Ida Fink Quotes

time brought all of us something quite different than what our childhoods promised.

She says, "Other people suffered so much.... But no one beat or tortured me.... I never saw a German.... But still it's as if they killed me. Because I'm not the same person. My name, my date of birth-they're not mine. The doctor said it's shock. I don't know what happened before then, or what I was like. So it's as if I didn't exist."

She went back into the room and carefully locked the door to the balcony, as if she could lock out all the evil events of the night. ("The End")

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

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.

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.

September came, and with it the war; the radio spoke a strange new language of exhortations and abbreviations.

What our cousin experienced, locked up in that room, will remain forever a mystery.

She watched him lying there, defenseless as a child and, like a child, unconscious of the evil that had been unleashed. ("The End")

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.

Less and less often we used the word "if"; more and more often we simply said "when," and wondered whether we would ever be like we used to be. Our fear of being found out or recognized had not gone away. It had only dug itself in deeper and was taking a little nap. Sometimes this fear would awaken suddenly and mistake a salesman for a secret policeman-like the cattle merchant who spoke to the baker behind closed doors. It would awaken suddenly and then fall back asleep. The more time passed, the deeper it slept. But even toward the end, after the British occupied the Ruhr Valley, when our fear should have disappeared completely-even then remnants of it still remained within us. They lingered in us until the very end, until that day-still far off-when two armored cars from General de Gaulle's army drove through the village, and Gottfried, the local party leader, climbed onto the roof of his house and jammed a flagpole into a crevice between the roof tiles-a flagpole with a white sheet attached. (p231-2)

In the evening, in my spacious attic room, I wrote, "Will I find peace here? Peace. I yearn for peace." Out of habit, I hid the sheet of paper under the mattress, where it stayed, blank, except for that one line of fine handwriting at the top. (p228)

One pebble had fallen; I awaited the avalanche. ("The Other Shore")

Father called us to his office, to the animated Mrs. Kasinska, who, once the price was agreed on, promised to make Kennkarten for us so we could be saved, so we would not be killed. ("The Garden that Floated Away")

There was the square, thick with people as on a market day, only different, because a market-day crowd is colorful and loud, with chickens clucking, geese honking, and people talking and bargaining. This crowd was silent. In a way it resembled a rally-but it was different from that, too. I don't know what it was exactly. I only know that we suddenly stopped and my sister began to tremble, and then I caught the trembling