THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

Israelis made a motion. So I started to shout at them and said, if someone does notcome immediately, I will call the police, and I speak French, so don’t get wise withme. Some of them left; they probably didn’t have visas. The rest did not move. Idon’t remember exactly what I wanted, so I cried out ‘Police, Policier.’ Then noneof the Israeli heroes stayed; they all fled.”In the first part of the dream they wanted to put him to sleep, to make him leave,but he refused, disobeying. He is a survivor. Once a Nazi officer told him, “Dr. Burg,every morning you come to our Gestapo headquarters and make deals on lives andJews [my father represented his people at the Gestapo, negotiating daily for theirlives]. Why should I not send you there as well?” My father, who lived by thesharpness of his tongue, replied: “Mr. Officer, you and I have the same goal. Youwant to free Germany of Jews, and I want the Jews out of Germany too. I help youand you help me. Therefore you have no interest in sending me there.”The Gestapo wanted him on a wooden bunk in a death camp, but my father is ofthe Heroes of Israel. He spoke French, was saved, and went on saving others. Anauthentic specimen of the People of the Book, and of the culture of persuasivearguments that made use of words that were eradicated in order to bring Israel andloudness into being. Only at this moment, on the threshold of his death, in the passagebetween this world and the one to come, he forgot his three languages: German, hisnative tongue; Hebrew, which he knew how to read before he went to school; andYiddish, with which he communicated with my mother and with the rest of the Jewishworld throughout most of his life. In that particular last moment of his, he revisitedParis, in French. Yosef Burg was between two worlds, between the world that wasruined and the world that was yet to be built between Jewishness and Israeliness. Hefound refuge with French as the language of transition, not ruin and not resurrection.The dying Yosef Burg dreamed of postwar Paris, the city that was like a secondwomb to him and to my mother. This was where he became accustomed to the lossof the spiritual empire of Germany, where he would sever the cord with Europe as aplace to live and where he would be born again into the established Israel. Howsymbolic that it was in Paris he was informed of his election as member and vicespeaker of the first Knesset. It was in Paris that my mother’s life touched my father’sexpansive world for the first time. There they raised Tzviya, my late sister, as a happyyoung couple, not knowing that fate would claim her before their own deaths. Mysister Tzviya was named after my grandmother, who died in misery at a camp. They