while reading aloud what I had written about the imaginary grandfather in Poland. The next tears I proceeded to reap were tears of the love for homeland and flag, tears proud and uplifted, tears of rich Jews and very rich American Jewish mothers and grandmothers, tears falling on checks and contracts for investments in bonds, which we collected every evening.
But that chapter of my story will have to wait. First, as I promised, I’ll tell you about the girl who stole my Holocaust.
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* “Eli, Eli.”
I don’t know the name of the thief, but her image is deeply etched in my memory. Her complexion is lighter than that of her fellow villagers. Her eyes are black and large, set off by long dusty eyelashes. Her height is that of a ten-year-old and she is thin, very thin. Her shoulder blades protrude.
On the day of the theft, she wore a light-colored garment that I can’t exactly describe, but I remember how, at the moment of the deed itself, when she finally looked away and began to run with her back to me, it fluttered against her bony body. The air was still on that hot, hazy day on the northern slopes of the Jerusalem hills. And yet that light-colored garment billows in my memory. Seeing her run was a familiar sight and seemed almost natural, so I realized very late that this child had run off with the most precious emotional and spiritual possession I had inherited from my forefathers—my Holocaust.
I didn’t know your village, my little thief. It was not one of those “wasps’ nests”—that is how we referred to the “hostile” or “trouble-spot” villages that we frequented in order to “make a show of presence.” This meant rumbling through them, raising a racket, hurling teargas canisters into markets and balconies, blasting stun grenades, amusedly yelling swearwords over the commander’s Jeep loudspeaker, firing live ammunition at house walls, piles of dirt and trash or vineyard terraces. I knew such villages like the palm of my hand.
I knew where stones would be thrown and where I could walk about safely, smiling, without wearing a helmet. I knew where a Jeep could be parked without being noticed and where passers-by could be taken by surprise at our show of force. I knew where we mustn’t enter because exiting that alley would take too long and the stone- and stick-hurlers would have plenty of time to jeer as we remained caged in our Jeep.
“I am no sucker,” the first Israeli I met in India, at the New Delhi airport, told me. “I let myself be screwed once in every country and then, then I learn my lesson and it never happens again, no way!” He was on his way to see his regular yoga teacher to calm down a bit. And he really needed to calm down, who doesn’t? That’s how it was in the Occupied Territories, too: I was no sucker and if I got screwed once with a hail of stones, sticks and curses, fine. Once, I entered that street, and it was a mistake that someone had to pay for; someone always pays for those first, one-time mistakes. For example, a kid paid for running slowly while trying to escape chaos. He was caught and shackled in front of his mother or older sister, who screamed and wept, and he was thrown into the Jeep, driven an hour’s walk away, then lightly pushed out of the Jeep. I don’t remember whether we freed his hands or let the other price-payers do it. Anyway, we figured, this kid learned his lesson.
And it was not only kids who were there to pay for the humiliation we felt after making such mistakes. Shopkeepers, too, paid when we fired teargas into their shops because we thought the curses or stones had originated there. Or their name was very similar to one of the names on our wanted list. Or their shop was on Shaheed Street, and Shaheed, we all thought, means terrorist, so it makes sense that on “terrorist” street we’ll find the guilty parties who must pay for humiliating us.
This was all done in order to “make them pay the price for disturbing the peace”—these were the exact words used in written orders when the authorities wanted to define the need for scapegoats. These orders needed to be confirmed by the upper echelons, but that did not mean that we always had to use gas canisters to make our point clear. We could just park the armed personnel carrier or Jeep in front of the shop and eat our warm meal there, brought along specially for this mission. Hear some music, have a good meal, if the right cook was on the right shift. And also “show presence.” The shopkeeper would beg us to go enjoy ourselves elsewhere, because otherwise no customers would come in, and he hadn’t earned anything anyway since that whole shit began. Interesting, what he meant by “since the whole shit began.” We had been in that area only two or three months and it smelled as though the shit has always been there … “You should have thought of this before you let them hurl stones from the roof of the apartment above your shop,” someone would tell him, while chewing some mashed potatoes or a meat patty. While the shopkeeper begged, flattered the soldiers, and cursed Arafat and the rest of the PA leaders, he also carried out our mission impeccably. He shooed away any boy or child and yelled at the youngsters running on the rooftops and sometimes even caught someone who may have been there yesterday and beat him to a pulp, beat him up as we never would. After all, we are no Arabs.
Her village was not like that. So in spite of its proximity to our camp, I wasn’t familiar with the place. The village vineyards bordered on the camp and we only had to drive ten minutes to enter: exit the camp to the main road and cross the barbed wire “barrier.” “Barrier”—the official appellation of the Separation Fence when it was first erected. Sometimes the barrier consisted of a mere pile of barbed wire coils—“curlies”—which were sometimes used for stage sets in Holocaust Memorial ceremonies. At other times the barrier might consist of a pothole, or a ditch dug in the rock, or a dirt pile. Our mission that day was as simple as could be: “escorting” civil administration officials.
Such escorts were usually easy and uneventful. But they sometimes included interesting encounters with “special forces,” such as police officers sent to search for stolen Jewish property in Palestinian towns; or Shabak General Security Services agents who spoke very little and always wore tense, impressive faces, their weapons—incidental as they were—shining under their dark jackets. We also escorted Engineering Corps units who sampled the bedrock, and waterworks employees who searched for water or planned pipeline routes, or employees of cellular phone companies and private contractors sent to put up antennas or connect residential trailers of Israeli settlers to the power grid.
We also escorted senior army officers who for some reason never followed the orders they themselves had issued and wouldn’t let us check the area before they rode through in their less-armored cars, so that our escort really had nothing to do with their security. They looked on with contempt, always, and we were especially amused to see how our tough, cruel deputy battalion commander would scurry around them like a chicken and explain and apologize in an unfamiliarly patient tone and note down their scolds and reprimands in his book as though these were direct orders to be promptly carried out.
Thus our commander faced the general, as I faced him and on down the chain of command, down to the child who was too slow to run away and would pay for the humiliation suffered by the legendary deputy battalion commander as the general scolded him in front of his subordinates.
Anyway, the escort on that day was as simple as could be. Civil administration agents arrived to survey land in various places and they were always delighted to tell us that this or that block of land was state land that the villagers had poached, or land that had been purchased by a very rich and generous American Jew who tricked the Arabs and promised them he’d build a gas station on it, and they naturally didn’t know he was a Jew and sold it to him. And now he wanted to transfer ownership to a yeshivah and so trouble might be brewing in the area. “But we of the civil administration are here only to survey the plot of land itself and pass on the maps.”
On such occasions, “locals,” as they were called, often materialized out of the fields or houses, wishing to present documents to the administration people or the “officer in charge,” which in their jargon meant the supreme authority in the region. And then, often, some passing sergeant or one of the soldiers would present himself as the “officer in charge” in order to wave off the villager, because the real officer was busy or simply didn’t feel like speaking with the Arabs.