with nuts, as well as the grandmothers who could not do any of those things but could only love their children and their children’s children; killed were the women who were faithful to their husbands and the loose women too; killed were the beautiful girls, serious students, and giggly schoolgirls; killed were the plain and the foolish; killed were the hunchbacks, killed were the singers, killed were the blind, killed were the deaf, killed were the violinists and pianists, killed were the two-and three- year-olds; killed were the eighty-year-old men with their eyes clouded by cataracts, their cold transparent fingers, and soft voices like rustling paper; and killed were the crying babies suckling at their mothers’ breasts to the very last moment. 111 And for every one of their surviving relatives, for all Jews by blood, as for Margarita Aliger, the spilled blood spoke in their mother tongue. As the Polish Jewish poet Julian Tuwim put it, I hear voices: “Very well. But if you are a Pole, why do you write ‘We— Jews?’ ” I reply: “because of my blood.” “Then it is racialism?” Nothing of the kind. On the contrary. There are two kinds of blood: the blood that flows in your veins and the blood that flows out of them. . . . The blood of Jews (not “Jewish blood”) flows in deep, broad streams; the dark streams flow together in a turbulent, foaming river, and in this new Jordan I accept holy baptism—the bloody, burning brotherhood of the Jews. 112