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The Eye and Other Tales
Andrew M. Fischer
May 2024 979-8-9890839-0-9DESCRIPTION:
This is a story of survivors. Jan Fischer survived Stalin's labor camps because he recognized the Jewish prayers the Shema. Lidia Szylberstajn evaded the Nazi death camps that claimed most of her family only to survive two years in Siberia, before meeting Jan in Egypt.
This is the story of Lidia's cousin Zlata, who later became Solange, the only one in the Szylberstajn family to survive the Nazi death camps.
This is the story of Adolphe Szylberstajn, who survived to fight in the French underground, as the liaison between the resistance to Archbishop Raymond, later Cardinal Raymond, to become the celebrated orchestra conductor Adolphe Sibert.
This is the story of Solange's son, Maurice, at the barricades in the summer of 1968 and at many other revolutionary frontlines, as a journalist and activist, and of Solange's son, Charles, a journalist, author and film director, who filmed his mother's story as a holocaust survivor and filmed the music and art of Haiti, only to film the fall of Haitian democracy.
This is the story of the survival of Jewish life over 175 years in Europe.
EXCERPT:
From chapter 4, The Shema
The first day in camp, my father and all the other prisoners lined up for their one meal a day, a bowl of thin soup. My father moved forward with the line, and as he moved forward in line, closer to the pot of soup, he could hear the man ladling the soup out, muttering under his breathe. As my father got closer he tried to make out what the man was saying, but the man was muttering under his breathe, so that the guards wouldn’t hear him talking to the prisoners. Not until my father was next to the man could he hear what the man was saying.
“Shema yisrael adonai eloheynu . . .”
Standing in front of the man, with his bowl in hand, my father realized what the man was doing, and answered, also muttering under his breathe so the guards wouldn’t hear.
“Boruch shem k’vod malchuso.”
The man didn’t say another word but dipped the ladle deep into the pot, reaching for the one bone, with a little meat on it, and put it into grandfather’s bowl.
The next day, when they lined up for food, the man looked at my father, recognized him and, again, dipped the ladle deep into the pot and delivered the one piece of meat into father’s bowl. This continued every day. I don’t think that the two ever spoke, except for that first time, when my father completed the shema, but my father never starved to death. He had a shomer, a guardian taking care of him. Did he have someone looking after him because he knew the shema?
From Chapter 9, No We have Never Met Before
When Nana
woke up, she did not know where
she was. She was still lying down under the tree, and not in good
shape. She looked up to see an Englishman in uniform attending to
her, and a native Kazakh, a farmer or a shepherd. The native Kazakh
had found Nana passed out under the tree. Nana was a light skinned,
European, a white woman. The Kazakh assumed she was English and he
went looking for an British soldier, or some other Englishman, to
report that one of their women passed out under a tree and needed
help.
As fortune would have it, the soldier he found was a doctor, a military doctor. However, the doctor did not speak Kazakh, and so did not understand the shepherd, who was jabbering in Kazakh and pointing to the tree. The English doctor thought the shepherd was accusing him, or other soldiers, of stealing fruit from the tree and tried to back away. The Kazakh shepherd was persistent, however, and kept pointing to the tree. Eventually, gesturing with arms waving, the shepherd got the English soldier to look under the tree, and see the woman and managed to communicate to the soldier that this woman was European, that she was “one of yours”. . . .
. . . Nana had a friend who was a nurse, also Polish. The nurse, who was dating a doctor, arranged for a second doctor to be a date for her friend. When the two couples met, Nana’s friend introduced the two doctors. Nana’s date said that he was pleased to meet her.
Nana looked at him and realized that he was the doctor who the Kazakh shepherd had brought to her when she had collapsed under his fruit tree. She answered him, saying “We’ve met before.”
The doctor answered that he did not think they had met. In fact, he insisted that “surely I would remember meeting a woman as attractive as you.” Nana smiled, graciously accepting the compliment, as she said “I didn’t look this then.” Over dinner that evening, she had the chance to tell the doctor the story of where they had met and to thank the young doctor for saving her life.
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