by Elie Wiesel
“Tell me a story,” I said. “A funny one, if you can.”
I felt my body grow heavy. The next day it would be heavier still, I reflected. The next day it would be weighed down by my life and his death, “I’m the last man you’ll see before you die,” I went on. “Try to make him laugh.”
Once more I was enveloped by his look of pity. I wondered if everyone condemned to die looked at the last man he saw in the same way, if every victim pitied his executioner.
“I’m sorry for you,” John Dawson repeated.
By dint of an enormous effort I managed to smile.
“That’s no funny story,” I remarked.
He smiled at me in return. Which of our two smiles was the sadder?
“Are you sure it isn’t funny?”
No, I wasn’t so sure. Perhaps there was something funny about it. The seated victim, the standing executioner—smiling, and understanding each other better than if they were childhood friends. Such are the workings of time. The veneer of conventional attitudes was wiped off; every word and look and gesture was naked truth instead of just one of its facets. There was harmony between us; my smile answered his; his pity was mine. No human being would ever understand me as he understood me at this hour. Yet I knew that this was solely on account of the roles that were imposed upon us. This was what made it a funny story.
“Sit down,” said John Dawson, making room for me to his left on the bed.
I sat down. Only then did I realize that he was a whole head taller than I. And his legs were longer than mine, which did not even touch the ground.
“I have a son your age,” he began, “but he’s not at all like you. He’s fair-haired, strong, and healthy. He likes to eat, drink, go to the pictures, laugh, sing, and go out with the girls. He has none of your anxiety, your unhappiness.”
And he went on to tell me more about this son who was “studying at Cambridge.” Every sentence was a tongue of flame which burned my body. With my right hand I patted the revolver in my pocket. The revolver too was incandescent, and burned my fingers.
I mustn’t listen to him, I told myself. He’s my enemy, and the enemy has no story. I must think of something else. That’s why I wanted to see him, in order to think of something else while he was talking. Something else…but what? Of Ilana? Of Gad? Yes, I should think of Gad, who was thinking of David. I should think of our hero, David ben Moshe, who…
I shut my eyes to see David better, but to no purpose, because I had never met him. A name isn’t enough, I thought. One must have a face, a voice, a body, and pin the name of David ben Moshe upon them. Better think of a face, a voice, a body that I actually knew. Gad? No, it was difficult to imagine Gad as a man condemned to die. Condemned to die…that was it. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? John Dawson was condemned to die; why shouldn’t I baptize him David ben Moshe? For the next five minutes you are David ben Moshe…in the raw, cold, white light of the death cell of the prison at Acre. There is a knock at the door, and the rabbi comes in to read the Psalms with you and hear you say the Vidui, that terrible confession in which you admit your responsibility not only for the sins you have committed, whether by word, deed, or thought, but also for those you may have caused others to commit. The rabbi gives you the traditional blessing: “The Lord bless you and keep you…” and exhorts you to have no fear. You answer that you are unafraid, that if you had a chance you would do the same thing all over. The rabbi smiles and says that everyone on the outside is proud of you. He is so deeply moved that he has to make a visible effort to hold back his tears; finally the effort is too much for him and he sobs aloud. But you, David, do not cry. You have tender feelings for the rabbi because he is the last man (the executioner and his assistants don’t count) you will see before you die. Because he is sobbing you try to comfort him. “Don’t cry,” you say; “I’m not afraid. You don’t need to be sorry for me.”
“I’m sorry for you,” said John Dawson. “You worry me, not my son.”
He put his feet down on the floor. He was so tall that when he stood up he had to bend over in order not to bump his head against the ceiling. He put his hands in the pockets of his rumpled khaki trousers and began to pace up and down the cell: five steps in one direction, five in the other.
“That I admit is funny,” I observed.
He did not seem to hear, but went on pacing from wall to wall. I looked at my watch; it was twenty past four. Suddenly he stopped in front of me and asked for a cigarette. I had a package of Players in my pocket and wanted to give them to him. But he refused to take the whole package, saying quite calmly that obviously he didn’t have time to smoke them all.
Then he said with sudden impatience:
“Have you a pencil and paper?”
I tore several pages out of my notebook and handed them to him, with a pencil.
“Just a short note which I’d like to have sent to my son,” he declared. “I’ll put down the address.”
I handed him the notebook to use as a pad. He laid the notebook on the bed and leaned over to write from a standing position. For several minutes the silence was broken only by the sound of the pencil running over the paper.
I looked down in fascination at his smooth-skinned hands with their long, slender, aristocratic fingers. With hands like those, I thought, it’s easy to get along. There’s no need to bow, smile, talk, pay compliments, or bring flowers. A pair of such hands do the whole job. Rodin would have liked to sculpt them…
The thought of Rodin made me think of Stefan, a German I had known at Buchenwald. He had been a sculptor before the war, but when I met him the Nazis had cut off his right hand.
In Berlin, during the first years after Hitler came to power, Stefan and some of his friends organized an embryonic resistance group which the Gestapo uncovered shortly after its founding. Stefan was arrested, questioned, and subjected to torture. Give us names, they told him, and we will set you free. They beat and starved him, but he would not talk. Day after day and night after night they prevented him from sleeping, but still he did not give in. Finally he was haled before the Berlin chief of the Gestapo, a timid, mild man, who in a soft-spoken, fatherly manner, advised him to stop being foolishly stubborn. The sculptor heard him out in stony silence. “Come on,” said the chief. “Give us just one name, as a sign of good will.” Still Stefan would not speak. “Too bad,” said the chief. “You’re obliging me to hurt you.”
At a sign from the chief two SS men led the prisoner into what looked like an operating room, with a dentist’s chair installed near the window. Beside it, on a table with a white oilcloth cover, was an orderly array of surgical instruments. They shut the window, tied Stefan onto the chair and lit cigarettes. The mild-mannered chief came into the room, wearing a white doctor’s jacket.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said; “I used to be a surgeon.”
He puttered around with the instruments and then sat down in front of the prisoner’s chair.
“Give me your right hand,” he said. Studying it at close range, he added: “I’m told you’re a sculptor. You have nothing to say? Well, I know it. I can tell from your hands. A man’s hands tell a lot about him. Take mine, for instance. You’d never take them for a surgeon’s hands, would you? The truth is that I never wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to be a painter or a musician. I never became one, but I still have the hands of an artist. Look at them.”
“I looked at them, with fascination,” Stefan told me. “He had the most beautiful, the most angelic hands I have ever seen. You would have sworn that they belonged to a sensitive, unworldly man.”
“As a sculptor you need your hands,” the Gestapo chief went on. “Unfortunately we don’t need them,” and so saying he cut off a finger.
The next day he cut off a second finger, and the day after that a third. Five days, five fingers. All five fingers of the right hand were gone.
“Don’t worry,” the chief assured him. “From a medical point of view, everything is in good order. There’s no
danger of infection.”
“I saw him five times,” Stefan told me. (For some inexplicable reason he was not killed but simply sent to a concentration camp.) “Every day for five days I saw him from very near by. And every time I could not take my eyes off those hands of his, the most beautifully shaped hands I had ever seen…”
John Dawson finished his note and held it out to me, but I hardly saw it. My attention was taken by his proud, smooth-skinned, frail hands.
“Are you an artist?” I asked him.
He shook his head.
“You’ve never painted or played a musical instrument, or at least wanted to do so?”
He scrutinized me in silence and then said dryly:
“No.”
“Then perhaps you studied medicine.”
“I never studied medicine,” he said, almost angrily.
“Too bad.”
“Too bad? Why?”
“Look at your hands. They’re the hands of a surgeon. The kind of hands it takes to cut off fingers.”
Deliberately he laid the sheets of paper on the bed.
“Is that a funny story?” he asked.
“Yes, very funny. The fellow who told it to me thought so. He used to laugh over it until he cried.”
John Dawson shook his head and said in an infinitely sad voice:
“You hate me, don’t you?”
I didn’t hate him at all, but I wanted to hate him. That would have made it all very easy. Hate—like faith or love or war—justifies everything.
“Elisha, why did you kill John Dawson?”
“He was my enemy.”
“John Dawson? Your enemy? You’ll have to explain that better.”
“Very well. John Dawson was an Englishman. The English were enemies of the Jews in Palestine. So he was my enemy.”
“But Elisha, I still don’t understand why you killed him. Were you his only enemy?”
“No, but I had orders. You know what that means.”
“And did the orders make him your only enemy? Speak up, Elisha. Why did you kill John Dawson?”
If I had alleged hate, all these questions would have been spared me. Why did I kill John Dawson? Because I hated him, that’s all. The absolute quality of hate explains any human action even if it throws something inhuman around it.
I certainly wanted to hate him. That was partly why I had come to engage him in conversation before I killed him. It was absurd reasoning on my part, but the fact is that while we were talking I hoped to find in him, or in myself, something that would give rise to hate.
A man hates his enemy because he hates his own hate. He says to himself: This fellow, my enemy, has made me capable of hate. I hate him not because he’s my enemy, not because he hates me, but because he arouses me to hate.
John Dawson has made me a murderer, I said to myself. He has made me the murderer of John Dawson. He deserves my hate. Were it not for him, I might still be a murderer, but I wouldn’t be the murderer of John Dawson.
Yes, I had come down to the cellar to feed my hate. It seemed easy enough. Armies and governments the world over have a definite technique for provoking hate. By speeches and films and other kinds of propaganda they create an image of the enemy in which he is the incarnation of evil, the symbol of suffering, the fountainhead of the cruelty and injustice of all times. The technique is infallible, I told myself, and I shall turn it upon my victim.
I did try to draw upon it. All enemies are equal, I said. Each one is responsible for the crimes committed by the others. They have different faces, but they all have the same hands, the hands that cut my friends’ tongues and fingers.
As I went down the stairs I was sure that I would meet the man who had condemned David ben Moshe to death, the man who had killed my parents, the man who had come between me and the man I had wanted to become, and who was now ready to kill the man in me. I felt quite certain that I would hate him.
The sight of his uniform added fuel to my flames. There is nothing like a uniform for whipping up hate. When I saw his slender hands I said to myself: Stefan will carve out my hate for them. Again, when he bent his head to write the farewell note to his son, the son “studying at Cambridge,” who liked to “laugh and go out with the girls,” I thought: David is writing a last letter too, probably to the Old Man, before he puts his head in the hangman’s noose. And when he talked, my heart went out to David, who had no one to talk to, except the rabbi. You can’t talk to a rabbi, for he is too concerned with relaying your last words to God. You can confess your sins, recite the Psalms or the prayers for the dead, receive his consolation or console him, but you can’t talk, not really.
I thought of David whom I had never met and would never know. Because he was not the first of us to be hanged we knew exactly when and how he would die. At about five o’clock in the morning the cell door would open and the prison director would say: Get ready, David ben Moshe; the time has come. “The time has come,” this is the ritual phrase, as if this and no other time had any significance. David would cast a look around the cell and the rabbi would say: “Come, my son.” They would go out, leaving the cell door open behind them (for some reason no one ever remembers to close it) and start down the long passageway leading to the execution chamber. As the man of the hour, conscious of the fact that the others were there solely on his account, David would walk in the center of the group. He would walk with his head held high—all our heroes held their heads high—and a strange smile on his lips. On either side of the passageway a hundred eyes and ears would wait for him to go by, and the first of the prisoners to perceive his approach would intone the Hatikva, the song of hope. As the group advanced the song would grow louder, more human, more powerful, until its sound rivaled that of the footsteps…
When John Dawson spoke of his son I heard David’s footsteps and the rising song. With his words John Dawson was trying to cover up the footsteps, to erase the sight of David walking down the passageway and the strange smile on his lips, to drown out the despairing sound of the Hatikva, the song of hope.
I wanted to hate him. Hate would have made everything so simple…Why did you kill John Dawson? I killed him because I hated him. I hated him because David ben Moshe hated him, and David ben Moshe hated him because he talked while he David was going down the somber passageway at whose far end he must meet his death.
“You hate me, Elisha, don’t you?” John Dawson asked. There was a look of overflowing tenderness in his eyes.
“I’m trying to hate you,” I answered.
“Why must you try to hate me, Elisha?”
He spoke in a warm, slightly sad voice, remarkable for the absence of curiosity.
Why? I wondered. What a question! Without hate, everything that my comrades and I were doing would be done in vain. Without hate we could not hope to obtain victory. Why do I try to hate you, John Dawson? Because my people have never known how to hate. Their tragedy, throughout the centuries, has stemmed from their inability to hate those who have humiliated and from time to time exterminated them. Now our only chance lies in hating you, in learning the necessity and the art of hate. Otherwise, John Dawson, our future will only be an extension of the past, and the Messiah will wait indefinitely for his deliverance.
“Why must you try to hate me?” John Dawson asked again.
“In order to give my action a meaning which may somehow transcend it.”
Once more he slowly shook his head.
“I’m sorry for you,” he repeated.
I looked at my watch. Ten minutes to five. Ten minutes to go. In ten minutes I should commit the most important and conclusive act of my life. I got up from the bed.
“Get ready, John Dawson,” I said.
“Has the time come?” he asked.
“Very nearly,” I answered.
He rose and leaned his head against the wall, probably in order to collect his thoughts or to pray or something of the kind.
Eight minutes to five. Eight minutes to go. I took the revolver
out of my pocket. What should I do if he tried to take it from me? There was no chance of his escaping. The house was well guarded and there was no way of getting out of the cellar except through the kitchen. Gad, Gideon, Joab, and Ilana were on guard upstairs, and John Dawson knew it.
Six minutes to five. Six minutes to go. Suddenly I felt quite clearheaded. There was an unexpected light in the cell; the boundaries were drawn, the roles well defined. The time of doubt and questioning and uncertainty was over. I was a hand holding a revolver; I was the revolver that held my hand.
Five minutes to five. Five minutes to go.
“Have no fear, my son,” the rabbi said to David ben Moshe. “God is with you.”
“Don’t worry, I’m a surgeon,” said the mild-mannered Gestapo chief to Stefan.
“The note,” John Dawson said, turning around. “You’ll send it to my boy, won’t you?”
He was standing against the wall; he was the wall. Three minutes to five. Three minutes to go.
“God is with you,” said the rabbi. He was crying, but now David did not see him.
“The note. You won’t forget, will you?” John Dawson insisted.
“I’ll send it,” I promised, and for some reason I added: “I’ll mail it today.”
“Thank you,” said John Dawson.
David is entering the chamber from which he will not come out alive. The hangman is waiting for him. He is all eyes. David mounts the scaffold. The hangman asks him whether he wants his eyes banded. Firmly David answers no. A Jewish fighter dies with his eyes open. He wants to look death in the face.
Two minutes to five. I took a handkerchief out of my pocket, but John Dawson ordered me to put it back. An Englishman dies with his eyes open. He wants to look death in the face.
Sixty seconds before five o’clock. One minute to go.
Noiselessly the cell door opened and the dead trooped in, filling us with their silence. The narrow cell had become almost unbearably stuffy.
The beggar touched my shoulder and said:
“Day is at hand.”
And the boy who looked the way I used to look said, with an uneasy expression on his face: