Free Writing in the Dark by David Grossman Page A

body, the family. Death is true, all else is an illusion.
    Ever since knowing I would be an author, I knew I would write about the Holocaust. I think these two convictions came to me at the same time. Perhaps also because from a very young age I had the feeling that all the many books I had read about the Holocaust had left unanswered a few simple but essential questions. I had to ask these questions of myself, and I had to reply in my own words.
    As I grew up, I became increasingly aware that I could not truly understand my life in Israel, as a man, as a father, as a writer, as an Israeli, as a Jew, until I wrote about my unlived life, over there , in the Holocaust. And about what would have happened to me had I been over there as a victim, and as one of the murderers.
    I wanted to know both these things. One was not enough.
    Namely: If I had been a Jew under the Nazi regime, a Jew in a concentration camp or a death camp, what could I have done to save something of myself, of my selfhood, in a reality in which people were stripped not only of their clothes but also of their names, so that they became—to others—numbers tattooed on an arm? A reality
in which people’s previous lives were taken away from them—their family, their friends, their profession, their loves, their talents. A reality in which millions of people were relegated, by other human beings, to the lowest rung of existence: to being nothing more than flesh and blood intended for destruction with the utmost efficiency.
    What was the thing inside me that I could hold up against this attempt at erasure? What was the thing that could preserve the human spark within me, in a reality entirely aimed at extinguishing it?
    One can answer this question only about one’s self, in private. But perhaps I can suggest a possible path to the answer. In the Jewish tradition there is a legend, or a belief, that every person has a small bone in his body called the luz , located at the tip of the spine, which enfolds the essence of a person’s soul. This bone cannot be destroyed. Even if the entire human body is shattered, crushed, or burned, the luz bone does not perish. It stores a person’s spark of uniqueness, the core of his selfhood. According to the belief, this bone will be the source of man’s resurrection.
    Those of you who would like to find your own response to the question may, when you go home, choose to gather your thoughts and consider: What is the thing within me that is the true root of my soul? What is the quality, the essence, the final spark that will remain in me even when all other things are extinguished? What is the thing that has such great and concerted power that I
will be re-created out of it, in an extremely private sort of “big bang”?
    Once in a while I ask people close to me what they believe their luz is, and I have heard many varied answers. Several writers, and artists in general, have told me that their luz is creativity, the passion to create and the urge to produce. Religious people, believers, have often said that their luz is the divine spark they feel inside. One friend answered, after much thought: Parenthood, fatherhood. And another friend immediately replied that her luz was her longing for the things and people she missed. A woman who was roughly ninety at the time talked about the love of her life, a man who committed suicide over sixty years ago: he was her luz .
     
     
    The second question I asked while writing See Under: Love is closely related to the first one, and in some ways even derives from it: I asked myself how an ordinary, normal person—as most Nazis and their supporters were—becomes part of a mass-murder apparatus. In other words, what is the thing that I must suspend within myself, that I must dull, repress, so that I can ultimately collaborate with a mechanism of murder? What must I kill within me to be capable of killing another person or people, to desire the destruction of an entire people, or to