When I left “Karl Liebknecht”
(Ili-Ili, Skopje, North Macedonia, 2019, shortlisted for the Writers Association of North Macedonia Prize for best prose book of the year, 2020).
Translated from the Macedonian by Christina E. Kramer
In the Karl Liebknecht House in Leipzig, Germany, thirty people of various nationalities are seated around an improvised table on the stage in the Events Hall, interpreters behind them, some with texts in front of them, some without, and while it looks as if they’re at an ordinary meeting, they are, in fact, at an exceptional one, one that could be called a performance. They are taking part in a pilot project organized by the Society of Admirers of Karl Liebknecht of Leipzig, which, on 19 January 2018, in recognition of the 99th anniversary of the death of Karl Liebknecht—the great German leftist and colleague of Rosa Luxemburg—had invited them, all migrants who, prior to their emigration, had lived at an address either bearing his name or having some other connection with him. Some had changed addresses temporarily, others had moved away forever, some wanted to leave, some never completely left, and yet others were connected in some particular way with places named “Karl Liebknecht.” The call was announced publicly, and it generated a great deal of interest, but in the end, thirty people were selected. The hall is completely packed—residents of Leipzig, most others somehow connected with Karl Liebknecht of whom a majority were also members of the Society of Admirers of Karl Liebknecht—all showing great interest in the event.
After a short speech by a representative of the Society of Admirers of Karl Liebknecht, people were given the opportunity either to speak freely or to read from a prepared text, each in his or her own way, in whatever manner they wished and considered appropriate, about how their Karl Liebknecht address had left its mark on them, both while they were living there and afterward.
Here are the stories two of them told:
Ali, 27, Baghdad, Iraq - Potsdam, Germany
I am Ali from Iraq, I fled to Germany in 2016. A classic refugee journey: by foot, boat, foot, then train, foot, a taxi that robbed me, foot, then a van which took the last of my money, foot, swimming, foot, etc. until I reached Potsdam, without a penny, and my head bandaged because of a beating from two Syrians in a camp at the Austrian border. They thought we were taking their place in Europe and they would be sent back towards Syria, which didn’t exist anymore. But Iraq is still there. “Don’t pretend you’re crazy or something,” they told me. I admit it, they annoyed me, fights broke out quickly in the refugee camp because we’re all so wired up. But deep in my gut I knew that we other refugees really were a stumbling block for Syrians headed to Europe. But our tales shouldn’t be taken lightly either. Extremists torched my jewelry shop in Baghdad after they cleaned it out, and one of the men told my son that all that glitters is not gold. My son didn’t understand, but I did. We packed all our basic things and fled to Turkey. My wife and son are still there, waiting for me to drag them here.
The first two weeks I slept on boxes outside the Karl Liebknecht stadium. Sometimes the groundskeeper took pity on me and let me inside, and, while he sprayed the field, I could rinse myself off a bit in the heat. One day the police rounded me up and took me to the station. They called a bunch of phone numbers, but couldn’t find a place for me. They said there would be a free bed the next day in the Refugee Centre, someone would be leaving— they had been given official notice to leave the country. “I’ll sleep by the stadium,” I said. But they got on their phones again and stared at their computers, until one of them began to nod and shout into the receiver bitte, bitte, danke. They brought me to an ugly little hotel at the edge of town. There the receptionist put a red band around my wrist which meant I would also get breakfast. I don’t know who pays for it – the police or the state – but it was very strange that I was put in a hotel, not a shelter for refugees.
The following day I overslept and was late getting out of the room by 10:00, that’s what was written in the information on the night table. At eleven I had to appear at the police station, so they could transfer me to the Refugee Centre. I didn’t even have time to wash up, I flew from the room, nearly crashing into the maid in the hallway, who looked at me panic-stricken, fear in her eyes, and she shouted after me in English: “It’s too late, now you’ll see what they’ll do to you!” I turned around and saw her crossing herself, then I ran down to the first floor. When I turned in the key, the woman at the reception desk smiled at me in a kind way and gestured with her hand for me to wait – they had to remove the band marked with their red-coloured logo. She gestured for me to lift my hand. She took a scalpel, small and gold-coloured like the one my uncle had, the uncle who had been a surgeon in Baghdad before getting killed in an explosion. She carefully cut the band, which dropped open on two sides. But, as if she didn’t notice, she almost tenderly touched the scalpel to my dark skin, through which the blue veins were barely visible. At first blood first lighly beaded on the surface, then it came streaming out. I gaped in horror, first at my hand then at the receptionist. With my other hand I grabbed the scalpel from her, but she seemed to be waiting for that, and with her free hand she grabbed a stapler from the desk, the longest one I’ve ever seen in my life, and she caught my arm between its teeth. It was now 10:08, she said, or something like that, because she glanced over at the wall clock. I didn’t have the strength to shout. I was bleeding onto the desk, I was dizzy. I only know that she got a big, red bandage from somewhere and bandaged my hand, then took my other hand from the stapler and blew on it so it wouldn’t hurt, and then came out from behind the desk and helped me sit on a bench. The bandage had written on it the name of the hotel in big white letters.
I left the hotel like in a dream. Rain was pouring down, it was running non-stop through the streets, it was coming down from every direction. I stopped under the semi-circle awning of a bar which had mounted speakers playing some kind of Spanish music. A woman carrying an umbrella with a cubist design made her way slowly across the street, as if she were enjoying the drumming of the rain on the triangles, squares, and circles above her head. I ran across the street with my wounded hands across my chest. My temples were pounding. As if through a fog I saw a child in a carriage drop a toy under a parked car. His father stopped the carriage, set his umbrella on it, and clumsily bent down. I watched him as if from another world, but I understood him to the core of my being. I know how annoyed parents get picking up toys that their children, unintentionally, and sometimes intentionally, throw from their carriages, beds, highchairs. A person needs to bend over, kneel down, sometimes even slip under the table, knocking their head against someone’s leg, or the underside of the table, dirty their knees on a spot on the floor or scrape their hand on a chunk of bread that has dried up and turned as sharp as a needle, and then fetch a spoon, a soother, or ball from under the last chair, or under the leg of another chair where, fortunately, no one was sitting. Or maybe there is a guest sitting there with a hole in his sock that he thought no one would notice when he hid his feet beneath his chair. But now, the host himself is going to notice and he’ll imagine all kinds of things: that his cousin’s husband wears socks with holes in them, yet makes himself out to be a big-shot businessman, but here he is, turning up as a guest with a torn sock that he’s hidden under the table, at the very corner of the dining room; perhaps no one would have noticed if the host hadn’t had to slide under the table to fetch the small spoon that his son intentionally threw there, a proud smile on his face, and his father—with that already inborn instinct to fix the mistakes of his only son quickly —doesn’t wait for any of the guests, or this particularly concerned guest, to bend down themselves to drag out the spoon. No. The father immediately kneels and sets after it under the table, and here, unintentionally, notices the sock of his wife’s cousin’s husband, which has a hole between the big toe and the neighbouring toe on his right foot…
I was still thinking about this when I entered the police station. The police jumped up when they saw me; “What were you doing last night? What’s with your hands? Did you cut your veins? In the hotel they told us that you were behaving strangely and that you left at seven and it’s already noon! Let’s go to the Centre for Foreigners. They’ll bandage your hand, they’ll give you something to eat and a permit, but as for asylum, you’ll have to wait, you still have a chance! We know everything about you, we’ve been googling around. In Iraq it seems you were the most promising poet! Don't let your country be left without such a man.
I am still waiting for asylum, I have stopped writing poetry, in Potsdam I walk the dogs of busy Germans around the “Karl Liebknecht” stadium, I tell them in Arabic how I slept there on boxes, I exchange a few words with the groundskeeper, but in my mind, I am creating a blog about the refugees’ hallucinations which no one understands. My wife and child have made it to Lesbos, but not even Allah knows whether they will make it here. I would give anything to be able to go looking for the spoons and toys that my son has dropped under the table, even when we have guests with holes in their socks. Anything.
Nathaniel, 50, Brest, Belarus – New York, USA
I am a descendent of Jews who survived in Brest, which at the time belonged to Poland. Jews from the Brest Ghetto, as it was called, which the Nazis created in 1941. Less than a year after its formation, twenty thousand Jews had already been killed. The twenty or so who survived were all that remained of the Jewish population in Brest. Among them was my grandfather. It took him a number of years to grapple with all the evil he had lived through and seen with his own eyes. With the pains in his body and his soul. My grandmother helped him, she was a nurse in the Brest hospital where other surviving Jews were also treated.
They left behind one son, my father, who is also no longer among the living. Nor is my mother. They died in a traffic accident while driving to the university in Minsk where I was defending my master’s thesis about news correspondents. You will say, and you will be right, that it is absurd to get a master’s degree in Belarus on a topic concerning journalism, but I needed the degree for formal reasons, in order to get a raise as a journalist, as a correspondent for Radio Free Europe. Unfortunately, perhaps because of the absurdity, God punished me as well, letting my parents perish in a traffic accident en route to my master’s defense. They were already dead while I was answering the committee’s questions, glancing the whole time at the amphitheatre door. I thought it was strange that they were late since I knew they were setting out early in the morning. The professors were already congratulating me when the secretary came in and told me that the radio had just announced that there had been a terrible car accident in which a man and woman with the same last name as mine had been killed. That was the worst day of my life.
After their death I returned to Brest and several months later, in a state of total depression, I received word that I had been selected for a Fulbright scholarship to the United States. I put out an ad for the house where I had been left alone, but the ad went unanswered for months. A bit later, I rented it to a family from Palestine who had, also by chance, if chance exists at all, ended up in Belarus, before I left for the United States on my Fulbright. The house was located among the hotels and small boutique hotels lining both sides of our street, Karl Liebknecht. Even I don’t know how many hotels have popped up on our street where earlier there had just been family homes. They, in fact, became hotels, some expanded into the back part of the yards around them, others renovated to became beautiful, like little boxes. There aren’t that many tourists in Brest, nor in Belarus in general, but the political system is totally exotic for foreigners, and they prefer to photograph it in Minsk. But it is lovely seeing Karl Liebknecht Street decorated with its renovated and new façades. The façade of our house is pretty new as well. Unfortunately, that is the least important thing when the house is left without its inhabitants, a house without its household. Well, at least the Palestinian family with its own share of misfortunes, has finally found a home right in my Brest, right in our house. Fate, providence, who knows what. Sometimes it’s not clear who wants things to turn out like this, God, Allah, or someone else.
I met them at the house in Brest and stayed there with them for three more days. Old parents, a daughter, in the last stages of pregnancy, married to a Jew. The son she had with her first husband who died in front of their house in Gaza, did not want to come, and he remained in Gaza, now one of the youngest members of Hamas, but they didn’t want to talk about that. How did Barak and Nadia get married? It seems that love knows no borders even between Palestinians and Jews in Israel. Nadia loved the poems of Yehuda Amichai, and Barak loved those of Mahmood Darwish. One of those nongovernmental organizations that bring Israelis and Palestinians together invited them, along with other fans of Israeli and Palestinian poetry, to a literary gathering in Tel Aviv. That’s how they met. That’s what brought them together in every sense of the word. Let someone just say that poetry can’t change the world. But they couldn’t remain in Israel, in Palestine; Nadia didn’t want to move from Gaza, mostly on account of her son, but Barak did not want to move to Gaza, also on account of her son. Nadia decided to leave. They thought they would settle in Tel Aviv, but they quickly understood that for a couple like them it would be best to settle abroad somewhere. They asked around to find a country where they could live together, where neither of them would be threatened, and they moved to Germany, along with Nadia’s parents. Just at that time an important meeting was held in Berlin concerning the situation in Gaza. As a correspondent with Radio Free Europe, I met them as they marched around the building where the meeting was being held. When I left, they were still standing out there, as if awaiting news and a decision from the Gaza summit that would resolve their personal problems. I approached them and asked whether I could help them. I was surprised to learn that Barak was a member of the family. This seemed to me so optimistic in the whole extremely pessimistic situation of Palestine and Israel.
As a descendent of Jews, the concern I felt in my conscience towards the Palestinians had for years led me into some very unpleasant and dangerous situations. But I couldn’t act against my conscience and I always explained the situation in Israel and in Palestine to my opponents like this: “What the Nazis did to us during the Holocaust, we, that is the Jews in Israel, are now doing to the Palestinians.” I am amazed that I’m still alive. And so, each meeting with Palestinians or liberal Israelis is valuable and important for me. They told me that that they had just recently arrived in Berlin, that at the moment they were living with some relatives, but that they didn’t know how they would get by in Germany, everything seemed so expensive, rent and food, and none of them could receive international protection. Then an idea popped into my head– I was moving to the US in any case because I had a Fulbright, after many years of applying. Perhaps they could live there, in Belarus, at least a year or so, until they found a better country to live in? I told them my crazy idea, after all who would want to live in a country like Belarus, but amazingly, they accepted right away. Palestine remains a more impossible mission than democracy in Belarus, and you don’t want to be in the skin of a person who has to protect his closest kin from his close kin, as was the case in the marriage between Nadia and Barak. I am sure they accepted my proposal solely on account of Barak, so he could feel like a normal Jew in the world. And not like an Israeli married to a Palestinian in an unrecognized country.
I returned to Brest the next day, they arrived three days later. I met them, spent three days with them, left them the keys to the house, and, at their insistence, I also left the number of my bank account, and we parted as friends. When they learned I was a descendent of one of the Jews who survived the Second World War in Brest, Barak, Nadia, and her parents happily patted me on the shoulder, but Nadia’s mother said: “Now you need to find a wife, so your line doesn’t end.” “I should now go out and find myself a wife?” I smiled, “The years for that have passed me by.” Still, I didn’t tell them that while I had had many girlfriends in my life, I had dreamt my whole life about a girl from my childhood who had given me a chain with a crescent-moon on it. Nor that I’ve always been attracted to American women, at least, that is, the ones in movies, but who knows what could happen in New York. We parted as true friends. The rent was totally symbolic, they paid my account in the US when they could and as much as they could. They had begun to earn a little money, Nadia would give birth soon, but most of their money was money sent to them by Barak’s parents in Jerusalem, who were happy that their son had saved himself from military service in Israel.
Later, in the US, some of my compatriots asked me how I could rent my house to enemies of my people in Israel. To people who didn’t recognize the state of Israel, the cradle of Jews in the entire world. Didn’t I see what Hamas was doing to the Jews? I always attempted to explain slowly and calmly that what the Jews in Israel were doing today to the Palestinians was not greatly different from what the Nazis had done to the Jews in the Second World War. I lost many friends from my groups on social media on account of this point of view. Some openly called me a traitor, though sometimes, rarely, someone supported me. In any case, I immediately felt myself at home in New York. Maybe I love that shining city too much. Apparently, there is still something very Jewish about me, if I can joke a little: We Jews love America. No, I do not love their politics, today it’s a bit like in Belarus, just on a higher level, but I do love the day to day life. I have found several people at Columbia University who think the same as I do about the relationship of Jews to Palestinians. This view was published in the New York Times – I quote “As Jews who survived or are descendants of those who survived and are victims of Nazi genocide, we unequivocally condemn the massacre of the Palestinians in Gaza and the continued occupation and colonisation of historic Palestine.” And that has become my life’s motto. I bought a postcard of New York, and I transcribed the text onto it and sent it to my tenants in Brest. Two weeks later there, I got called into the police station in Astoria where I live: my postcard had not been sent off to Belarus because it contained subversive content. I went, explained who I was, the police found my dossier – yes, I already had a dossier, the postcard had already been scanned and printed, they held on to the original, but they gave me a photocopy that had been marked by the police. I took it, bought an envelope at the first kiosk I came to, stuffed the copy inside, and sent it, now only a photocopy, to my tenants from Palestine. It arrived! They sent me back a postcard of my native city, Brest, with a big heart drawn on it with Barak’s name inside and around it were written the names of the other members of the family. I couldn’t help laughing: The Jew inside the heart and the Palestinians around him, protecting him from evil. That is, in fact love, isn’t it?
It would be interesting to hear more stories from former and current residents of places named for Karl Liebknecht throughout the world. This storytelling meeting was a first, and represents a trial run for the next one, which will be held the nineteenth of January 2019, on the occasion of the centennial of Karl Liebknecht’s death. It has been planned that following the demonstration on the street bearing his name here in Leipzig for the rights not only of migrant workers in Europe, but for all people whose rights are endangered—humanity has not stopped fighting for these rights for centuries—the Society of Admirers of Karl Liebknecht will invite another thirty people connected with the address Karl Liebknecht throughout the world, who, at this second meeting, will tell how, or whether, the address Karl Liebknecht marked them, their life that is, either when they lived on it or afterward. History should repeat only the good things. It should be a good teacher in that at least.
When I left “Karl Liebknecht”
(Ili-Ili, Skopje, North Macedonia, 2019, shortlisted for the Writers Association of North Macedonia Prize for best prose book of the year, 2020).
Translated from the Macedonian by Christina E. Kramer
In the Karl Liebknecht House in Leipzig, Germany, thirty people of various nationalities are seated around an improvised table on the stage in the Events Hall, interpreters behind them, some with texts in front of them, some without, and while it looks as if they’re at an ordinary meeting, they are, in fact, at an exceptional one, one that could be called a performance. They are taking part in a pilot project organized by the Society of Admirers of Karl Liebknecht of Leipzig, which, on 19 January 2018, in recognition of the 99th anniversary of the death of Karl Liebknecht—the great German leftist and colleague of Rosa Luxemburg—had invited them, all migrants who, prior to their emigration, had lived at an address either bearing his name or having some other connection with him. Some had changed addresses temporarily, others had moved away forever, some wanted to leave, some never completely left, and yet others were connected in some particular way with places named “Karl Liebknecht.” The call was announced publicly, and it generated a great deal of interest, but in the end, thirty people were selected. The hall is completely packed—residents of Leipzig, most others somehow connected with Karl Liebknecht of whom a majority were also members of the Society of Admirers of Karl Liebknecht—all showing great interest in the event.
After a short speech by a representative of the Society of Admirers of Karl Liebknecht, people were given the opportunity either to speak freely or to read from a prepared text, each in his or her own way, in whatever manner they wished and considered appropriate, about how their Karl Liebknecht address had left its mark on them, both while they were living there and afterward.
Here are the stories two of them told:
Ali, 27, Baghdad, Iraq - Potsdam, Germany
I am Ali from Iraq, I fled to Germany in 2016. A classic refugee journey: by foot, boat, foot, then train, foot, a taxi that robbed me, foot, then a van which took the last of my money, foot, swimming, foot, etc. until I reached Potsdam, without a penny, and my head bandaged because of a beating from two Syrians in a camp at the Austrian border. They thought we were taking their place in Europe and they would be sent back towards Syria, which didn’t exist anymore. But Iraq is still there. “Don’t pretend you’re crazy or something,” they told me. I admit it, they annoyed me, fights broke out quickly in the refugee camp because we’re all so wired up. But deep in my gut I knew that we other refugees really were a stumbling block for Syrians headed to Europe. But our tales shouldn’t be taken lightly either. Extremists torched my jewelry shop in Baghdad after they cleaned it out, and one of the men told my son that all that glitters is not gold. My son didn’t understand, but I did. We packed all our basic things and fled to Turkey. My wife and son are still there, waiting for me to drag them here.
The first two weeks I slept on boxes outside the Karl Liebknecht stadium. Sometimes the groundskeeper took pity on me and let me inside, and, while he sprayed the field, I could rinse myself off a bit in the heat. One day the police rounded me up and took me to the station. They called a bunch of phone numbers, but couldn’t find a place for me. They said there would be a free bed the next day in the Refugee Centre, someone would be leaving— they had been given official notice to leave the country. “I’ll sleep by the stadium,” I said. But they got on their phones again and stared at their computers, until one of them began to nod and shout into the receiver bitte, bitte, danke. They brought me to an ugly little hotel at the edge of town. There the receptionist put a red band around my wrist which meant I would also get breakfast. I don’t know who pays for it – the police or the state – but it was very strange that I was put in a hotel, not a shelter for refugees.
The following day I overslept and was late getting out of the room by 10:00, that’s what was written in the information on the night table. At eleven I had to appear at the police station, so they could transfer me to the Refugee Centre. I didn’t even have time to wash up, I flew from the room, nearly crashing into the maid in the hallway, who looked at me panic-stricken, fear in her eyes, and she shouted after me in English: “It’s too late, now you’ll see what they’ll do to you!” I turned around and saw her crossing herself, then I ran down to the first floor. When I turned in the key, the woman at the reception desk smiled at me in a kind way and gestured with her hand for me to wait – they had to remove the band marked with their red-coloured logo. She gestured for me to lift my hand. She took a scalpel, small and gold-coloured like the one my uncle had, the uncle who had been a surgeon in Baghdad before getting killed in an explosion. She carefully cut the band, which dropped open on two sides. But, as if she didn’t notice, she almost tenderly touched the scalpel to my dark skin, through which the blue veins were barely visible. At first blood first lighly beaded on the surface, then it came streaming out. I gaped in horror, first at my hand then at the receptionist. With my other hand I grabbed the scalpel from her, but she seemed to be waiting for that, and with her free hand she grabbed a stapler from the desk, the longest one I’ve ever seen in my life, and she caught my arm between its teeth. It was now 10:08, she said, or something like that, because she glanced over at the wall clock. I didn’t have the strength to shout. I was bleeding onto the desk, I was dizzy. I only know that she got a big, red bandage from somewhere and bandaged my hand, then took my other hand from the stapler and blew on it so it wouldn’t hurt, and then came out from behind the desk and helped me sit on a bench. The bandage had written on it the name of the hotel in big white letters.
I left the hotel like in a dream. Rain was pouring down, it was running non-stop through the streets, it was coming down from every direction. I stopped under the semi-circle awning of a bar which had mounted speakers playing some kind of Spanish music. A woman carrying an umbrella with a cubist design made her way slowly across the street, as if she were enjoying the drumming of the rain on the triangles, squares, and circles above her head. I ran across the street with my wounded hands across my chest. My temples were pounding. As if through a fog I saw a child in a carriage drop a toy under a parked car. His father stopped the carriage, set his umbrella on it, and clumsily bent down. I watched him as if from another world, but I understood him to the core of my being. I know how annoyed parents get picking up toys that their children, unintentionally, and sometimes intentionally, throw from their carriages, beds, highchairs. A person needs to bend over, kneel down, sometimes even slip under the table, knocking their head against someone’s leg, or the underside of the table, dirty their knees on a spot on the floor or scrape their hand on a chunk of bread that has dried up and turned as sharp as a needle, and then fetch a spoon, a soother, or ball from under the last chair, or under the leg of another chair where, fortunately, no one was sitting. Or maybe there is a guest sitting there with a hole in his sock that he thought no one would notice when he hid his feet beneath his chair. But now, the host himself is going to notice and he’ll imagine all kinds of things: that his cousin’s husband wears socks with holes in them, yet makes himself out to be a big-shot businessman, but here he is, turning up as a guest with a torn sock that he’s hidden under the table, at the very corner of the dining room; perhaps no one would have noticed if the host hadn’t had to slide under the table to fetch the small spoon that his son intentionally threw there, a proud smile on his face, and his father—with that already inborn instinct to fix the mistakes of his only son quickly —doesn’t wait for any of the guests, or this particularly concerned guest, to bend down themselves to drag out the spoon. No. The father immediately kneels and sets after it under the table, and here, unintentionally, notices the sock of his wife’s cousin’s husband, which has a hole between the big toe and the neighbouring toe on his right foot…
I was still thinking about this when I entered the police station. The police jumped up when they saw me; “What were you doing last night? What’s with your hands? Did you cut your veins? In the hotel they told us that you were behaving strangely and that you left at seven and it’s already noon! Let’s go to the Centre for Foreigners. They’ll bandage your hand, they’ll give you something to eat and a permit, but as for asylum, you’ll have to wait, you still have a chance! We know everything about you, we’ve been googling around. In Iraq it seems you were the most promising poet! Don't let your country be left without such a man.
I am still waiting for asylum, I have stopped writing poetry, in Potsdam I walk the dogs of busy Germans around the “Karl Liebknecht” stadium, I tell them in Arabic how I slept there on boxes, I exchange a few words with the groundskeeper, but in my mind, I am creating a blog about the refugees’ hallucinations which no one understands. My wife and child have made it to Lesbos, but not even Allah knows whether they will make it here. I would give anything to be able to go looking for the spoons and toys that my son has dropped under the table, even when we have guests with holes in their socks. Anything.
Nathaniel, 50, Brest, Belarus – New York, USA
I am a descendent of Jews who survived in Brest, which at the time belonged to Poland. Jews from the Brest Ghetto, as it was called, which the Nazis created in 1941. Less than a year after its formation, twenty thousand Jews had already been killed. The twenty or so who survived were all that remained of the Jewish population in Brest. Among them was my grandfather. It took him a number of years to grapple with all the evil he had lived through and seen with his own eyes. With the pains in his body and his soul. My grandmother helped him, she was a nurse in the Brest hospital where other surviving Jews were also treated.
They left behind one son, my father, who is also no longer among the living. Nor is my mother. They died in a traffic accident while driving to the university in Minsk where I was defending my master’s thesis about news correspondents. You will say, and you will be right, that it is absurd to get a master’s degree in Belarus on a topic concerning journalism, but I needed the degree for formal reasons, in order to get a raise as a journalist, as a correspondent for Radio Free Europe. Unfortunately, perhaps because of the absurdity, God punished me as well, letting my parents perish in a traffic accident en route to my master’s defense. They were already dead while I was answering the committee’s questions, glancing the whole time at the amphitheatre door. I thought it was strange that they were late since I knew they were setting out early in the morning. The professors were already congratulating me when the secretary came in and told me that the radio had just announced that there had been a terrible car accident in which a man and woman with the same last name as mine had been killed. That was the worst day of my life.
After their death I returned to Brest and several months later, in a state of total depression, I received word that I had been selected for a Fulbright scholarship to the United States. I put out an ad for the house where I had been left alone, but the ad went unanswered for months. A bit later, I rented it to a family from Palestine who had, also by chance, if chance exists at all, ended up in Belarus, before I left for the United States on my Fulbright. The house was located among the hotels and small boutique hotels lining both sides of our street, Karl Liebknecht. Even I don’t know how many hotels have popped up on our street where earlier there had just been family homes. They, in fact, became hotels, some expanded into the back part of the yards around them, others renovated to became beautiful, like little boxes. There aren’t that many tourists in Brest, nor in Belarus in general, but the political system is totally exotic for foreigners, and they prefer to photograph it in Minsk. But it is lovely seeing Karl Liebknecht Street decorated with its renovated and new façades. The façade of our house is pretty new as well. Unfortunately, that is the least important thing when the house is left without its inhabitants, a house without its household. Well, at least the Palestinian family with its own share of misfortunes, has finally found a home right in my Brest, right in our house. Fate, providence, who knows what. Sometimes it’s not clear who wants things to turn out like this, God, Allah, or someone else.
I met them at the house in Brest and stayed there with them for three more days. Old parents, a daughter, in the last stages of pregnancy, married to a Jew. The son she had with her first husband who died in front of their house in Gaza, did not want to come, and he remained in Gaza, now one of the youngest members of Hamas, but they didn’t want to talk about that. How did Barak and Nadia get married? It seems that love knows no borders even between Palestinians and Jews in Israel. Nadia loved the poems of Yehuda Amichai, and Barak loved those of Mahmood Darwish. One of those nongovernmental organizations that bring Israelis and Palestinians together invited them, along with other fans of Israeli and Palestinian poetry, to a literary gathering in Tel Aviv. That’s how they met. That’s what brought them together in every sense of the word. Let someone just say that poetry can’t change the world. But they couldn’t remain in Israel, in Palestine; Nadia didn’t want to move from Gaza, mostly on account of her son, but Barak did not want to move to Gaza, also on account of her son. Nadia decided to leave. They thought they would settle in Tel Aviv, but they quickly understood that for a couple like them it would be best to settle abroad somewhere. They asked around to find a country where they could live together, where neither of them would be threatened, and they moved to Germany, along with Nadia’s parents. Just at that time an important meeting was held in Berlin concerning the situation in Gaza. As a correspondent with Radio Free Europe, I met them as they marched around the building where the meeting was being held. When I left, they were still standing out there, as if awaiting news and a decision from the Gaza summit that would resolve their personal problems. I approached them and asked whether I could help them. I was surprised to learn that Barak was a member of the family. This seemed to me so optimistic in the whole extremely pessimistic situation of Palestine and Israel.
As a descendent of Jews, the concern I felt in my conscience towards the Palestinians had for years led me into some very unpleasant and dangerous situations. But I couldn’t act against my conscience and I always explained the situation in Israel and in Palestine to my opponents like this: “What the Nazis did to us during the Holocaust, we, that is the Jews in Israel, are now doing to the Palestinians.” I am amazed that I’m still alive. And so, each meeting with Palestinians or liberal Israelis is valuable and important for me. They told me that that they had just recently arrived in Berlin, that at the moment they were living with some relatives, but that they didn’t know how they would get by in Germany, everything seemed so expensive, rent and food, and none of them could receive international protection. Then an idea popped into my head– I was moving to the US in any case because I had a Fulbright, after many years of applying. Perhaps they could live there, in Belarus, at least a year or so, until they found a better country to live in? I told them my crazy idea, after all who would want to live in a country like Belarus, but amazingly, they accepted right away. Palestine remains a more impossible mission than democracy in Belarus, and you don’t want to be in the skin of a person who has to protect his closest kin from his close kin, as was the case in the marriage between Nadia and Barak. I am sure they accepted my proposal solely on account of Barak, so he could feel like a normal Jew in the world. And not like an Israeli married to a Palestinian in an unrecognized country.
I returned to Brest the next day, they arrived three days later. I met them, spent three days with them, left them the keys to the house, and, at their insistence, I also left the number of my bank account, and we parted as friends. When they learned I was a descendent of one of the Jews who survived the Second World War in Brest, Barak, Nadia, and her parents happily patted me on the shoulder, but Nadia’s mother said: “Now you need to find a wife, so your line doesn’t end.” “I should now go out and find myself a wife?” I smiled, “The years for that have passed me by.” Still, I didn’t tell them that while I had had many girlfriends in my life, I had dreamt my whole life about a girl from my childhood who had given me a chain with a crescent-moon on it. Nor that I’ve always been attracted to American women, at least, that is, the ones in movies, but who knows what could happen in New York. We parted as true friends. The rent was totally symbolic, they paid my account in the US when they could and as much as they could. They had begun to earn a little money, Nadia would give birth soon, but most of their money was money sent to them by Barak’s parents in Jerusalem, who were happy that their son had saved himself from military service in Israel.
Later, in the US, some of my compatriots asked me how I could rent my house to enemies of my people in Israel. To people who didn’t recognize the state of Israel, the cradle of Jews in the entire world. Didn’t I see what Hamas was doing to the Jews? I always attempted to explain slowly and calmly that what the Jews in Israel were doing today to the Palestinians was not greatly different from what the Nazis had done to the Jews in the Second World War. I lost many friends from my groups on social media on account of this point of view. Some openly called me a traitor, though sometimes, rarely, someone supported me. In any case, I immediately felt myself at home in New York. Maybe I love that shining city too much. Apparently, there is still something very Jewish about me, if I can joke a little: We Jews love America. No, I do not love their politics, today it’s a bit like in Belarus, just on a higher level, but I do love the day to day life. I have found several people at Columbia University who think the same as I do about the relationship of Jews to Palestinians. This view was published in the New York Times – I quote “As Jews who survived or are descendants of those who survived and are victims of Nazi genocide, we unequivocally condemn the massacre of the Palestinians in Gaza and the continued occupation and colonisation of historic Palestine.” And that has become my life’s motto. I bought a postcard of New York, and I transcribed the text onto it and sent it to my tenants in Brest. Two weeks later there, I got called into the police station in Astoria where I live: my postcard had not been sent off to Belarus because it contained subversive content. I went, explained who I was, the police found my dossier – yes, I already had a dossier, the postcard had already been scanned and printed, they held on to the original, but they gave me a photocopy that had been marked by the police. I took it, bought an envelope at the first kiosk I came to, stuffed the copy inside, and sent it, now only a photocopy, to my tenants from Palestine. It arrived! They sent me back a postcard of my native city, Brest, with a big heart drawn on it with Barak’s name inside and around it were written the names of the other members of the family. I couldn’t help laughing: The Jew inside the heart and the Palestinians around him, protecting him from evil. That is, in fact love, isn’t it?
It would be interesting to hear more stories from former and current residents of places named for Karl Liebknecht throughout the world. This storytelling meeting was a first, and represents a trial run for the next one, which will be held the nineteenth of January 2019, on the occasion of the centennial of Karl Liebknecht’s death. It has been planned that following the demonstration on the street bearing his name here in Leipzig for the rights not only of migrant workers in Europe, but for all people whose rights are endangered—humanity has not stopped fighting for these rights for centuries—the Society of Admirers of Karl Liebknecht will invite another thirty people connected with the address Karl Liebknecht throughout the world, who, at this second meeting, will tell how, or whether, the address Karl Liebknecht marked them, their life that is, either when they lived on it or afterward. History should repeat only the good things. It should be a good teacher in that at least.