Literatuur Zonder Leeftijd. Jaargang 10

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Andersenprijs 1996 voor Uri Orlev
Dankwoord

Uri Orlev (65) werd geboren in Warschau, overleefde de deportatie naar Bergen-Belsen en woont sinds het einde van de Tweede Wereldoorlog in Israël. Veel van zijn boeken zijn gekleurd door zijn ervaringen in de oorlog. In Nederland werd Het eiland in de Vogelstraat in 1986 bekroond met een Zilveren Griffel. Het hier gepubliceerde dankwoord sprak Orlev na het in ontvangst nemen van de H.C. Andersenprijs in Groningen (1996).

From an early age, I read a lot. Whenever I went to the library there were two things I wanted to know: did it have illustrations and if it is scary. If the answers were yes, I borrowed the book. The more I read, the more jealous I became. Why did such exciting things happen to the heroes of the books, while all that ever happened to me was being forced to eat, to take my afternoon nap, and to go to school every day? School was what I hated most. And then the war broke out. My father went off in an officer's uniform and I felt very proud.

There was no more school. The cook and the nanny disappeared, leaving only my mother. It was she who now fed us, dressed us, washed us, read us books and told us bedtime stories.

After a month of German shelling, my family found itself fleeing a building that had gone up in flames. We ran down the street, my mother holding my brother and me by the hands. Fire shot out the windows around, timbers cracked from the heat, walls came crashing down, a screaming woman jumped from the top story. And it was then I realized that it was happening to me too. I had become the hero of an adventure story myself.

Of course, there were many painful and frightening things in my childhood, but others were amazing and exciting, the kinds of things one can experience only in wartime, like a lost cannon my friends and I accidentally exploded by sticking a shell up its barrel, or a dead horse that opened its mouth and laughed at us. But beyond of all - there were the memories of my mother surrounding us with her love in the most trying situations and treating us with great patience - and

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sometimes with a spanking too.

When all our family, friends and neighbors had disappeared, I began to tell myself that everything - the war, the ghetto, the Germans, the Jews - none of it really happened. I was the son of the emperor of China, and my father had ordered my bed placed on a large platform and surrounded by twenty wise mandarins. (They were called that because each had a mandarin orange attached to the top of his hat.) My father had ordered them to put me to sleep and make me dream what I dreamed so that when I became king myself one day, I would know how terrible wars were and never start any.

Perhaps this is the place to mention the brave stand taken during the German occupation by the king of Denmark, Christian X, the grandfather of the patron of this prize, Her Majesty Margrethe II. Every reader of history knows how the king, along with the Danish people, rallied to transfer the country's Jews to Sweden under cover of darkness with the help of Danish fishermen and other brave helpers.

The list of people whom my brother and I owe our lives to is a long one. First on it is my mother, Sophia Zelda Rozencwaig Orlowska, a small, delicate woman, brought up to believe in European humanism, who was unable to come to terms with the monstrous fate that came crashing into her world.

Once, I remember, we were talking about the dead bodies that I saw in the streets of the Warsaw ghetto every morning on my way to my lessons with my tutor. As usual, my mother spoke of the sacredness of human life and tried explaining to me how tragic every death was, no matter whose.

Even crazy Rubinstein's? I asked.

Of course, said my mother. Every human being is a whole universe. Even crazy Rubinstein.

Even Hitler?

My mother gave ma a long look and then turned away and went to wash the dishes.

My Aunt Stefa, my father's sister, promised that she would protect us if anything happened to my mother and she kept her word, sometimes by risking her own life.

Of all the other people who helped us to survive when their paths crossed our own, I'll mention only one - a Polish secret policeman, Sergeant Zuk, who came one spring day in 1943 to arrest the two Jewish children, my brother and me, whom a neighbor had reported

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living in a small room on the roof of a Warsaw apartment building. My brother kept silent and refused to answer the questions put to him by the sergeant, who thought he could get more information from the younger of us. Only when the interrogation was over and the sergeant was on his way out did my brother open his mouth to ask:

You're not taking us? But why? Aren't you one of the bad ones?

The Polish policeman stood there for a moment and then said:

No, I'm not taking you. And I'm one of the bad ones.

A journalist once asked me if I view myself as a writer of teenage Holocaust novels. I was stunned. I have written twenty-five books for different age groups, of which only four deal directly with Holocaust - and these four were not written for the purpose of instructing young people in the subject. The Holocaust was simply part of my childhood, and just as the childhoods of writers, painters, musicians and movie-makers are frequently a source of inspiration for them, so has mine been for me. What has motivated me all my life is the need to tell stories, which lead to more stories and to connections between people of very different ages and cultures.

I have received many letters from children who have read my books through the eyes of their own experience.

I would like to mention in particular one I received in November 1992. It was written by Ramon Stewart, a 12-year-old black boy from Columbus, Ohio in the United States, after reading my book The Island on Bird Street and it said:

The same kind of stuff that was happening here. There are drive-by shootings and people are killed in front of their families. One day I went for a walk and I heard gun shots. When I turned around, it was my brother who was on the corner, and he was shot to death. My mom was very sad for a long time because he was going to college. My father worked very hard preparing for my brother's college. He had put a lot of money into my brother's account. I miss him very much.

A boy in Zurich asked me two questions. The first was a question that I'm often asked: Were you afraid of the dark when you were a little boy? The answer was yes. The first children's book I wrote about was about darkness. I can still remember how my father used to tuck me in with the blanket so that the thing that I believed lived under my bed would not be able to grab my foot. I received a letter about that book from a ten-year-old girl from Jerusalem that said:

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Sometimes, when I'm falling asleep, I imagine that there's a lion hiding underneath my bed, waiting for me to get into it so that he can eat my foot. I hope I go on being afraid of him until I'm old. I love being scared to death.

And nine-year-old Eran wrote:

I'm afraid of ghosts. But they hate music, and so whenever I'm alone in the house, I take the violin I'm learning to play and play as loud as I can until they all run away.

By then, the neighbors probably run away too.

The boy from Zurich's second question, one that no child had ever asked me, was:

Does writing about what happened to you in the past help you to get over it?

My answer was that I didn't know. What I do know is that, for me, there is no grown-up to talk, tell, or think about the things that happened. I can remember them only as if I were still a boy. It's still walking very carefully on a frozen lake. If I were to take a sudden step the ice would break and I would tumble through it may be without being able to climb back out.

In closing I would like to thank the Andersen Jury with its president Peter Schneck and executive director Leena Maissen, and the Israeli Section of IBBY, and especially Tsiyona Kipnis, for nominating me time and again for this prize. By now more of my books have been translated into other languages and her determination has paid off.

I would also like to thank Hans Christian Andersen himself not only for his magical stories that enriched my childhood with their sense of mystery and their heroes whom I intensely identified with, opening for me the world of imagination, but also for this prize in his name. When I was in Copenhagen a year ago, I asked a taxi driver to take my camera and photograph me with Andersen's statue. While he was focusing, I whispered something about the prize into the bronze ear beneath the bronze tophat. I whispered it in Hebrew, because I once heard that when Hans Christian Andersen visited a family in the Jewish ghetto in Rome, and saw a Hebrew bible on the table, he opened it and read: In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth.

I would also like to thank my translators, and most of all my dear friends Hillel Halkin, the translator of all my books and of this speech into English; Mirjam Presler from Germany; Tamir Herzberg from Holland, Steffen Larsen from Danmark, Ludwik Jerzy Kern from Poland, and my Japanese translator Natsuu Motai-Koseki. And there

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are all the other translators, too, whom I have never met and whose languages I do not know. I would like to thank my interpreter and host in the German speaking countries, Mirjam Morad, who is here today, and of course my literary agencies, who first brought my books beyond the borders of Israel.

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to thank all of you for being here today, and especially, my brother, Steven Orlowski, who has crossed the ocean with his wife Neta for this occasion. I would like to thank my children whose childhood has enriched me and given me many ideas for my books. And lastly, Ya'ara, who has been my wife for thirty-two years and without whose love, support and uncompromising criticism I would not be standing before you today.