A Legacy

...There are booths offering membership in Hadassah, the Encyclopaedia Judaica...

...It's very nice that these people are seeing each other after so long," he says finally...

...He groped for a new politics that would transcend the pre-Holocaust division of left and right, religious and secular, an irrational politics of "ahavat Yisrael," love for the Jewish people...

...On his stone are engraved these words: "Reb Asher ben Reb Yosef Haleivi...

...A woman tells a journalist about the time the Nazis broke into her parents' home in the ghetto, and how she hid under the bed with her baby sister...

...No one cares about helping The people of Israel are not much inspired by our presence among them...

...I ask one of them, a dark young man with intense brown eyes, what he thinks about the Gathering...

...For a moment it is 1948 again, the Jews are landing in a dream state, a mini-ingathering of humanity whose mutual love will be a light unto the nations...

...Some speak of the details with a precise, scientific distance, a terrible nonchalance...

...Maybe to Finland...

...Six thousand accents cope with the Hebrew words: "We have not yet lost our hope, the hope of two thousand years...

...It is to these technicians the survivors must entrust the emotions they have kept carefully hidden for thirty years...

...I heard in 1946 that someone saw her alive," she says...

...From where, if not from us, will come the warning that a new combination of technology and brutality can transform the planet into a crematorium...

...As he grew older, my father began to use a mystic's vocabulary...

...The World Gathering was to be the only time that the survivors of the last generation of Europe's Jewish civilization would formally assemble and deliver their Message to the World...

...Samuel Pisar, lawyer and author, who tells a TV reporter that he has come to Jerusalem seeking a reunion with Shmulik Pisar, the little boy within him who was deported and lost in Auschwitz...

...From where, if not from the bloodiest killing ground of all time, will come the hope that coexistence between 'hereditary enemies' is possible...

...For here prayers and memories burn...

...I have come here to escape the speeches and tours and seminars that envelop the World Gathering like a veil, shielding us from the unpleasant truth that the people of Israel are not much inspired by our presence among them...

...And if they did, would The Message slip away in translation and something else, trivial, become the public record of this singular event, the last will and testament of a generation...

...Fourth Day We are gathered in the plaza of the Kotel, our final reunion...

...The keynote speaker is Dr...

...We rise for the Hatikvah...

...The woman stares at him...

...I place a small stone on his grave, the Jewish equivalent of laying flowers...

...It was in June that the Nazis collected my family from the ghettos of Transylvania, and every year in our home Shavuot...

...The speakers follow one another without applause, a silent procession...

...For we have seen the end of creation, in the shadow of permanently flaming gas chambers, where Eichmann's reality eclipsed Dante's vision of hell, we The messianic moment will not interrupt the political blood libels...

...The TV crews have already gone, rushed back to their studios for the late night news on which will be shown Menachem Begin and Teddy Kollek speaking at the Kotel once again about the Holocaust and Jerusalem...

...the major events of Israel's past as seen through the pages of the Jerusalem Post, the official government medallion commemorating the World Gathering and bearing its logo, "From Destruction to Rebirth...

...Two women are intensely exploring a photograph of skeletons...

...But there is only this stone in the white heat, strong and steady, the names of our relatives who died without burials etched on its side, my father a monument to the eternity of Israel, just as he had always intended himself to be...

...Now he is 17 years old, and next year, because of his criminal record, he will be barred from the army, barred, in effect, from Israeli society...

...Unlike most of his friends, my father spoke incessantly of the war...

...Begin accuses Peres of betraying the State...

...The electronic equipment probes for open wounds from which to extract thirty seconds of airtime...

...The unity of the Jewish people, he said, reflected the unity of God, a monotheism of peoplehood...

...Off to the side is a room with uneven concrete floors, grey pillars, unpainted walls...

...the journalist asks...

...We gather atop Yad Vashem's highest peak, below us the emptiness of the Judean Hills, the forest that circles the military cemetery, and farther off, the stone buildings of Jerusalem, desolate in the fading light...

...The official material of the Gathering spoke in less grandiose terms: "We will tell the world, 'mir zeinen do'—we are here...

...One friend suggested that perhaps the survivors, as had Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, would put God on trial, seek to force Him to send the Messiah...

...What were they looking for...

...The crowd begins to disappear through the twisting lanes of the Old City, and I stand dazed for a time in the white-lit plaza, seeing patches of my father's face in the people walking by, imagining that I have been given one last kiss...

...Peres accuses Begin of bombing the Iraqi reactor for domestic political gain...

...Remember what an indifferent world did to us and to itself...

...He passed through the test of the Holocaust and did not lose faith in the eternity of Israel...

...But Pisar's speech tonight goes far beyond the personal and is this Gathering's first attempt to outline a collective message...

...At night I walk through the streets of Jerusalem, past billboards that offer the Israeli voter 31 ways to save the country...

...Tonight there will be no tears...

...This raw place has been turned into a DP camp, a site for attempted reconstructions...

...He would turn dinner parties into shouting matches with friends who, he believed, were betraying their past...

...Yesterday, Antek Zukerman, a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, died of a heart attack after hosting a group of survivors at his kibbutz...

...He does not understand what I mean...

...The Message seems directed at a handful of "revisionist" historians who claim the crematoria were used for baking bread...

...Second Day Binyanei Ha'Uma, Jerusalem's squat convention center, has been turned into something called a "survivor's village...

...Yet no one seems to notice the coincidence of the arrival of the survivors in Jerusalem to celebrate Jewish endurance at a time when Israel has lost a sense of itself...

...If any common theme can be discerned at all, it is that the Holocaust really did happen...

...They burn and burn and will not be consumed...

...We rise to sing "The Partisan's Song": "Never say, 'This is my final road, and the light of day is banished by the clouds'/The hour we have waited for is near/Beneath our tread the earth shall tremble, 'We are here.' " All the Jews of Europe are here, Litvaks and Yekes and Hashomer Hatzair and Betar, the shul Jews and the atheists, a remnant Internationale of competing instincts and ideologies, gathered now to give the Jewish people one last lesson in survival...

...A minyan of white-bearded Yemenites, barefoot and wrapped in multicolored prayer shawls, appears before us...

...For more than a minute they blow into huge, curled shofars, a blast that does not wail but stampedes...

...you in Israel...

...Listen," he says, "I have a personal holocaust of my own...

...Posters announcing a rally for Shimon Peres hang in shreds, a reminder of the violence waged by Begin partisans at Labor' Party gatherings...

...The survivors, who seem to have emerged heavier and instantly aged from the photographs around them, react to the evidence of their lives with the varied defenses they have developed since the war...

...Everyone eats each other alive here," he says...

...Let our legacy endure as a stone of the Temple Wall...

...The main hall is a festive bazaar promoting the institutions and wares of Jewish rebirth...

...Be sure to tell them in America about us," the young man with the personal holocaust tells me when we part...

...We are here...

...Sharing the dais earlier with Pisar were members of the Knesset who had survived the Holocaust...

...One woman tells a reporter, "I survived to be able to tell the world what happened to us," and then runs away when the cameras begin to roll...

...June seemed a particularly good time for that too, since I had known its men and women most intimately in summer, when the shtieblach—hothouses of hasidic exotica kept alive in Brooklyn's Jewish enclaves—would empty and survivor families like mine would head for shabby Catskill bungalow colonies that were always off the main road...

...They wander through the various stages of the Final Solution, past photographs of Nazis in the ghetto ripping out a Jew's beard with pliers, of a doctor's experiment table where lies a camp inmate whose eyes seem larger than any other part of his body, of a child in oversized partisan's uniform smoking a cigarette, of piles of baby shoes, piles of glasses, and then on to 1945, where Allied soldiers are forcing SS women to bury the random bodies and where women inmates in shawls are bent around dim campfires, empty pails, an outdoor shower, tents, the random materials with which they are supposed to transform a death camp into a refugee center...

...became a festival of light, my father burning wax in small glass jars to the memory of his parents, deported on Shavuot but whose date of death we only knew was some time in June...

...The speakers, overwhelmed by the renewed demonization of the Jew, seem to be swinging wildly at the most accessible target...

...On the walls are tacked messages from those who do not trust technology: "Zicherman, Avram son of David/Born in Hetanya, Czech/Approx 1932-3/1 heard for the first time this week that someone met you in the Sinai during the 1956 War/Please call—" Off in a corner, observing the survivors wandering dazed through their own tumult, is a group of Sephardim, the clean-up crew...

...One by one, six children of survivors rise to read their response: "We, the first generation born after the darkness, pledge ourselves to the oneness of the Jewish people...

...Tonight I will turn on the news and watch a repetition of the Jewish blood feuds of Europe...

...Most survivors, though, seem desperate to talk...

...There is a message my father would have wanted to deliver, but it may be too late for anyone to know...

...Walking among the crowds are reporters, cameramen, soundmen, the mediators between the survivors and the outside world...

...Perhaps that is why I did not mourn his death, but immediately assumed the rites of continuity, wearing his suits as I made the rounds to say kaddish in those shtieblach where we had once davened together...

...His personal holocaust, he says, began when the police arrested him for possession of hashish...

...I think about how happy my father would be to hear his fellow survivors finally unburdening themselves to "the world...

...The unity that Jews achieved in the gas chambers had somehow to be translated into a way of life...

...Each of its two ground-floor halls reflects a competing personality of the Gathering...

...They don't look differ-rent," her friend says, "they're dead...

...The Kotel burns with floodlights, and six thousand yahrtzeit candles huddle together like collected sparks, the fragments which the Kabbalah says will reunite in the end of days...

...He tells about crawling out of a mass grave, and then rolls up his pants to reveal the bullet scars...

...Would the survivors find the words after years of silence, not only for their personal stories, but for a collective statement...

...At moments of dark premonition," he tells us, "we see a vision of doomsday...

...When I close my eyes I can almost hear his voice, Hungarian English accenting the first vowel of every word, telling me about his town, Karoi...

...We gather toward evening before the Knesset, filling hundreds of rows of folding chairs as if we have come to our own graduation...

...The energy level of all those survivors coming together in Jerusalem will be more powerful than an assembly of kabbalists," he assured me...

...But where is The Message...

...Sandwiched between the bloodletting is the story of a woman who has come to the World Gathering to find her sister...

...With its overlapping rites of holidays, family celebrations and memorials, June seemed to me the perfect time for the World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors, four days of celebration and remembrance in Jerusalem...

...He would fill his van with hasidim along the Boro Park-Williamsburg hitching route and harangue them for not teaching their children about the Holocaust...

...Third Day My father is buried on a hill in Jerusalem tiered with white tombs...

...whatever personal dislocations remain, tonight we cross the bridge together...

...On a makeshift stage, an army choir sings the words of Reb Nachman of Bratslav: "The whole world is a narrow bridge, and the main thing is not to be afraid...

...Even if I recognize someone in the picture," one woman says, "they look different now...

...Two months earlier I had sat through the oratory of the annual Warsaw Ghetto memorial meeting in New York, and had made a list of all the phrases that tried to encompass agony: "unspeakable evil," "reared its ugly head," "the world was indifferent," "thousands upon thousands" "millions upon millions," "man's inhumanity to man...

...It is perhaps the only time since the election campaign has begun that so many political rivals have come together to share a common language...

...I ask him if he thinks the World Gathering has a message for the people of Israel...

...Some say nothing...

...I decided to go to Jerusalem to represent my father, and also to renew a relationship with the survivor community of my childhood...

...Mir zeinen do...

...There our parents would peel in the sun and rediscover a semblance of beauty in the overgrown thickets surrounding the fading family barracks...

...And then the speeches begin...

...To kill people," she says...

...The rhetorical level is mercifully low...

...it is a permanent warning...

...This country is finished," he says...

...They belong to Labor, Likud, Mizrachi...

...But those words were repeated in the newsletters and brochures so often that they assumed the sanctity of a chant, as if, like my mystical friend, the organizers of the Gathering believed in their own power to transform the consciousness of all who would hear The Message...

...His friend, hair slicked back and wearing a t-shirt whose sleeves have been cut, is an ex-junkie...

...itself...

...Tell them what they are doing to Jews in Israel...

...The messianic moment that has just been summoned within us will not interrupt the political blood libels being played out on Israeli TV...

...In this election, no rules hold...

...All that remained in my father's mind of Karoi were the petty squabbles of its doomed Jews...

...It is not the words I am hearing so much as the languages in which they appear: Yiddish and Ladino, Russian and English, Hebrew and French, an ingathering of tongues in which the real legacy lies...

...If I had the chance, I'd run from here...

...She tells the Israeli audience that she last saw her sister when the girl was 14, very small with blue eyes...

...Sound the great shofar for our liberation," reads one of the Yemenites, "and deliver the miracle that will ingather our exiled...

...An old man approaches a TV crew and announces that tomorrow is his seventy-second birthday, and he has decided to speak for the first time about the war...

...I have the right to know: is she alive...

...On TV the news is more of the same...

...We are your children...

...Says Michel: "To those who deny that it happened: our eyes have seen, our ears have heard, our nostrils have been filled with the acrid smells...

...The wind blows a chill through the crowds, and a nearly full moon hangs above us, a sun without warmth...

...have witnessed a pilot project for the destruction of humanity, the death rattle of thermonuclear proliferation—the final solution...

...Six survivors read it aloud in as many languages: "Remember what the German killers and their accomplices did to our people...

...There is a political party opposing withdrawal from Sinai, a party opposing the creation of "Jewish ghettos" on the West Bank, a party for Sephardim that is violating the country's unwritten law against ethnic political formations...

...In my mind is the refrain from "The Partisan's Song," the unofficial anthem of the Gathering: "Never say, 'This is my final road.' " But the Holocaust generation is now on its final road...

...He did not speak of personal details, friends, school, childhood antics, only of the ideological battles that separated Zionists from anti-Zionists, Orthodox from secularists, Satmar hasidim from Spinker hasidim...

...It was around that time that my father slipped out of the ghetto and dug a hole in the forest where he survived the war, and it was at the beginning of summer three years ago that he died...

...Stories like these have begun to appear nightly on Israeli TV, human interest segments to break the spell of political chaos...

...To us, the Holocaust is not only an indelible memory of horror...

...He had asked to be judged not on the basis of his accumulated traits but as a survivor, a part of him buried in Europe, a part of him already immortal...

...Now, just as my father's generation is about to die out, a sudden lurch from oblivion, a last desperate attempt to record was under way in Jerusalem...

...And on a Likud poster nearby, someone has scrawled a Hitler mustache beneath the nose of Menachem Begin...

...The survivors have written a "legacy" to us, their children...

...The one connection between the Gathering and the elections to appear in the Israeli media is made by a columnist for Yediot Aharonot, who tejls this joke: "What is a gathering of Holocaust survivors...

...A meeting between Abba Eban and Shimon Peres on their way back from Labor Party rallies...

...It is a measure of how far things have gone here that the Gathering is being publicly treated as a curiosity, or else not treated at all...

...But if it is the revisionists who determine where the battle lines are drawn, then what will emerge this week from Jerusalem will be nothing more than a reaffirmation of the facts, transmitted to a world that cannot make moral sense of its past...

...No one was quite sure what that message would be, but everyone I spoke with about the Gathering seemed certain it would emerge, inspired by the occasion Yossi Klein is a free-lance writer who lives in New York...

...Here are housed the computers that are trying to trace the lost relatives and friends of those survivors who are lining up for one last chance at a miracle...

...Remember the deeds of the Righteous Gentiles...

...In the breathing space between the Holocaust and nuclear extinction, is not the role of a survivor people to prove that every difference can be submerged, if only our commonality is acknowledged...

...There is President Navon, Knesset member Gideon Hausner, World Gathering initiator Ernie Michel...

...With the support of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities he is completing a film based on his father's life...

...I have come here for a seance, to conjure the voice of my father...

...First Day In the late afternoon, as the sun begins to deepen the gold and amber streaks of Jerusalem's stone, survivors and their families trickle into Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum...

...Had he come to the World Gathering, that is the message he would have urged upon everyone he met, one more eccentric survivor peddling his private obsession about how to save the Jewish people...