Behind the counter of a small coffee shop on Allenby Avenue in Tel Aviv, Chaim distracted his customers that December morning with a long story. It was a very personal and tragic tale. Abraham, sitting at the bar, sweetened the steaming cup of coffee, and with a gesture of patience prepared to listen to him.
It was part of a routine that had been repeated almost daily since Chaim set foot on Palestine for the first time on board the deck of a dilapidated ship in 1946. Abraham knew it by heart detail by detail. But the little stooped shopkeeper was funny and it seemed like every morning he said something new. That clear morning the first cold winds heralded the premature arrival of winter. And sitting on the stool next to me, Pesaj Rofe translated for me that sad story that had begun 35 years earlier in Poland.
Like any bourgeois family, Chaín enjoyed a certain respect in the Warsaw Jewish community, when German tanks dragged the world into World War II. A small but accredited watchmaker was the entire family heritage. But he did not complain because he gave to live and his children could afford the luxury of periodic whims. One afternoon they knocked on his door. Ever since the morning he saw her wife come out for her after an urgent call, his heart would skip a beat whenever someone rang the doorbell. It wasn’t her, he was sure. Her and her neighbors had told her that they saw her forced into a truck that later stopped at the railway station where she, already in a crowded and smelly wagon, left for an unknown destination towards her death.
At the door of his house, requisitioned and made available by superior order for any German need, one day a Star of David appeared and the word “Jew” in grotesque characters. It was the sign of a passage to the antechamber of death. In this part of his story, Chaim stopped, took a napkin and, pretending to remove a speck from his eye, wiped away his tears. There was an eerie silence around him and he could barely hear the sound of silverware on the plates of some customers, seated a few steps behind.
I asked Pesaj what was happening and with a gesture he cut me off. The doorbell kept ringing so Chaín took the children to the kitchen and opened it. A German guard pushed him, searched the house and ordered the patrol to take him away. The children were as if petrified, watching as they put him on a truck where almost all the Jews from the neighborhood were already. He knew no more of the children and every night he suffered for them in the terrible solitude of the cold walls of Treblinka, where he miraculously survived four years. When the Allies liberated Europe, the war had barely begun for Chaim. There was no place for him in the world. He wandered for weeks from one camp to another. He spent two years looking for his wife and his children. In this hopeless task he was from one side of the continent to the other. He asked Russians, Americans, British, French and Dutch. He violated graves, removed rubble and visited death camps.
Desperation pushed him to alcohol and in a stinking Dutch tavern he met a young man from the Jewish League who told him about Palestine for the first time. He embarked on a ship weeks later in Greece and circumventing the British prohibition was able to disembark one early morning, in the midst of a hundred old people, women and children helpless like him. The story continued for a few more minutes. Breakfast was over and Pesach waved me off. I felt something strange and heavy in the environment. With the sole exception of me and Pesaj, all the customers were scarred old men. They were all staring strangely ahead, absorbed and trembling. On the way to the hotel Pesaj he told me that they were all Poles and had been through the same thing. In a way, Chaim’s story was that of each one of them.
