Night and Hope

Arnost Lustig, George Theiner

• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781787205277
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia judía

First published in 1962, Night and Hope is a collection of interrelated short stories by a young Czech writer who was a boy in the Terezín concentration camp near Prague during the war. They have already been received with great acclaim abroad and they now make their appearance for the first time in this country. They reveal what it was like to live in a sealed town which was in fact a reception station for the gas chambers of Auschwitz. A guard thrashes a poor old woman on the counter of her little shop and each are curiously resigned to their roles of giving and receiving degradation. Little boys play in the streets and are quietly regretful that they won't grow up and wear fine clothes. A guard's wife and her coffee-party friends stroll round the ghetto to collect anything that catches their eye—a wedding-ring, pathetic clothes....Arnošt Lustig's stories are a new and vivid focus on this fearful tragedy as it affected the private individual. They are written with restraint yet nothing is glossed, and they take their place amongst the very best writing to have come out of the shambles of Hitler's 'Jewish Question'."Arnošt Lustig has succeeded in putting truth into a poem. Nothing in art could mean more than that. His style is sober and modern, his sentence carries all attributes of that which connects prose with poetry and makes it obvious how slight and unperceivable the borderlines between genres."—L. Askenazy, Literarni Noviny (Prague)."Each tale has a genuine unity of its own and is a small work of art in its own right. No one reading them could ever feel that they were only stories."—The Times Literary Supplement (London)."No writer in Europe, in the East or in the West, has expressed as much truth about the time of the holocaust as Arnošt Lustig."—Maariv (Tel Aviv)."Outstanding stories."—The Bookman, London

BLUE FLAMES

1

THE taller of the two gendarmes frowned and repeatedly cleared his throat; he had had an uneasy feeling right from the moment when he first entered the ghetto. The two of them were just passing the bandstand of the Ghettoswingers, and the shrilling of the trumpets did not abate in the slightest. The gendarme’s weary mind vaguely registered the shouts of the brown-tanned youths, calling someone named Woodpecker and exhorting him not to slack, but sing; he replied by saying they could all go to hell because he was on his way to the blacksmith’s shop to get some exercise. Then they waggled their shoulders and yelled:

“Up and down and down and up

Our ship goes rolling.”

The gendarme was irritated, and felt a desire to hit the boy. It was a persistent feeling, and he could not get rid of it.

‘They’re crazy!’ he said, bending down slightly towards his smaller companion. ‘In this heat.’

‘They’re on a ship,’ grinned the other. ‘It’s not so hot there.’

He pushed his helmet a little to the back of his head and blew beads of perspiration off his lips.

The taller gendarme had pale, cheese-coloured cheeks in a lean, pock-marked face. The collar of his service blouse stood out stiffly from his emaciated neck. As he tried to moisten his dry lips, his Adam’s apple jogged up and down in his throat.

‘Still,’ he repeated, ‘in this heat!’

‘What do you care—here?’ said the smaller one.

The taller one did not reply any more. Now and again he nodded his long, horse-like head, sleepily, without moving his parched lips. His distrustful, green eyes scanned everyone in the street, but he said nothing and never stopped. They traversed the town with long, quick strides, like a knife cutting bread.

‘They say Holler is behind it all,’ the smaller one spoke up after a while.

‘That’s what I say,’ said the taller one wearily. To himself he swore at the heat.

‘It stands to reason,’ he added, ‘that if you make such a racket, you’ll only get more knocked about.’

‘More or less,’ replied the smaller one. ‘If you were here you wouldn’t care.’

The dusty smell of the chestnuts and lime trees clung to their mouths.

‘Phew!’ spat the tall one.

‘If the commandant has allowed them to, why shouldn’t they have a little fun?’ muttered the smaller one with a frown.

‘Even so,’ the taller one insisted.

Their heavy army issue boots slid along the paving, and they listened to the clinking of their hobnails. That was an ordinary pleasant sound, but above and beneath it squawked the jazz. The youths behind their backs roared as if they were drunk.

‘What’s that coming?’ asked the taller one suddenly, and licked his lips.

Before the other could reply, a carriage came into view and rattled towards them.

The taller one slowed his pace a little.

A piebald horse with white and grey spots scattered over his rump jutted out of the silver-polished harness. Enthroned in the purple of the now much-faded blankets which covered up the patches in the upholstery of the seat behind the coachman, sat Ignatz Marmulstaub, member of the Council of Elders.

‘Will he stop?’ asked the taller gendarme inquiringly.

‘He might,’ replied the other.

‘He should,’ the tall one corrected him. In spite of all the compassion he felt for this town because it was a Czech town, he felt pleased that here at last was something he could tackle; a job worthy of a sergeant of the gendarmerie who was already half on duty; and on the other hand the responsibility of someone who would never be freed from the obligation of accounting for himself to the gendarmes on the highway.

‘Mr. Marmulstaub,’ the coachman said in a confidential undertone as he half turned towards him, ‘the gendarmes!’

‘Where?’ came from his passenger. ‘Ah! In front of us. You’ll have to go slower.’

He leaned out of the coach.

‘Your obedient servant, gentlemen,’ he said in a gruff voice. And he was going to add something about the weather and the heat.

They did not as much as raise their eyes.

‘Do you think he ought to stop?’ the taller one asked his companion, bending down towards him.

‘He could,’ said the smaller one.

‘Rightly speaking, he should,’ the taller gendarme insisted in a loud and stubborn voice.

Marmulstaub coloured, thinking: too late to stop now. He had simply missed it. And then: they weren’t addressing him. On the contrary: they didn’t even respond to his greeting. And anyway, they didn’t call him back, and they looked so uncouth in their polished helmets covered with green cloth.

‘He drives about like a bloody king,’ murmured the taller gendarme angrily without moving his narrow head.

‘Well, that’s not such a big impertinence,’ replied the smaller one, ‘considering the heat.’

‘Bloody cheek, I call it,’ countered the taller one.

‘They drew to the side,’ said the smaller one in a languid tone. ‘That’s enough for me.’

‘They couldn’t do less,’ added the tall one.

‘We were in the middle of the road, and our boots are for pedestrians,’ the smaller one replied calmly.

‘Too much molly-coddling, that’s what I say,’ complained the taller one.

‘Oh, well, it’s so terribly hot, chum,’ the smaller one evaded a reply. He had actually meant to say it wasn’t worth talking about. Now he took his helmet off. He had sparse, straw-coloured hair, wet and crumpled with perspiration.

‘It is that,’ agreed the taller one, and he too lapsed into silence.

Then he swallowed some saliva he had laboriously gathered on his tongue. The Adam’s apple, which protruded like a knuckle of a fist rammed inside his throat, leaped erratically upwards and fell again.

They passed through a narrow gate in the fence which ran round the ghetto. The concert in the main square was only a barely perceptible sound now, almost inaudible. The SS man who walked up and down the other side of the fence was given a perfunctory salute and replied in the same mute way.

The smaller gendarme put on his helmet.

2

‘No,’ Marmulstaub answered the coachman when they had reached the square. ‘Don’t wait for me.’

He had decided not to use the carriage any more. It attracted too much attention to himself, as he could see from his encounter with the gendarmes. And others, too, were irritated by it, he could see that right now by looking at the people in the square.

‘You know what?’ he said. ‘Take the carriage away for repairs. It creaks abominably.’

‘It creaks all right,’ replied the coachman, who was just thinking the same thing, ‘because I have nothing to grease it with.’

Just as he left, the music stopped.

‘What’s up?’ someone asked Marmulstaub.

‘Why?’ he replied. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Can’t you hear it?’

‘What should I hear?’ he asked, but at that very moment he, like everyone else, heard the murmur of the car belonging to Herr von Holler, which carried through the cleft of sudden silence, the car’s klaxon cutting across the hush of the crowd and ringing out sharply over their heads. Ignatz Marmulstaub, however, was quick to notice that Herr von Holler, the ghetto commandant, was not in the car, its only occupant a mere private of the Signals Corps.

The crowd thinned out.

‘Why don’t you go on playing,’ he said in a hoarse voice. This wretched town, he thought, hangs its tail and sits on its backside even when it doesn’t have to. After all, he had turned his back on these gendarmes a while ago, and nothing happened.

He delighted in their almost tangible astonishment. The people kept their eyes glued to his face as though they could interpret even the motions of his lips and tried to guess in advance what shape his thoughts would take.

‘You can go on playing!’ he repeated huskily.

He noted with pleasure that the concert was beginning anew.

At that moment he caught sight of little Liselotte.

She, too, had seen and heard him, was his first thought. In the joy that welled up in him he forgot all about the gendarmes.

‘Good afternoon, miss,’ he greeted her, narrowing his eyes.

‘Good day,’ she replied.

‘It’s a fine day today, and there’s music,’ he said. ‘Quite a change, isn’t it.’

‘But it’s also advisable to keep out of sight because one can’t tell what might happen. That is another change.’

‘What could happen?’ he smiled. ‘After all, everything has already happened.’

‘I have more errands than I have leisure in any case,’ she said. ‘...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• THE RETURN
• ROSE STREET
• THE CHILDREN
• MORAL EDUCATION
• STEPHEN AND ANNE
• BLUE FLAMES
• HOPE
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER