...of privacy

23.


I don’t know if my father went to the funeral. I don’t know how long it took him to make the connection between my grandfather’s death and Auschwitz, if he did so on that very day, at that very moment, of if this only became clear when he read my grandfather’s notebooks, and there would inevitably have been a delay between their discovery and the delivery of the translation that my father commissioned without telling my grandmother. I don’t know who did the translation, I don’t know how my father paid them, I don’t know if he asked the translator to keep quiet about it, if he made it clear to the translator that he or she should make no comment on what the notebooks contained, because up until then my father had no idea what my grandfather had written in those sixteen volumes without ever once mentioning the relatives he saw die, and it’s possible that he may have seen each and every one of them die, the last breath, the wide, lifeless eyes of his brother, another brother, a third brother, of his father and mother, of his girlfriend and his cousin and his aunt and who knows how many friends and neighbors and work colleagues and people he was quite close to, my father making it clear to the translator that he didn’t want him to make any comment on any such scenes because none could justify the scene of my grandfather lying dead at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning.

[Diary of the Fall, Laub, M.]