by Elie Wiesel
Salud, David Aboulesia. Salud, Don Itzhak Abravanel. Salud, Bercu. Salud, Sanchez. Paltiel is going his way. He leaves you a poem about Cain and Abel* and their messianic aspirations.
I left Barcelona crying tears of rage.
Shall I ever forget the volunteers’ shameful return to France? Nobody came to welcome us. No flowers, no speeches; no fanfares, no words of praise for the soldiers of international solidarity. After the border guards, the policemen and the customs officers, only the representatives of the various offices of the Préfecture were waiting for us, ready to plunge us back into the bureaucratic reality of the Third Republic: papers, visas, permits, rubber stamps. We were not on their side and they treated us accordingly.
“Since you love it so, your Spain, why didn’t you just stay there?” grumbled a gruff official.
“They’ll make nothing but trouble,” added his colleague. “That’s how they are: they come to a country, make trouble, then they’re off to the next to make more trouble.”
The troublemakers, that was us: some fifty volunteers of the second and third convoys. There was still isolated fighting in free and unhappy Spain, but our Brigades were already dismantled. On Moscow’s orders? That’s what our people were saying and I believed it. Nothing was done or undone without an order from above; and “above” was Moscow, where a pragmatic policy of Salud, España was emerging.
The French went home and the Spaniards were packed into dilapidated and macabre internment camps. As for me—still thanks to my precious Romanian passport—I was free to return to Paris.
On the train I was accosted by a stranger who introduced himself as Monsieur Louis. He had been directed by “certain friends” to take care of us, of me. He did not inspire confidence—he really had too much of a “clandestine” look—but I managed not to show him how I felt. After an hour or so, he became talkative:
“We see everything, we know everything. We have our people even inside the police; that fellow who examined your papers, do you think he would have let you pass like that, without difficulty, if he were not one of ours?”
The idiot. And what if I were an informer? I indicated to him that I was exhausted and wanted to sleep. I closed my eyes so as not to see anything, not to hear anything. Not to ask anything, not to refuse anything. The train was whistling, puffing, stopping, moving again; I was dozing, daydreaming. A prisoner of romantic Spain, I fled from it only to return. In love with desperate Spain, I carried it away with me like a handful of sand in my palm or ashes on my forehead.
Two years. Paris had not changed. There are cities that become estranged from themselves in one night. Not Paris. A matter of pride: at her age it becomes crucial not to change.
People were getting ready to leave on their vacations: the sea, the sun. This was the season of the newly won paid vacations. There was talk of war, but not too much: the wisdom of government and the strength of armies would surely prevail over the wiles of dictators.
Said the optimists: Why would Hitler declare war on France since in any case the French let him have his way? It is by not having a war that he will win it. The pessimists made similar utterances but with a slight variation: Why would Hitler rush into a war he has already won? As for the realists, who was listening?
From time to time, there was an outburst of anxiety, of malaise, but it didn’t last. The theaters were sold out, there were lines in front of the movie houses, the street vendors hawked their junk. Elegant avenues, lively streets, inviting store windows, successful novels, fashionable gowns. The grumblers grumbled, the politicians made speeches, the military paraded. The right threatened, the left countered, the women laughed. As for the poor stateless wretches, they were trembling, dreaming of peaceful dawns, of a visa to some inaccessible paradise. The Spanish war had transformed neither morals nor ideas. The Popular Front was already history. The reactionary right barely concealed its triumph: the future would carry it to power.
Nor had Sheina changed—except that she no longer loved me. She had a new tenant, a painter who expressed himself like a poet, and that made him sufficiently attractive to give him shelter and protection and, as she put it, inspiration.
I wasn’t angry with her, I wasn’t angry with anyone. The war and the “homecoming” had drained me of my wrath. I observed others dispassionately, I watched myself as I would a stranger. I belonged to nobody.
“You don’t mind?” exclaimed Sheina.
“Why should I? We are adults and free. We owe each other nothing, we promised each other nothing.”
Sitting on the terrace of a café not far from her apartment, we talked of everything and nothing. I had telephoned her to tell her of my arrival; she had seemed embarrassed. I smiled to myself: She was in the middle of making love. I knew her well enough to guess that.
“What? Who? Oh, it’s you? You’re here? Really?”
“I’ll call you back—later,” I said, hanging up.
I kept my word and called her back an hour later.
“Sorry about before,” I said.
She laughed. “You’re silly—but your intuitions aren’t bad.…”
I wasn’t in the mood for banter; I went straight to the point. “Any mail for me?”
“Yes. From your father. Want to come by?”
I preferred to meet her at the café. We made an appointment for the next day. I found her a little thinner but just as ebullient. She kissed me on both cheeks, complained about the heat and the rain, the world situation and the Party, which refused to understand that she could not accommodate more than one tenant.
I reassured her: “Don’t worry about me, Sheina. I have found a place to stay.”
“Really?” she cried, relieved.
“Really.”
It wasn’t true, but she was grateful. She seized my hand and squeezed it. My other hand held my father’s letters.
“Tell me,” she said. “You must tell me everything.”
“There’s nothing to tell, Sheina.”
“Nothing? You come back from Spain, you come back from the war and you have nothing to tell?”
“That’s it, Sheina. I’ve come back from the war, I’ve come back from Spain and I have nothing to tell.”
She found it necessary to caress my hand. “Still, my little poet, you can’t be serious? You’ve been in battle, you’ve seen comrades fall, you’ve done things, things. You must tell me what it was like. Unless you’ve written some poems. Would you rather read those to me?”
I endured her assault calmly. “We’ll talk about it another time.”
“Why not now? Because … I live with someone? Is that it? You want to know who it is?”
“Yes,” I lied again. “I do.”
She began to describe the young painter: so gifted, so sweet, so wild.… The parting was friendly: we would stay in touch. Promise? Promise. Of course.
I saw her again on several occasions, by chance, at meetings of the Party’s cultural sections. Once I thought I recognized her current lover: a friend introduced me to a painter of Romanian origin, recently escaped from a notorious fortress in the Cluj region. But it wasn’t he.
I was lonely. I had lost track of all my former friends and the colleagues around Paul Hamburger. He had disappeared. I tried to find him; I followed clues, questioned mutual friends. Everywhere I was given to understand that I was treading on thin ice: new tasks had been assigned to Paul Hamburger and it was better not to ask questions. A clandestine mission into Nazi Germany? Or perhaps to the Orient? A finger indicating sealed lips, a look heavy with implications. I believed it, but not quite. I remembered my last evening with Paul; his forebodings, his advice. I also remembered my last conversation with Yasha, in Barcelona. I hoped. What else was there to do? I hoped against all hope that my friend Paul Hamburger was somewhere on a mission, therefore free, therefore alive.
I discovered the truth later, much later: Paul had been arrested as he stepped off the plane in Moscow. He had been thrown into the cellars of the Lubiank
a, tortured and killed. The same fate had been reserved for all his companions, all those I had tried in vain to contact in Paris.
Now that I think of it—if I had not left for Spain, if I had followed my friends, I would have undergone your interrogations earlier, Citizen Magistrate; I would have spared you sleepless nights and my wife a great deal of worry, and my son a life without future. Or perhaps one of your “services” would have liquidated me immediately?
Strange, one day as I was questioning her about Paul, Sheina almost predicted what is happening to me today.
“You knew him, Sheina. You were friends. You meet important people. Do you know something?”
We were having our usual black coffee, at the same café; Sheina was scrutinizing me, a look of concern on her face.
“I am worried about you,” she said.
“Why? Because I refuse to abandon Paul? What can I do? He’s my friend. He has been important in my life. If he’s in trouble, I want to know. To help. That’s normal, isn’t it? I am afraid for him. I have a premonition … and it is terrible.”
Sheina, her mouth open, trembling, leaned toward me; her gaze was clouded. “Me too,” she whispered.
I jumped. “You too? You’re worried about him?”
“No,” she said, barely audible. “About you.”
She paused, straightened up. “Do you want me to go on?”
“Yes.”
“I feel—I see—a man—you, in the dark. Alone. Prostrate.”
“You’re describing a prison. Or a grave. Or both?”
Fear was distorting her features. She shook herself.
“It’s all nonsense, you know that. I say whatever comes into my mind—but be careful. Paul … went back to Russia. Don’t think about him.”
And yet, when I had to make my final choice—call it attraction to danger or absurd fatalism—I decided to settle in Soviet Russia. In spite of or because of what I had experienced in Spain? Because of the political situation in Europe? Was the Communist in me losing his patience? Let us say that there was nothing and nobody to keep me in Paris. Of course, I could have gone back to Liyanov—where my father, by bribing a few officials, could have “arranged” my military record as he had done earlier at the passport office—and could have lived there reunited with my family. That was what my father advised and my mother requested. The Jew in me wanted to follow their call, to kiss their hands, to rediscover his childhood. But the Communist prevailed. Moscow represented the future, Liyanov the past. Paul and Yasha, Inge and Traub urged me to seek adventure and the unknown; my parents chained me to a structure whose foundations were too solid for my taste. And yet, had Ahuva-Tziona, my companion of a single afternoon in the Holy Land, been alive and at my side, I believe I could have rebuilt my life with her in Palestine.
Chance: what an incredible genius for organization. Is it really as blind as people claim? History surely is not, as my friend Bernard Hauptmann would have said; it knows where it is going and where it is leading us. As for me, I didn’t know. I no longer knew. And yet.
Early 1939. A comrade, more lucid than the others, advises me to clear out. Munich is nothing but a farce. Hitler has fooled us all. No more doubt about that. Prague despises her French protectors, Warsaw still believes in them. Hitler swears that his thirst for conquest is quenched. People, less and less credulous, fearfully await his next blow: where and when will he strike? I watch them anxiously poring over their newspapers on buses and in the metro. In the cafés, the waiters’ banter is filled with black humor, their customers’ responses betray their anxiety. Place de la République, on the Grands Boulevards, in the Quartier St. Paul, in the courtyard of the Préfecture, wherever stateless emigrants and refugees congregate, I run into their questions, their uncertainties. What will tomorrow be like? Their anxiety weighs on me, their sorrow troubles me. They look at me enviously: I have a passport, I enjoy certain rights. I am not an intruder. If I feel like leaving suddenly, I can jump into the first train and that’s it, I am gone. I can go wherever I wish. It makes me feel ill at ease and guilty. I don’t like myself.
A depressing, sterile spell. I write nothing; I do nothing. I miss Paul. I miss Spain. I miss something. My life unfolds in slow motion. In my tiny hotel room on the Rue de Rivoli I sometimes stay for hours staring at the grimy walls, the sooty windows, motionless, without the slightest thought. I speak to nobody and nobody speaks to me; I no longer open my door to the maid; she thinks that I am ill and perhaps I am.
Ever since my return from Spain, that is how I have been; my heart is heavy with foreboding. I don’t recognize myself. It’s not that I feel defeated—military defeat is, after all, something I could accept—but I feel different. My true self is leaving me, vanishing into the distance under a bleak sky, and I remain riveted to the ground, unable to run after it, or even to shout, asking it to come back, to wait for me. I can do nothing, say nothing. I let myself sink. I sink.
I meet colleagues from the newspaper who evidently know of my troubles from Sheina. I listen to them absentmindedly; they don’t even succeed in exasperating me with their advice: One must look at things as they are, they say, overcome one’s difficulties, and, once and for all, pull oneself out of this despondency that risks …
Pinsker has asked me to come and visit him. I do not go. He has written me a most amiable letter, insisting on my gifts as a writer, as a poet, on my duties to my readers. I do not answer. I have not opened his paper, nor that of his Zionist competitor, for weeks. What could they possibly announce that I don’t already know? That the storm is near? That the Christians of Europe still have not learned to treat the Jews as equals, if not as brothers? The two editors argue with one another, insult one another as in the past. The commentators comment, the poets versify, the polemicists flounder. How futile it all is.
Finally Pinsker takes the trouble to come and see for himself.
“Why are you living as a hermit? Is that your idea of Marxism? Of a poet’s role in society? My dear fellow, solitude is for the shopkeepers.”
“I am tired,” I tell him. “Nothing serious. Just overwork.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure.”
“Come with me. Keep busy. It will do you good.”
“Not now; I don’t have the strength.”
Then it’s Sheina’s turn; she appears, sits down on my bed, her breasts and mouth more inviting than ever, and asks me gently, tenderly about my writings, my “works” as she calls them. She begs me to read her a sonnet, a few verses, anything, in the name of our old friendship, in the name of … I refuse. I have other things on my mind, I tell her. She insists and I turn her down gently. In the end, she confesses: the Party needs me, or rather my by-line. Which explains my dear comrades’ interest in my well-being.
It seems that the Pariser Haint has published an open letter to the Jewish poet Paltiel Kossover. Why is he silent? Is he still alive? If so, is he still free? There are disquieting rumors making the rounds about him: must he be counted among the victims of the recent purges? Or—and that is our heartfelt wish—is he among the repentants?
“The Party would like you to respond,” says Sheina. “Tell those dirty bourgeois what you think of their infamous intrigues; tell them that you have not broken with the working class, that you believe in the Revolution, and in the homeland of the Revolution.”
Sheina expresses herself well except when it comes to politics; then she is less than eloquent. In the old days, her exhortations would have made me laugh; now she leaves me indifferent. Let the bourgeois, the Zionists, the capitalists think what they will, let them do whatever they wish, let them write whatever appeals to them—but let them leave me in peace. Sheina, I am tired, make them understand that. I am too tired to participate in their games. Revolution and counterrevolution, Trotsky and Stalin, Bukharin and Radek, Pinsker and Schweber move about as on a screen. Their problems: I refuse to watch. I no longer move. I no longer think. My mind wishes to rest. Do you understand that, Shein
a? Words no longer obey me; they remain inanimate like so many anonymous corpses. Only the Messiah can raise the dead, and I am not the Messiah.
Carried away, her shadowy mouth half open as in the good old days, Sheina is purring. She whispers, Oh, how beautiful, how virile; you must write it down.
Does she suddenly want to resume an old love? I don’t ask. I don’t care. If only she would go away, if only she would clear out. If only they would all go away. And stop bothering me. I wish to live outside life.
But that is not as simple as it seems, Citizen Magistrate. Life catches you and does not let you go. You flee from man and he pursues you; you run after him and he tries to elude you.
Confined within your four walls, you believe that events on the outside no longer concern you, yet there remains a link between you and the world—and it is permanent—a strange and oddly tragic link: it always depends on someone and that someone is never you. Two chiefs of state seal a pact and it is me that a police inspector hauls out of bed for an “identity check”; I hand him my carte de séjour, my duly stamped passport and wait for him to give them back. In a neutral, noncommittal voice he orders me to get dressed and follow him. My documents remain in his possession. I should be worrying, protesting, asking questions, but I remain impassive, neutral, like him. What can he do to me? My papers are in order, I can prove it. Admitted legally into France, I lead a legitimate life, I am not a burden to the economy, I cost France nothing since I live on the monthly money orders sent by my father.
I finish dressing. We go downstairs. A black automobile is parked near the entrance. Five minutes later I am in a noisy waiting room packed with people and tension. I ask, I get an answer: the police have rounded up all foreign Communist agents. Why? Nobody wants to believe that I don’t know. What? You don’t know that Russia and Germany have signed a pact—the pact—of the century? Molotov and Ribbentrop. You haven’t seen the papers? I say, Impossible. Lies. Propaganda. Russia would never do that. Never, never. They show me the headlines of Paris-Soir, of Petit Parisien. I repeat only one word: Never. They show me the article, in smaller print, of the Party newspaper. They say, Read! I read. I reread. A comrade standing near me says: Political, strategic, diplomatic reasons, what do I know? We mustn’t jump to conclusions. Now there is another word on my lips: Unbelievable, unbelievable. And I begin once again to think, to react. Thus it has taken an event of historic impact to wrench me from my torpor. I amble back and forth between the benches looking for familiar faces and more information.