to hear details about the “buddy system,” Bernie told me more about present matters—Simcha's current life and the Rosners' impressions of contemporary Israel. Simcha did not want Bernie to talk about their experiences in the concentration camp. The pain, as Bernie told me, remained too raw for him, even after so many years. I, for my part, began to ruminate on this glimpse Bernie had allowed into the buddy system and what might have happened to them decades ago behind the watch towers, barbed wire, and electric fences. Too much time had passed, too much had changed for these two concentration camp inmates to find their way back to the days when they both needed each other for their survival.
I thought about my own childhood buddy, Ludwig Bohn, with whom I played chess in summer 1944—at the time that Bernie was deported to Auschwitz. We played our game behind shuttered windows to keep out the heat and humidity. Ludwig and I would take long walks through the countryside, and on several of these forays we searched for a specimen of Goethe's Urpflanze, the ideal prototype of perfection in the plant world. We convinced ourselves that we found the Urpflanze in the form of a particularly tall pine tree in the English gardens of the Prince of Lowenstein's castle at the edge of Kleinheubach. I lost track of Ludwig when I came to the United States. But I found out that he married a woman of German descent in Namibia, a German colony before World War I, and I also heard rumors that he had become an anti-Semite.
Shortly after Bernie told me about Simcha, I dreamed that I telephoned Ludwig in Africa and tried to question him about these rumors. In the dream I reminded Ludwig that we had boycotted some of the meetings of the Jungvolk, the pre-Hitler Youth organization we had to join, preferring to play chess, collect stamps, and look for Goethe's perfect plant. We had considered ourselves better than the clods who ran the Nazi youth meetings. I asked what had happened to him. Why had he changed? But the answer to my repeated questions over the phone was silence. In my dream he did not reply.
I sometimes thought that Bernie and I should just let go of our pasts. I reasoned that if we would simply forget, we wouldn't be suppressing anything. We were the buddies now, but not to survive a death camp or to search for an Urpflanze in a princely park. Why not just have another glass of wine and listen to music, or discuss philosophy or European literature? After all, the 1990s were not 1944. We might just as well take advantage of suburban American life and the easy escape from history it provided.
One day, as we lounged at his pool, I was amused to learn that Bernie could barely swim. He not only admitted it but also thrashed across the shallow width of his pool to demonstrate his uncertainty in the water. I told him about my own water shyness and how as a boy I used to tell my grandmother that I'd been in the Main River all the way up to my neck, when in fact I'd barely gotten my swimming trunks wet. We both had a good laugh. Wasn't communicating such intimate trivia of the past enough? Isn't it exactly the shared bons moments in life that deepen a friendship? Although we enjoyed this pleasant status quo, I wondered whether it could be sustained. Lurking just below the surface of this everyday, after all, were events that remained never more than a nightmare or a phobia away for both of us. Without our being completely aware of it, the walls we had raised around these events had already begun to crumble. As it turned out, something unexpected happened that brought the walls crashing down.
On a business trip to the East Coast not long before his retirement in 1993, Bernie visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. The museum was crowded, and when he received a number that would have allowed him to enter too late in the day to make his afternoon flight back to the West Coast, he informed museum personnel of his predicament and of the fact that he was a concentration camp survivor. They immediately allowed him to enter.
In the museum Bernie looked up the Nazis' records of the arrivals at the Mauthausen concentration camp. He had been transferred from Auschwitz to Mauthausen in September 1944. His reaction to these documents took him by surprise. He told me that his heart began to pound as he started to turn the pages on the microfiche machine to the date of his own arrival. When he finally reached the relevant page and ran his finger down the entries, there it was, his name, in an old German typeface: “Rosner Bernat.” Thus he came face-to-face with his experience at Mauthausen. He told me that as he stared at his name, all the steps he had taken in his life seemed to lead nowhere but back to the horrors of that past. He was shaken, and he decided there in the museum that the time had come to confront his concentration camp experiences as directly as possible. These bureaucratic documents that stood for events that he had believed no longer would touch him convinced him to do so. Not only did he want to tell his story now, but he wanted to tell it to me. I felt moved by his decision, yet uncertain about what it would mean.
It became clear that our suburban get-togethers with our wives, our casual poolside or dinner table conversations accompanied by good food and wine, were not the appropriate framework for the telling of his story. So we decided that just the two of us would meet, beginning in fall 1995. By then we were both retired and no longer had to focus our energy on present tasks or on long-term professional objectives. I think that this slight slackening of the will—which Thomas Mann considered crucial for gaining insights into the past—also helped us to bring our histories out of hiding.
Our working method was simple. I took notes of Bernie's oral accounts and rendered them into narrative form. I wrote up my own story in conjunction with his. My wife, Sally, a freelance writer, then worked on organization and English style. After the draft of a section was written, we got together for a reading and discussion, and Bernie made additions and corrections. This matter-of-fact chronicling of how we proceeded, however, conveys little of the difficult path we had chosen to travel together. For one thing, even after Bernie decided to tell me his story, we drifted toward these memoirs, or rather, we backed into them gradually. We had no preconceived notion of a “final product.” That early unselfconscious, naive phase of our joint efforts, when we gathered memory fragments, wrote them down, and discussed them, was crucial for the emergence of the eventual memoirs. And at the outset, we had no idea what obstacles and limits we would encounter on our way—obstacles in Bernie, limits in myself.
The story emerged in twists and turns. At first it seemed
enough to listen to Bernie tell me about his concentration camp experiences in a deliberately detached and factual manner. His initial recollections emerged well thought out and usually presented without hesitation. He was an attorney, after all, accomplished in articulating conflicts and complexities. His verbal facility helped to put me at ease and allowed me to approach a life very different from my own. It helped that we had a silent agreement about the limits regarding what needed to be or should be articulated. But then, sometimes a year or more later, heartrending facts would surface when he made new “stabs into his memory bank,” as he called them. I slowly learned that “sticking to the facts” and recounting them as rationally as possible was also Bernie's way of not seeing that these facts had inflicted wounds. It took him time to admit this.
To maintain the separation between his two lives, during our visit to Tab in 1990 Bernie had downplayed the trauma he had experienced there. And true to his American persona, it was late in our work that he admitted to me his compulsive desire during one period of his adult life to return to Tab, to revisit the places where his parents had lived. During this period, he even purchased a detailed map of the region and memorized all the train stations between Tab and nearby Siofok.
As for me, I narrated my story believing that my good memory and grasp of details in their historical context would be a reliable guide to my own past. I learned, however, that what one puts in and leaves out—what one likes to remember or prefers to forget—also tells a story, one that is difficult and occasionally impossible to narrate. But over time, as I saw Bernie struggle with his own past, it was natural for me to look at myself, at who I am now and what made me this way. Bernie encouraged me to do so.
Someone
