Open Heart

by Elie Wiesel

  At first the doctors would not hear of it. They said that neither of us had any idea of the gravity of my condition. “Pneumonia, and what’s more, double pneumonia, requires constant supervision. The patient requires medications that need to be administered intravenously. Impossible outside the hospital.”

  In the end, Marion proposed turning our hotel room into a veritable hospital room, complete with round-the-clock nurses. Even I was surprised when the doctors accepted.

  But I was growing weaker and weaker. Ridiculously, all I was concerned about was that, for the first time in my professional life, I had to interrupt my courses, and my students were taken over by my colleague. I felt unhappy and guilty, for teaching and writing remain my true passions. When I miss a class, I am probably more disappointed than anyone else.

  Only later did I learn that during those days and nights, my life had been in danger. In truth, I had not given it any thought. In spite of the difficulty I had breathing because my lungs were filled with fluid, I was still able to read, reflect, dream.

  After a few months back in New York, I resumed my “normal” existence. If someone had suggested to me that the real ordeal still lay ahead, hidden in my chest, I probably would have called him a nasty prophet.

  17

  YES, I have written much, and yet, at this stage of my life, at the very threshold of the great portal, I feel that I have not even begun.

  Too late?

  Similarly, I question my many other activities. For example, in my combat against hatred, which I wished to be unrelenting, did I in fact invest enough time, enough energy, in denouncing fanaticism in its various guises? Evidently not, since all of us who have fought the battle must now admit defeat.

  At the time of the liberation of the camps, I remember, we were convinced that after Auschwitz there would be no more wars, no more racism, no more hatred, no more anti-Semitism. We were wrong. This produced a feeling close to despair. For if Auschwitz could not cure mankind of racism, was there any chance of success ever? The fact is, the world has learned nothing. Otherwise, how is one to comprehend the atrocities committed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia …?

  I have initiated many actions, in countless locations, with many companions. And fought so many battles. Was it all in vain?

  What shall I say to God? That I was also counting on His help? Shall I have the nerve to reproach Him for His incomprehensible silence while Satan was winning his victories? While my father, Shlomo son of Eliezer and Nissel, lay dying on his cot?

  Suddenly, here is my father; he too is in my room.

  I see three images in one: my father in Buchenwald, my father in the present and one image from my visit to the camp two years ago. There are other people around us, mostly unknown except for one: President Barack Obama, who had invited me to accompany him to Buchenwald. Had he been told that there were in fact two camps, known as large and small? In any case, we visited the small one, the more lethal one. When I left New York to meet him and his entourage on their official visit in Germany, I didn’t think I would have to make any formal remarks. Marion thought that I would, and I was convinced that, for once, she was wrong, since my name did not appear on the program. She was right. As he was about to begin his speech, the president leaned toward me and whispered, “In this place, it is you who must have the last word.” I improvised, speaking about a son’s duty to visit his father’s grave to meditate. I remember saying that my father has no grave, that his grave is in the largest cemetery in history, the one that is in heaven. That he died not far from here, in this camp, and that I was there too, close to him and yet so far. When he called me, I had neither the strength nor the courage to go to him. It was the first time I had disobeyed him, and I confessed that I was paralyzed by fear.

  And now, on my hospital bed, it is my turn to call him.

  And of course my father responds.

  18

  IN TRUTH, my father never leaves me. Nor do my mother and little sister. They have stayed with me, appearing in every one of my tales, in every one of my dreams. In everything I teach.

  After surgery, as I lie on my bed fighting off pain, I review what I have accomplished as a teacher. For the past forty years, I have lived among the young, and I fully know that I have received more from them than I have given. If I could teach them one last time, what would I say?

  The midrash tells us that there is an academy in heaven. And that God Himself studies there with our masters. Some sources affirm that the Messiah is there, seated at the same table as the masters and their disciples. Will they allow me to join them? I am counting on my grandfather Reb Dodye Feig to intercede for me.

  For the moment of joining them has almost arrived; I am convinced of it. I feel it.

  Once again I appeal to the memory of my parents and grandparents. Even though none of them ever reached my age, I should like to prolong my life by a few years, by a few months or at least by a few moments.

  For there are so many unfinished projects! A study on asceticism, initiated a long time ago because the concept of accepted, invoked suffering has preoccupied me since the end of the war. I also would like to develop the ideas advanced in an already-published book, Somewhere a Master, in which we find yesterday’s masters and today’s side by side: Moses, who remains our master; Rabbi Akiba, our steadfast friend; and so many others, including Maimonides, Rabbi Bahya Ibn Pekudah, the Baal Shem Tov, the Gaon of Vilna, Rav Shushani and Rav Saul Lieberman.

  Even in my present state, my head is bursting with so many questions: How does one become a master? How does one simultaneously stimulate and appease the intellectual and spiritual thirst of a young student? Interestingly, in Hasidism, it is the disciple who chooses his master, not the other way around.

  And there is so much more I’d like to say on another topic: friendship. I devoted a course to it at Boston University, a course that was most of all a celebration, for friendship contains an element of immortality. A broken friendship results in deep sadness, deeper even than what we may feel at the end of love.

  Probably none of those projects will become realized. I have had my doubts for some time because, sadly, my body, which remains an enigma for me, often refuses to cooperate. And has, in fact, already played a number of tricks on me.

  For example, as a child, I suffered from severe migraines. As did my parents. They took me from doctor to doctor, in Sighet and as far away as Budapest. But no specialist, no medication, provided relief. The term “genetic” was uttered. And then, oddly, my headaches stopped the night of my arrival in Birkenau. And returned, as intensely as ever, the morning of my arrival in Ecouis, the first of the children’s homes that welcomed me in France in 1945.

  No professor of medicine, no neurologist, in Paris or in New York, has ever been able to explain this phenomenon to me.

  My body decided to be incomprehensible. Like the soul, it remains a mystery.

  19

  HOSPITAL LIFE is something I am familiar with.

  July 1956. Correspondent for the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth at the United Nations, I have just arrived from Paris. Every evening I walk over to the New York Times Building to buy the first edition of the paper, which—truth be told—is helpful to all foreign journalists in their work.

  That particular evening, clutching the newspaper under my arm, I cross Times Square, heading for the telegraphic bureau from which I dispatch my daily cable. That cable is never sent: I am run over by a taxi. Multiple fractures of the hip, the vertebrae, the ankles.

  The surgery lasts several hours. When I awaken, a cast is covering my entire body except my head and arms. For three long months, a hospital room becomes my headquarters. I need assistance to move or accomplish any task. I am unable to change position without calling for help.

  Fortunately, I have made a few friends among my United Nations colleagues and so, from morning till night, I am rarely alone. I especially remember Daniel Morgaine (France-Soir) and Alexander Zauber (Iton Meyuchad). The latter, endowed w
ith a magnificent sense of humor, loves to make me laugh. And while laughing makes me feel better, it also hurts.

  On his first visit, he wants to know everything about my accident. I describe my various fractures, and as I mention each one, he nods and says, “It could be worse.” I have terrible headaches: “It could be worse.” My left ankle is broken: “It could be worse.” My knees are on fire: “It could be worse.” Surprised and somewhat annoyed, at one point I cannot hold back: “Really, Alexander, what could be worse?”

  And with a serious face, my friend murmurs, “It could have been me.”

  Another time, I remind him, a former yeshiva student, of a prayer that as a child I recited every morning: “Blessed be Thou, Lord, who has created man wisely. In his body, there are a multitude of arteries, cavities and openings: if but one of them were to be blocked or damaged, he could not survive an hour.”

  And I add, “Only now do I understand those words.”

  Alexander’s response: “If you don’t watch out, you’ll discover other similar prayers. And the Lord will help you to better understand other aspects of your body.”

  Several decades later, I discover things my body has kept secret all my life. Do I really need to know them?

  20

  ONCE BACK in my room, I give in to fatigue. Everything exhausts me. To breathe, to open my eyes, to think—everything brings renewed agony. Am I out of danger? Not yet. They say so over and over. My wife and my son try to reassure me. Their voices reach me from afar: They are asking me whether I would like them to stay overnight, but a physician’s aide advises against it; the powerful medications will make me fall asleep soon. I hear them discuss: They would like to stay at least an hour or two. Their presence does me good. I’d like to intervene in their exchange, but a large tube has just been removed from my throat and it hurts.

  In spite of the sedation and tranquilizers, I sleep poorly. Nurses and nurse’s aides constantly manipulate my body, turning it in every direction. Multiple injections, unending blood tests, checkups from top to bottom. No sooner do I close my eyes than I must open them again. My lids remain half closed. I think I dreamed, but I can’t recall clearly what the dreams were about. I do remember their color, though: gray-black ashes and an incandescent flame rising from a gigantic chimney consuming rows upon rows of books.

  Am I really saved? For good? I doubt it. Nothing seems real to me. Still, death has evidently decided not to claim my body as yet. A strange heaviness overwhelms me. It is in my chest, my head, and it pulls me down. Toward the void.

  I feel the proximity of the dark, implacable enemy. I no longer know where I am going, where I am, who I am. Nor even what I want. The doctors try to convince me that from now on, for a few days, a few weeks, I must be patient, that the feeling of being cut into pieces will disappear. But when? Tomorrow. The day after tomorrow. If only I could sleep a week, perhaps even a month.

  A lingering doubt: What if the doctors are hiding the truth from me? What if, in fact, I am dying? It could still happen: I may die any minute. But I am not dead yet. What does being resuscitated mean if not rediscovering one’s future?

  21

  THE OPPRESSION lasts thirty-six hours, perhaps two days. An eternity during which I can do nothing without help. Huge bandages cover my chest and the inside of my right leg. Electrocardiograms constantly control my heart rhythm. Attached to my body are long cables to analyze and measure the functioning of my vital organs. True, I had been warned that I would lose all notion of time and reality, except that every vanished reality makes way for another. Indefinitely.

  On the third day, I am at last able to leave my bed. Then my room, to walk a few steps in the hallway. The state of my health improves, but the discomfort due to the incisions in the chest and leg persists. Yes, I do have medications, but they upset my stomach. It seems my brain is affected as well, for I am certainly thinking less clearly. I feel removed in time and space; I do not recognize myself. Who am I? What have I become? I know that I have escaped death. I also know that my life will never be the same again.

  22

  AND GOD in all that?

  Am I asking myself that terrible question to chase away my anxiety and my pain?

  Now that I am confined to the hospital bed, that question arises again, obsesses me as it haunts all I have written. And, lover of insoluble philosophical problems that I am, I remain frustrated.

  A great journalist, a friend, in a televised conversation, asked me what I would say to God as I stood before Him. I answered with one word: “Why?”

  And God’s answer? If, in His kindness, as we say, He actually communicated His answer, I don’t recall it.

  The Talmud tells me: Moses is present as Rabbi Akiba gives a lecture on the Bible. And Moses asks God, “Since this master is so erudite, why did You give the Law to me rather than to him?” And God answers harshly: “Be quiet. For such is my will!” Some time later, Moses is present at Rabbi Akiba’s terrible torture and death at the hands of Roman soldiers. And he cries out, “Lord, is this Your reward to one who lived his entire life celebrating Your Law?” And God repeats His answer with the same harshness: “Be quiet. For such is my will!”

  What will His answer be now, to make me be quiet?

  And where shall I find the audacity and the strength to not accept it?

  And yet, once I have left the antechamber of death, I ponder the question again. Why this illness? These pains, why did I deserve them? Even the possible success of the surgery leads me to inquire: “And God in all this?” Merciful God—as we say—did He not, after all, intervene and lend a hand to the surgeon? But again why, for what purpose?

  When I was a child, I situated God exclusively in all that is Good. In all that is sacred. In all that makes man worthy of salvation. Could it be that for God, Evil represents just another path leading to Good?

  In truth, for the Jew that I am, Auschwitz is not only a human tragedy but also—and most of all—a theological scandal. For me, it is as impossible to accept Auschwitz with God as without God. But then how is one to understand His silence?

  As I try to explain God’s presence in Evil, I suffer. And search for reasons that would allow me to denounce it. Thoughts I expressed already in Night, in particular in the passage that describes a Rosh Hashanah service in Buna:

  Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes. Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.

  But a few lines later I describe how during the same service I recite the traditional prayers and litanies, and proclaim my faith in Him, God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.…

  I confess to having rebelled against the Lord, but I have never repudiated Him.

  Having studied the sublime, enchanting texts of the prophets, I make mine Jeremiah’s Lamentations, evoking the destruction of the first Temple of Jerusalem:

  “You have killed [Your children] without mercy!”

  “You have assassinated [Your people] without compassion!”

  What? God, assassin? True, some of us protested against the divine silence. But none of us had the audacity to call God “assassin”!

  On the third day, I feel the need to say my daily prayers. I ask Marion to bring me my tallith and tefillin.

  To thank Him? To explain to God that I believe in Him in spite of Himself? My thoughts are still too nebulous to formulate a valid response on the subject of the Almighty.

  I do, however, find a response, more personal perhaps: namely, that my commitment is an affirmation of my fidelity to the religious practice of my parents and theirs. If I observe the laws of the Torah by putting on the tefillin, it is because my father and grandfather, and theirs, did so. I refuse to be the last in a line going back very far in my memory and that of my people.

  I know this answer is in no way satisfactory, or perhaps not even valid. B
ut it is the only one.

  All my life, until today, I have been content to ask questions. All the while knowing that the real questions, those that concern the Creator and His creation, have no answers. I’ll go even farther and say that there is a level at which only the questions are eternal; the answers never are.

  And so, the patient that I am, more charitable, repeats, “Since God is, He is to be found in the questions as well as in the answers.”

  23

  ONE DAY at the beginning of my convalescence, little Elijah, five years old, comes to pay me a visit. I hug him and tell him, “Every time I see you, my life becomes a gift.”

  He observes me closely as I speak and then, with a serious mien, responds:

  “Grandpa, you know that I love you, and I see you are in pain. Tell me: If I loved you more, would you be in less pain?”

  I am convinced God at that moment is smiling as He contemplates His creation.

  24

  PHYSICIANS WARNED me that the feelings of weakness and fatigue would last long after I left the hospital. And so, for several weeks I walk like an old man—after all, I am only eighty-two! I have to make a considerable effort to hold myself straight. Every few steps, I have to stop, short of breath, and rest a moment until I am able to go on. Also, the pain in my chest continues to prevent me from sleeping.

  Among the interdictions imposed by the physician: no smoking. But I have not smoked for forty-two years, since I married. No alcohol either. It happens that I don’t drink; I never did. No exercise. Never did that either.

  And then came the warning: “A bypass brings with it deep depression.” Why? I don’t know; it probably is linked to the many mysteries of the heart. In my case, it didn’t happen.

  As yet.