India! Why hadn’t he thought of India before? Why did he keep missing the signs? Despite the personal and racial insults and innuendoes heaped upon him by the fat town burghers, as Shmelke recounted it to me, he would always be grateful to these Swiss anti-Semites for pointing him in the right direction, sparking the idea, telling him where to go. Now he could hear me at last, calling out to him from Mother India across the vast distance, he said, faintly at first, but then with increasing urgency and distress. There are times when your ears can be opened even by the most despicable of wretches, he said. I hear you, sister. You are pulling my umbilical cord as you were wont to do so playfully in our mother’s womb, how well I remember it. I’m coming, didi, I’m on my way.

Over the seven years of my brother’s flight, stopping at many more spiritual stations than I have strength to record, until he arrived in the earthly India for my sake, he said, and found physical refuge at last (but too late, too late for me—and you), he reached out to me once only. I recognized his voice on the phone instantly, it was my own blood voice calling to me, resonating from our shared gestational chamber, though he never identified himself by name, it was not necessary. “I am now going to the most dangerous and symbolic of places. If you are contacted, say, please, that you are my sister, so that things will go well for me, and my soul will live because of you.”

And I was contacted, relentlessly, within the limited brackets of the attention span of the public. It was one of those times during my brother’s journey that his movements surfaced in the media. It was also the exceptional occasion when he did not opt to stay in a Mottel Patel, but instead took up residence with his closest followers in Block 5 at the Auschwitz death camp. He chose Block 5 because of its museum display of mounds of prosthetic limbs, crutches, and similar artifacts confiscated from inmates, to which he ceremoniously added his own wheelchair. For the interim, he was transported on the back of the sheriff, Buki ben Yogli.

The action was titled, Occupy Auschwitz. Every attempt by the Polish officials who ran the complex and museum to eject him and his band of loyalists was fearlessly resisted, dismissed, derided. My brother would not even look at them, or speak to them directly. Astride the shoulders of Buki ben Yogli, framed by the dark opening of Block 5, he would address the mass of his Hasidim gathered outside. He would address them in the softest of voices, and they would repeat what he had just said word for word, clause by clause, in unison, booming it out. Exceedingly quietly my brother said, “The motherfuckers locked us up in this shithole against our will. Now that we voluntarily demand to be here, the motherfuckers are kicking us out. Fuck them!”—and his boys in turn shouted it out. This was an occasion when such language was permissible, my brother ruled, even necessary in the name of heaven for the sake of capturing the attention of the world, unfortunately sick and tired of Jews still kvetching about their Holocaust; a shock to the system was needed to get them to focus. From the perspective of the authorities, the only way to shut them up would be to drag the crippled rabbi out along with his groupies, or turn them over to the Israeli kapos. Either way, it would not be pretty for Polish–Jewish relations.