In Israel cabinets fall, bread is scarce and butter non-existent, and the buses most distinctly don’t run on time. But one great and overriding fact remains—to the vast majority of the lost and defeated who survived Hitler, this land gave haven and a home. Zelda Popkin did not write this moving story of one defeated latter-day Maccabee and what Israel meant to him as a historical reminder, but such reminders of Jewish struggle and heroism are always appropriate, and especially for this Chanukah season. 

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Since 1914, when I first went to work on a daily newspaper, I have done innumerable interviews. The strangest of them all was that one recently on the Samarian plain in Western Galilee, at a kibbutz called Lochamei Haget’ot, which means “fighters of the ghettos.” It was with a man who was known as Antek in the Warsaw ghetto.

He is the original of Itshak Katz, the Hashomer man, in John Hersey’s novel The Wall. Actually, the living man’s name is Itshak too, Itshak Zuckerman. He is thirty-five now. In 1943, when the battle of the ghetto took place, he was in his twenties, a youth, but seasoned in underground conspiracy and in the cunning of unequal battle. I went to see him to try to find out what becomes of a hero when he has settled down.

An appointment had been made for me by the Public Information Office in Tel Aviv and he was waiting for me in the doorway of a small, one-story, red-roofed, white cement house. He came forward, hand extended. He was tall, lean, and sunburned. He had bushy fair hair and a short, scraggly blond mustache. His eyes were light blue, unusually large, brilliant and intense. He wore khaki slacks and a neat gray pullover sweater. He looked like a Midwestern farmer.

We shook hands. He led the way through the little house to a large room and sat down behind a desk. His manner seemed both curious and shy. He waited for me to speak first.

We had to select a mutual language. We decided on Yiddish. That is a chameleon tongue. It takes on the colorations of the country in which it was learned. My Yiddish had its mixture of English and Antek’s of Polish. Our dialogue went haltingly. Often we had to pause to interpret ourselves. Joe Davis, the former New Zealand newspaperman who was conducting me, knew no Yiddish. He tried to help out with Hebrew.

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Joe had said when we were driving down from the Galilee hills that this place gave him the creeps. Yet in the spring forenoon it seemed pleasant enough. The room was large, airy, and flooded with sun. Simple cream-colored draperies of hand-woven cloth hung at the windows. The desk and chairs were modern, of light woods and chrome tubing. On a shelf a polished silver menorah reflected the light. Photographs ran in a row around the whitewashed walls. There were low glass cases and a tall cylinder, plastered with papers of yellow, pink, green.

I decided to begin with the room where we were. “This is an attractive room,” I said.

“This is our museum,” Antek replied. “Here is our history.”

“I want your personal history,” I said.

He looked down the bare desk top. After a moment he mumbled, “I do not know where to begin.”

“Begin with Warsaw. When did you leave Warsaw?”

“In 1947.”

I thought I had not understood: 1947 was long after the ghetto was razed, two years after the war was over. “But where did you stay all those years?”

His reply was evasively curt. “With friends.”

There was silence again. I tried a new approach. “What did you do before the Nazis came into Warsaw? What was your profession, your trade?”

“Profession? Trade?” His words came painfully. “The underground was my profession. That was all the profession I ever had.”

“How old were you?”

“I am thirty-five now.” He paused again, doing subtraction. “I was twenty-three when the war broke out.”

“You were just a boy, very young for a leader.”

Again the slow, flat, unemotional accents. “We were all young. The older men were afraid. They failed us. There were only the young.” He halted. He waited for me.

I tried a new gambit. “How many of you are here?”

“Seven. There are only fifteen of us alive in the world. Seven of us are in this place. We came together and we decided to remain together, to make sure the world would never forget what happened to us. So we decided to build our kibbutz and to build our museum and gather together all that there was to tell our history. We came here on April nineteenth, two years ago.” He was speaking more easily now.

“Which is now most important to you,” I asked, “to preserve the past or to build a future?”

He wove his long fingers together and studied them. He got up slowly. “I should like to show you what happened to us,” he said.

We walked to the whitewashed wall where the photographs were. “Here it starts,” Antek said. “These are true photographs.” He accented the word “true.” It was a word he was to use often that day, the word the survivors of Dachau and Auschwitz most often employed back in 1945, when they tried to tell all that had happened to them. “It is true. . . . It really happened. . . . It’s true,” as though they were certain we were convinced in advance these things had never happened, could never happen, to people like us.

“These were found on the Nazi commandant of Warsaw when he was captured,” Antek said. “The Nazis were methodical people. They made pictures of everything.”

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Gruesome and graphic, the historic drama unfolded in black and white: first the ghetto intact, the substantial 19th-century houses and shops, the well-dressed residents in the streets; then the laying of the first bricks for the wall and the streets stretching empty and desolate; after that, houses in flames and people in panic, running; then other photographs of people, hands over head after being rounded up, and one of a fear-frozen man being dragged from the cavern where he had hid. Around one wall and half of another, the mordant frieze ran. It ended when the ghetto’s drama was finished, with charred rubble heaps.

The day outside had been hot; I felt chilled to the bone.

Antek walked beside me and stood beside me, without saying a word. He stared at the photographs as though to him, too, they were new. When I had reached the last, he turned and veered toward the cases. “This mandolin.” He lifted it out, fingered it almost indifferently. “They made it there.” It was of metal, tin cans possibly, and its head was the parchment of a torn Holy Scroll. He put it back, his mustache closing over tightened lips. “There are our letters,” he said. “What people wrote to relatives and to friends.” He bit off his words. “And our identity cards. Our yellow badges. All the things of our life. We have collected everything.” Then he led the way to the tall cylinder plastered with papers. “Our instructions are here.”

He had a way of just half raising his arm, never actually pointing, merely indicating where I might look if I chose. There was no urgency in his manner. It was as if, had I been bored, he could have endured even that. The bright papers were handbills in German, instructions where to report, orders to turn in precious metals, gold and silver jewelry, and what meager rations to draw.

I returned to the desk. Antek followed me there. I sat down again. “Now let us talk about you,” I said.

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There was a half minute of silence before Antek shrugged and shook his head. “I will bring you our archivist,” he replied. “Doctor Karmisch,” he called out.

A man bustled in promptly, as though he had had his ear to the door, awaiting summons. Despite the prefatory denial in The Wall, there was and there is an archivist of the battle for the Warsaw ghetto. The counterpart of Hersey’s Noach is a lively, merryeyed, smallish man. He seemed eager to talk, yet like Antek he spoke of no personal matters, merely telling me, in a quick, passing response to my direct question, that in the ghetto, before the disaster, he had been a minor civil servant, and then turning back to the museum. Had I seen everything here? Then come to the other room. There were other things.

The small anteroom through which we had followed Antek when we arrived turned out to be a library and a memorial gallery. It was hung with photographs and framed manuscripts, the letters, poems, plays of Itzhak Katzenelson, poet of the ghetto, who had been deported and had died with the rest of Jewish Warsaw. At one side of the small crowded room were bookshelves and a table spread with pamphlets. In many languages, they retold the ghetto’s disaster. I looked for copies of The Wall and, finding none, asked whether the survivors had read it. Dr. Karmisch said the kibbutz had several copies. They were around, being read.

He shrugged lightly. “They are glad he wrote it, but they do not think it is true to the facts.”

I tried to explain that a novelist has the privilege of choosing whatever proportion of fact he requires, of inventing, of blowing hot, blowing cold, on historic events for artistic effects. The two men—Karmisch and Antek—agreed to that, but Antek said quietly he did not feel that Hersey had given recognition enough to “our underground.” When I pressed him to explain, he replied he would be pleased if we stayed to have lunch.

We went out of the museum. The air was refreshing, was good. “The sea is before us,” Antek said, “and the mountains behind. We have four thousand dunams. We have a fine place.”

Across the road, rusting, lay coils of barbed wire, surrounding an abandoned British Army cantonment. It struck me as more than strange that these people who so long had lived back of barbed wire now kept this here, in daily sight. Masochism, I thought, they torture themselves deliberately, guilty perhaps because they alone have survived. To them the past is all that is real. But can it also be (I felt impelled to revise my thought) that they’ve progressed so that barbed wire has become meaningless and they can see it yet no longer see it, defy the symbol because they are free and alive and part of a creative life? No, I thought again, that cannot be so, else why do they cherish each macabre scrap?

I called Antek’s attention to the wire and asked him why it still was there. “We have not had time to remove it,” he answered. “We have more important things to do here.”

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We were late for lunch. The long, cool dining hall was all but empty. Most of the members of the kibbutz had eaten and gone back to work. Antek cleared and wiped off a table for us, brought in a platter of bread, set down our spoons, carried in metal soup plates with kasha and meat balls in gravy. As is the custom in the kibbutzim, meat or fish and vegetables are served first, in their gravy. You wipe your plate clean with a chunk of bread and ladle soup into the dish. As we finished our kasha and meat, Antek glanced at me and got up. He hurried into the kitchen and brought out clean soup bowls. “It isn’t necessary,” I said. “I have eaten in a kibbutz before.” He blushed, but he smiled faintly and seemed pleased. The soup was an excellent borscht. I praised it. “It’s a real borscht.”

“Everything here is real,” he answered stiffly. We finished without more conversation. He brought out a bowl of oranges. Then he said, if we were interested he would like to show us the rest of the kibbutz.

We walked slowly along the paths between the small cement houses. We received the statistics: the kibbutz had two hundred and sixty people, one hundred and eighty adults. It had taken in forty Iraqi and Syrian orphans. The kibbutz was getting along well enough. Here were the workshops; there were the barns; there the orchards of young fruit trees. Here was the school; there the culture building. As an achievement in building up, the place was indeed impressive.

But Joe Davis had been correct after all. Something about the place was depressing. This was springtime in Galilee. Everywhere fields were freshly green. Scarlet anemones spangled the grass. Yet here it was barren and bleak. Some attempt had been made to plant flowers. They hadn’t done well, were scraggly and sparse. There were no lawns, no shade trees. It almost seemed as though most of what had been left of strength and of will in the group had been channeled into perpetuating memories of a barbarous past.

“What is your work here?” I asked Antek while we walked along.

“I used to drive a tractor.”

“And now?”

“I am sick.”

The familiar silence dropped between us again.

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We came at the end of the afternoon to the infants’ house, a small white cement building, with a red roof, like the museum. It was nap time and therefore we couldn’t go in and so we stood on tiptoe and peered through a screen. In an immaculate nursery, five rosy infants lay asleep in their cribs.

Then, all at once, the man who had been Antek turned to me. “I have a son sleeping there,” he said. He spoke quietly.

In the book that Hersey wrote about the Warsaw ghetto, a baby is born in the underground bunkers where the fighters hide. It is a precious infant but it is hungry and therefore it cries. The noise of its crying puts all the others in peril and the child must be killed. It is put to death by the Hashomer man, the man modeled on Antek himself.

“I have a son sleeping there,” Antek had said. In those six words he told me everything I wished to know.

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