by Elie Wiesel
There were six of us. I don’t remember the names of the five others, but Gad was not among them. That day he stayed at the school, as if to show that he had complete confidence in us, as if he were saying: “Go to it; you can get along without me.” My five comrades and I set out either to kill or to be killed.
“Good luck!” said Gad as he shook hands with us before we went away. “I’ll wait here for your return.”
This was the first time that I had been assigned to any operation, and I knew that when I came back—if I came back—I should be another man. I should have undergone my baptism of fire, my baptism of blood. I knew that I should feel very differently, but I had no idea that I should be ready to vomit.
Our mission was to attack a military convoy on the road between Haifa and Tel Aviv. The exact spot was the curve near the village of Hedera; the time late afternoon. In the disguise of workmen coming home from their job we arrived at the chosen place thirty minutes before H-hour. If we had come any earlier our presence might have attracted attention. We set mines on either side of the curve and moved into planned positions. A car was waiting fifty yards away to take us to Petach Tivka, where we were to split up and be driven in three other cars back to our base at the school.
The convoy arrived punctually upon the scene: three open trucks carrying about twenty soldiers. The wind ruffled their hair and the sun shone upon their faces. At the curve the first truck was exploded by one of our mines and the others came to an abrupt halt with screeching brakes. The soldiers leaped to the ground and were caught in the cross-fire of our guns. They ran with lowered heads in every direction, but their legs were cut by our bullets, as if by an immense scythe, and they fell shrieking to the ground.
The whole episode lasted no more than a single minute. We withdrew in good order and everything went according to plan. Our mission was accomplished. Gad was waiting at the school and we made our report to him. His face glowed with pride.
“Good work,” he said. “The Old Man won’t believe it.”
It was then that nausea overcame me. I saw the legs running like frightened rabbits and I found myself utterly hateful. I remembered the dreaded SS guards in the Polish ghettos. Day after day, night after night, they slaughtered the Jews in just the same way. Tommy guns were scattered here and there, and an officer, laughing or distractedly eating, barked out the order: Fire! Then the scythe went to work. A few Jews tried to break through the circle of fire, but they only rammed their heads against its insurmountable wall. They too ran like rabbits, like rabbits sotted with wine and sorrow, and death mowed them down.
NO, IT WAS NOT EASY to play the part of God, especially when it meant putting on the field-gray uniform of the SS. But it was easier than killing a hostage.
In the first operation and those that followed I was not alone. I killed, to be sure, but I was one of a group. With John Dawson I would be on my own. I would look into his face and he would look into mine and see that I was all eyes.
“Don’t torture yourself, Elisha,” said Gad. He had turned off the radio and was scrutinizing me intently. “This is war.”
I wanted to ask him whether God, the God of war, wore a uniform. But I chose to keep silent. God doesn’t wear a uniform, I said to myself. God is a member of the Resistance movement, a terrorist.
ILANA ARRIVED a few minutes before the curfew with her two bodyguards, Gideon and Joab. She was restless and somber, more beautiful than ever. Her delicate features seemed chiseled out of brown marble and there was an expression of heartrending melancholy on her face. She was wearing a gray skirt and a white blouse and her lips were very pale.
“Unforgettable…that broadcast of yours,” murmured Gad.
“The Old Man wrote it,” said Ilana.
“But your voice…”
“That’s the Old Man’s creation, too,” said Ilana, sinking exhausted into a chair. And after a moment of complete silence she added: “Today I saw him crying. I have an idea that he cries more often than we know.”
The lucky fellow, I thought to myself. At least he can cry. When a man weeps he knows that one day he will stop.
Joab gave us the latest news of Tel Aviv, of its atmosphere of anxiety and watchful waiting. People were afraid of mass reprisals, and all the newspapers had appealed to the Old Man to call off John Dawson’s execution. The name of John Dawson rather than that of David ben Moshe was on everyone’s lips.
“That’s why the Old Man was crying,” said Gad, brushing a stubborn lock of hair back from his forehead. “The Jews are not yet free of their persecution reflex. They haven’t the guts to strike back.”
“In London the Cabinet is in session,” Joab went on. “In New York the Zionists are holding a huge demonstration in Madison Square Garden. The UN is deeply concerned.”
“I hope David knows,” said Ilana. Her face had paled to a bronze hue.
“No doubt the hangman will tell him,” said Gad.
I understood the bitterness in his voice. David was a childhood friend and they had entered the Movement together. Gad had told me this only after David’s arrest, for it would have been unsafe before. The less any one of us knew about his comrades the better; this is one of the basic principles of any underground organization.
Gad had been present when David was wounded; in fact, he was in command of the operation. It was supposed to be what we called a “soft job,” but the courageous stupidity of a sentry had spoiled it. His was the fault if David was to be hanged on the morrow. Although wounded and in convulsions he had continued to crawl along the ground with a bullet in his belly and even to shoot off his gun. The mischief that a courageous, diehard fool can do!
IT WAS NIGHT. An army truck came to a halt at the entrance of the red-capped paratroopers’ camp near Gedera, in the south. In it were a major and three soldiers.
“We’ve come to get some arms,” the major said to the sentry. “A terrorist attack is supposed to take place this evening.”
“Those goddamned terrorists,” the sentry mumbled from under his mustache, handing back the major’s identification papers.
“Very good, major,” he said, opening the gate. “You can come in.”
“Thanks,” said the major. “Where are the stores?”
“Straight ahead and then two left turns.”
The car drove through, followed these directions and stopped in front of a stone building.
“Here we are,” said the major.
They got out, and a sergeant saluted the major and opened the door. The major returned his salute and handed him an order with a colonel’s signature at the bottom, an order to consign to the bearer five tommy guns, twenty rifles, twenty revolvers, and the necessary ammunition.
“We’re expecting a terrorist attack,” the major explained condescendingly.
“Goddamned terrorists,” muttered the sergeant.
“We’ve no time to lose,” the major added. “Can you hurry?”
“Of course, sir,” said the sergeant. “I quite understand.”
He pointed out the arms and ammunition to the three soldiers, who silently and quickly loaded them onto the truck. In a very few minutes it was all done.
“I’ll just keep this order, sir,” said the sergeant as the visitors started to go away.
“Right you are, Sergeant,” said the major, climbing into the truck.
The sentry was just about to open the gate when in his sentry box the telephone rang. With a hasty apology he went to answer. The major and his men waited impatiently.
“Sorry, sir,” said the sentry as he emerged from the box. “The sergeant wants to see you. He says the order you brought him is not satisfactory.”
The major got down from the truck.
“I’ll clear it up with him on the telephone,” he said.
As the sentry turned around to re-enter the box the major brought his fist down on the back of his neck. The sentry fell noiselessly to the ground. Gad went over to the gate, opened it, and signaled to the driver to
go through. Just then the sentry came to and started shooting. Dan put a bullet into his belly while Gad jumped onto the truck and called out:
“Let’s go! And hurry!”
The wounded sentry continued to shoot and one of his bullets punctured a tire. Gad retained his self-possession and decided that the tire must be changed.
“David and Dan, keep us covered,” he said in a quiet, assured voice.
David and Dan grabbed two of the recently received tommy guns and stood by.
By now the whole camp was alerted. Orders rang out and gun-fire followed. Every second was precious. Covered by David and Dan, Gad changed the tire. But the paratroopers were drawing near. Gad knew that the important thing was to make off with the weapons.
“David and Dan,” he said, “stay where you are. We’re leaving. See if you can hold them back for three minutes longer while we get away. After that you can make a dash for it. Try to get to Gedera, where friends will give you shelter. You know where to find them.”
“Yes, I know,” said David, continuing to shoot. “Go on, and hurry!”
The arms and ammunition were saved, but David and Dan had to pay. Dan was killed and David wounded. All on account of a stubbornly courageous sentry with a bullet in his belly!
“HE WAS A WONDERFUL FELLOW, David,” said Ilana. Already she spoke of him as if he belonged to the past.
“I hope the hangman knows it,” retorted Gad.
I understood his bitterness; indeed I envied it. He was losing a friend, and it hurt. But when you lose a friend every day it doesn’t hurt so much. And I’d lost plenty of friends in my time; sometimes I thought of myself as a living graveyard. That was the real reason I followed Gad to Palestine and became a terrorist: I had no more friends to lose.
“They say that the hangman always wears a mask,” said Joab, who had been standing silently in front of the kitchen door. “I wonder if it’s true.”
“I think it is,” I said. “The hangman wears a mask. You can’t see anything but his eyes.”
Ilana went over to Gad, stroked his hair, and said in a sad voice:
“Don’t torture yourself, Gad. This is war.”
DURING THE HOUR that followed nobody said a word. They were all thinking of David ben Moshe. David was not alone in his death cell; his friends were with him. All except me. I did not think of David except when they pronounced his name. When they were silent my thoughts went out to someone else, to a man I did not yet know, any more than I knew David, but whom I was fated to know. My David ben Moshe had the name and face of an Englishman, Captain John Dawson.
We sat around the table and Ilana served us some steaming tea. For some time we sipped it without speaking. We looked into the golden liquid in our cups as if we were searching in it for the next step after our silence and the meaning of the events which had brought it about. Then, in order to kill time, we spoke of our memories, of such of them that centered on death.
“Death saved my life,” Joab began.
He had a young, innocent, tormented face; dark, confused eyes, and hair as white as that of an old man. He wore a perpetually sleepy expression and yawned from one end of the day to the other.
“A neighbor who was against us because of his pacifist convictions reported me to the police,” he went on. “I took shelter in an insane asylum whose superintendent was an old school friend. I stayed there for two weeks, until the police found my traces. ‘Is he here?’ they asked the superintendent. ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘He’s here; he’s a very sick man.’ ‘What’s the matter with him?’ they asked. ‘He imagines he’s dead,’ the superintendent told them. But they insisted on seeing me. I was brought to the superintendent’s office, where two police officials assigned to the antiterrorist campaign were waiting. They spoke to me but I did not answer. They asked me questions but I pretended not to hear. Even so, they were not convinced that I was crazy. Overriding the superintendent’s protest, they took me away and submitted me to forty-eight hours of interrogation. I played dead, and played it successfully. I refused to eat or drink; when they slapped my hands and face I did not react. Dead men feel no pain and so they do not cry. After forty-eight hours I was taken back to the asylum.”
As I listened to Joab various thoughts floated to the surface of my mind. I remembered hearing some of my comrades refer to Joab as the Madman.
“Funny, isn’t it?” he said. “Death actually saved my life.”
We kept silence for several minutes, as if to pay homage to death for saving his life and giving the name of Madman to a fellow with an innocent, tormented face.
“Several days later, when I left the asylum, I saw that my hair had turned white,” Joab concluded.
“That’s one of death’s little jokes,” I put in. “Death loves to change the color of people’s hair. Death has no hair; it has only eyes. God, on the other hand, has no eyes at all.”
“God saved me from death,” said Gideon.
We called Gideon the Saint. First because he was a saint, and second because he looked like one. He was a husky, inarticulate fellow some twenty years old, who took pains to make himself inconspicuous and was always mumbling prayers. He wore a beard and side curls, went nowhere without a prayer book in his pocket. His father was a rabbi, and when he learned that his son meant to become a terrorist he gave him his blessing. There are times, his father said, when words and prayers are not enough. The God of grace is also the God of war. And war is not a matter of mere words.
“God saved me from death,” Gideon repeated. “His eyes saved me. I too was arrested and tortured. They pulled my beard, lit matches under my fingernails, and spat in my face, all in order to make me confess that I had taken part in an attempt against the life of the High Commissioner. But in spite of the pain I did not talk. More than once I was tempted to cry out, but I kept quiet because I felt that God’s eyes were upon me. God is looking at me, I said to myself, and I must not disappoint Him. My torturers never stopped shouting, but I kept my thoughts on God and on His eyes, which are drawn to human pain. For lack of evidence they finally had to set me free. If I had admitted my guilt I should be dead.”
“And then,” I put in, “God would have closed His eyes.”
Ilana refilled our cups.
“What about you, Ilana?” I asked. “What saved your life?”
“A cold in the head,” she replied.
I burst out laughing, but no one else joined in. My laugh was raucous and artificial.
“A cold in the head?” I repeated.
“Yes,” said Ilana, quite seriously. “The English have no description of me; they know only my voice. One day they hauled in a whole group of women, myself among them. At the police station a sound engineer compared each one of our voices to that of the mysterious announcer of the Voice of Freedom. Thanks to the fact that I had a heavy cold I was quickly eliminated and four other women were detained for further questioning.”
Once more I was tempted to laugh, but the others were glum and silent. A cold, I thought to myself. And in this case it turned out to have more practical use than either faith or courage. Next we all looked at Gad, who was almost crushing his teacup between his fingers.
“I owe my life to three Englishmen,” he said. With his head almost on his right shoulder and his eyes fixed on the cup, he seemed to be addressing the rapidly cooling tea. “It was very early in the game,” he went on. “For reasons that no longer matter the Old Man had ordered three hostages taken. They were all sergeants, and I was assigned to kill one of them, any one; the choice was up to me. I was young then, about the age of Elisha, and suffered great mental agony from having this unwanted role thrust upon me. I was willing to play the executioner, but not the judge. Unfortunately, during the night I lost contact with the Old Man and could not explain my reluctance. The sentence had to be carried out at dawn, and how was I to choose the victim? Finally I had an idea. I went down to the cellar and told the three sergeants that the choice was up to them. If you don’t make it,
I said, then all three of you will be shot. They decided to draw lots, and when dawn came I put a bullet in the unlucky fellow’s neck.”
Involuntarily I looked at Gad’s hands and face, the familiar hands and face of my friend, who had put a bullet in the neck of a fellow human being and now talked coldly, almost indifferently, about it. Was the sergeant’s face gazing up at him from his cup of golden cool tea?
“What if the sergeants had refused to settle it among themselves?” I asked. “What then?”
Gad squeezed the cup harder than ever, almost as if he were trying to break it.
“I think I’d have killed myself instead,” he said in a flat voice. And after a moment of heavy silence he added: “I tell you I was young and very weak.”
All eyes turned toward me, in expectation of my story. I gulped down a mouthful of bitter tea and wiped the perspiration off my forehead.
“I owe my life to a laugh,” I said. “It was during one winter at Buchenwald. We were clothed in rags and hundreds of people died of cold every day. In the morning we had to leave our barracks and wait outside in the snow for as long as two hours until they had been cleaned. One day I felt so sick that I was sure the exposure would kill me, and so I stayed behind, in hiding. Quite naturally I was discovered and the cleaning squad dragged me before one of the many assistant barracks leaders. Without stopping to question me he caught hold of my throat and said dispassionately: ‘I’m going to choke you.’ His powerful hands closed in on my throat and in my enfeebled condition I did not even try to put up a fight. Very well, I said to myself; it’s all over. I felt the blood gather in my head and my head swell to several times its normal size, so that I must have looked like a caricature, a miserable clown. I was sure from one minute to the next that it would burst into a thousand shreds like a child’s toy balloon. At this moment the assistant leader took a good look at me and found the sight so comical that he released his grip and burst out laughing. He laughed so long that he forgot his intention to kill. And that’s how I got out of it unharmed. It’s funny, isn’t it, that I should owe my life to an assassin’s sense of humor?”