The Dining Hall

Sometimes I worked in the kitchen. Other times I bused tables. For a time I ran a lathe in the water meter factory. That came easily. My father was a blacksmith and I grew up secondary to lathes and anvils, forges and hammers. But mostly I worked in the Pardes, picking oranges. But the kitchen and the Dining Hall is where I learned of the holocaust. I had read of it, even ridden the S-Bahn to Dachau from Munchen, ten days after Black September slaughtered the Israeli athletes, and stood, stunned, in the camp, overwhelmed by the simple utility of that place. Where we had been young and boisterous on the trip out, our return, six hours later was a complete contrast. There was no longer any humor in taking the train to Dachau. But it wasn’t until the Kitchen and the Dining Hall that I began to understand, just a little, what the holocaust was.

Jakob was a most unloved man. He ran his kitchen for sixteen hours a day, every day, and refused to speak socially with anyone. He had no family, no friends. They were still at the killing grounds. Lost among the utility of those places. I pulled dishes out of plastic tubs and stacked them in a massive dishwasher. The Dining Hall served at least three meals a day for six to seven hundred people. That takes a big dishwasher. Since Jakob never spoke, I sang.


"Would you like to swing on a star
Carry moonbeams home in a jar…"

"The moon comes up from Africa
Last night I couldn’t sleep..."

"I got a big black cloud hangin’ over my head
It follows where ever I go…"

"Winter, spring, summer, or fall
All you gotta do is call…"

On a Monday, after hours of this, I realized that he was yelling at me.

“You. What is your name?”

“Why you sing always?”

I told him my name but could not explain the singing. He glared at me, close. His brow knitted into one continuous, bushy, scrawl. His face was lined and leathery like an orange left on the counter of an abandoned kitchen.

He said, “No one has sung with me since they sealed the Ghetto.”

Then he spun away and I watched as his shoulders hunched, then started to shake, and his fists bunched. When I noticed he was going to turn back to me, I pivoted away to my tub of greasy water and dirty dishes. I did not want to be the one to witness his tears.

But I heard him, “Chuck, you sing. It is the right thing.”

Jakob, I learned, was from Warsaw. The Ghetto was established on October 16, 1940. He had played in a Symphony Orchestra.

One evening a few of us, volunteers from around the world, were in the bomb shelter, drinking Goldstar beer and listening to Cat Stevens on a battered tape deck when Sonia, The kibbutznik I lived, came down. She said Jakob wanted me. I popped a fresh Goldstar and we walked hand in hand across the battered ground to the Dining Hall. Jakob didn’t so much as acknowledge Sonia.

All he said was, “ You go sit with those old men.” And returned to the kitchen.

Sonia said, “They are all seventy or eighty. Every year they sit together on this date. Chuck you should do as Jakob demands.” She had emigrated from Turkey and the ‘Chuck’ came out halfway between Chick and Check. It was January 30, 1973. Forty years earlier Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich. To the day.

How should a young man approach a table of six old men reliving an event that happened so long ago? Well he shouldn’t worry to much about it. As I moved towards their table, still with the Goldstar, One of them rose and said, “We are one less than last year. There is room for you.”

They took turns. Telling their story from January 30, 1933, to the day they arrived in Israel. They spoke English for my benefit. They were all Germans, all university educated, and had, between them, several hundred friends and relatives dispersed into the blood-sodden ground of Europe. They spoke of a mother, a sister, a fiancée as if they had stepped away to the toilet. They spoke of Treblinka, of Dachau, of beatings and suicides. They spoke of partisan bands in forests and tattooed wrists. Their stories took four hours to tell. I stood, asked that they wait for a minute, walked to the bomb shelter and took four bottles of someone else’s wine, and returned. I poured wine for all and proposed a toast.

“To all of them”, I said.

Jakob, I noticed, had drunk the wine I left for him on the pass through to the kitchen but he never came out. His own story was to much to bear, let alone theirs.

We talked of many things until the wine was gone. I slipped into bed beside Sonia an hour and a half before the truck left for the pardes. Picking oranges is particularly good for a hangover.


One evening I was assigned to bussing tables after dinner. I had a stainless steel cart. Endlessly I circumnavigated this room for seven hundred diners with a book propped between the handle and a plastic tub. The book was James Joyce’s Ulysses. It was probably my third reading of the book. I was just getting the hang of it. Slowly people started to slip away, in groups or singly, until there was just one elderly couple left. As I pushed my cart past their table, the man asked what I was reading. I showed him the book.

“What edition is it?”

I flipped to the title page and read the edition to him.

“What page are you reading?”

I told him.

And he recited the first complete sentence on that page.

Now he had my attention. Completely. He was from a large German University city. In 1933 he was the head of the Department of English Literature at the University. He decided to flee when they striped him of his job. He tried to convince his family to come with him. They refused to believe that the Reich would do any more to them. They stayed. He went to the home of his fiancée and argued that if they would not go with him they should, at least, allow their daughter to go with him. They refused. He walked and hitchhiked to all the major ports in Europe. He contacted every University and every foreign colleague he could reach. No country would accept him. No Universities supported him. Some colleague tried to help but to no avail. So he started walking east. Into the Soviet Union. He turned south and walked through Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Jordan. And by the end of the war he reached Palistine. He fought in the 1949 War of Independence and settled in the Kibbutz. Since the mid-fifties one of his jobs was to travel to Haifa to meet immigrant ships looking for suitable candidates for the Kibbutz. Everyone he had known was gone. As far as he could learn, his family and fiancée had managed to survive into 1942. But after January 20, 1942, there was no question of survival. The Wannsee Conference, held on that date, codified, in Adolf Hitler’s words, “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”

He married, had two sons, lost one in Sinai in the 1967 six day war, and ultimately lost his wife to cancer the following year. And every time a ship docked in Haifa he was there to meet it. When he was 88 years old he made his last trip to meet a ship. And met the woman holding his arm as he told me the story, his wife, and in the late 1930’s, his fiancée.

In 1972, they were both 90 years old and that remains the only happy ending I heard in the Dining Hall or the Kitchen.