See Under, page 45
The old doctor closed his eyes, shocked with the bitter knowledge that this child was a stranger to him; that he would always remain so. That Fried would always love him more than Kazik loved Fried. And even if he were wonderfully successful and Kazik lived a complete and happy life [see under: PRAYER], Fried would suffer the same hunger and grief at his inability simply to “be” Kazik, to overcome the strangeness, the part of himself that was banished forever. And he wondered whether he shouldn’t reconsider, whether he shouldn’t start defending himself against this disappointed love and the unendurable pain that bound him. And he also knew that there is something in parents—even in the best and most sensitive of parents—that the child must always kill in order to free his way into the light and air, like a sapling struggling against the old trees in the forest. Now, the doctor realized that he and his child had only a very short time together, and that their capacity for understanding, love, and compassion was scant indeed, and as he was staring into space, Kazik emerged from the closet, ran past the bookstand, yanked the doily and brought down the porcelain bowl with the four blue stags, and the bowl was shattered to bits.
Also see under: TIME
CHADASH, HAADAM HA
THE NEW MAN
The German prototype delineated by Nazi theoreticians.
The NM is what Obersturmbannführer Neigel contraposed to Wasserman’s type in speaking of the “new future” pledged by the Reich and the Fuhrer. At this point, for precision’s sake, the NM concept will be enlarged upon: In Mein Kampf, Hitler claims that the Nordic race is the bearer of civilization; thus the struggle against the alien, the Jew, the Slav—in short, all inferior races—is a holy struggle. Hans Gunther, the official theoretician of the National Socialist Party, on the basis of his study of ten million Germans, delineated the ideal NM: tall, with straight blond hair, an elongated skull, a narrow face, a well-formed chin, a thin nose, fair deep-set eyes, and a whitish-pink complexion. (Neigel, like most Bavarians, had dark hair and dark eyes as well.) Since there were not enough ideal subjects in Germany to ensure the NM’s dominance of the Reich for the next thousand years, German leaders began to look for ways of increasing their human resources. A plan was proposed, for example, with regard to the improvement of Bavarian stock, to transplant Norwegians to Bavaria, where by means of crossbreeding and proper diet the local stock would become pure Nordic in only a few generations. This idea was just the beginning of a more far-reaching plan, as Dr. Willibaud Henschel wrote in Die Hammer, the official propaganda organ of the National Socialists in Berlin: “Round up a thousand girls, isolate them in a camp, mate them with a hundred thousand strapping young German youths, and then, with a hundred such camps, you will beget a generation of a hundred thousand pure-blooded German children.” Or as the Gauleiter of Bavaria, Paul Giesler, reminded the females in the audience during his address to the students of the University of Munich on 2/19/39: National Socialists regard SEX [q.v.] solely as a means of procreation, and every woman should bear a child for the good of the fatherland, and “any girl who lacks sufficient charms to find a mate of her own, will be assigned one of my adjutants. I can promise you she won’t regret it!” He also stressed Reichsführer Himmler’s concern with the problem of increasing the German population and the improvement of the NM. It was Himmler who promised the Führer to populate Germany—by 1980—with a hundred and twenty million Nordic Germans. He made himself the godfather of all children born on October 7, his own birthday. These children were to receive a lamp as a gift from Himmler, and one Deutsche mark and a candle on every subsequent birthday. The first hundred thousand lamps were manufactured by the prisoners at Dachau. As Himmler used to say, “If Frau Anna Magdalena Bach had stopped with the fifth child, Bach would not have come into the world!” Himmler was also extremely interested in folk customs that fostered male offspring, and the results of his “research” were officially circulated in the SS. More than once he complained that SS men were not interested in respectable Nordic girls and preferred plump, short-legged women. Deserving of mention for their part in the attempt to improve the strain are the institutions known as the Lebensborn, founded by the SS at Himmler’s instigation. Lebensborn (meaning “lifestream”) is what the maternity homes established by Himmler throughout the Reich were called. These “human breeding farms” served both as orphanages and as brothels, and were intended to breed the new master race according to the racial standards of the Reich. To this end, hundreds of thousands of children classified as “racially valuable” were kidnapped by the Germans and raised on farms for crossbreeding with pure-blooded Germans and each other. The chief director of these institutions was Max Solman (Nazi Party membership number 14528), who joined the SS in 1937. Frau Inge Wirmitz was in charge of resettling the kidnapped children among childless SS families. The SS breeding farms received children hunted in Eastern and Northern Europe. The kidnapping squads were ordered to steal only the most attractive children. Their method was simple: spotting a child in the street who seemed to fill the racial requirements, they tempted the child with sweets, and learned his name and address. The information was then passed on to the kidnapping squads. This method allowed them to kidnap several children from the same family. Unsuitable children were put to death. Parents were usually killed too so the children could be taken without any unnecessary complications. Once kidnapped, the children were subjected to psychological pressure to repress their origins and hate their parents. They were told continually that their parents were sick criminals, that their fathers were drunken murderers and their mothers “sluts who died of tuberculosis and alcoholism.” The children were not permitted to speak their mother tongue. They were tortured if they ever dared to mention their origins. The author of a book called Children of the SS met a woman in Germany who at age five had been shown the stone casket of an archbishop and told by the SS that her mother was buried inside. After the war her mother found her (she had been in a concentration camp), but the child refused to go back to her. “I saw my mother die once,” she explained, “I didn’t want to see her die again.” The Lebensborn organization also dealt in Norwegian, Dutch, and French women pregnant by German soldiers, for Himmler did not want to lose high-quality offspring to other nations. These women were transferred—sometimes against their will—to the institutions in Germany, where they were given appropriate treatment. Children born flawed from the point of view of racial requirements were put to death. Children from orphanages in all occupied countries were kidnapped as well and sent to Lebensborn institutions. In Hungary and the Ukraine alone more than fifty thousand children were kidnapped; in Poland, about two hundred thousand. The children were immediately examined for racial traits. Measurements were taken of their skulls, chests, penises (boys), and pelvises (girls), the ostensible intention being to crossbreed them as soon as they reached sexual maturity. The girls were given hormone injections to accelerate the onset of puberty. At the age of fifteen they were to be inseminated by SS men. This is how the Lebensborn centers turned into semiofficial brothels for SS men, who made free use of them. Kidnapped children were branded on the neck and arms. Himmler himself supervised the institutions down to the most minute details: there is a cable of congratulations from him—preserved in the archives—to Frau Annie 0. (the full name is missing), who in a single week, between the first and seventh of January 1940, yielded 27,870 grams of milk as a wet-nurse at the Lebensborn! Himmler likewise encouraged births among unmarried mothers and promised them the economic support of the Reich. He addressed German girls with a request “not to be so scrupulously modest and pure in these times of war,” and asked them “to be patient with the demands of our young men going off to fight on the front for the Führer.” Today, decades after the war, kidnapped children and their parents from all over Europe are still searching for each other. At the Nuremberg trials in October 1947, those responsible for the Lebensborn institutions were found guilty of membership in the SS. No other charges were brought against them.
CHUFSHA
LEAVE (military)
An authorized absence from military duty.
Neigel’s leave was undoubtedly the turning point in Wasserman’s story. On the eve of his departure, Neigel ordered the Jew to continue telling the story of Kazik, who was by then around forty years old. Wasserman refused, for some reason, and insisted that he must now fill in some of the missing details for Neigel, e.g., why the Children of the Heart had banded together again for this last adventure, and whom they were fighting now [see under: HEART, REVIVAL OF THE CHILDREN OF THE]. Without this information, he explained, the story “will never be properly cooked.” Neigel was furious. He accused Wasserman of BETRAYAL [q.v.], but Wasserman refused to tell him any more about Kazik’s life. Neigel lost control and gave Wasserman a beating. Later, when he broke down and asked the Jew’s forgiveness, his ugly secret was revealed [see under: PLAGIARISM].
And so Neigel went away on leave without hearing the rest of Kazik’s story. By the time he returned to the camp, in a state of shocked and anxious remorse over what he had done at home, Wasserman, Fried, Otto, and the others had become Neigel’s family, his near and dear, his entire world. Neigel—if one may say so—had dissolved into the imagination of Anshel Wasserman.
(HA) CHAZIRUYOT HAELEH
(THIS) SWINISHNESS
What Paula called the Nuremberg Laws.
Also see under: HITLER, ADOLF
CHAYIM, MASHMAUT HA
LIFE, THE MEANING OF
CHAYIM, SIMCHAT HA
LIFE, THE JOY OF
A unique or prolonged sense of identification with Being.
At 0425 hours, Kazik experienced the joy of life full-force. Twenty-seven years old at the time, he had gone out with Fried to wake Otto and break the news that he was ephemeral. Together they made their way to Otto’s pavilion, as one by one the other ARTISTS [q.v.], the living-dead who never shut their eyes, joined them from every corner of the zoo. The zoo was dark and the moon shone brightly, and Kazik saw dusky shadows everywhere that folded gently as he approached; he saw mysterious paths stretching through the darkness into the future; he saw the fresh grass sparkling with dew, the vast night sky strewn with thousands of slowly breathing stars that brushed his face with their veils … and though the shrill, metallic sounds of loudspeakers and the rattle of machine-gun fire could be heard in the distance, and the horizon was red because the Germans had set the ghetto on fire, Kazik did not understand this, nor did he want to understand this, or the sadness and despair on the faces of his companions. Because suddenly his heart swelled, till he could barely contain it, and his body was light, full of a bubbly effervescence and the murmurings and cracklings of joy, yes and he began: (1) to tumble over the wet lawn; (2) to hop on one foot and wave his arms; (3) to scream, drunk with happiness because (a) look, here he is! (b) he’s alive as can be! (c) and this is where he will stay! The eternal emperor of the moment! Divine singer of his own beating heart! Artist, painter of grass and the night sky! Yes! Alive! Alive! There was no deeper or simpler explanation for it than this! To hell with the sad sounds of trudging behind him! To hell with everything we know about this lousy life and about the inevitable end of KAZIK [see under. KAZIK, THE DEATH OF]!!! And Fried, seeing Kazik’s euphoria, was filled with dark dread, because how infinite was the great stream of time in which Fried was only a comma, a brief pause, a caesura in the flow; seventy years ago, Fried had not yet been steeped in time, and soon he would be out of it forever, and he and his world and everything he loved and deemed important would be extinguished then, and he saw the artists walking beside him and reflected, this was what was in store for each and every one of them, they would be erased as fast as footprints in a swamp. There was nothing new to this, and yet it shocked him, because for a moment he could feel how strange and lost and hopeless they all were, and then suddenly, for no particular reason, sensible old Fried was also filled with this feverish, fearful joy, and he spread his arms and stifled a small happy sob, and felt a thousand tiny fragrant rosemary flowers budding all over his body, filled with nectar.
CHINUCH
EDUCATION
A process of instruction that forms, changes, or develops the character in a certain direction.
As soon as Fried realized how brief Kazik’s allotted time was, he decided to devote himself entirely to his son’s education, and to make good use of every moment of childhood while Kazik’s brain was still alert and receptive. He led him by the hand—that small architectural wonder!—around the room, bending over to point out objects and call out their names. Fried: “Carpet. Lamp. Table. Chair. Another chair. Another chair …” and the child repeated the words and remembered everything. Fried told him frantically about the house full of rooms made of bricks, and about the zoo made up of cages and about the people who come to look at the animals, made up of limbs and organs, but his description immediately seemed to him lacking in truth somehow, not the truth of simple facts but the living truth behind them, and so he stopped and reproached himself. Fried: “Nu, really! What nonsense you’re filling his mind with! Don’t you see that first you have to tell him the important things!” And he crouched down, holding Kazik firmly by the arms, and lectured him warmly and fluently about the people of the world, and their division into nations and religions and political parties … He stopped himself here again and added hesitatingly, “And ideologies,” but he could taste the dry, bland flavor of division, and when he named them—Poland, Germany, Christianity, Communism, Britain, Judaism, etc.—he felt as he had felt some fifty years before in the middle of his examination at the faculty of medicine in Berlin, when he was obliged to rattle off, to a full hall, a list of incurable diseases, and again he stopped and reproached himself. Fried: “Nu, really, what nonsense you’re talking, first you have to teach him what to be, that is—” But despite his noble intentions, Fried could not hold back slapdash advice, like: Beware of strangers, and doubt your friends, and never tell anyone what you really think, never tell the truth unless there’s no choice, someone is bound to use it against you, and don’t love anybody too much, not even yourself. He spoke in a fever, in the tone and manner of an irascible father, regurgitating from his soul bitter advice from his own father, after a lifetime of denial; and the more convinced he was of its validity, the more he hated it and wished it proven false, and the more he wanted to speak his mother’s silent words of comfort to his son, for he had loved her so much when she and her little Albert would sit down at the piano, and the melody flowed out of their fingers like a kind of mist, till his father scoffed and said, “Who knows, maybe Albert will grow up to be an artist and bohemian,” in a tone Fried could not easily forget, and he heard it escape his own lips with a cruel precision—which pained him—when he spoke the selfsame words to Otto, after Otto started bringing his lunatics around to the zoo [see under: HEART, REVIVAL OF THE CHILDREN OF THE]. Yes, Fried had dreamed in childhood of becoming a pianist, till his mother was taken ill, and one day his father walked into Fried’s room and announced sternly that Mother had gone away on a long journey. What, for no reason at all, gone away, without saying goodbye? He asked no questions, and tried to forget her as quickly as possible and to hate her for what she had done to him. He began to avoid other children and wandered over the fields near his home. There he met little animals which, he discovered, were not afraid of him. There was no rational explanation for this: even wild rabbits waited patiently for him to touch them gently. Around this time Fried met OTTO BRIG [q.v.] and his sister, Paula, and thus began his happiest days with the Children of the Heart. But these days, too, passed. Fried grew up and became a doctor like his father and grandfather before him. Then World War I began. Fried, drafted as a physician, saw a few battles and witnessed things he had never believed man capable of. Life battered Fried on every hand [see under: BIOGRAPHY], and in revenge he lived it as though it were his booty. And now, as he sat talking to Kazik, he became sadly aware that everything his father and grandfather had told him either explicitly or with a frown of disgust had come true to the letter in his own life, and he wondered whether things might have been different if he had dared to fight courageously for the misty comfort his mother had offered with her gentleness and beauty, with the fragrance of her body as she waved her hand, and only then did he stop talking nonsense to Kazik and begin to speak of the essence: he told him about Paula, trapping the child who squirmed and kicked in his arms, though Fried hardly noticed, he was so busy telling his story. He had never dared speak about it to anyone before, or even think about it; yes, he had never allowed himself to say a single word of love or endearment to Paula. Otto: “But she knew, Fried, I know she knew.” And Fried stared ahead, and saw nothing beyond his tears, and he told Kazik about the fierce longing for the smell of her underarms, for the wrinkles around her eyes when she smiled, for that beauty mark, his private property—he was the only one who knew of its existence, not even Paula had ever seen it “there”—and now Fried understood the depth of the loss he had suffered, because he loved Paula more than anything on earth, and loved her wonderful gift for life, her own life, and everything about her, like her way of sitting on a chair, or bandaging a sore, and at times in her presence Fried knew that he, too, was alive, that perhaps there was something in him also deserving of the good life, and Fried spoke to Kazik of this with eyes closed and cheeks burning, and he was deeply grateful, because thanks to this child born to him in his old age, he had begun to straighten out the chaos of his life, and to settle into his own time, the way a seed dry these many years is suddenly blown by the wind and dropped on fertile soil, where it begins to germinate, and Fried spoke, or—in fact—did not speak, but only growled and splattered Kazik’s face with words and groans because he sensed the brevity of TIME [q.v.], and Kazik almost suffocated under this avalanche that destroyed his quickly dwindling life, and transfused him with experience he would never be able to use, because he wanted to live his own life and make his own mistakes, and Fried opened his eyes and looked at the child with COMPASSION [q.v.] and perceived how small and weak and miserable he was, and fell sadly silent. And so they sat hugging each other for a long while. And the doctor knew that at last he was doing something truly important for his son.
