Without Lifting A Finger

“What will happen now?” Barlach whispered. “Nothing will happen,” replied the Jew, grabbing the old man by the shoulders and pulling him up so that their faces were close together, eye to eye. “Nothing, nothing at all,” the giant whispered again. “No one knows, except for you and Hungertobel, that I was here; inaudibly, I glided, a shadow, through the corridors, to Emmenberger, to you, no one knows that I exist, only the poor devils I have saved, a handful of Jews, a handful of Christians. Let the world bury Emmenberger and let the newspapers publish their eulogies and memorials for this dead man. The Nazis wanted Stutthof; the millionaires, this hospital; others will want other things. We can’t save the world as individuals, that would be a task as hopeless as that of poor Sysyphus; it is not up to us, nor is it up to any man of power, or any nation, or the devil himself, who is surely more powerful than anyone; it is in the hand of God, who makes his decisions alone. We can only help...

“I think you’re used to that,” the old man retorted. Emmenberger was taken aback for a moment. “I’m pleased,” he finally said, shaking his head, “that you haven’t lost your sense of humor. Let’s start with Fortschig. He was sentenced to death and executed. My dwarf did a good job. Climbing down the light shaft of the house in the Kesslergasse, after a strenuous promenade across wet roof tiles, cats purring all around him, then squeezing through that little window and landing a truly powerful and deadly blow with my car key against the skull of our poetaster on his throne—this was not easy for my little Tom Thumb.

Thus I, Edith Marlok, a thirty-four-year-old woman, commit the crimes that are demanded of me in exchange for a colorless liquid which, injected beneath my skin, gives me the courage of contempt during the day and the beauty of dreams at night, a fleeting illusion of being in possession of what no longer exists: this world as God created it. C’est ça.

“All it takes to hear this story is a little nerve; less nerve than it did to live through it,” continued the Jew in his old musty caftan in a singing tone. “It’s time to forget all these things, they say, and not just in Germany; there’s cruelty in Russia too, and there are sadists everywhere; but I don’t want to forget anything, and not just because I am a Jew—six million of my people the Germans killed, six million!—; no, it’s because I am still a human being, even though I live in basements and cellars with the rats! I refuse to make a distinction between peoples, I refuse to speak of good and bad nations; but I do have to make one distinction between human beings, this was beaten into me, and from the first blow that cut into my flesh I distinguished between the torturers and the tortured.