The Time of the Uprooted: A Novel

by Elie Wiesel

  Softly, so gently that it was imperceptible—not like the sudden nightfall in the tropics—twilight was settling over the city that says it never sleeps, calming its spirit, wrapping it in a melancholy veil of yellow and gray.

  More and more people were coming and going in Central Park. Newly arrived couples were seeking cool spots under the trees or by the lake. Gamaliel wondered if Bolek noticed them, or was he still absorbed in memory? Troubled, Gamaliel wanted to look at him to see whether he was going to resume his narrative. But he had promised to listen, just listen.

  “Gamaliel, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?” His friend was as surprised by Bolek’s tone of voice as he was by the question. He had been expecting anything but that.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Why do you still live alone? Since Colette’s death have you never wanted to have another family? A son to make you proud and happy?”

  Colette’s absurd and tragic death. It was so long ago. What could it have to do with Bolek’s story? Was Gamaliel right in thinking his friend had finished with his confession? Too bad. He would have wanted to hear how the sentence was carried out in that far-off Davarowsk ghetto. Was the executioner chosen by lot?

  “Oh, forget about that. This isn’t the time for it, and besides, it’s a long story,” he replied.

  “Longer than mine?”

  Gamaliel wondered if he should tell Bolek about Budapest. Ilonka. The times he strayed. Esther’s disappearance. His estrangement from Katya and Sophie. Their mother’s suicide. The obsessive sense of heartbreak that he could not rid himself of.

  “Let’s just say that God didn’t want my name to be carried on.”

  “That’s too easy an answer, isn’t it?”

  Gamaliel wondered if he should ask what his life had to do with Bolek’s. Why should Bolek’s confession require him to do the same?

  “Let’s talk about it some other time.”

  “Why not now?”

  “You’ll have to go home soon. Noémie—”

  “She knows I’m with you.”

  Bolek heaved a sigh. “After the war, I still couldn’t put it behind me. I was constantly seeing the SS in the ghetto. They were like dogs, bristling, ready to jump on their prey. I hated their making a traitor of a young Jew. I hated all Germans. And all those who collaborated with them. And all the neutrals who stood by. I was so devoured by rage that I was ready to hurl all of Creation, damned a thousand times over by the sin of Cain, into the furnace of my hate. And yet I didn’t give in to it. I would tell myself, In what way would my vengeance help my mother and father, whose loss still makes me weep?”

  At one point Gamaliel turned to him. “All right, you want to know if I ever wished for a son? Yes, I did, and often. To have a son who would bear my father’s name, to see him grow up, to watch him sleep, to show him the world and all that’s in it, to make him a gift of all I have and all I am. What man doesn’t want that?”

  “But?”

  “I told you, God didn’t want it to happen. . . . Wait, let me finish. When I say this, I’m referring to when God’s been present in history as well as the times He’s been eclipsed or was absent. It’s written in the Talmud that when humanity experiences catastrophes—floods, epidemics, famines—man’s duty is to refrain from having children. Because, said a Sage, we are forbidden to go against the will of the Lord. If He has decided to destroy the world, we have no right to populate it.”

  “Well, in that case, your Talmudic Sage is wrong. And so is God.”

  “Possibly. But there’s something else. For a long time, I’ve distrusted this world we live in. I told myself it doesn’t deserve our children. And the proof is Auschwitz.”

  “No, no, a thousand times no. Look, I have Leah. She gives meaning to my life. She’ll have children, and they’ll change the world. They’ll make it a better place—more welcoming, more humane. Yes, humanity does have a future. It deserves Leah. And her children will prove it.”

  Was that Bolek’s secret? Gamaliel wondered. Was he trying to answer the philosophy of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer?

  Bolek’s face darkened. “Your argument is nihilistic,” he said after a moment, “and I’ve heard it before. I find it inadmissible. Think of your parents. Your family tree will end with you. Is that what they wanted?”

  “What about the Horowitzes’ son?” Gamaliel retorted, trying to change the subject. “That’s a strong argument, isn’t it?”

  “The exception proves the rule, but that is not an argument.”

  “Don’t you have more to tell me about that traitor?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “What happened next. All of it. When did he die?”

  “Three days later.”

  “Why the wait?”

  “Because of his father. He found out his son had been arrested, I don’t how or from whom. He asked to see Abrasha. Their talk lasted several hours. The older Horowitz was pitiful. At first, he refused to believe his son could have sunk so low as to betray the ghetto and its Jews. Then, after he’d read and reread the testimony of the witnesses for the prosecution, he began to sob. ‘It’s all my fault, my fault,’ he said over and over, wringing his hands. ‘I brought him up wrong. I was too preoccupied with business; I thought too much about money, about success. So is it any surprise that he grew up without principles or values? It’s my fault, my fault....’ Abrasha tried to reassure him: ‘It serves no purpose to blame yourself. You’ve been an honorable man, a good Jew. You’ve done a lot for the community. If your son didn’t follow your example, it’s not your fault, but his.’ ‘But that’s just it,’ the father said. ‘I gave too much time to others and not enough to him. I blame myself; the responsibility is mine, not his.’ Abrasha said again that he was wrong to think that. Then the older man used another argument. ‘I’m on your side; you know that. I’ll give you whatever you want, all the money you need; I’ll give you what is left of my fortune—but give me back my son! I’ll punish him myself. I’ll lock him up at home, like a prisoner, till the war is over. Or else do it yourselves—put him in your own prison, but don’t kill him! Even if he deserves it, I don’t!’

  “Abrasha summoned all the cell leaders to an emergency meeting the following night. Should we accept old Horowitz’s offer? he wanted to know. It was then, during the discussion, that one of us commented, ‘A father like Horowitz would have done better not to have had children.’ ”

  “And the condemned man? What happened to him?”

  Bolek looked down. He did not answer right away. He seemed to be wondering whether he should satisfy his friend’s curiosity or leave him in suspense.

  “The traitor was executed.”

  A wave of sadness came over Gamaliel, mingled with a jumble of other thoughts. He had to suppress a vague sort of fear, a sense of impotence in the face of so much sorrow, before he could continue. “And his father?”

  “He mourned his son in keeping with our law.” Bolek swallowed, then added, “Two weeks later, he and his wife were put on a transport to Treblinka.”

  For a long moment, they were both silent, as if paralyzed by the name that stopped thought in its tracks, as though to restrain it from hurling itself into the pit of death.

  “Now it’s my turn to ask you a question,” said Gamaliel. “Why don’t you write about what you went through back then? Don’t you think it’s your duty to pay homage to what your comrades did? For the sake of history . . .”

  Bolek grunted in contempt. “Don’t talk to me about history. Some believe in it, and others will go so far as to sacrifice their conscience to make it say what they want, for lack of the truth. As for me, I don’t believe in it. History is murderous, and as set as the blank face you’d see on a hardened killer. I’ve heard it said that now we know everything about the Holocaust, that it’s been picked apart, analyzed, demystified, that all its parts have been dismantled. Such is the arrogance of ignorance! They accumulate data drawn from the official German archives wit
hout realizing that the truth isn’t found only in numbers, dates, and orders. Who knows about my father’s heroic dying, my mother’s silent tears? Where is their truth? And where is the truth of my brothers and sisters when they were being driven to their mass grave? We seem to know the murderers better than their victims. And they call that serving history. Well, their history isn’t my history, because my truth isn’t their truth!”

  “Exactly, Bolek,” Gamaliel replied. “Isn’t that all the more reason for you to write something different, to tell another truth, that of the victims?”

  “The truth of the victims went up in smoke with them,” said Bolek. “How about you? Where’s your testimony? You’re a survivor of the Holocaust, too, aren’t you? And on top of that, you’re a professional writer, aren’t you?”

  Survivor! For a long time now, Gamaliel’s reaction to the word has been that it was cheapened, made a cliché, used in all kinds of situations. Everybody wanted to be one. No need to have undergone a selection at Birkenau or the tortures of Treblinka. It was sufficient to have lived, to have survived, in a Europe occupied or even threatened by Hitler’s Germany. How many times Gamaliel had heard some hapless speaker trying to win the audience’s sympathy by declaiming, “We are all survivors. . . . Of course, I was born in Manhattan, but I could have been born in Lodz or Kraków. . . .” Didn’t they realize that if everyone is a potential or virtual survivor, then no one is a true survivor? How to explain to them that, confronted with such deception, those who did indeed survive come to be ashamed of having really been there? How to tell them to let “remembrance” rest in peace, because the dead took its key with them when they disappeared in smoke?

  “You have nothing to say?” Bolek asked.

  “What can I tell you? It’s a sensitive subject. It takes a lot of thought.” If he hadn’t met Ilonka, would he have survived that most cruel of wars? Gamaliel preferred the word orphan to survivor.

  “May I quote you on that?” Bolek asked. “And what are you doing about what you call ‘the obligation of remembrance’?”

  “I believe in it, but I don’t know how to go about it. I might know what to say, but not how. Sometimes it seems to me that when I use words, I get them all mixed up and they cancel one another out, instead of proceeding in a coherent order. Actually, one word is all I’d need. But it would have to be true. And I don’t know where to go find it!”

  Gamaliel often wondered what means of speech would be decent, honorable, and effective enough for him to testify on behalf of his dead parents. A prayer, or a howl? Or perhaps silence?

  Gamaliel walked his friend home in silence. Never had the streets, the buildings, the passersby seemed so hostile. He tried to picture himself in the Davarowsk ghetto, but he couldn’t manage it. There was a question still plaguing him. “Bolek, who executed young Horowitz? Was it you?”

  “No, not I.”

  “Then who?”

  “A member of our group.”

  “Did you choose him?”

  “No, not I.”

  “He volunteered?”

  “No, I had us draw lots.”

  “He didn’t object?”

  “Romek, that was his name, Romek wasn’t glad, but he accepted it.” He paused a moment, then went on. “Strange, but he was surely the least suited for it of us all. He wasn’t a tough guy, the quickest with his fists; rather, he was an introvert, an intellectual. Romek was forever reading, studying. When we were in our shelter, worrying about a raid by the SS, or when he was waiting to go to his job as an accountant in a workshop, he would lose himself in one of the books he’d borrowed from the ghetto library. That fate should have chosen him, it was . . . well, it was unfair.” He stopped, smiled awkwardly. “It’s funny. . . . Afterward, he couldn’t stop rubbing his hands together. . . . Well, what can you expect? It was wartime.”

  He made as if to open the door to his building, then halted. “I went with him,” he said in a low, inward voice.

  “Time stood still.

  “Young Horowitz, down in the cellar, stared at us with distrust and hate. ‘Well, this is great and glorious. Out there, the Germans are massacring Jews, and now you’re going to assassinate a Jew in here. Tell me, doesn’t that bother you?’

  “He was waiting for me to answer, to speak to him, to his despicable conscience, to the man who was somewhere in him, but I had nothing to say: The time for words was over. I was thinking, He’ll take the sight of me with him into the hereafter. One part of me, forever tainted, will die with him. I was looking at him. The silence was growing heavier, and then it became unbearable. I had to break the silence with a word, but the right word was staying just beyond my reach, jeering at me. Suddenly, I saw everything with a strange clarity. I saw things and people in a new light, one that cast them in excruciating relief. I caught myself staring at Romek, and for a moment I thought I was losing my hold on reality. I recalled something my father had said: ‘The Angel of Death has a thousand eyes.’ So did Romek. I wondered if the condemned man saw what I was seeing. I looked at him more closely. Nothing escaped me. I noticed his right eyebrow: It was thicker than the other. There was a fever sore on his lips. His nails were dirty. That last detail bothered me: One shouldn’t die with dirty fingernails.

  “ ‘How about it?’ the condemned man shouted angrily. ‘You’re not going to say anything? You’re going to kill me without a word?’

  “I said nothing, and that was driving him out of his mind. Even though his hands were tied, he moved as if trying to throw himself on me. He was like a circus animal in its cage. In fact, he was right to be angry. He was about to die, and those who are to die have rights, including the right to hear a human voice, even if it’s only the voice of their judge or executioner. So should I speak to him? I wondered. But to say what? That he was a murderer? That in helping the Gestapo, in betraying us to the Germans, he had become one of them? That at this moment we represented opposite poles of humanity, the pole of Evil and the pole of those who refuse Evil? That at this stage of our lives, in this climate of absolutes reigning in that cellar, the universe, in losing one of its beings, would be losing its equilibrium? But wasn’t that true every time a German killed a Jew? All that was too complicated. Why not just tell him his fingernails were dirty and he had a fever sore on his lips. I left the cellar, leaving the two men alone. I stood with my back to the door, not daring to breathe. Then it happened. And I felt more alone than ever.”

  Bolek shook his head as if he didn’t believe his own story. Or that it continued. Gamaliel did not ask him to go on. That evening they did not talk to one another.

  But on his way home, Gamaliel couldn’t help thinking that young Horowitz—in fact, what was his first name? Bolek had never mentioned it—in a strange way, he had been lucky. He had lived with his father, they had prayed together, eaten together, laughed together. Unlike Gamaliel who had of his father nothing but a faded, blurred image: a life barely sketched. How many bad memories had they shared? How many words had they exchanged? For a time, Ilonka had taken the place of his mother. But who had taken his father’s place, even for a brief moment? Shalom? Too young. Rebbe Zusya? Too old. No, his father was as old as he, his son, is today. And what if I had followed him to prison, then to the camp? Gamaliel wondered. Surely I would not feel the void that, sometimes, pulls me into the blackest of nightmares.

  8

  TIRED AS HE IS, GAMALIEL CONTINUES TO WANDER the streets and green places of Brooklyn without purpose or destination. Passersby glance at him with curiosity, wondering, Who is this man who seems so preoccupied with his own cares that he talks to himself, oblivious to others on the street? Gamaliel reaches the hospital entrance, looks at his watch, and goes on walking. Suppose he were to go in to see the old woman without waiting for the doctor? She might begin to speak. Miracles can always happen; such cases are known to medicine. Patients awaken after sleeping for weeks or months. Some speak; others let their subconscious minds speak for them. The philosopher Henri Bergson, in a
coma, gave a dazzling lesson before dying. Naturally, Gamaliel does not hope for as much from the wounded woman in the hospital. Should he go in anyway? The doctor promised to join him there. He finds her attractive. Her smile reminds him of Eve, and so does her voice. They might have married eventually had he been younger. But now it’s too late.

  For that matter, hasn’t it always been too late in his life? Even with Colette?

  IT HAD SEEMED SO PROMISING AT FIRST. COLETTE had the skills and the wherewithal to captivate those who attracted her. Every day, she would take presents to her new love: ties, shirts, belts, trousers, a sports jacket. He never wore them. “No offense, but please don’t spend so much money on me,” he told her. “If you’re not interested in material things,” she exclaimed, giving him a passionate kiss, “I’ll give you the best I have!” Giving free rein to her imagination, she transformed their nights into enchanting hours of constantly renewed pleasure.

  Yet Gamaliel would not give up the hotel room he shared with Bolek. Colette tried to persuade him. “Either you insist on wasting the little you earn, or else you’re not sure of me, of us, of our future together. Are you really so afraid that you’ll be out on the street tomorrow?” But Gamaliel held out. He clung to his lodgings, modest as they were, to his ways, to his freedom, to his connection to Bolek. “Besides,” he observed, “it’s thanks to Bolek that we met. We should at least be grateful to him.” Seeing that he was irritated, Colette was quick to calm him, to act as if she agreed. As a general rule, she would give in when he held out. But she didn’t accept his resistance with good grace. She would make him pay for it.

  Bolek did not comment on his friend’s affair. When Gamaliel came back at dawn, or after a week’s absence, Bolek would greet him with a laugh. “You’re happy—it shows in your face—and that’s what counts.” He did permit himself to give Gamaliel a bit of advice one evening when they were chatting about this and that. “Don’t go too fast or too far. Keeping some distance is a good idea and can be useful. Also, you’re too young to marry. And perhaps Colette isn’t young enough.” He thought for a moment, then continued. “I hope I’m not hurting your feelings. But think about what I’m saying. It’s for your own good. It’s great to make love with your mistress, so long as she’s not your wife.” Gamaliel teased him: “But how about the French passport I’d get?” “You can get along fine without it,” Bolek replied, then added, “Besides, it’ll be easier once we get to America. You won’t have to sacrifice your future for a passport.” When Gamaliel remained silent, Bolek became concerned. “Are you angry with me?” he asked. “Forgive me if I said the wrong thing, but you’re my friend.” Gamaliel reassured him, thinking, Strange that he didn’t ask if I love Colette in spite of the difference in our ages.