by Elie Wiesel
Therefore they prefer, in this condemned world, not to hurl their defiance at men and their anger into the face of history, but to keep silent, to pursue the monologue which only the dead deserve to hear. Guilt was not invented at Auschwitz, it was disfigured there.
15.
A Plea for the Dead
I was not quite fifteen when, for the first time, completely fascinated, I was present at a strange discussion about dignity and death and the possible relationship between the two.
People who were dead and did not know it yet were discussing the necessity, rather than the possibility, of meeting death with dignity.
The reality of certain words escaped me and the weight of that reality as well. The people around me were talking and I did not understand.
Now, I am more than twenty years older, and all paths leading to the cemetery are known to me. The discussion still goes on. Only the participants have changed. Those of twenty years ago have died and they know it now. As for me, I understand even less than before.
I had just stepped off into unreality. It must have been about midnight. Later, I learned that executioners are usually romantic types who like perfect productions: they find in darkness a stage setting and in night an ally.
Somewhere a dog began to howl, another echoed him, then a third. We were, it seemed, in the kingdom of dogs. One of the women went mad and let out a cry that no longer resembled anything human; it was more like barking; no doubt she wanted to become a dog herself. A pistol shot put an end to her hallucination; silence fell over us again. In the distance, red and yellow billows of fire, spewed out by immense smoke-stacks, rose toward the moonless sky, as if to set it aflame. A quarter of an hour before, or less, our train had stopped at a small suburban station. Standing at the grates, people read the name aloud: Auschwitz.
Someone asked: “We’ve arrived?”
Another answered: “I think so.”
“Auschwitz, you know it?”
“No. Not at all.”
The name evoked no memory, linked itself to no anguish. Ignorant in matters of geography, we supposed it was a small peaceful spot somewhere in Silesia. We did not yet know it had already made history with its populace of several million dead Jews. We learned it one minute later, when the train doors opened into an ear-splitting din and when an army of inmates began to shout: “Last stop! Everybody off!”
Like conscientious tour guides, they described the surprises in store for us: “You’re acquainted with Auschwitz? You’re not? Too bad, you’ll get to know it, it won’t be long before you know it.”
They sneered: “Auschwitz, you don’t know Auschwitz? Really not? Too bad. Someone is waiting for you here. Who? Why, death, of course. Death is waiting for you. It waits only for you. Look and you will see.”
And they pointed to the fire in the distance.
Later, many years later, I asked one of my friends: “What were your first impressions of Auschwitz?”
Somber, he answered me: “I found it a spectacle of terrifying beauty.”
I found it neither beautiful nor terrifying. I was young and I simply refused to believe my eyes and ears. I thought: our guides are mocking us in order to scare us. It amuses them. We are living in the twentieth century, after all; Jews are not burned anymore. The civilized world would not allow it. My father walked alongside me, on my left, his head bowed. I asked him: “The Middle Ages are behind us, aren’t they, Father, far behind us?”
He did not answer me.
I asked him: “I’m dreaming, Father. Am I not dreaming?”
He did not answer me.
We kept moving on toward the unknown. It was then, like a whisper, a feverish discussion went through the ranks. Some youths overcoming their stupor, grasping at their anger, called for a revolt. Without arms? Yes, without arms. Fingernails, fists, and a few penknives hidden in their clothes, that will suffice. But won’t that mean certain death? Yes, so what? There is nothing more to lose and everything to gain, especially honor, that can still be gained, honor. To die as free men: that is what they advocated, those youths. There is defeat only in resignation.
But their fathers were opposed. They went on dreaming. And waiting. They invoked the Talmud: “God can intervene, even at the very last moment, when everything seems lost. We must not rush things, we must not lose faith or hope.”
The argument won everyone over. I asked my father: “What do you think?”
This time he did answer me: “Thinking isn’t much use anymore.”
The human herd marched ahead, we did not know where our steps were leading us. No: we knew, our guides had told us. But we pretended not to know. And the discussions continued. The young were in favor of rebellion, their elders against. The former finally conceded, one must obey one’s parents, the Bible says; their wishes must be respected.
And so the revolt did not take place.
In recent times, many people are beginning to raise questions about the problem of the incomprehensible if not enigmatic behavior of Jews in what was concentration-camp Europe. Why did they march into the night the way cattle go to the slaughterhouse? Important, if not essential, for it touches on timeless truth; this question torments men of good conscience who feel the need to be quickly reassured, to have the guilty parties named and their crimes defined, to have unraveled for them the meaning of a history which they have not experienced except through intermediaries. And so those millions of Jews, whom so-called civilized society had abandoned to despair and to agonize in silence and then in oblivion, suddenly are all brought back up to the surface to be drowned in a flood of words. And since we live at a time when small talk is king, the dead offer no resistance. The role of ghost is imposed upon them and they are bombarded with questions: “Well, now, what was it really like? How did you feel in Minsk and in Kiev and in Kolomea, when the earth, opening up before your eyes, swallowed up your sons and your prayers? What did you think when you saw blood—your own blood—gushing from the bowels of the earth, rising up to the sun? Tell us, speak up, we want to know, to suffer with you, we have a few tears in reserve, they pain us, we want to get rid of them.”
One is sometimes reduced to regretting the good old days when this subject, still in the domain of sacred memory, was considered taboo, reserved for the initiates, who spoke of it only with hesitation and fear, always lowering their eyes, and always trembling with humility, knowing themselves unworthy and recognizing the limits of their language, spoken and unspoken.
Now in the name of objectivity, not to mention historical research, everyone takes up the subject without the slightest embarrassment. Accessible to every mind, to every intellect in search of stimulation, this has become the topic of fashionable conversation. Why not? It replaces Brecht, Kafka, and communism, which are now overdone, overworked. In intellectual, or pseudo-intellectual circles, in New York and elsewhere too, no cocktail party can really be called a success unless Auschwitz, sooner or later, figures in the discussion. Excellent remedy for boredom; a good way to ignite passions. Drop the names of a few recent works on this subject, and watch minds come alive, one more brilliant, more arrogant than the next. Psychiatrists, comedians, and novelists, all have their own ideas about the subject, all are clear, each is ready to provide all the answers, to explain all the mysteries: the cold cruelty of the executioner and the cry which strangled the victim, and even the fate that united them to play on the same stage, in the same cemetery. It is as simple as saying hello. As hunger, thirst, and hate. One need only understand history, sociology, politics, psychology, economics; one need know only how to add. And to accept the axiom that everywhere A+B=C. If the dead are dead, if so many dead are dead, that is because they desired their own death, they were lured, driven by their own instincts. Beyond the diversity of all the theories, the self-assurance of which cannot but arouse anger, all unanimously conclude that the victims, by participating in the executioner’s game, in varying degrees shared responsibility.
The novelty of this view c
annot fail to be striking. Until recently, Jews have been held responsible for everything under the sun, the death of Jesus, civil wars, famines, unemployment, and revolutions: they were thought to embody evil; now, they are held responsible for their own death: they embody that death. Thus, we see that the Jewish problem continues to be a kind of no-man’s land of the mind where anyone can say anything in any way at all—a game in which everyone wins. Only the dead are the losers.
And in this game—it is really nothing else—it is quite easy to blame the dead, to accuse them of cowardice or complicity (in either the concrete or metaphysical sense of that term). Now, this game has a humiliating aspect. To insist on speaking in the name of the dead—and to say: these are their motivations, these the considerations that weakened their wills, to speak in their name—this is precisely to humiliate them. The dead have earned something other than this posthumous humiliation. I never before wholly understood why, in the Jewish faith, anything that touches corpses is impure. Now I begin to understand.
Let us leave them alone. We will not dig up those corpses without coffins. Leave them there where they must forever be and such as they must be: wounds, immeasurable pain at the very depth of our being. Be content they do not wake up, that they do not come back to the earth to judge the living. The day that they would begin to tell what they have seen and heard, and what they have taken most to heart, we will not know where to run, we will stop up our ears, so great will be our fear, so sharp our shame.
I could understand the desire to dissect history, the strong urge to close in on the past and the forces shaping it; nothing is more natural. No question is more important for our generation which is the generation of Auschwitz, or of Hiroshima, tomorrow’s Hiroshima. The future frightens us, the past fills us with shame: and these two feelings, like those two events, are closely linked, like cause to effect. It is Auschwitz that will produce Hiroshima, and if the human race should perish by the nuclear bomb, this will be the punishment for Auschwitz, where, in the ashes, the hope of man was extinguished.
And Lot’s apprehensive wife, she was right to want to look back and not be afraid to carry the burning of doomed hope. “Know where you come from,” the sages of Israel said. But everything depends on the inner attitude of whoever looks back to the beginning: if he does so purely out of intellectual curiosity, his vision will make of him a statue in some salon. Unfortunately, we do not lack statues these days; and what is worse, they speak, as if from the top of the mountain.
And so I read and I listen to these eminent scholars and professors who, having read all the books and confronted all the theories, proclaim their erudition and their power to figure everything out, to explain everything, simply by performing an exercise in classification.
At times, especially at dawn, when I am awakened by the first cry I heard the first night behind barbed wire, a desire comes over me to say to all these illustrious writers who claim to go to the bottom of it all: “I admire you, for I myself stumble when I walk this road; you claim to know everything, there again I admire you: as for me, I know nothing. What is to be done, I know I am still incapable of deciphering—for to do so would be to blaspheme—the frightened smile of that child torn away from his mother and transformed into a flaming torch; nor have I been able, nor will I ever be able, to grasp the shadow which, at that moment, invaded the mother’s eyes. You can, undoubtedly. You are fortunate, I ought to envy you, but I do not. I prefer to stand on the side of the child and of the mother who died before they understood the formulas and phraseology which are the basis of your science.”
Also, I prefer to take my place on the side of Job, who chose questions and not answers, silence and not speeches. Job never understood his own tragedy which, after all, was only that of an individual betrayed by God; to be betrayed by one’s fellow men is much more serious. Yet, the silence of this man, alone and defeated, lasted for seven days and seven nights; only afterward, when he identified himself with his pain, did he feel he had earned the right to question God. Confronted with Job, our silence should extend beyond the centuries to come. And we dare speak on behalf of our knowledge? We dare say: “I know”? This is how and why victims were victims and executioners executioners? We dare interpret the agony and anguish, the self-sacrifice before the faith and the faith itself of six million human beings, all named Job? Who are we to judge them?
One of my friends, in the prime of life, spent a night studying accounts of the holocaust, especially the Warsaw Ghetto. In the morning he looked at himself in the mirror and saw a stranger: his hair had turned white. Another lost not his youth but his reason. He plunged back into the past and remains there still. From time to time I visit him in his hospital room; we look at one another and we are silent. One day, he shook himself and said to me: “Perhaps one should learn to cry.”
I should envy those scholars and thinkers who pride themselves on understanding this tragedy in terms of an entire people; I myself have not yet succeeded in explaining the tragedy of a single one of its sons, no matter which.
I have nothing against questions: they are useful. What is more, they alone are. To turn away from them would be to fail in our duty, to lose our only chance to be able one day to lead an authentic life. It is against the answers that I protest, regardless of their basis. Answers: I say there are none. Each of these theories contains perhaps a fraction of truth, but their sum still remains beneath and outside what, in that night, was truth. The events obeyed no law and no law can be derived from them. The subject matter to be studied is made up of death and mystery, it slips away between our fingers, it runs faster than our perception: it is everywhere and nowhere. Answers only intensify the question: ideas and words must finally come up against a wall higher than the sky, a wall of human bodies extending to infinity.
For more than twenty years, I have been struggling with these questions. To find one answer or another, nothing is easier: language can mend anything. What the answers have in common is that they bear no relation to the questions. I cannot believe that an entire generation of fathers and sons could vanish into the abyss without creating, by their very disappearance, a mystery which exceeds and overwhelms us. I still do not understand what happened, or how, or why. All the words in all the mouths of the philosophers and psychologists are not worth the silent tears of that child and his mother, who live their own death twice. What can be done? In my calculations, all the figures always add up to the same number: six million.
Some time ago, in Jerusalem, I met by chance one of the three judges in the Eichmann trial. This wise and lucid man, of uncompromising character, is, to use an expression dear to Camus, at once a person and a personage. He is, in addition, a conscience.
He refused to discuss the technical or legal aspects of the trial. Having told him that side was of no interest to me, I asked him the following question:
“Given your role in this trial, you ought to know more about the scope of the holocaust than any living person, more even than those who lived through it in the flesh and in their memory. You have studied all the documents, read all the secret reports, interrogated all the witnesses. Now tell me: do you understand this fragment of the past, those few pages of history?”
He shuddered imperceptibly, then, in a soft voice, infinitely humble, he confessed:
“No, not at all. I know the facts and the events that served as their framework; I know how the tragedy unfolded minute by minute, but this knowledge, as if coming from outside, has nothing to do with understanding. There is in all this a portion which will always remain a mystery; a kind of forbidden zone, inaccessible to reason. Fortunately, as it happens. Without that …”
He broke off suddenly. Then, with a smile a bit timid, a bit sad, he added:
“Who knows, perhaps that’s the gift which God, in a moment of grace, gave to man: it prevents him from understanding everything, thus saving him from madness, or from suicide.”
In truth, Auschwitz signifies not only the failure of two thousa
nd years of Christian civilization, but also the defeat of the intellect that wants to find a Meaning—with a capital M—in history. What Auschwitz embodied has none. The executioner killed for nothing, the victim died for nothing. No God ordered the one to prepare the stake, nor the other to mount it. During the Middle Ages, the Jews, when they chose death, were convinced that by their sacrifice they were glorifying and sanctifying God’s name. At Auschwitz the sacrifices were without point, without faith, without divine inspiration. If the suffering of one human being has any meaning, that of six million has none. Numbers have their own importance; they prove, according to Piotr Rawicz, that God has gone mad.
I attended the Eichmann trial, I heard the prosecutor try to get the witnesses to talk by forcing them to expose themselves and to probe the innermost recesses of their being: Why didn’t you resist? Why didn’t you attack your assassins when you still outnumbered them?
Pale, embarrassed, ill at ease, the survivors all responded in the same way: “You cannot understand. Anyone who was not there cannot imagine it.”
Well, I was there. And I still do not understand. I do not understand that child in the Warsaw Ghetto who wrote in his diary: “I’m hungry, I’m cold; when I grow up I want to be a German, and then I won’t be hungry anymore, and I won’t be cold anymore.”
I still do not understand why I did not throw myself on the Kapo who was beating my father before my very eyes. In Galicia, Jews dug their own graves and lined up, without any trace of panic, at the edge of the trench to await the machine-gun barrage. I do not understand their calm. And that woman, that mother, in the bunker somewhere in Poland, I do not understand her either; her companions smothered her child for fear its cries might betray their presence; that woman, that mother, having lived this scene of biblical intensity, did not go mad. I do not understand her: why, and by what right, and in the name of what, did she not go mad?