Mordechaj Livni

“There is a specific case of a boy whose name was Rudi or Rudla Rosen, and he went with his parents to the east as the Germans told us. Several weeks after his departure a postcard came from him, written in German in capital letters and very legibly, as they were apparently ordered to write. The things he wrote were more or less general, he wrote: ‘Dear friends, I am here, with this and this man, we work hard but we hope that the situation will get better soon, and give my greetings to this or that person and to my girlfriend.’ He signed his name as Rudla Namut. Instead of his surname Rosen he wrote the Hebrew word Namut, in Roman alphabet, and if translated from Hebrew to Czech, Namut means ‘we will die.’ I remember the scene when there were fifteen or twenty of us boys and girls of the same age, sitting in some attic in Terezín which served as a kind of clubroom for us, and the postcard was being passed from hand to hand and each of us tried to make something out of it, because this was not the password on which we had agreed before. He wrote Namut there, ‘we will die,’ and what did he want to suggest by it? What did he want us to know?”

“I was promised that I would be with these children for about half a year and then I would go with a group of children to Palestine. Actually, throughout the whole time when I was in the Zionist youth movement, from my fourteenth year onwards, throughout the time of the Nazi regime and the concentration camps, this journey to Palestine and joining a kibbutz there or building a new kibbutz has become a kind of a dream for me. This was the light at the end of a tunnel: just to survive the war and survive the Nazis and finally get out of this violent Europe and build a new life in Palestine where my brother was already living, as I told you, and after the war it became apparent that he was actually my only relative, a close relative, who has remained alive in the whole world.”

“I asked him [Wolfgang Sinaj Adler]: ‘Where is your father?’ Meaning rabbi Adler. He was younger than me, he was probably sixteen, I think. He motioned with his thumb to one of the chimneys with the flames and he said: ‘He is there.’ I asked: ‘And mom?’ ‘Mom too.’ I argued: ‘Your parents had never done any manual work in their life, so how come that they now work in that steel factory or in the mine, they cannot do any work there.’ He, this sixteen-year-old boy, looks at me and says: ‘What, you think that this is a factory or a mine? Don’t you know where you are?’ I told him: ‘This is Silesia, and there are steelworks and coal mines here, it could be that.’ And he told us what it could be. These buildings were crematoriums. ‘The place where you are now is Auschwitz. When I showed you that my father and mother were there, I wanted to say that they killed them immediately when we arrived here, in gas chambers, and they cremated them. The smoke which stinks here and the flames that you see are your friends, those who went to the left side just a few hours ago.’ At this moment, it all snapped into place for me, including the card from Rudla Rosen, Gastod, and suddenly it was clear that he had written from Auschwitz and that he was expecting that they would kill them.”