I had never really read him . . . a few tales here and there, the novel Enemies . . . until I opened a volume of his Collected Short Stories not long ago. It has kept me riveted. This passage is one of the reasons. It is the straightforward, cold-blooded truth, told exactly in that manner.
° ° °
The war made a quick mess of the family. The father was killed by a German bomb, the older brother in Bedzin was shot by the Nazis, the younger brother was drafted into the Polish army and killed somewhere, the mother died of starvation and kidney disease in the Warsaw ghetto, and the sister, Ytta, disappeared and Dora didn’t know where she was. Dora had a French teacher on the Aryan side, a spinster named Elzbieta Dolanska, and she saved Dora. How she did this would take too long to tell. Dora spent two years in a cellar and the teacher fed her with her last savings. A saint of a woman, but she perished during the Polish uprising. That’s how the Almighty rewards the good Gentiles.
“In essence, we were all walking on graves. When you spend years in camps and prisons and stare death in the face ten times a day, you lose all compassion.”
The passage comes from “A Tale of Two Sisters” . . . in case you’re innarested.
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