Never the Last Journey [antikvár]

For many years I was simply unable to talk about the Holocaust. It was nor until decades afterward that my wife, Ruta, was able to begin drawing the story out of me, making it possible for me to articulate those things I had suppressed for so long. Expressing what I had lived through enabled me to put it into perspective. I began to see those events in the context of the entire life I had managed to live instead of as an inexpressible nightmare that seemed always on the verge of breaking forth from my subconscious.Once I was able to tell her the story, Ruta began urging me to write it down, but for a long time that was beyond my strength. Then, a few years ago, I was having lunch with a prominent Israeli author. The conversation turned to the war years, and I mentioned that I had been saved by a Polish family, which had hidden me and four others for seventeen months beneath the floorboards in their bedroom. The writer was instantly attentive. Here was an unusual existential situation. How could five people have managed to live together for so long jammed into a grave? How could they have survived physically, emotionally, and morally in such inhuman circumstances? Because the fact was that when the Soviet army finally arrived, the five of us had emerged from our hole in the ground as decent human beings. There was plenty wrong with us physically, but psychologically and morally we were still whole.The author was taken by what had happened and wanted to write about it. But after several discussions I could see we weren't on exactly the same wavelength. From his point of view, our time in the grave presented an opportunity to explore fundamental questions of human interaction. I wasn't insensitive to that. We all knew that we had survived because we had established rules of behavior, a kind of social contract that we could either adhere to and live or ignore and die. Although I was only seventeen when I got out of the hole, the experience had made me understand in my./ 'I, rI.I, !