thursday night i met guta's son yair @ the train station to go back to his home for the night. he is a commercial lawyer & lives in a suburb less than an hour outside of tel aviv. i mentioned to him briefly the work that my new friend emily does, defending palestinian civil rights, & he became noticably agitated. he stated they don't deserve those rights in the first place.
his home is large & full of beautiful art. his oldest daughter is a very succesful actress & model who graces the covers of israeli fashion magazines, looking very beautiful & angry, as is apparently internationally en vogue. his family's way of life is an extreme polar opposite of aliza & moshe's orthodox existance on the yishuv. at dinner i expressed my desire to go back into the city the next day, & that it would be ok to take a cab to the train station. yair insisted that his wife yael could take me, & we would leave at 1:30.
at 1:15 she stormed into the house in a furious hurry, exclaiming "go go go i am in a hurry! are you ready? i have only enough time to make schnitzel for gilad!" gilad is their eldest son, who i connected the most with. he was just discharged from the army due to an injury he incurred playing basketball. lucklily i was all packed & ready to go, & heaved my backback on & followed her out to the car.
it was 75 degrees outside & blindingly sunny.
yael drove anxiously & made no attempt at conversation. she dropped me off at a dubious bus stop, saying that she never takes the bus, but probably the #62 would get me where i wanted to go, ask the driver.
i had intended to meet up with a friend in about an hour on the other side of the city. i left the bus stop & settled myself on a picnic table at a nearby park to eat an orange & look at my map to orient myself. when i discovered i was only 10 or 15 blocks away from guta's i decided to call her up & see if it was a good time to come by & look at old pictures & hear stories. she was home & excited to see me. i walked about 5 blocks in the wrong direction & then caught a cab. the cab driver noticed that i was overheated from the sun & my large pack, & that my nature was rushed. "slow down!" he told me, "we are in no rush! life takes its time, even if you hurry!"
my time with guta was memorable & precious.
she & her late husband's names both translate roughly to mean "good". guta & tuvia. she had photos dating back to the early 20s from both sides of the family. guta & tuvia were each one of 7 children born in poland. in the school pictures children wear no shoes. there was no money, but everybody is immaculately dressed & groomed. beautiful & stylish people. my favorite photo that she let me keep is of tuvia's brothers weaving baskets. they are gorgeous & serious looking, the baskets are huge. tuvia escaped the camps by being a soldier in the soviet army. he literally jumped ship while his troops were on en route to italy in the late 30s & made his way to palestine.
guta told a few stories of the camps mostly focusing on the kindness of a few gentile girls she was friends with who were imprisoned close by & smuggled her food. she & 2 of her sisters survived, but everybody else was killed.
"they were murdered" guta repeated, more than once, with the only instance of harshness i encountered in my visit with her.
when she showed me the tattoo of numbers she recieved in auschwitz she told me, "it did not hurt my body. no. no pain on the body, pain on the heart, pain in the soul."
she showed me a picture of a blonde haired blue eyed german woman named barbara from the 80s. this woman found guta because she was writing a book about an obscure concentration camp that guta spent time in. "barbara wanted to know my story. i told her my story, & i asked in turn for hers. she had a hard childhood with no love. i had love, she needed love, so i gave her love. she became like a daughter to me."
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