by Elie Wiesel
“What, Comrade Doctor? You’re not killing enough patients? You need more?”
I made him laugh, and he was grateful. That was my contribution to the war effort: I made people laugh. At that time, during the autumn of 1941, laughter was a precious commodity.
The newspapers never mentioned it, or only after a delay and in veiled terms, but our glorious army, caught unawares by the German offensive, was anything but glorious. I know, I was part of it. Hastily improvised, our lines of defense were hardly off the drawing board before they were broken through. Cities and fortresses opened and collapsed before enemy tanks; the defenders left their corpses there or surrendered en masse. The wounded coming in, plus the evacuation plan being studied by the staff, kept our medical personnel abreast of what was happening. After Kiev, Odessa and Kharkov, Moscow was next.
Lebedev’s mood was darkening by the hour. He knew things I did not, but he rebuffed my questions brutally. I insisted; he turned his back. One evening, in his warm quarters, a bottle of vodka in front of him, and after swearing me to secrecy, he disclosed in broad outlines the fate of the Jews in the territories occupied by the invaders. The first reports from the partisans and agents operating behind enemy lines spoke of massacres.
“I don’t understand, I don’t understand,” Lebedev kept saying, baffled.
“What don’t you understand, Comrade Colonel? The Germans hate Jews, Russians and Communists. They’ve proclaimed that loudly and clearly enough! And now that they’re putting their hands on Jews, Russians and Communists all at once, they’re killing them, that’s to be expected.…”
“Even so,” Lebedev would say, while drinking, “even so.”
“You don’t know them; I do. They’re inhuman barbarians. Capable of the worst.”
“Even so,” Lebedev, who was not listening, went on repeating.
He was hearing another voice, other inner voices.
“The people in Vitebsk, I know them. I grew up in Vitebsk. I treated patients from Vitebsk, all patients regardless of nationality or religion. Why did the good people of Vitebsk permit those murderers to kill their Jewish neighbors? Couldn’t they have protected and sheltered them? They didn’t. Forty years of Communist education … I don’t understand, I don’t understand.”
There was a big difference between the two of us: I knew Berlin, he thought he knew Vitebsk. Condemned to death by Berlin, the Jews had been sacrificed by Vitebsk.
“Even so, even so,” Lebedev kept saying. “I’ve got friends there who owe me one year, ten years of their life.”
Was his family still there, in Vitebsk? I wanted to ask, but finally preferred not to know.
Days and nights flowed by as in a bottomless memory. As our armies fell back, our base became more active. In Moscow the people were digging trenches; where we were, the orderlies were preparing field hospitals. If October was marked by anguish, November was a month of disbelief. The enemy was advancing too rapidly, in too many directions at the same time; the gods of war were smiling on him. Only a miracle could stop him, but, apart from the Jews, who believed in miracles?
But a miracle did take place. It is too well known for me to dwell on it. General Winter made one leap forward, that was all. Instead of having to treat soldiers wounded in combat, our base was dealing with victims of frostbite. We were overwhelmed, but we didn’t complain; on the contrary, we congratulated ourselves as though the sudden, inexplicable drop in temperature had been an exploit conceived and executed by our High Command.
It was strange: even though medically ill, and gravely so—so said my record—I showed no particular symptoms. Not only had my condition remained stable, but I felt at the top of my form.
Lebedev didn’t hide his astonishment: “I saw you dying, and now you’re as lively as a house painter.”
“Why a house painter, Comrade Colonel?”
“I don’t know. I think I saw one once at my place; he looked like a stevedore.”
“Why a stevedore, Comrade Colonel?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea. Because—oh, stop bothering me.”
We spent the long, dull winter evenings chatting, discussing Jews, literature and philosophy. He knew I was a poet, but I avoided the subject. The front needed fighters, fighters needed stretcher-bearers, not poets. But one night, when a strange silence, a silence from the beginning of time, held sway, I could not keep from reciting for him some poems on death and dying; they weren’t by me but by an obscure medieval poet, Don Pedro Barsalom of Córdoba and a friend of the Jews of Castile.
All those dying men
voiceless and voracious
haunt the angel’s memory
And curse him …
“You read well,” Lebedev remarked, stretching out on his cot. “Continue.”
I began the second quatrain:
You, death who extinguishes
the fire that shines,
do not extinguish the sun
that illuminates you …
That night Lebedev neglected his bottle; he listened, with closed eyes. He waited for the rest of the poem, but I had forgotten it.
“Go on,” said Lebedev.
I searched my memory—I appealed to my Sephardic friend, David Aboulesia, who had helped me discover the Castilian poet. In vain. Fatigue, tension, the obsession of the here and now weighed on my mind; I lived between two communiqués, between two exhortations from the political commissars.
“Well?” said Lebedev impatiently. “You’re asleep?”
As a last resort, I improvised, without telling him, of course. Later, when I confessed the truth, he burst out laughing. “Which is worse? Claiming someone else’s poems or passing off your own as his?”
I answered that poets give and take with an open hand: the more they take the more they give. Because poetry …
“You’re not going to give me a lecture on writing poetry! Are you crazy?” he shot at me, sitting up on his cot.
“Excuse me. I let myself be carried away. I won’t do it again.”
“Look at him scowling. Did I insult you?”
I did not reply.
“Yes, I’ve hurt you. I’m sorry—I didn’t know you were so sensitive.”
“It’s just that …”
I mumbled. I couldn’t finish the sentence.
“All right, all right, let it pass,” said Lebedev. “You’re a funny stretcher-bearer.”
“No doubt I’m also a funny poet, Comrade Colonel.”
I have forgotten the childish verses I had invented for him in order to complete Don Pedro Barsalom’s poem, as I have forgotten all the other poems. The winter had shrouded my voice. I watched Lebedev amputating arms and legs, I leaned over the dying, sniffing the stench of their sores, and I had nothing to say to those who would survive me. I witnessed the end of so many lives that death killed the words within me. I listened to the wind from distant steppes that rasped and bayed like a thousand beasts at the door of the slaughterhouse; it veiled my voice.
“Drink,” Lebedev would say to me. “The state you’re in …”
I was feeling bad, worse and worse. One day, overcome by dizziness, I let myself fall down on the snow to rest. Needles were pricking my chest.
“It’s nothing,” I said to Lebedev. “I have some pain in my heart, it’s normal. Don’t you have a pain in your heart, Comrade Colonel?”
“Drink,” he said. “The state you’re in …”
Two orderlies carried me to the hospital barracks. In my delirium I saw myself divided in two—I was my own stretcher-bearer. I heard one voice, ten voices, asking me whether it hurt here or there, but what difference did it make, since I was delirious, delirious while thinking that now at last I had the right to be delirious.
As in a fairy tale, I was tended by nurses I thought beautiful, gentle and delicate. I depended on them for food, drink and everything else. Like a child, I let them care for me. I took their precise, businesslike gestures for caresses. Watching them was enough to make me w
ant to rise up and follow them—and live. I fell in love with one and then with all of them together. I loved Natasha because she was robust, Paula because she was frail, Tina because she was red-haired and Galina because she reminded me of a gypsy girl from Liyanov. I loved them because I was weak and helpless, and needed to love. But I had numerous rivals. All the men in the ward, including the dying, breathed more rapidly when they heard them coming with a syringe or a bowl of broth. I soon forgot those radiant and enchanting nurses. Hardly had I been discharged when I stopped thinking about the hospital. What happened was that another woman had, as they say, conquered my heart. Her name was Raissa. As lieutenant in the Political Bureau of the division, she threw me into a panic every time she came to see Lebedev; she blew in like a whirlwind, charging straight toward the colonel and looking over the lists of patients. Seated on a corner of the table, she dominated officers of superior rank to her own. As for myself, a simple private, she did not even deign to accord me a regulation salute. Why was I taken with her? You’ll laugh again—I liked her uniform, her stripes, her authority.
Bundled up in a heavy overcoat, and a fur hat that hid her blond hair and half her face, she would remove both with an impatient gesture. All the while she went on cursing the glacial winter that refused to release its grip, those German bastards who could not remain quietly at home, those shirkers who invented illnesses and chilblains. Today, she promised, we would see what we would see. She expressed herself like a peasant, cursed like ten and drank like twenty. And I, who still blushed at the slightest vulgarity, I liked all that. Lebedev also, as he confessed to me. Being discreet and cautious, I remained guarded; I was not about to make myself look ridiculous.
“That broad,” Lebedev grumbled, “she drives men crazy, she’d turn the head of the devil himself if she met him.”
I was convinced that he was sleeping with her, that all the officers slept with her—the upper ranks for periods of some duration, the lower ranks for briefer periods. And we privates were to be pitied because of our inability to commandeer anyone, not even a third-class soldier, since there was none.
Completely liberated and shameless, she subjected everyone to her whims. I imagined her in bed, in her nightdress, giving orders to her lovers: “Make love to me unless you want to wake up in prison or in Siberia.” I would have gone to Siberia with her, or, at least, because of her. Instead, Siberia had moved into our midst. We shivered, we were buried in snow; our tears and our spit turned into icicles. We might as well have been in Vladivostok.
With the thaw, the division received orders to move up toward the front. Submerged in work, I no longer languished for Raissa. Our unit followed close behind the combat soldiers. The enemy was going to launch an offensive, but we did not know on which front. Defenses and counterattacks were being prepared all around. We studied maps, scrutinized the clouds, cleaned rifles, greased machine guns; we counted the hours, the minutes. Then, one night, the sky and the ground were split. From all sides cannons started belching fire. And there were no longer dawns or dusks—war was all there was. Sallies and retreats, positions abandoned and reclaimed, villages crossed and recrossed without knowing whether we were attacking or falling back. I was plunged into a hallucinatory universe of the wounded who no longer had even the strength to groan, of mangled corpses, scattered limbs, dazed faces. In sunshine and rain, with shells flying across streams and through woods, in full attack and during lulls, I advanced with my fellow stretcher-bearers close behind the first wave, bringing back soldiers shouting for help after having shouted “For the fatherland, for Stalin.” Their cries followed me into my sleep: I would wake up with a start, thinking I’d heard the cry of a wounded man whose arms were stretched toward me—toward me alone.
Surrounded by the dead, enveloped by death, I performed my duty with a feeling of inexplicable satisfaction and pride: I was no hero, yet I was exposing myself to dangers as if I had come into the world only to brave them.
Beyond the explosions of grenades and the crackling of machine guns, I heard the death rattles of my mutilated comrades; I made every effort to find them in the shell holes and beneath the smoking ruins. Little by little I learned to distinguish between the critically wounded and those not in desperate need of immediate attention: without even seeing them I could make a diagnosis. Bent over, making myself very small, I ran through the trenches among the bodies, through the puddles of blood, to seize the highest-ranking officer, then the worst-hit soldier. I ran and ran: whenever I think of the war I always see myself running and out of breath, one moment bent over a slaughtered fighter, and already on to the next one, still alive but badly wounded in the eyes, the chest, or the shoulders. In a panting but friendly voice, I would tell him the usual lies: “Don’t worry, leave it to me, just hang on, comrade. Your troubles are over, two steps from here our doctors are waiting for you, they’re terrific, you’ll see; come, my friend, here we are; you’re lucky, you’re only wounded; and I know all about wounds; yours is just a scratch, you’ll be fine.…” And the wounded man, if still conscious, clung to me with all his strength; others, half-dead, whispered broken, final incoherent words addressed to their mother, their grandmother, or the holy mother of God. And I encouraged them, I incited them all to talk, to shout, to say anything at all—as long as they were shouting they were living, and their life mattered to me as much as my own, if not more. I ran through fire and came running back to talk to the wounded and make them talk. Some of them cursed, others complained. Some whimpered and moaned like old men, their teeth chattering. Bullets whistled above us, incendiary bombs hit the sky with a barrage of yellow and red flames; men flung themselves into hand-to-hand combat yelling “Hurrah, hurrah for the fatherland!” “Hurrah for Stalin, hurrah!” And they collapsed, mowed down in the middle of their course. “Here, here—help!” Of all the words invented by God and man, only those still had some meaning. The other stretcher-bearers and I leaped toward our brothers whipped by the fire, to wrest them from the enemy and extricate them from death. Carrying them to the rear, I felt victorious; in saving one unknown comrade, I was forcing death to retreat if only to return an hour later.
I thanked God for having given me a bad heart. Had I been in good health I would have been thrown into a combat unit, I would have killed, I would have been killed; I would have helped to enlarge the kingdom of death; as stretcher-bearer I was reducing it.
Between two operations, Colonel Dr. Lebedev—morose, exhausted, his pupils dilated—reprimanded me:
“You’re going again? Do you think you’re immortal?”
“As a poet, Comrade Colonel, only as a poet,” I shouted, turning my back on him.
“You’re crazy. And dangerous. You think death respects poets?”
I set down my wounded and returned to the firing line, while Lebedev went back to his operating table. We were both crazy. Nothing stopped us. One day, however …
It was near Smolensk, during a particularly brutal battle that cost us a fourth of our combat troops. A German soldier wounded in the throat seized me by my boots and begged me in German to finish him off. I tried to free myself, but he hung on. I bent over him: he was unshaven, wild-eyed, contorted with pain. Coming closer, I saw that he was also wounded in the stomach. His eyes unbelievably white, his lips unbelievably swollen, he uttered phrases interrupted by gasps: “Kill me, comrade, take pity on me, finish me off.…” And I, after a moment of hesitation and disgust, answered in my poor German, “No, not possible, not allowed, not right.” He repeated the same words sobbing, “Pity, comrade … finished, comrade.…” And, in the midst of shellings and screams for help and the officers’ enraged orders, I tried to reassure him: “You live, have patience; I come back get you; first I take care my people.…” And, like an idiot, I kept my word. I left the German lying in his own blood and carried behind the lines a mustached sergeant who was rubbing his eyes and screaming that they were scorched. He was really heavy, that sergeant, he weighed a ton; I don’t know how I managed, b
ut I brought him back. I pushed, pulled, dragged, carried him to the emergency station, all the while telling him what he wanted to hear: his eyes were all right, he would see his wife and children and his native Kirghiz again.… Then I went back for the German; I dragged him and laid him out among the wounded the orderlies were bringing into the barracks, where Lebedev and his assistants, impassively, were examining, probing, cutting.
Suddenly I heard a voice that sounded familiar, though from an uncertain past: “Tell me, soldier, what do you intend doing with that one?”
I raised my eyes and met Raissa’s cold, hard gaze. She did not recognize me.
“Well, soldier? Answer me!” she hissed. “What the devil is he doing here?”
“He’s wounded in the neck and stomach.”
“Let him croak.”
“He’s in pain,” I said looking away.
“Our doctors are swamped and you want them to take care of these mad dogs?”
Meanwhile the wounded man had opened his eyes and was watching us; he didn’t understand our words but guessed their meaning, because he started groaning again: “Kill me, finish me off!”
“Throw him out,” the lieutenant ordered.
And, like an idiot, I argued. Ten steps away men were falling by the hundreds, and thousands, and here I was trying to keep an enemy alive. Luckily the German did me a favor; he had the good grace to die of his own accord a few moments later. Raissa threw me a disgusted look and left. And I wondered, Was there once a time when I found her human, when I desired her?
Lebedev, informed of this episode by the lieutenant, agreed with her. “War’s war, my little Jewish poet. Emotions are good for love, and love is good for your poems; and your poems—you know what you can do with them, and if you don’t, I can tell you, and you won’t like that. Pity, my boy, is reserved for our brothers; care, for our fighters. As for the Germans, let them croak; let them stay in their beer halls!”