and moved to the city, got married and raised children. They have new ideas and don’t ever attend the synagogue. He himself still lives with his wife in the same wooden hut where he was born. Every night as he comes home from the market, where he is employed as a coachman, he stops at the nearby woods to chop some wood for heating. When he gets home, his wife is still working in the garden and the chickens scurry around her, pecking. He unloads the wood off his aching back and they go inside together and have supper—dark bread, cooked barley grits, a chunk of hard cheese and hot tea. This simple, hard, pleasant life came to a sudden halt when this grandfather, who for a few moments is mine as well, was arrested, stuffed into a cattle car and brought here. His heavy boots were taken off, he was stripped, showered, shaved, suffocated, incinerated. His smoke scattered in this sky right here, his ashes thrown into the clear water of the river flowing nearby. This is how I went on and scanned many pairs of shoes, and created people, and invented their lives.
In Poland I was proud and happy. The piles of shoes and ash at Auschwitz and Maidanek, and the stories of the witness who accompanied us (who had been one of Dr. Mengele’s “children”), the descriptions of starvation in the woods—all these are not exactly a recipe for happiness, of course, but still I was happy.
At Auschwitz I wept as I read the names of all the Labendiks who had been killed. Labendik was the name of my paternal grandfather before he changed it to the Hebrew name Chayut (vitality)—a rather absurd name to bear in the death camps. I wept at the hall with its commemorative candles and sang the kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead, in a deep sad voice with a list of names in my hand. I burst into very real tears and wept for a very long time, a loud, visceral, unstoppable weeping. It was the first time I ever read this list that we were asked to bring along and my mother had prepared for me before we left. It was photocopied from the town register of Sokolka. What a horrible list: names and names and more names, truly depressing.
I had not worked on a roots project in the seventh grade, not even copied my sisters’ projects, as did many other third sons of deep-rooted families. I was lazy, just as I was too lazy to photocopy that list myself or at least give it a glance before our departure, and that’s why I didn’t know how large my family had been. And perhaps, too, because my grandfather passed away long before I was born and my grandmother did not even live long enough to celebrate my father’s Bar Mitzvah, and so I had no one to relate that huge murdered family to. But that shocking list removed all the brakes and opened my floodgates. Only now did I realize that out of so many, only my father and one aunt—his sister—were left, and that we seven cousins would have numbered dozens or even hundreds of people.
The anger, the sorrow, the shame and the unwillingness to be a part of all this—the emotions I felt towards my Holocaust when I was a young child—were now replaced by entirely different emotions. Now, in Poland, as a high school adolescent, I began to sense belonging, self-love, power and pride, and the desire to contribute, to live and be strong, so strong that no one would ever try to hurt me.
I remember the tones of “Hatikvah” as I played my trumpet in the death camps of Poland, and a year earlier in the German concentration camp at Buchenwald, which I visited with a German-Israeli friendship delegation of youth—the strongest sensation I had had back then was the desire to take revenge.
As I played I took revenge on all those who hated us. If any Nazi villain, I thought, is hiding in Argentina or Brazil, if some miserable train worker of that war is now sitting in his living room in Germany or Poland, he is surely going crazy at the thought that in spite of all the extermination efforts, our State has come into being. A whole nation was gathered from all corners of the earth to the land of its forefathers to found a mighty army and build national waterways and highways, and glass skyscrapers in Tel Aviv. And that nation sent me to the country of this Nazi villain to play our national anthem, full of hope—tikvah.
Wherever they might be, those scum-of-the-earth criminals, they were now tormented by my vengeful playing, our vengeance in being proud Jewish boys, a vengeance mightier than any court sentence, more painful, even, than the hangman’s noose. That melody echoed in the ears of our haters and proved that in spite of the registers of the victims that we read, weeping, and despite the ashes of all those who were incinerated, and the piles of shoes and spectacles and gold teeth pulled out and shipped directly to Switzerland, in spite of it all, we were strong. And I was here and I was blowing the trumpet D-E-F-G-A-A for “Hatikvah” and B-B-F#-G for “My God, my God, may it never be over / The sand and the sea, the rustling water / The glittering sky, man’s prayer.”*
This was sweet revenge. I drew power from my Holocaust and this power pushed me on, to want to enlist and serve in a select recon unit, possibly in the Nahal, for my dad served there and that would strengthen my roots. (And also because there are fewer bullies in the Nahal and my time there would be more fun.) But this is only in parentheses because frankly I am all for integration, and a melting pot the likes of our army exists nowhere else in the world.
This was the force that later pushed me to go to officers’ training at the end of my training as a combatant. Other options of assignment made by my commanders were tempting and even flattering and much in demand, and I wasn’t exactly one of my team’s favorites, to put it mildly. And rightly so.
I was one of those who told on the commander who cheated on exams and who opened a map during navigation maneuvers. I had been instructed that “credibility and truth are foremost in the army,” but I never realized they didn’t really mean it. Even years later, when I would join Breaking the Silence and would tell anyone, any journalist who listened, how houses were blasted and what it was like to use a human shield and how it felt to command a dozen soldiers and 2,500 Palestinians on a normal “workday” at Qalandiya Checkpoint—even then I would still think that credibility and truth come first.
It would take a long time for me to gradually realize that for many people, truth is worth nothing. When I realized this I was deeply disappointed in human nature, just as I felt when, as a child, I discovered what rape was and was ashamed of being male, and just as I felt when I discovered how many guys cheated on pilot training exams. There were only a few nerds who watched their ass and they didn’t really mind what the others did. When the squadron commander arrived to deliver a speech about credibility and warned us not to cheat, I wondered whether he had once been one of the few nerds and not like all the rest. Suddenly, I didn’t believe him. I got sick to my stomach and cried that night, cried like a kid on the shoulder of my buddy, the other nerd in the course.
I cried because I missed my girlfriend, and because of the lies. Everyone lied. Even I lied. I had lied to her two years earlier. I had gone as a “young ambassador” to represent our country in Argentina and Chile. I told them what a cool place Israel was and that they shouldn’t listen to the news about us because everyone lied and we in Israel only wanted peace, and that boys and children were the same everywhere, maybe except for those in countries where they are brainwashed and it was not their fault. There, in Chile, I kissed the daughter of the man in charge of education in the region. We even made out in the back seat of the car, when her father drove us to our next destination. And now I was crying because I hadn’t confessed this to my beloved, my girlfriend who was not waiting for me at home like she did two years ago, loving and loyal, and I was a wretched liar like everyone else. What a crisis that was. The irony is that the friend on whose shoulders I cried would wait not even twenty-four hours after I broke up with that love of my youth before he took her under his wing and invited her to cry on his shoulder—not just any shoulder. It was the shoulder of a pilot, a tall and handsome pilot.
I was sent on this mission to Chile and Argentina on behalf of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when I was in the eleventh grade. We traveled in couples as “young ambassadors” and stayed overnight with host families, mainly from the Jewish communities but also with families of non-Jewish Zionist supporters. We spoke at schools, universities, youth movements and even at one Christian church. We projected an official silent PR film and spoke of our country’s beauty,
