Tel Aviv on Fire (2018)

All Backs Were Turned by Marek Hlasko (New Vessell Press 1964)

“Like I’ve always helped you.”

“Yes,” Israel said. “You always helped me.” Suddenly he put his face against Ursula’s breast. “Dov,” he said, “she’s alive. She’s breathing.”

He got up; Dov knelt next to Ursula’s body and placed his head on her breast. Israel held the stone ready in his hand; he had noticed it while kneeling by Ursula’s body, and he picked it up while pressing his face to her chest. He waited until he saw Dov begin to straighten up, then he hit him twice in quick succession; he circled the body to make sure Dov was really dead, then hit him a third time; only then did he toss the stone away.”

Killing the Second Dog by Marek Hlasko (Cane Hill Press 1965)

I should have told her all this. I wouldn't have needed Robert and his goddamn instructions to do it either. There was so much I could have told her about myself and my life, but she probably wouldn't have believed me. I could have told her how I robbed someone when I was fifteen and wasn't caught. And how three months later a friend and I robbed a ticket office at a train station; my friend was arrested, and I gave myself up so we could go to jail together, because I enjoyed his company. But she wouldn't have believed me. Nor would she believe me if I told her I lost my virginity at the age of twelve to a ripe German girl on the day of her engagement to a young lieutenant. Nor would she believe me if I told her about the German soldier who set his dog on me and then started kicking me and broke my nose just because I wanted to play with the dog—this happened when I was seven. Nor would she believe me that in 1944, in Warsaw, I saw six Ukrainians rape a girl from our building and then gouge her eyes with a teaspoon, and they laughed and joked doing it. Maybe I didn't believe all this anymore. I should have told her that I bear the Germans no grudges for killing my family and a few more million Poles, because afterward I lived under the Communists and came to realize that by subjecting men to hunger, fear, and terror, one can force them to do anything under the sun, and that no group of people is better than any other. Those who claim otherwise belong to the lowest human species and their right to live should be revoked.