Fork from Auschwitz, bequeathed by Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk (1930–2013), photographed 2015
© Miranda Kaniuk

”He reached into the bag with his right hand, gave a start like he had burned himself, and pulled out a bent, brown-black fork, moving quickly as if he were trying to escape the pain. It was the most pitiable fork I had ever seen. If sorrow and grief were manifested not in humans, but in cutlery, then this fork would be God. (…) I asked him why he was showing me the fork and he said: ‘It belongs to you.’ I looked at him and asked: ‘Why me?’ He said: ‘The fork is from Canada, and it belongs to you!’ I understood that he meant the last station before the gas chambers of Auschwitz and looked at him in askance. ‘You must be mistaken’, I said, and he replied: ‘No, I’m not mistaken.’ I started to feel nervous, this man was disconcerting me. He said: ‘I remember, I remember exactly.’ I looked at my hand with the fork, which had already become mine. I did not want it, but I also could not give it back.“

In his memoirs of Germany, “Der letzte Berliner” (2002), Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk describes how, after a reading in Germany, an old man forced a fork upon him.