Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

He didn't look flaccid and faint like the other Jews but there was no pride of a human being in him either. He wore tatters I wouldn't have given to a pig. He maintained a distance of a meter and a half from me, as if that measure was natural to him and not just a form of obedience. I told him to come close to me and he didn't. I saw his body stiffen; closeness to us was forbidden and he knew that in his body, as a genetic code, but after I raised my voice and waved my cane, he came close. I wanted to discover his image. When he came close I whipped him, he bent over with a typical Jewish dexterity but didn't make a sound. The first blow struck him, but his evasion of the second blow almost made me stumble. He straightened up and said a sentence to me that I shall never forget, he said to me: My name's Ebenezer Schneerson, Herr SS Sturmbahnfuhrer, and there is no acceptable reason for you to hit me, by day I'm the carpenter of SS Obersturmbahnfuhrer Weiss, at night I'm your Jew! And then you can hit me. I noticed the tone of the words. He knew how to emphasize the fact that Weiss's rank was higher than mine but he also knew that I had more power than Weiss. That Yid knew how to play Berlin against our camp, and if somebody needed proof of the force of cunning, that was a smashing example, and if my blood didn't go to my head that was because of the strict education I had obtained in my youth when I was sent to the homeland to complete my schooling, and because my father didn't spare me a decent education worthy of the name. Think before you hit, my father told me, and hit them so that the blow will evoke respect, more than strength, the memory of the blow is more important than anything. But there's no denying that at the sound of Ebenezer's words I was stunned. "My poor puppy ran away from here," I quoted in my mind a line from some forgotten song, and at that time I also saw before my eyes my sisters, Lotte, Sylvia, Kaete, and Eva, I saw my sweet mother in her new house in the homeland, an exact copy of our house in Palestine, in my thoughts I saw them listening to a sweet melody notes bursting from those beautiful music boxes, I saw them putting in a handsome cabinet the pearl necklaces and the beautiful objects I used to bring them now and then from organized tours in the liberated areas of France, Poland, Holland, and Belarus, and I said: Stand, dog, and he stood, I ordered him to make me a box like the one I had seen in Weiss's room but with a different tune, and he said, With your generous permission, and after I didn't say anything else, the dog waited a while and then without turning his face, as was customary, he walked to his kennel, his back knew the way, he didn't stumble, he didn't slip, but he walked backward as if he were born to walk backward. His eyes fixed on me the whole time, weren't lowered. He was frightened, he was very frightened, but he also knew not to show that fear. What a silly demonstration of courage when all I had to do was hang him on the hook and let his guts rot. His face was familiar to me, his name struck waves in my mind for some reason.

I couldn't shut my eyes that night. A scene from the recesses of my youth rose and bothered me and wasn't clear. I heard the sounds of the night, the orders of the guards, I was restless, those eyes of his, I knew them, I got dressed and went to the office to check what block he lived in. There were about a thousand creatures there lying on bunks. None of them paid any attention to me. What could hardly be called human beings were twined into one another like leeches. In the light of my flashlight, some of them were seen chomping breadcrumbs, their faces full of mad lust, hungry, some were rubbing the breadcrumbs on the damp boards to moisten them, others were picking lice out of their heads and swallowing them, others were scraping the sweat off the wall with their tongues, the Latvian and Ukrainian guards huddled around the small stove were amazed to see me. The wooden boards groaned, people muttered in their sleep or in dying that spared us the need to destroy some of them with our own hands every night. He looked straight into my eyes, as if he were waiting for me. I ordered him to get up and he got up. His rags now looked as if they were wrapping a scarecrow. I ordered him to stand on all fours and he obeyed. I was so stunned by it that my grief and offense increased. I was mighty and at the same time the deputy of a fool, a powerful and noble cog in a dark machine of strict and necessary laws. To preserve my honor I had to act as I demanded others act, the chain of orders I was part of created divinity, not vice versa, when I ordered him to recite the prayer Adon 0lam sitting like a dog he told me he didn't know the prayer by heart, that infuriated me not because of what he said but because of the fact that when I attended the Hebrew course in my training as an SS Reiterstandarten I was almost the only one who knew anything about Judaism. And when we were told that every Jew knew the prayer Adon 0lam by heart, I said there were many Jews today who didn't know it. And they laughed at me. The course was superficial and short, we could have succeeded much better if our knowledge had been much better. When I asked my commander, who was an ignoramus about Jewish matters, to read to the students, all of them loyal commanders and good Nazis, the important pamphlet "The Catholic Faith against the Jews" by Isidor of Seville, and I claimed that that was one of the most ancient German works even though it was written in Roman, the commander said: We don't need to learn from the Catholics who the Jews are! As if that was what I meant. He said, and I'll never forget this: An ancient pamphlet a hundred years old shouldn't interest us when we have "The Myth of the Twentieth Century" by Rosenberg. I said, Commander, this pamphlet is more than a thousand years old and it explains to us how ancient and rooted our loathing is and even how justified it is, but instead of listening to me he became hostile to me and it wasn't only because of my wound in the first battle I participated in that I was transferred to the camp, but also because of the enmity of that commander who later participated in the revolt of the generals. And I was denied the bliss of serving the Fuhrer with the courage I knew was in me, because of the miserable jealousy of a person who was later hanged on a hook and died very slowly dripping blood and kicking.

And so I stood facing him, I yelled: Pray Adon 0lam, pray what you don't know. And he muttered something in Hebrew and then I opened my fly and urinated on him. The need to trample him was denied me, I could only insult him.

About a week later, special relationships between him and me started to take shape. Not deliberately at first. I wasn't proud of them then, and I'm not proud of them today. Weiss claimed correctly that I was confusing aesthetics with ethics and we sank into that eternal argument. I sank into a gloomy despair. I was the prisoner of my enemy and I loathed Weiss's perverse ideas. I wrote about the argument between us to my superiors in Berlin. And once again, as in the past, I was answered with a harsh and quarrelsome laconicism and even when I wrote them how Weiss composed a strident oratorio based on the song of the birds whose chirping he could imitate very well (integrating his life as a merchant of oriental objets d'art and a singer in coarse opera), intertwined with selected quotations from the speeches of the Fuhrer, even that letter received an almost amused answer. In the letter I wrote how Weiss would sing his oratorio when he was sitting in his easy chair, an Egyptian cigarette in his hand that was filthy with ash, his face thrust in a dreadful picture of pastoral slopes as a background to a dance of phony satyrs, a footnote of painters puffed up with self-importance and devoid of talent, and next to the picture, dirty and with a broken frame, hung a picture of the Fuhrer. The landscape was framed for him by a Jew-I wrote them-while the picture of the Fuhrer had stood desolate and ruined for two years. In reply to that letter of mine, I was told I would do better to pay attention to the decreasing portions of hair that were essential for our manufacture of mattresses. And that was maybe because the exaggerated interest of certain deputy camp commanders in irrelevant oratorios and their inattention to what required attention was increasing, and the camp commander, it said there, who works to the best of his ability deserves the support of his deputy since he cannot supervise everything.