wife every night. He does not care that she is starving, tired, and exhausted, nor that she is overwhelmed by the effort to feed their children. He produces new offspring thoughtlessly, mercilessly. He does not care about the suffering of the miserable victim, who is overburdened with supporting the children.
Did she take off Hesia’s shirt herself? Did she throw her naked onto the street like a broken pot into a dumpster? There is no reply from the mother hen, who has harmed her beloved Hesia for the sake of her other children. She does not cry. She is not ashamed. She freezes, silent.
When I say good-bye to her I once again look into her eyes, which she has fixed in a silent reproach at one of her younger daughters.
I understand: the girl has inherited Hesia’s rag-dress, her rag-shirt. It’s the mother hen’s silent reproach and request for forgiveness and understanding.
[7] These are the bare facts about the naked corpse. But surely you will demand digits, documents, figures, data. But I will not reveal the name. I will disclose neither the flat number nor the tenement number. Her name was Hesia. Her surname was Jewess, and she lived in flat number X. You will not believe me unless I give you figures and surnames. You will accuse me of falsity, lying, and exaggeration. No, I did not exaggerate. I did not embroider anything. I did not don the naked truth in beautiful robes of imaginary reality. [It remained] naked, unclothed, just like Hesia’s corpse. We need neither witnesses of Hesia’s existence nor evidence for her existence and miserable end. But there is plenty of evidence at hand to show the commonness of such incidents—evidence in the form of accounts of thousands of witnesses, ever ready to testify that they have experienced, observed, witnessed such incidents. This is a better proof than figures and surnames. Let us leave Hesia’s shadows in peace. She has been stripped of everything, anyway. Let us not strip her of her personal secret after her death. Let her rest in peace with her secret in the common grave, as Jane Doe, unknown and unidentified, as a nameless hero, as a silent martyr, as an unknown soldier who perished at the most dangerous outpost of the great war for freedom: on a ghetto street . . .
