These stories take place during these dreadful times. >> [COUGH] >> And some of them take place after. And they start to tell us about what happened after. There's a story called Night of Surrender, where a young woman. I met Mike in a park in a pretty little town on the Alsatian border. I'd been in prison there briefly. Considering I was a Jew using Aryan papers now the war was ending. The front was falling apart. The surrender was expected any day. And this is a very ordinary story. Just like all our lives, of a young American soldier, who meets this girl in the park, sits on the bench next to her. She is just sitting there on the park because she is now in a displaced persons camp. And they talk after a bit and then he shows up the next day, and then he shows up the next day, and her friends in the camp say did he kiss you? She says, no, we just talked. And they talk. And one of the questions they're talking about is, who are you? It takes a while for us to learn that her name is not Anna but Clara, because she is afraid to tell him what she has hidden, now, for years, that she is Jewish. And he says, okay, let's not worry about it, and suddenly they are connected to each other, and he says I will take care of you, I want to have you come with me. There are all kinds of little moments in this story you should know about. Mike shows up and he's always whistling a passage from the Moldau by Smetana. I don't know if any of you are musicians or know about this, but Smetena's Moldau is very close to the Jewish national anthem, Hatikvah, they're connected musically. That's where it comes from. So he's giving her a message that she doesn't quite know about yet, because she's been in prison, but every time we sing Hatikvah, we sing and we echo Smetana. So that's one kind of thing that happens in that story. But, these stories are astonishing [SOUND] but they're not the kinds of stories we expect about the Holocaust. We expect the heroes stories, or what was that movie by Quentin Tarantino, Inglorious Bastards, or, in a silly way, Hogan's Heroes. Right. That's what we expect. These stories are understated, very clear. And he says, the American, Michael, I looked into his eyes, I couldn't afford to miss even the tremor of an eyelid. I am Jewish. Perhaps it was because I was hearing those words for the first time in three years, those words I had carried in myself constantly, inside myself, or because none of things I'd fear registered on Mike's face. And that's what you were hiding from me so carefully? Whatever for? You don't know and you can't know. You don't know what it is like to say, I am Jewish. For three years I heard those words day and night, but never, not even when I was alone did I dare to say them aloud. You may recall that Paul Roth, when he was here last time, said when people ask him "what's your identity?" he says "I tell them, I'm Jewish." Mike here is an American. We talk about these things directly. Here is a girl who, for three years, hid her name and her identity. The story goes on. But I want to look at another story, the one that comes after again about after the war. It's called The Tenth Man, it's four pages long. And again there are, it's filled with photographs blurry, fuzzy, and then they come into focus and then they fade and stories are implied in these photographs. The tenth man, the first to come back was Hein the Carpenter. He turned up one evening from the direction of the river in the woods. No one knew where he had been or with whom. Those who saw him walking along the river bank didn't recognize him at first. How could they? He used to be tall and broad shouldered. Now he was shrunken and withered. His clothes were ragged and most importantly he had no face. It was completely overgrown. It's hard to say how they recognized him. So we have Heim showing up and it, there's a they. There's a whole town looking. They recognized him from above, from the cliff. He stopped and began to sing. First they thought he had gone mad, but then one of the smarter ones guessed it was not a song, but a Jewish prayer, with a plaintive melody like the song that could be heard on friday evenings in the old days, coming from the 100 year old synagogue. Writing a scrap of time the narrator talks about the ruins of memory, but notice that this sentence doesn't stop. Like a song that can be heard on Friday evenings coming from a hundred year old synagogue, which the German's had burned down. The synagogue was in the lower town. The whole lower town had always been Jewish and no one knew what it would be like, now that the Jews were gone. Heim the carpenter was the first to come back. So we have here a story of, After the war, a story of a town and suddenly the Jews returned. Remember in harmattan, the end of harmattan of dry tears, where she returns to her home town, returns to her house, and here we're going to have a story like that. In the evening, can you see this, yes. When the news had spread, a crowd gathered in front of Heim's house. Some came to welcome him, others to watch, still others to see if it was true that someone had survived. The carpenter was sitting on the front steps in front of his house. He didn't respond to questions or greetings. Later, people said his eyes had glittered emptily in the forest of his face as if he were blind. He sat and stared straight ahead. A woman placed a bowl of potatoes in front of him, and in the morning, she took it away untouched. So, he's returned, but is not sure if he's really alive. One of the things you learn from these others, from these stories is that the experiences they have had have made them dead inside before they're dead, like the young woman who has to talk to Mike and she can't say who she is even to herself. He can't eat the food, even. Four days later, and the next one came back. He was a tenant on a neighboring farm. The manager brought the tenant back by wagon. His face, unlike the carpenter's, was as white as a communion wafer, which struck everyone as strange for a man who had lived so long in the open. When the tenant got down from the wagon, he swayed, fell face down on the ground, which people described more to emotion than to weakness. In fact, it was possible to think he was kissing the threshold of his house, thanking God for saving him. The manager helped him up and led him into the entrance hall.
