aunt Stefa did not say anything to me. I didn't ask. And I did not say anything to my brother. (sandgame, Page 33.) 4. The need to write a diary and poems: Although I had already written my first poem when we were hiding in the attic room in Warsaw, it was only in Bergen-Belsen that I began to think of myself as a poet. I wrote a lot of poetry and sometimes read it to the grownups, who gathered in the barracks to hear it. From then on I planned to be a writer when I grew up. (Sandgame, Page 42.) |
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5. The need to control younger siblings and the world in general:
In Paris we were put up in a fancy ten-story hotel. My brother and I had a room on the seventh floor and felt like royalty. We had a modern bathtub, lots of mirrors, a huge double bed and red carpets. Our sandwiches were ruined, though, because someone had sat on them on the way. I gave my brother a command to find a garbage can to dump them in, but he refused to obey it. In punishment I gave him ten more commands, but that didn't help either, and in the end I had to empty the squashed knapsack myself. Since I didn't know how to work the elevator, I walked down the stairs until I came to a door that opened on a dark alley, looked around to make sure that the coast was clear, and dumped the sandwiches on the pavement. Any Frenchman seeing me would have said: "Those dirty Jews," but who cared? We were going to Palestine. I went back to our room, found my brother taking a bubble bath and jumped in with him.
(Page 44.)  |