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CounterPunch
November
20, 2002
What Would the
Jews of Terezin Say?
by WILLIAM A. COOK
I saw the pictures children drew at Terezin last
March when I delivered a paper at a Prague conference. Yesterday
I saw a picture of a Palestinian woman, old and bent, weeping
as she watched Sharon's bulldozer demolish her home. The children's
pictures jumped to mind; the thousands of drawings, hidden in
Terezin, are the only evidence of their existence. Mothers, the
old women lured to Terezin by the Nazis on the pretext that it
was a care facility for the elderly, and the Nazi Commandery
allowed the children to draw, a way to express how they felt
about being herded like cattle, crowded into dark attics and
cellars, separated from their parents before they were transported
to Izbice, Maly Trostinec, Sobibor, Majadanek, Treblinka or Auschwitz.
For Terezin was a transport town.
It occurred to me that Sharon's savagery
against the Palestinians mirrors the plight of the Jews in Terezin.
Consider the woman weeping for her home. What would the women
of Terezin say as they watched Sharon destroy this woman's home?
How they would share the anguish of being driven from their home
as they had been and confined, as the Palestinian woman was confined,
in squalid conditions, in a refugee camp under the booted foot
of their oppressor. What would the Jews of Terezin say as they
watched their sons, daughters, nieces, and nephews corral the
indigenous people of Palestine into ghettos, packed into cement
bunkers not unlike the cells at Terezin, or crammed into ancient
towns where the walls are falling down or bulldozed into oblivion?
What would the Jews of Terezin say as
they watched Sharon build walls around the ghettos? How like
the walls of Terezin that rose before those locked in waiting
the day they would be transported to their death. How like the
Gestapo the IDF looms before the Palestinians as they crouch
locked in their homes under curfew, unable to get to the market,
unable to play in the streets, unable to work; dependent on the
oppressor's will to get to UN food supplies, the only defense
against their impending death.
What would the Jews of Terezin say as
they watched Sharon circle their temporary homes with search
lights from towers and trucks, hemming them in behind barbed
wire, suffering the indignity of caged animals? What would they
say as they watched the Palestinian family wait hours in line
before they could pass through the gate, derided and mocked by
the soldiers who laughed at their plight? What would the Jews
at Terezin say as they witnessed their own kin steal land and
homes from those who owned them on the pretext that they were
animals and did not deserve the land given to Sharon by G-d?
Had they not lost all to their oppressors?
What would the Jews at Terezin say to
those imprisoned behind the walls unable to till the fields taken
from them, unable to move from one city to another to visit relatives,
friends, neighbors, unable to survive without the largese from
nations beyond the walls? Would they not understand those who
tried to resist? Had they not tried to resist? Would they not
understand that what desperation breeds is desperation? Had they
not seen themselves as David against Goliath? Would they not
see this David, the imprisoned Palestinian, as their brothers
and sisters throwing stones at tanks weighing tons, scattering
shells from Kalashnikov rifles at F-16 Fighter Jets and Apache
Helicopters, and standing defiantly in front of bulldozers while
Goliath dispatches some of his134,000 troops into the ghettos,
sends a few of his32,000 airforce to shell homes and factories,
and drives his 3,900 tanks into the ghetto cities and refugee
camps? Would they not grasp the metaphor of the Biblical story
that graphically illustrates the consequences of the strong,
willingly and mercilessly, attempting to destroy the weak? And
would they not know that David will triumph because David has
nothing to lose, his cause is just, and his God has promised
him victory? But the strong have everything to lose, and the
fear that they will lose it. As Israeli Professor Martin Van
Crevold stated: "He who is wise should never engage the
weak for any length of time."
When at Terezin, I saw the drawing of
a hearse, the only means of transportaion in the ghetto, by Ferdinand
Bloch, Alfred Kantor's picture of a police patrol controlling
women returning from work, and Bedrich Fritta's black drawing
of cramped life in the attic, and others, others by children
and I thought of the old woman kneeling in the street watching
her home demolished. That, too, is a drawing that captures forever
the fear of those who live without hope, without dignity, without
respect. What would the Jews of Terezin say? Perhaps they would
speak through me:
THE GHOSTS OF TEREZIN
I saw the pictures children drew at Terezin
As they clustered in the attic's closing darkness, --
Pictures of the sun beyond the rain,
Of Mothers muffled in scarves and solemn dress,
Of Fathers proud beneath their yarmulkas, --
All waiting patiently the promised day
When they would board the silver train
And flee to the Holy City.
And I wept at their plight,
The silent, unknown, gnawing fright
That burned within their Ghetto of sin,
This Terezin.
And then before my eyes there came
Another scene, so strange, as if incarnate in the first
That burst untimely before my weeping heart;
A scene more ravaged than Terezin,
Of streets and alleys swamped in sewage and despair
Where children breathed the fetid air of hate
That smoldered like steaming ashes there.
Suddenly appeared above the graves, the
ghosts of Terezin,
Arising like mist around the crematorium;
Fathers and Mothers, in their promised land at last,
Grasping children to their breasts.
Silent as sentinels they stood,
And there they wept as they watched in vain
The wardens wander through the camps
Like Gestapo agents of old,
Stark, cold, indifferent to the pain
Of those who huddled beneath the tin roofs,
Encased like the dead in cement boxes
As the acrid stench of lingering sewage
Flowed through the alleys and the homes.
They saw the tanks rattle through the
streets
With ranks of soldiers scurrying behind,
Seeking the vermin that infested this place,--
Homeless, nameless, without a face, --
Sneaking through this ghetto in the dark of night
To drive the children from this transport town,
This resurrected refugee camp, this new Terezin,
Where the new Jew wanders the world
Like the Jews of Terezin,
Joined in their loneliness and despair
As they watch their children there
Become the walls of Terezin!
William Cook
is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern
California. He can be reached at: cookb@ULV.EDU
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