THE LITTLE UNCIRCUMCISED JEW

By Roberto Leon Ponczek

David and Lili Rubinstein were a Jewish couple who survived the Nazi Holocaust, surviving thanks to false Christian documents. Both of them practiced crypto-Judaism, Judaism behind closed doors and closed curtains. They considered themselves Jewish, but publicly declared themselves Catholic. They passed through the tragic experience of having their parents murdered in Auschwitz. In addition, David, when fleeing from Krakow, together with his wife, he was arrested at a train station in Landskrona, a small Polish town, by the local collaborationist police. They showed their (false) documents to the suspicious police officer who took them to the small police station in the city, where they were thrown into a filthy cell.

“Let’s check it out now,” the Polish man shouted.

“Pull down your pants!”

To make sure his suspicions were correct, he forced David to show his penis, to prove whether the couple were in fact Jewish, and if so, to be handed over to the Gestapo. “You see how my nose never fails you, damned Jews, killers of our Lord Jesus Christ!” he shouted loudly. Once the circumcision was confirmed, the Gestapo was called, and a detachment arrived to arrest the couple and send them to a concentration camp. Lili commented to David, “now it’s the dead end for us.”

However, the Nazis arrived at the prison completely drunk and the officer of the detachment, with his cheeks flushed from drinking so much, could not take his eyes off Lili, a beautiful brunette who, to seduce him, began to sing old Viennese songs. The Nazi, bewitched not only by the alcohol but mainly by Lili's singing and beauty, asked her "where did you learn to speak German so well with a Viennese accent?" "I lived in Vienna before the war," Lili replied in fluent German. "I am Viennese!" the German officer said enthusiastically. "And are you Jewish?" "Of course not, I am Catholic," she lied with conviction. The officer called the Polish policeman and said to him in a harsh tone: "Let them go now, they are not Jews as you say, otherwise I will have you arrested, you Polish pig!”

The couple managed to escape imminent death by leaving their heavy suitcases behind, running to the station, and with only the clothes on their backs, they got on the first train that stopped at the station and it didn't matter to know its destination, thinking: “let's escape immediately before the Nazi's drinking spree stops”

After the war and the genocide of the Jews, with all those trauma, David and Lili emigrated to Brazil and for a long time yet continued to practice Judaism just at home, deciding not to circumcise their first-born son Marcos, to spare him the dangers of being clearly identified as a Jew.

In the summer of 1968, the boy had turned 10 years old and the Rubinstein couple decided that it was time for them to assume their true identities and so decided to send him to a Jewish summer camp in Paty dos Alferes, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, without imagining that this would cause great suffering to her son.

When it was time for the group bath, Marcos covered his penis with his hands so that the other boys wouldn’t notice that he hadn’t made the so-called Abrahamic Pact with God. When they noticed that Marcos always covered his penis with his hands, the boys suspected that there was something wrong with him. Some would shout: “He must be a faggot or a little girl, he probably doesn’t even have a dick”, while others would yell: “This guy isn’t Jewish and he covers his dick to hide it, he’s a goy”! These mockeries sounded to little Marcos like violent and aggressive insults to the point of making him cry silently. The scenes of mockery were repeated every day at bath time, driving him to despair.

In a way, Marcos went through the opposite process to his father: while he was arrested and virtually sentenced to death for being circumcised, Marcos suffered daily humiliation for not being circumcised. And this was the great trauma that accompanied him throughout his life: giving up being Jewish and completely incorporating himself into the non-Jewish culture and life of his native country or accepting his Judaism, however never publicly showing the condition as a Jew who did not obey the law of Abraham and Moses.

Until now, when Marcos goes to urinate in the bathroom of a synagogue, which he attends in memory of his parents, he always prefers to lock himself in the small cubicles of the toilets rather than having to expose his penis in urinals. The memories of the mockery he suffered so intensely in childhood will never be erased from his mind.

*The characters in this story are fictitious, although many Jewish boys, sons of Holocaust survivors, were not circumcised.