Sunrise West by Jacob G.Rosenberg Read Free Book Online Page B

week.” “But doctor,” I said, “I have no money.” To which she replied: “Young man, my job is to look after your health, not your bank account.” I became very agitated, jumped up from my chair, called her heartless and arrogant. But the woman sat there unruffled. “Doctors don’t have to be admirable people,” she said.’
    This might strike the reader as a sad joke, but it’s not. As it turned out, Zakhor lived, while the little doctor unexpectedly passed on. Survivors harboured an inherent dislike for doctors: there were many cases where, in order to gain favours for themselves, camp doctors had reported their patients to the authorities — which was as good as a ticket to the gas chambers.
    One day we went to a public baths in a nearby town. As we undressed I noticed that three toes were missing from Zakhor’s left foot. ‘I lost them in Gross-Rosen, during roadmaking,’ he explained apologetically. ‘For days I had to stand barefoot in freezing mud, and though it was almostspring it wouldn’t stop snowing. As you can see, nature is quite indifferent to human suffering.’
    I nodded, looking away, but Moshe was not finished yet. ‘I believe,’ he resumed, ‘that Vincent Van Gogh understood nature’s indifference to pain better than any other painter. You just need to look at his nervous landscapes, his flowers. Perhaps, in a way, he was also an inmate, a condemned ghetto-dweller — which made him rebel, in the face of the human anguish within him and all around him, not only against collaborating with the prettiness of nature, but against its very apathy and silence.’

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    Â  Pinocchio  
    Time had eaten up much of May; most of the former prisoners were preparing to leave, or had already left, for their respective national homes. At dusk we sat around watching the embers of our smouldering youth. Moshe whispered, ‘Where to, Zakhor, where to?’ Perhaps to feed his depressed mood, he began to mouth the words of a Polish miners’ song — one which our former German masters had forbidden on pain of death:

    We will never see the sun again,
    God’s luminous feast;
    We are condemned to die far away
    From our homeland in the east.

    But before long we heard that illegal emigration to Palestine was being organized. It was time to leave Austria. At the start of June we boarded a goods train for Italy and headed south.
    It was early on this journey that I met up with Majer Ceprow, my sister Ida’s husband, a short man with a talent for acting. Moshe Zakhor, who had once been Maximilian Zacharski, was not overjoyed. ‘A brother-in-law,’ he maintained, ‘is just that, a brother-in-law.’
    â€˜Meaning?’ I asked.
    â€˜Meaning that if your sibling is dead, the “in- law ” does not apply.’
    â€˜Maybe,’ I said, ‘but at a time when all your dear ones lie murdered, he is not just family but a real link to the past.’
    The goods train that ferried us across the border was welcomed by scores of Italians. At Bolzano there were orchestras, choirs and speeches, but no food: things were in perfect disarray. Oddly, however, commerce had not stopped thriving. In June the days are beautiful in the north of Italy, but the nights are brutally cold — and were especially so for our two hundred or so travelling camp survivors.
    As we pushed deeper into the country our hunger became unbearable, but we had no money to buy food and no commodities to trade. My leather belt, which I had ‘organized’ in Mozart’s city, Salzburg, during our brief stopover there — camp inmates were terrific organizers — fetched a loaf of bread, but that didn’t last more than an hour. Majer came up with a brilliant idea. ‘I’ll exchange my woollen trousers for some cotton shorts,’ he said (shorts were quite fashionable during the warm Italian