a dirt path that led to the Jewish cemetery. Enclosed within a rickety fence and partially bordered by trees, it was abandoned and overgrown with weeds. We forged our way through the surrounding hedges and a hole in the fence. Tall grass, still damp with morning dew, hid many of the grave sites. Bernie looked for names he might remember, names of family and friends, and found a few. Reading the stone slabs, he told us the profession of this or that person and related a few anecdotes in a matter-of-fact way—fragments of life from his normal childhood, before things changed. At one edge of the cemetery, almost hidden beneath the trees, we came across an abandoned coffin and cart that had been used to transport the deceased from the village to their burial place. The cart had been sturdily built, so that even with the passage of more than forty-five years the wooden planks were only partially rotted. Bernie became animated, as if he had made an archaeological discovery. He knew people who had been taken on this cart to their resting places. I felt an aversion to this smug Hungarian village for neglecting the cemetery, for allowing the coffin and cart to lie abandoned and exposed to the elements, for forgetting its former citizens and letting the weeds grow over their graves.
Bernie asked us to leave him alone for a while in the cemetery. So Susan, Sally, and I made our way out through the broken fence, down to the main road, and headed back in the direction of the village below the constantly shifting clouds in a sky that was beginning to clear. We walked slowly so that Bernie could catch up with us. He seemed small and alone as he approached us from a distance. I realized that he may have been the only one of his people to have survived and to have revisited this village. To my amazement, he was striding lightly when he rejoined us. His step had an unexpected buoyancy. We talked about wholly different things, and I suddenly had the feeling that four American friends, whose present lives had hardly anything to do with this place, walked like tourists back toward the main street of Tab. I now know that Bernie wanted it that way.
We made another stop at the tavern. The same men were still talking and drinking. Again, they seemed to take little notice of us. Would they have cared had they known why we had come to Tab? A couple of them might have been old enough to have known the twelve-year-old Bernat or his ten-year-old brother or his mother or father before they were taken away. Why weren't they more curious when they heard this foreign tourist speaking in broken Hungarian?
The walk back down the main street seemed long. I thought of the three burial grounds in my childhood village of Kleinheubach—the Protestant cemetery, the most prominent and the one closest to the village center, the Catholic graveyard, next to a main road that used to be about a ten-minute walk beyond the last houses, and, finally, up on the east slope of the Odenwald, the Jewish cemetery, located in a forest, not unlike the graveyard in Tab. On my last visit to my village, I had taken a walk past the Jewish cemetery. Partially hidden behind high walls, it was locked up tightly. A German sign posted on the gate read, “Anyone defacing this cemetery will be punished by law.” This warning was signed by a former mayor of Kleinheubach, Herr Lippert, who had been a member of the Waffen-SS during World War II.
The main street of Tab brought us back to the railroad station. A semideserted, two-story building, its paint was peeling. Cobwebs hung across some of the doors. Printed signs were yellowed with age. This country station, which looked abandoned like so many train stops all over rural Europe, came to life even in 1990 only twice a day. As we approached, the station appeared quiet and forlorn. Just as in Bernie's youth, the building was inscribed with the word “TAB” in capital letters. Our car stood where we left it. The only sounds were the electric humming of summer crickets and the buzz of low-hanging telephone wires. The clouds were gone, and the sun beat down. Nothing moved. Silence enveloped us for a long moment. Cameras ready, the four of us stood there wondering what pictures to take before our departure. We decided to photograph ourselves, in front of the station and next to the partially overgrown railroad tracks.
After the picture taking, I noticed that Bernie's eyes were fixed on a couple of run-down brick buildings dominated by a tall chimney near a stand of trees to the west. He didn't move except to raise his hands to shade his eyes from the glaring sunlight. Suddenly he said, “That's the brickyard. That's where the horrors began.” No one spoke. As we climbed back into the car and drove away from the village, the fleeting remark hung there in the summer heat.
After our visit to Tab, various bits of conversations I had with Bernie about his past would run through my mind over the next few years. Despite this visit, I still had only fragmentary knowledge of his early life. He had never told his entire story to anyone, preferring to think that the Nazi terror had happened to a “Bernie” in quotation marks, a different Bernie. Would he someday trust me enough to tell me more? Perhaps our suburban California lifestyle was not conducive to such communication. Or was my German background an unspoken barrier? Yet his untold story, the “other side” of him that was closed to me, did not let go. He wanted it that way at first, because it helped him support the division he had made between his present and past lives. I, however, was left with a desire to build a bridge but few means to do so.
When you are twelve years old you feel immortal. Bernie and I both felt that way then. He had told me that much. I remember looking through an open air vent on the tiled roof of my grandparents' house, feeling invulnerable as I watched low-flying American Mustangs strafing the countryside. I asked myself whether Bernie felt fearless, even invulnerable, while he was being transported to Auschwitz—at least before he came in close contact with the death machine. Is that sense of immortality a privilege of youth, no matter how great the dangers? The danger to his life was incomparably greater than the danger I faced. After all, no one was out to get me, personally. No one forced me to go up to the attic to watch American planes during air raids. And air raids didn't continue indefinitely. But the threat to Bernie's life was ever present. A chance decision by a guard or a general order involving the group of inmates to which he happened to belong could have meant his death at any moment. Or he could have been chosen to become a human guinea pig in the bestial experiments of the camp doctor, the infamous Josef Mengele.
How did this twelve-year-old live his daily life in an extermination camp? In another brief allusion to his past, Bernie had compared his experience as a camp survivor to that of a barnacle attached to an underwater rock. I was struck by this metaphor, the hard jagged shell that protects the animal inside. Do analogies help one to understand the life of another person, in particular a life lived inside a factory of death? His analogy was distilled out of his experiences. I drew inferences from what he said, but they were not enough for me to understand the catastrophe that befell him and his family, notwithstanding my years of training as a professor of German and the textbook I had written on the Nazi period.
It wasn't until the 1990s that I became aware that Bernie had searched for links to his past, to that other life to which he claimed to have cut his ties. In the course of putting down our stories, he told me that before his first trip to Israel in 1995 he had thought long and hard about contacting Simcha Katz, his concentration camp buddy of fifty years before. “Without a buddy you couldn't survive/' Bernie told me after this trip. “With a buddy your chances for survival were a little better, because you could help each other.” But instead of elaborating on their friendship and dependence on each other in the concentration camps, Bernie stressed how the intervening years had distanced him from his former partner. They had corresponded for only six months after Bernie's arrival in America. After much soul searching, Bernie decided to reestablish contact with his old friend as part of his visit to Israel. The result was an emotional reunion at the Jerusalem Hyatt, dampened, however, by trouble communicating. Their native Hungarian had grown rusty, and Simcha spoke no English. Bernie's spoken Hebrew was minimal, and neither of them was fluent in Yiddish anymore. They talked to each other through a Hebrew-English interpreter.
Simcha had immigrated to Israel after the war and raised a family. He made his living as a self-employed paving contractor, and the Rosners had tried to downplay how well off they
