Antonio Molina - Sepharad

“WHAT IS THE MINIMAL portion of country, what dose of roots or hearth, that a human being requires?” Jean Améry asked himself, remembering his flight from Austria in 1938, perhaps the night of March 15, on the express train that left Vienna at 11:15 for Prague, his troubled, clandestine journey across European borders toward the provisional refuge of Antwerp, where he knew the endless insecurity of exiled Jews, the native’s hostility toward foreigners, humiliation from the police and officials who examine papers and certify or deny permits and make you come back the next day and the next and who look at the refugee as someone suspected of a crime. The worst is to be stripped of the nationality you thought was yours inalienably. You need at least a house in which you can feel safe, Améry says, a room that you can’t be dragged from in the middle of the night, that you don’t have to run from as fast as you can when you hear police whistles and footsteps on the stairs.

YOU HAVE ALWAYS LIVED in the same house and the same room and walked the same streets to your office, where you work from eight to three Monday through Friday, yet you are also constantly running and can’t find asylum anywhere. You cross borders at night along smugglers’ routes, travel with false papers on a train, and stay awake while the other passengers snore at your side. You fear that the footsteps coming down the corridor toward you are those of a policeman. At the border, uniformed men who study your papers may motion you to one side, and then the other travelers, who have their passports in order and are not afraid, look at you with relief, because the misfortune that has befallen you has left them unscathed, and they begin to see in your face signs of guilt, of crime, a mark that cannot be seen and yet cannot be erased, an indelible stain that is not in your appearance but is in your blood, the blood of a Jew or of a sick man who knows he will be driven out if his condition is discovered. Confined in a sanatorium for tuberculosis, Kafka remembers the anti-Semitic remarks another patient made at the dining table, and writes a letter sharpened by insomnia and fever: The insecure situation of the Jews explains perfectly why they believe that they are permitted to possess only what they can cling to with their hands or teeth, and that only such possession gives them the right to live.

In the room of a hotel in Port-Bou, Walter Benjamin took his own life because there was no road left to take as he fled from the Germans. Two identities were offered to Jean Améry when he was stopped by the Gestapo, when he was interrogated and then tortured by the SS: enemy or victim. He could be a German, an army deserter, in which case he would be tried and shot as a traitor, or he could be a Jew, in which case he would be sent to a death camp. He was arrested in May 1943, in Brussels, where under the name of Hans Mayer he and his small group of German-speaking resisters printed leaflets and distributed them at night near the barracks of the Wehrmacht, risking their lives on the futile hope that the conscience of some German soldier would be moved by reading them. Primo Levi armed himself only a few months later with the small pistol he didn’t know how to use, no more a threat to the Third Reich than Améry’s leaflets. Neither man was a practicing Jew; Levi thought of himself as Italian, Améry as nothing but Austrian. But when arrested, both declared themselves Jews and joined the ranks of victims condemned not by their acts or their words, not for distributing pamphlets or plunging into the forest without warm clothes or boots and with no weapon but a ridiculous little pistol, but for the simple fact of having been born.

You are the person who after the morning of September 19, 1941, must go outside wearing a Star of David on your chest, visibly displayed, printed in black on a yellow rectangle, like the Jews in medieval cities, but now with all kinds of regulations regarding size and placement, explained in detail in the decree, which also lists the punishments awaiting the person who does not wear the star when he goes out or tries to obscure it by covering it, for example, with a briefcase or shopping bag or even with an arm holding an umbrella. In the Warsaw Ghetto, the star was blue, the armband white.

YOU ARE ANYONE AND NO ONE, the person you invent or remember and the person others invent or remember, those who knew you in the past, in another city and another life, and retain a frozen image of what you were then, like a forgotten photograph that surprises and repels when you see it years later. You are the person who imagined futures that now seem puerile, the person so much in love with women you can’t remember now, and the person you sometimes were whom no one knew. You are what others, right now, somewhere, are saying about you, and what someone who never met you is telling of what he has been told. You change your room, your city, your life, but shadows and doubles of you continue to inhabit the places you left behind. As a boy you ran along the street imagining you were galloping your pony, and you were both the rider spurring on your mount with film-cowboy yells and the galloping horse, and also the boy who saw that horse and rider in a movie, and the one who the next day excitedly told about the movie to friends who didn’t see it, and you are the boy who with shining eyes listens to another tell stories, the boy who asks for just one more story so his mother won’t leave and turn out the light, the mother who finishes telling the story to her son and sees in his eyes all the nervous enthusiasm of imagination, the desire to hear more, to prevent the loving voice from falling silent or the room from turning dark, when it will be invaded by dark fears.

You change your life, room, face, city, love, but something persists that has been inside you for as long as you can remember, before you learned to reason, it is the marrow of what you are, of what has never been extinguished, like a live coal hidden beneath the ashes of last night’s fire. You are uprootedness and foreignness, not being completely in any one place, not sharing the certainty of belonging that seems so natural and easy in others, taking it for granted like the firm ground beneath their feet. You are the guest who may not have been invited, the tenant who may be ejected, the little fat kid among the bullies in the schoolyard, the one flat-footed soldier in the garrison, the effeminate man among the macho, the model student who is dying inside of loneliness and embarrassment, the husband who looks at women out of the corner of his eye as he strolls arm in arm with his wife on a Sunday afternoon in his provincial city, the temporary employee who never is given a contract, the black Moroccan who leaps from a smuggler’s boat onto a beach in Cádiz and moves inland by night, soaked to the bone, freezing, dodging the spotlights of the Guardia Civil. You are the Spanish Republican who crosses the French border in February 1939 and is treated like a dog or someone with the plague and sent to a camp on a rugged seacoast, imprisoned in a sinister geometry of barracks and barbed wire, the natural geometry and geography of Europe during those years — from the infamous beaches of Argelès-sur-Mer, where Spanish Republicans are herded like cattle, to the farthest reaches of Siberia, from which Margarete Buber-Neumann returned only to be sent not to freedom but to the German camp of Ravensbrück.

YOU DON’T KNOW WHO you would be if you found yourself expelled from your home and country; arrested by a patrol of the Gestapo as you distribute leaflets one dawn in a street in Brussels and are hanged from a hook, held by handcuffs behind your back so that as the chain goes up and your feet lift from the ground, you hear the sound of your shoulder joints as they are dislocated; locked in a cattle car in which you spend five whole days traveling with forty-five other people, and night and day you hear the crying of a nursing baby whose mother cannot feed it, and you lick the ice that forms in the cracks between the planks of the car because in those five days and nights there is no food or water for you, and when finally the door is opened on an icy night, you see the light reflecting the name of a station you never heard of before: Auschwitz. “No one knows whether he will be cowardly or brave when his time comes,” my friend José Luis Pinillos told me. In a remote life, when he was a youth of twenty-two, he fought in a German uniform on the Leningrad front; when you see the enemy coming toward you, you don’t know if you will jump toward him or freeze, white as death, literally shitting your pants. “I am not the person I was then, and I am very far from the ideas that took me there, but there is one thing I know and am pleased to have found out: I wasn’t a coward when the bullets began whistling. But I am also alive, and others died, brave men and cowards both, and many nights when I can’t sleep I remember them, they come back to ask me not to forget them, to tell the world that they lived.”