Monologue

One day in 1942 my brave mother sent me with food to the railway station in Debrecen where the refugees came from Poland. The look in their eyes made me shiver in fear all through the night. When my father returned from the forced work camp, without his beard, he had the same look in his eyes. He stared into space and did not look dare at us straight in the eye because he knew… and was afraid.

As a girl I was full of fear. I looked for a way to give myself hope, as only death was our destiny. I wondered whether it was possible that nobody cared about us. So, with a keen child's eye, I looked for a solution. In the ghetto, when I saw the searchlights scouring the skies for enemy planes, I imagined seeing signals in the light rays that someone wanted to get in touch with me, to help me, to save us all. Afterwards, after my father had died, I cried for the last time as a child. I learned to repress the thoughts of what was happening to us. I imagined standing aside; We children invented a game frightful game, in which we predicted who of us would die tomorrow, and who the day after. During those awful days of death and childhood naivety I gave my sister Eva my daily bread ration.
I imagined standing aside. We children invented a frightful game, in which we predicted who of us would die tomorrow, and who the day after.

After this time of dread and terror, when everyone wanted to survive looked only after himself, my late mother took food from whoever was ready to give even a small spoonful. This way she saved the lives of some people who would have died the next day.

I am here in Israel! In my anger as a child I did not want to speak either Hungarian or German, nor remember anything, only close myself up, afraid of neither death nor hunger, leading a life of hope. Only later I began to read and to understand where I fitted into that horrible and awful picture. I was angry and I hated. But I did not know whom to hate more: the Hungarians who gave us up to the Germans for slaughter, the Austrians who let my father starve; the Poles who were dedicated to the work of death; or the English who did not let the Jews enter the Holy Land to be saved (they did not want to spoil their good relations with the Arabs). Perhaps it was the Americans, who did not stop the murder and annihilation (which they could have)! My mother, the heroine, taught me not to hate because hate disfigures the beauty of the soul. It is forbidden to let children grow up with hate.

To build a healthy Israeli family without the shadow of the Holocaust, to repress and repress, not to remember but to invest all of one's powers in building a new life in a country of stength and security, without war and danger –this is the only sane way to live.
force, strength, ambition, energy ??

To gather strength again and return, through memory, to hell. To begin to draw in fear, with strained bowels and rapidly beating heart. To draw to open just a small crack. To paint the feeling first, to want to scream with all your strength: how could one let this happen?! To try to return with dreadful fear, to hold your breath, to paint one picture and then another one – the pictures passing slowly. I am strong; now I can look back without fear. Indeed? Could this happen after 46 years?

I have a burning need to convey to the youth in Israel and abroad what happened to the Jewish people during that time. We must remember but not only by traveling to death camps in Poland or other countries, where the stones are silent. The memories are here – we are the memories. We must do all we can to ensure that these "events", or the likes of them, will never happen again.

Sara Atzmon