by Elie Wiesel
His face darkened suddenly as he no doubt thought of his wife and others who suffered a similar fate. The word “miracle” resonated like a kind of blasphemy.
• • •
Shaltiel summoned memories and faces as a way of protecting himself, shielding himself from the torturers. His moments of complete dejection, the feeling of plummeting into bottomless depths, was thereby mitigated by the glimmers of ecstasy. He shivered with cold, yet was bathed in sweat.
Outside, life triumphs. There are cries and tears of victory, fascism defeated, Nazism humiliated. The horror of the German dictatorship is unmasked. Suffering the worst defeat in its history, Germany has lost all its pride. Europe is liberated. The Jewish people have survived. Shouts of “Hurrah” are heard in Moscow and Kiev. People dance in the streets of Paris and Amsterdam. There are military parades everywhere. The Resistance is jubilant. “Never again” becomes more than a slogan: It’s a prayer, a promise, a vow. There will never again be hatred, people say. Never again jail and torture. Never again the suffering of innocent people, or the shooting of starving, frightened, terrified children. And never again the glorification of base, ugly, dark violence. It’s a prayer.
One autumn day, my father is rereading letters sent to friends in Palestine and America: requests for advice and help. It is our joint decision to leave Europe. It feels urgent to escape from the land and the clouds that witnessed the death of so many of our people, abandoned by God and betrayed by His creation. We want to start a new family life elsewhere, far from the cemeteries embedded in our recollections of ashes and blazing skies.
Arele is engrossed in a history book.
I’m still clinging to the chessboard.
Someone knocks at the door.
“Go see who’s there,” says my father.
When I see who it is, I shout so loudly that it could wake a deaf person on the other side of the ocean. “Piotr!”
I fall into his strong arms. He laughs; his whole body is laughing.
He shouts in a strong, booming voice, “So, little man, you thought I had forgotten you, huh?”
My father and Arele are standing behind me, waiting for the reunion scene to end. I introduce them to Piotr. He removes his rucksack and opens it. It contains coffee, sugar, flour, chocolate, condensed milk—all American products, the riches of our pitiable world. He hands them to my father, who is so overcome with emotion that he doesn’t take them right away.
“Before anything,” he says, “I have to shake your hand. My son told me so much about you that I feel I’ve known you since the beginning of my life.”
Returning home from Berlin, Piotr stays with us for several days. We each talk about our war experiences. “I know Auschwitz,” says Piotr, looking fixedly at my father and cousin. He wants to see their tattooed numbers. He shuts his eyes and opens them, shaking his head incredulously. Some of his comrades liberated Birkenau and other extermination camps. Their thirst for revenge was not to be believed.
“Whatever sufferings we now impose on the Germans,” he said, “they deserve. They deserve much worse. They’re living in fear and, let’s hope, haunted by remorse and shame. Russian soldiers frighten them, and when the Russian soldier happens to be Jewish, their fear is a thousand times more intense. They see me as a pure avenger, thirsting for their blood. Yet, God is my witness, I didn’t touch a single woman. Seeing them grovel before me is enough. But tell me, Shaltiel, who’s living in the house where I met you?”
“I don’t know. I never set foot there again.”
“Why don’t we go?”
“What for?” my father asks.
“Simple curiosity. Since it used to belong to a German officer, probably a Soviet officer lives there now.”
“Fine. Let’s go there.”
“All of us?”
“Why not?” says my father.
We go there on foot. As we walk, Piotr describes the street fighting in Berlin, one building at a time, and the fanatical Hitler Youth who defended the privileged neighborhoods near the Chancellery. He asks me: “What became of your German?”
“I have no idea. Maybe he’s dead. Maybe he’s in Berlin.”
“Maybe I killed him,” says Piotr.
We laugh while we walk on. A shiver runs down my spine when we’ve arrived. It’s the end of the afternoon. In the coolness of dusk a little wind is blowing in from the mountains. It brought to mind nights tormented by nightmares. Memories of chess games brought anguish. I recalled the fear of winning and the fear of losing: How was I to guess the mood and thoughts of my opponent, my enemy? I remembered waiting for the following day and its uncertainties, and the loneliness, as I brooded over my father. It all came to the surface and swirled around in my memory.
Here we are in front of the house. I had expected to come upon ruins, but it hadn’t changed. The tree was still there in the garden, carrying yellow leaves. I could sometimes see them from below, in the hideaway. I wished I could touch them, confide in them.
There is light in the windows. I knock on the door lightly. After a moment, it opens. An elderly, stooped woman appears and with a clumsy movement quickly tries to shut the door; the sight of the Russian officer has frightened her. Piotr prevents it. She sees us behind him. In spite of the darkness, I see panic etched on Dorothea’s face.
“We’d like to go inside,” says Piotr in Yiddish.
She doesn’t move. He eases her gently out of the way. Her gaze has not left me. I can read her thoughts, her astonishment, her feelings of helplessness, as though she were facing a great danger: “You … you … what do you want? What are you doing here?”
Suddenly, it becomes clear that she is hiding someone. I point to the secret door leading to the underground hideaway. She almost collapses, stifling a cry.
There he was. The count. He was hiding there in the very place where I had hid, where I had found asylum against crushing misery. He is pale, as I had most likely been several months before, thinner too. He is still dressed elegantly: a white shirt and a black tie.
He is sitting wide-eyed, at “my” table, in front of a chessboard, maybe ours. I wondered whose presence frightens him more, mine or the Russian officer’s.
“That’s him?” Piotr asks.
“Yes. Count Friedrich von Waldensohn, officer of the SD, in person,” says my father.
Piotr asks him a few questions in Russian, which I translate. He doesn’t answer. Piotr becomes incensed.
“He better open his mouth or I’ll take him straight to the Kommandantur! There he’ll be taught respect.”
We are speaking Yiddish, but the count gleans the meaning of the words. He stands up, bows and states his rank. He says I can vouch for his innocence: He has never tortured anyone, killed anyone or arrested anyone. He held only a desk job, he says, far from the scene of action. He merely studied and evaluated the information provided by his subordinates, and later passed it on to his superiors.
“Is this true?” Piotr asks me.
“Yes and no.”
“Explain, please.”
“I never saw him kill anyone, but he lied to me about my mother, my father and my cousin. My mother was already dead and burned, and my father and cousin deported to Auschwitz when he claimed he had run into them in a camp not far from here.”
“Translate,” the count demands of me.
I do, and he shrugs his shoulders.
“I had no choice,” he says. “I had to lie to you. The truth would have driven you to despair. Also, you wouldn’t have been able to concentrate on your game.”
“Yes,” I say bitterly. “I used to play chess with him. In order to survive. I had to.”
My father, Arele and Piotr seem stunned. They can’t understand. While they were suffering in the throes of hell, I was playing chess with a German officer who was more concerned about my powers of concentration than the fate of my loved ones? Piotr asks him to sit down, while we remain standing. Dorothea nervously says she is sorry she can’t offer us an
ything, not even tea.
Piotr stares at her with a look of disgust.
“His Lordship isn’t guilty,” she says. “He must not be taken to jail. He merely did his duty. He never hurt anyone.”
Piotr motions to her to stop talking. She retires to a corner of the basement, buries her head in her hands and sobs convulsively.
“I’m taking him in,” Piotr says to me. “I have to deliver him to the Soviet military authorities. His fate doesn’t depend on me. Maybe on you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Since you know him, you’ll have to testify.”
The count cuts in. “You’ll testify on my behalf, won’t you? You’ll tell them I treated you well, that I protected you, that I took a big risk keeping you with me?”
He spoke Russian after all. A thorough man of deceit.
The count stares at me with his cold, penetrating gaze. “Shaltiel, do you remember what I said to you when we separated? I told you to remember that you owed me your life, do you remember?”
“Yes, I remember. And I replied that I owed my life to chess.”
“But you played with me!”
“No. Not with you, with Death.”
Piotr remains pondering. Then he grabs the count. He will deliver him to headquarters. It is his duty as an officer.
At that very moment, I decide never again to look at a chessboard. But with the passing of time, I couldn’t keep my promise.
From all quarters, he is being asked to talk about it. What was it like? His first sensations. The turning points. When did he feel his suffering was intolerable? And was death to be desired or inevitable? And the possibility, if not the certainty, of being rescued, when did that feeling come? And being liberated, what was that like?
He shakes his head: No, not yet. Another time. Later. Oh, he’s well aware of what he owes them. If he’s still alive, if he’s breathing, if he feels able to resume his life, to renew relationships and even deepen them—he will repay his debt to them. But he can’t now fulfill the questioners’ expectations. Or satisfy those of the journalists. Everything in its own time. One day, he’ll talk. He’ll find the words. He’ll write.
He’ll also talk about the one who is missing.
Of the two torturers, which one is more dangerous? Luigi with his provocative, intelligent remarks, or Ahmed with his temper tantrums? The former, calm, unflappable, ghostly, tries to appeal to one’s humanity; the latter, on the contrary, fiery and on edge, plays at making one feel useless, weak and scorned.
Through an opening somewhere—the small basement window or a door left ajar to let some air in—comes the noise from outside: the racket of garbage collectors, kids playing, adults running, the complaints of some, the laughter of others, birds chirping. Yes, there are still free human beings who exercise their freedom and humanity for good or ill.
The hostage keeps his swollen eyes open. Time flows, but its rhythm changes radically. Therein lies the tragedy: In order to break with the present, from which there is no present means of escape, he tries to recapture the recent or distant past, elusive as it is, moving within a personal time frame that sometimes heeds him, sometimes slips away from him. Time drags on, then suddenly, for no apparent reason, speeds forward, rushing with an implacable yet hidden logic.
The hostage invents his own clock, his own measuring system. He recites the first chapter of the Psalms; that must take a minute. For the fifth, he needs four. The biblical story of the Akedah, or the near sacrifice of Isaac: three minutes. The commentaries: an hour and a half. Antigone: eighty minutes. A hundred for Aesop’s fables. A few of Satan’s monologues in Milton’s Paradise Lost: thirty-two.
What does Maimonides say about the legal problem of hostages? What is the duty of the community when it comes to paying a ransom?
His brain is working, his memory too; Shaltiel is reassured. But is this an advantage in his situation? Wouldn’t it be better to be all mixed up, or for his memory to be blank? No. Anything is better than chaos or amnesia.
So what does Maimonides say?
“No commandment surpasses the one concerning the liberation of hostages, for they are among the starving, the thirsting, the stripped, always in danger of death.”
In other words: If he, Shaltiel, has been abducted, the Jews of New York and Jerusalem are morally and legally obliged to pay whatever is demanded of them.
As his thoughts wander in the nebulous future, Shaltiel draws away from the physician philosopher of Cordoba and latches on to a visionary from Galilee. Specifically, he focuses on the decision in the Shulchan Aruch, or Guide to Behavior, by the famous Rabbi Joseph Karo of Safed in the fifteenth century: Even the building of a study house or synagogue should be stopped for the deliverance of a prisoner. Every delay is tantamount to a murder.
Shaltiel likes this mystic and his celestial dreams. A great Sage took the trouble of coming down from the heavens to teach him the secrets of Creation in his sleep. I’m lucky, the hostage says to himself. My dreams are wounds; his were made of light. Could he assist me in my nightmare here?
Be careful, Shaltiel says to himself. Let’s not run too fast. I need to stop and catch my breath to probe my memories from yesterday. But when was yesterday? And where? In what school? There was the Maharam of Rothenburg. Arrested in 1286, he tried to escape from Germany but was sentenced and imprisoned. From his cell, he sent his decision to the Jewish community: Do not pay a ransom, for it would encourage other abductions. He drew his last breath in jail, after seven years of captivity.
But then, if a shining light like the Maharam, one of Israel’s Sages, the author of essential volumes on the foundation of religion, had to be abandoned to his fate, why would anyone care about a minor Jewish storyteller like me, who has only jotted down a few simple words on paper, a few sad and entertaining stories here and there, which probably no one has ever read, much less remembers?
Caution, Shaltiel. You’re going offtrack. You’re becoming too impassioned. Memory, which lurches forward and backward, has its own traps, its own breaks and cracks. You’re tracing concentric circles, keeping yourself continually in the center. If you think too much about yourself, how will you stand up to future questioning? So, Nirvana no longer appeals to you? Dissolve the self in order to remain whole. This is not a Jewish attitude, true, but for the time being, the point is to survive. Isn’t everything allowed in order to defeat death? Don’t you want to live for those close to you, to take part in their joys and to help the new generation of young people struggle against the demons that assail them?
He decides to take a different approach. In his mind he lines up the men and women whose paths crossed his, and questions them about what to do or not to do in his situation.
His father, with a solemn air, advises him to stand fast. His stepmother says he should be careful and not give in to despair. His brother advises him to play deaf and dumb. One-Eyed Paritus says he should laugh even through tears. The musician from Kraków urges that he guard the tremulous song that haunts him.
Shaltiel questions them: Why this suffering? What is the meaning of this ordeal? Could it be a punishment for something? Could it be for having said too much, or not enough, in my stories? Or again—and nothing could be worse—for having said it badly? He doesn’t realize that the torturer scores a victory over his victim when the latter, in the grip of doubt, begins to torture himself.
Torture is the act of making someone die a slow death, making the prisoner die several times.
Thoughts arise in the hostage’s tormented brain. In the hospital, patients feel they are returning to childhood; in prison, they age. The gods blind themselves.
Shaltiel remembers a story:
A very young child is dreaming. I want to grow up, I want to sing of the joy of the world, I want to celebrate the dark beauty of the mountains, I want to kiss a woman, the most beautiful woman in the world, but …
“But what?” asks his would-be girlfriend.
“But I don’t
know how,” says the little boy.
So she caresses his hair, his lips, his eyelids, which she closes, and says to him: Come, I’ll show you how.
And his heart, the little boy’s heart, begins beating violently.
And the young woman’s too.
Shaltiel, though prone to migraines, has never before awakened with such a bad headache. Even his teeth are throbbing. And he feels as though he were inside a heated iron vise. Is it just a nightmare? He’s in pitch darkness. His hands and ankles are tied, his body numb. Moving his head, formulating an image, are painful. Everything aches. Just keeping his senses alert so that nothing will escape him is an exhausting effort. He’s short of breath and his head is empty. He’s alive, that’s already something. He remembers Yankel, a survivor, who used to say to him, “When I wake up in the morning and have no aches and pains, I wonder if I’m still alive.” Shaltiel doesn’t wonder. Voices come to him from very close, amplifying his pain. Questions are burning his lips, but he knows they will be hard to answer. His mouth is swollen. What a predicament, he thinks. One day, I’ll have to write a short story about it.
“Where am I?” he stammers.
Exhaustion has caused him to forget everything.
“Far away,” says a voice.
The European accent gives him a start: Is he dreaming?
“Who are you?”
“None of your business.”
“I have a right to know.”
“We couldn’t care less about your rights.”
“Why am I here?”
“To help us.”
“But who are you?”
“You know that already: We’re freedom fighters.”
The accent is guttural; it’s the Arab.
“I can’t help you. I’m Jewish,” says Shaltiel, more in a dream than reality.