Ida Fink Quotes

The car was silent. But just as we reached the door, came the first whispers: "Jews. They caught some Jews." (p29)

It's hard to reconstruct those days, to push through the nebulous expanses of memory. The fog thickens and thins, the picture blurs and clears. All the bits and pieces must be assembled into one continuous whole, and the task is difficult, and, above all, painful. (p33)

She went for so long without talking that silence became a habit.

It was near the end. They had already shot my sons and my husband. I remember that people were saying, 'How can she do it? Why should she save herself? For whom?' But you know, the life force has such strong roots, you can't tear it out. Even after those we love most have died. But you are young, what do you know about that? ("The Other Shore")

Our fate suddenly came to a halt and hung there for a moment, suspended over the abyss it had been racing toward, hung there for a few minutes (five? six?) and then, just as suddenly, turned...This was why I had come here, just for that moment at the crossroads, that sudden turn, that circus trick performed by our fate. (p248-9)

I recall one image from those days of difficult waiting: the train in the meadow. It was on a day when a thunderstorm was brewing. Under the black, rain-swollen clouds we were raking hay in the fields. A long, serpentine train slithered through the meadow. Watching it disappear from sight, I felt—very clearly, very palpably--the proximity of danger and the futility of my desperate scrambling, my frantic efforts to break out of this closed circle. It was as if a metal band was suddenly squeezing my ribs. The world went quiet and dark. A thick, heavy silence fell. I dropped my rake on the ground, loosened my blouse. I was gasping for breath. (p185)

Finally she says, "What I remember best is the silence. But you can't talk about silence. Silence is the opposite of talk," she explains.

I heard the gentle click of Aunt Julia's knitting needles. No one knew what she was knitting, but we all knew why. (p18)

Sometimes even I would return from work, open the door, and feel as if I were seeing a stage on which the last act of a play was about to begin at any moment. (p18)

She had already begun to resemble her mother, and would surely have relived her mother's life-a fine home in a small town, pretty children, pretty dresses, the annual trip to a health resort-if the sentence of time hadn't made tragic heroes even of those least suited to play the part.

Only the end of the war brought us the truth about his last hours. The peasant who delivered the note did not dare to tell us what he saw, and although other people, too, muttered something about what they had seen, no one dared to believe it, especially since the Germans offered proofs of another truth that each of us grasped at greedily; they measured out doses of it sparingly, with restraint a perfect cover-up. They went to such trouble, created so many phantoms, that only time, time measured not in months and years, opened our eyes and convinced us.

It was silent in the forest. There were no birds, but the smell of the trees and flowers was magnificent. We couldn't hear anything. There was nothing to hear. The silence was horrifying because we knew that there was shooting going on and people screaming and crying, that it was a slaughterhouse out there. But here there were bluebells, hazelwood, daisies, and other flowers, very pretty, very colorful. That was what was so horrifying-just as horrifying as waiting for the thundering of the train, as horrifying as wondering whom they had taken. ("Jean-Christophe")

Because many places that year had posted signs that said NO DOGS OR JEWS ALLOWED, the only amusements left were strolls along the river that flowed through the clean, Germanized town.

He had that horrifying clarity of vision that comes just before death.

June turned into July; the linden trees perfumed the air; the frogs croaked in the river; the dogs bayed at the moon; the nights were bright and sleepless. The white posters demanded tribute. The Jews gathered gold and silver, coffee and tea, and money, money. The Landrat insisted on silver tableware and valuable china. From nearby towns came news of gold and silver, of coffee and tea and money, money. Gold and silver, coffee and tea, were supposed to buy peace and quiet in the town, peace that was not peace, quiet that was not quiet. "People are naive," Szymon shouted, "whoever believes them is naive. This is only the prelude," he shouted, "only the beginning." He did not say what it was the beginning of. He didn't have to.