Memories and Premonitions
MEMORIES AND PREMONITIONS When the survivors gathered in Jerusalem in June, was it just a poignant reunion or was there a message? A story needs more than a teller; it needs someone to hear it....
...so also we who attend the story, who defend and extend the tapestry...
...Which threads are real, which imagined...
...once upon a time, Janusz Korczak...
...His name was Janusz Korczak...
...L.F...
...There, the meters can be left unattended...
...once upon a time, a flag...
...On the outer wall of that school, we read the words of Isaiah: "The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard lie down with the kid...
...so the children of Kiryat Shmonah, and Pisar, and Klein...
...It was behind that flag that Janusz Korczak, born Hirsh Goldszmit, and his two hundred children marched, on August 5, 1942, from the Children's Home to the Umschlag-platz where they were loaded into the freight cars for the journey to Tre-blinka, to death...
...In Kiryat Shmonah, where the rockets fall, and the death goes on, there is a school that carries the name of Janusz Korczak...
...once upon a time, death...
...Scorched forever, it is still our canopy...
...Verily...
...And in the life of Yossi Klein, child of survivors, heir, weaver...
...Green was the color of his surgical apron, for he was also a physician, and green was the color of the flag of King Matt, his principal literary invention, and green, too, was the color of the flag of the orphanage he directed in the district of the damned, in Warsaw, in the ghetto...
...they will register the rush of air...
...Once upon a time, brutes ripped the flag, thought to burn the tapestry...
...it is only a dream...
...The cameras were there, and the typewriters...
...For the words that were spoken may have been heard, or they may not have been heard...
...There, the tape recorder can be left to record the sound itself...
...Even less than such a tree in such a forest...
...They may have been lost in the wind, or they may have entered our hearts, and only our grandchildren, if they come to be, will know...
...In June of this year, the survivors gathered...
...But whether what they captured was a story or only a dream is not yet clear...
...A gold four-leaf clover on a field of green...
...In Faust, Goethe wrote, "Green is the golden tree of life...
...Without an audience, it is a tree that falls in an abandoned forest and, falling, makes no sound...
...And inside the Janusz Korczak Elementary School of Kiryat Shmonah, the story is happening still, the threads of the prophet and of the hun, of the physician and the weaver, of the rockets and of the flag, of King Matt and of tomorrow are woven anew...
...And later, much later, another weaver of tales wove a tapestry of green so golden that its glow is with us still, though the weaver was murdered, his tales neglected, his audience destroyed...
...But a story told into the wind is no story...
...Once upon a time, King Matt...
...so, Janusz Korczak...
...the words that I have placed in your mouth shall not be absent from your mouth, nor from the mouth of your children, nor from the mouth of your children's children—said the Lord—from now on, for all time...
...So, Isaiah (59:21...
...As also in the courtyard of the Knesset, where Samuel Pisar, originally of Bialystok and Auschwitz, now of Paris and New York and Auschwitz still, spoke to the World Gathering...
Vol. 6 • September 1981 • No. 8
