H o l o b u t o w

When Jacob speaks his voice quivers. It has a peculiar characteristic and I had to think very hard how I could best describe it. May be the hypothesis helps that his voice seems to come from his stomach and not from his throat, where, as we know, two voice cords are normally causing the sounds. Therefore I bluntly asked him, outspoken as I am:

"Jacob, would you tell me something? I can't help the impression that your voice -- fun enough -- is not as usually produced in your throat but in your stomach."

"That might be so," -- he answered without a trace of aggression in his voice although he would have been perfectly well entitled to it, considering what impertinence I had just produced by asking him such a bolt question which I really had no right to.

"I was eleven years old -- it was the year 1942 -- when the Nazis killed my mother. They forced me to watch the execution and then they shot at me. Either with disgust or in horror or maybe hit by the bullet -- I instantly fell on mother earth which was already red, soaked with my own mother's blood.

Shortly after I noticed that the bullet unfortunately had not at all hit. Therefore I must have fallen to the ground for other reasons -- either it was because of that revolting feeling over the raging men in uniform who had just killed a young woman, my own mother, with such cheerful ease and unrestrained mirth or was it because I was overcome by my own cowardice. Anyway, at that moment something choked my throat very hard and this choked feeling has not left me any more until this very day."

"I am so sorry, Jacob!" I felt so infinitely ashamed at that moment, I even felt sick. 1 saw a young woman -- his mother? -- dismembered by these henchmen ... how disgusting... How only could I have asked him such an idiotic question?

"Jacob, please... I... I..."

I really did not know what else I could say ... should say... But dear Jacob stroke my hand trying to calm me:

"You really are a good guy... I know you did not want to hurt me! Since that day..." he now surely thought of that moment when he lost his mother! -- "...more than fifty years went by. Who still remembers the Nazi times today? The young ones most often do not even know what the Nazis were. When I think of everything that happened to me in those days 1 ean not help thinking of my throat. It had choked then "why actually?" and remained that way until now. Even today it does not release my voice which had vanished that day."

"Jacob, forgive me... please!"

With my help he moves into his wheel chair which has no back or armrests since Jacob Rosen is paralysed on one side and can not sit down just anywhere like you and me. Only a simple straight stool is suitable for him. Before he got paralysed he was a sportsman and not an average one at that. In a news paper of those days I found him mentioned as one of the best discus throwers of Europe. I read the name "Rosen"...I read Jacob ... but it never occurred to me that it could be "my" Jacob Rosen.

He awoke one night as I was later told and suddenly saw the Nazis again shooting at his young mother. When that, as we know already, had happened some fifty years ago she remained mute because fear had robbed her of all strength. But in Jacob Rosen's dreams she behaved differently: she screamed louder and louder and with growing despair ... He thought that she intended to prevent the Nazis from killing her with this unearthly screams but they kept on shooting and Jacob Rosen saw his mother falling to the ground. Strangely enough her legs kept on jumping for a long while... they jumped and jumped ... if it were not such a tragic sight it would have looked very funny.

"How can that be?" my Jacob Rosen tried to analyse in his dreams. "Do the legs of the dead have a life of their own? Did the Nazis therefore have to shoot them separately one by one?" Thinking about it he saw those henchmen in their black uniforms drinking alcohol from their canteens like on that very day fifty years ago. Then they wildly shot about with their machine guns and at mother's legs too. Jacob Rosen screamed in his horrible dream but funny enough with his mother's voice:

"...please ... please ... not just that..."

He awoke with sheer despair for they did not heed his begging. What he saw now remained like that for the rest of his life: The left side of his body had got paralysed during this bad dream. Neurosurgeons came even from the USA to help him. "Holocaust victim!" they diagnosed him, depression in their voices. In their report about him they wrote:

"The trauma which lodged itself into Jacob Rosen's brain deepens now. The paralysation is the manifestation of that fear which overcame him in the moments of that family drama."

Whatever they wrote and whatever their treatment -- Jacob Rosen's condition remained the same exactly as it had started during the night of that dream.

"Listen!" -- he says to me now with his voice trembling -- "you are a noble and good friend. My only one for that! And you are true, true, true, extraordinarily true! On you one can rely. Therefore I will tell you everything that happened in those days. Before my mother was taken from me my father was already dead. In our town were sixteen thousand Jews when the Nazis invaded it. Eighteen of them were alive when the Nazis had to run off. Eighteen, including me! They killed my father in Holobutow in the very first hour after conquering the town. Now where is this Holobutow? It is a tiny village thirteen kilometres from our town. How can I be so sure that this is the place where they liquidated my father? Where the city's best men including my father really taken there? Sorry to say, there is no doubt about that! Those men rounded up by the Nazis had to cover the distance between our town to Holobutow on foot. All the way they had dropped cigarette boxes, fountain pens, glasses, hats, bags, rucksacks, even odd shoes, jackets, sweaters, lighters. The further from town they more items were on the way side. I certainly went to Holobutow immediately after the war. Why? Would you not like to plant flowers on your father's grave? But I looked in vain for this burial place. The Soviets had already evacuated all the farmers to Siberia in the year 1946 having branded them as collaborators. They did not even leave a single soul in the village. Whom could I have asked then to show me those graves?"

"Jakob" - I said with a whisper - maybe my voice too will sound like a hollow tremor from now on for my throat seemed to have lost its moisture and slowly began to choke - "Jakob! Enough for today! Do not upset yourself! A sick person like you..." I got up and wanted to leave but he grabbed my hand. "If you are human go to Holobutow for me. Find this mass grave and place a stone on it. You ought to write the following on it: - Here lies Natan Rosen, father of Jakob. He was murdered by the Nazis in the year 1941. May he rest in peace. - Do it for me I beseech you! A cold fear is rising inside me for I feel my father might curse me because I did not see to his eternal rest. On the contrary I neglect every son's first duty in a criminal way."

"Calm yourself Jakob... please... Did I not help you in any way to this very day, isn't it? Neither will I letyou down in future. Certainly I will go to Holobutow for you.

The village lies to the south east of Lemberg. In The Small Guidebook for Galicia, edition 1938, I read about it "....three hundred souls, a small quarry, forests and wheat fields as well as meadows rich with lush grass, ideal for cattle breeding..."

No easy task to obtain a visa from the Ukrainian authorities for Holobutow! Someone else but me would have shirked right away because of these difficulties alone. But not me! Holobutow is still called Holobutow today, but even today it can only be reached by bicycle or like some hundred years ago by horse carriage. A car can't get there because the former road has disappeared and the new settlers who came here only eight years ago do not need a road. They do not have anything to sell nor do they have any money to buy anything in town. The complications this lack of roads causes if one has to finish a task for Jakob Rosen! Finally I am in Holobutow. Not a village but rather a backdrop for the paintings of Chagall. Even the famous goat is here. Every hut looks into another direction. The ducks swim in a muddy puddle, the pigs grunt in a sty made of a few rough planks. The forest from the south not only conquered the village but even the Don Cossaks themselves who were forcibly settled here by the Soviets eight years ago. That forest anyway, had no difficulty in fighting its way right up to the first ones of the dilapidated huts. Finally a human soul. A big woman with an impressing behind resembling a horse's croup, feet in well-worn boots, the head wrapped in an enormous scarf, maybe it is just a bed sheet and not a scarf, on her back a huge bundle of dried branches.

"...eh..." - I want to start a conversation with her somehowbut all in vain as I soon realise because that woman thinks I came from town to confront her over her steeling firewood from the state forest. Therefore she increases her marching tempo and simply pretends tobe deaf - "Sowaitforme! I don't care a damn for your firewood. What I am looking for is a grave. A mass grave!"

"A WHAT?"

Talking to this one is only a waste of precious time. I find myself a long rounded stick and I start to prod the soil in the village centimetre by centimetre.

Wait a moment: In the "Brockhaus, edition 1938, a small quarry was mentioned indeed... What was I waiting for, the Nazis loved such places. And right I was: there is a quarry or whatever is left of that place which seems to have been a quarry ages ago but there was no trace of any mass grave what so ever. How should one ever find it here when everything is overgrown and disintegrated?

Meanwhile the sun disappears behind the horizon - I would not think of staying overnight in such a place.... where then anyway? So back to town!

Naturally I can not fall asleep! I study the map of Holobutow... should I have shot hundreds of healthy people where would I have thought of burying them? How disgusting... how low can I go - I pondered - I start identifying myself with those..., with those...I would think any description of them to be nothing but a phrase. There isn't any description fitting the Nazis. An eternal most terrible curse may seal their fate!

I think of Jakob Rosen. Should I not be able to carry out his request he would crack up ... he will simply lose his mind... Knowing that he was unable to see to his father's peace would make him mad. God.... what if he reacts with another paralysation? Then he might be in the wheel chair for good and might not even be able to move his fingers.... I must ... I must... find that mass grave where his father or whatever remained of him rests, whatever it takes...

The next day was not favourable for Jakob Rosen and myself either. Perhaps my friend was on the wrong track after all? One had to consider that the Nazis had perhaps burnt their victims since they had so passionately practised that all over Europe? In this they surely achieved the rating: "True specialists!"

Again a Don Cossack appeared before me!

"... Sober? Is there really such a thing as a sober Cossack?" He says to me: "Are you looking for gold here, my brother? Or are you mad?"

"I am searching for a mass grave!"

"In Holobutow? I never heard of one!"

On the horizon I can see heavy leaden clouds now They draw closer to the village, they will bring the rain, the soil will soon turn into a sponge.... who could find a grave in there then. Yet if I do not find it what will happen to my friend Jakob Rosen?

Good God! After all, I did what I possibly could, what any human being could possibly do - My stick had prodded the forest thoroughly it probed the quarry, it poked about in five hills without finding a single human bone.

"Nothing! Jakob Rosen, believe me I did whatever possible. Even you yourself could not have come up with anthing more..."

Another Don Cossack crosses my Way. This one too is sober! Am I perhaps not on Ukrainian soil? Two Cossacks and none of them sozzelt!

"Sir, you are coming from far away..., from very far?"

He talks to me without waiting for an answer and continues instead:

"Do you know anything about potatoes?"

"Nothing!"

"I thought so! All of you there in these big cities you only have muck in your heads!"

He is upset! I for my part I am sorry for not having studied agriculture. It would have been a good chance not to disappoint that Cossack so bitterly.

"And what if I had known something about potatoes after all?" - I therefore ask sheepishly, though I am more interested in listening to a human voice than in the content of whatever the Don Cossack will have to say. His facial expressions react vividly to my question. I now realise there are indeed some human emotions in that Cossack from the Don area. - "So do you know anything or not?"

"A little..." I lie straight to his face.

"Then tell me why is it that the potato harvest in Kociubynsky's field is six times richer than the one in

my field?"

God... is it You talking through the mouth of this lout?

"Brother, off we go!"

Through fierce thunder and lightening, he takes me southward in the direction of the forest which has forced its way towards the village. After some five hundred metres, the thicket suddenly ends. A large clearing in the forest! Dry twigs mark two equal sections. "The field facing the village is mine. Do you see? Only here and there some potatoes..., and now look at the field which stretches up to the forest. Doesn't that seem odd to you? The green leaves are growing rampant there."

"...My stick" - I remember feverishly and without restraint I roughly poke this soil which yields so rich a harvest. The surface has surely been ploughed and harrowed repeatedly only too well. Suddenly I feel some resistance! What is it? A stone or a human bone?

An extremely bright flash of lightening, a clap of thunder so powerful that I assume God is giving me a warning. I admit: I start to tremble, but why? Why? With my bare hands, I dig the soil out of the crater made by my stick. Human bones, indeed!

It thunders.... thunders.... where can I get a large stone from now and how shall I engrave the words: "Here lies Natan Rosen, the father of Jakob?" Tomorrow I will think of how it could best be done - I consciously try to deceive myself..

"Tomorrow? My visa expires tomorrow! I certainly can't come back to this place tomorrow!"

The rain gets heavier and heavier... The Don Cossack stands in front of me, completely drenched, his face expresses something, maybe it is astonishment while he gapes at the human bone I have just picked up from the ground.

The storm becomes unbearable, maybe heaven wants to show me its discontentment at my disturbing those lying in this soil...

I leave the field and ignore the Cossack's question which gets fainter and fainter the further I go: "So what do you say, Sir? Why does Kociubynsky have a better potato harvest than me?"

I think of my friend Jakob Rosen. He will surely not understand that a thunderstorm prevented me from putting up that stone on his father's grave. He will stare at me for a long time with his big, dark, mild, sad eyes and will ask me in the end:

"Why didn't you put up that stone? Didn't I tell you what my father's last wish was, which he uttered before they led him away: "...and one word has definitely to be engraved on the stone, that is: Shalom!"

Both of us repeated this word together: "...Shalom!"