Hersh was lost within himself like a traveler in a foreign city. He did not know whether he was moving forward or back, whether he was dreaming or wide awake.
It was Passover, the night before the ghetto commemoration. In his sleep Hersh saw Rivkele, his blonde, light-footed first wife, who had never actually looked as beautiful as she did in his dream. And he saw their two children, Mirele and Yossele, who along with Rivkele had been taken away from him during the selection on the ramp at the Auschwitz train station, a selection conducted by the infamous Dr. Mengele. Hersh tossed and turned on his bed, entangled in a mass of half-seen images and disjointed thoughts. He thought of the happiness he had lost and of the happiness he had found after the war.
Hersh had been incarcerated in Auschwitz for two years, during which time he had worked at the Union munitions plant as a slave labourer. There he had joined the secret resistance organization that had stolen dynamite from the plant for the October 1944 bombing of the crematorium at Birkenau, the extermination camp that adjoined Auschwitz. By some miracle his participation had escaped notice and he was not punished when all the others were rounded up and executed. In the camp, Hersh had been a dare-devil, a desperado; he had felt no fear.
After the liberation in 1945, Hersh’s personality underwent a transformation, at least on the surface. He became a devil of a different kind, a devil-may-care,...
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