by Elie Wiesel
What did I feel? You will not understand. I felt neither anger nor hatred, neither thirst for blood nor desire for vengeance. Only sadness, heavy and all-embracing. An ancient sadness, welling up from the depths of time, tore me from the present. I was there and elsewhere, alone and not alone, more clearheaded than ever, more intoxicated than ever. My sadness was personal and collective: my memories, my gestures, the pulsing of my blood, the beating of my heart were steeped in it. Between the world and myself, between my life and myself, there was this dark mass of infinite, unspeakable, tumultuous sadness; it encompassed the first man killing the last. And I stood by, helplessly watching. Just as I stood by watching as my friend Ilya, without a word, began to slap the old man. The woman, on her knees, was wailing, clutching our trouser legs, knocking her head against the floor. Ilya went on. I watched him and was sad for him, for my vanished parents, for their son standing there. Sad for this world in its fury, sad for its Creator. Sad for the dead, sad for the survivors who would remember the dead. “Stop, Ilya,” I told my friend. “Stop, what’s the use?” He did not hear me. Perhaps I had said nothing. “Let’s go,” I said in a low voice. I took his arm and we went out into the street. Outside, Ilya stretched, took a deep breath and began cursing more and more violently, “Son-of-a-bitch bastard, son-of-a-bitch bastard.…”
Our company remained in the vicinity for three days. The population granted the liberators a warm welcome, spoiling us with their wines and their women. “If things go on this way,” Ilya said, “I’ll resign from the war and stay here in your town.”
The orders from Staff Headquarters, however, forbade excesses. Romania was no longer our enemy but our ally, and the Red Army was to take that into account. We were to show ourselves understanding, helpful, good-natured. On both sides no one asked for anything better than understanding and mutual aid.
As for me, I strolled through the streets and alleys of my memory and wondered if all this was not a dream. And what if I was delirious? I am a youngster again, I am going to school, I am studying with Ephraim, I am the disciple of Rebbe Mendel-the-Taciturn, and together we are exploring the secret paths to glory; together we are hearing the sages relate our adventures while describing their own. I never left for Germany, I never lived in France, I never set foot in Spain. The Jews have not been massacred. And you, Father, you are not traveling in a sealed train, you are not traveling days and nights without air and without hope, you are not suffocating, you are not perishing from asphyxiation as you stand riveted to members of your own family and community. No, Father. You did not die that way. You did not die. And I am not living through this nightmare; humanity has not fallen into the abyss, it has not consumed its own soul.
I visited the few synagogues that were still open and insisted on hearing ten times, a hundred times, about the murderous days of 1941: the raids, the shootings, the death trains, the complicity of the inhabitants. The Fascists had worked out a program to which the whole town had become witness. It was here, on these avenues bordered by lush trees, where people strolled, met one another, exchanged greetings, wished one another a good day and a good evening and a healthy appetite. This was the road taken by housewives to go to market while discussing prices and recipes, this was where couples were formed and lovers left one another; it was here that children ran around, played ball, laughed, and their parents scolded them, while right near them, so near them, the sealed trains and their cargoes of dead and dying were rolling, rolling in circles, going from nowhere to nowhere, coming to a stop only when the last man breathed his last breath. But how was it possible? And then I stopped asking that question.
But Ilya went on muttering, “Son-of-a-bitch bastard, son-of-a-bitch bastard.” Sometimes he accompanied me on my excursions and we looked like two soldiers in search of pleasure, excitement and feminine warmth.
I went to the cemetery, I wandered between the slightly tilting white and gray stones. I stopped here and there to read the names of a rabbi, a sage, a philanthropist. Here was the tomb of Rebbe Yaakov, the miracle worker who saved his community during the riots of the seventeenth century. “Why didn’t you intercede on behalf of my community, rebbe?” I asked him in a low voice. I reproached him: “You could have shaken the Celestial Throne, Rebbe Yaakov; and if you yourself lacked the strength you could have alerted those who have it. Why didn’t you enlist the aid of the Baal Shem Tov and his disciples, of Jeremiah and his ancestors, who are also ours? You were here, Reb Yaakov, and you were unable to protect your descendants.…” Ilya grumbled, “What are you doing talking to yourself?” “You wouldn’t understand,” I told him, thinking that a fellow like him, a young Communist and all the rest, a Communist from head to toe, did not, could not, believe in wonder-working rebbes. But Ilya surprised me once again: “Yes, Paltiel, I do understand.” It was true. He understood. He was a Jew, Ilya.
We reached the mass grave. After a long silence Ilya wanted to launch into his litany of curses, but I held him back. He understood. He touched my arm as if to say goodbye, then went off. I was left there alone. Alone with whom? With how many victims? The grave seemed narrow to me, too narrow for so huge a number of men and women. The earth is deceptive. Alive, man needs room: offices, palaces, workshops, stores; dead, he needs but his own space: a tiny crack on the earth’s surface.
Suddenly I was seized by a wild desire to open the grave, to search for my family and to bury them properly, in their own tomb. I did not. My father, on the other side of death, forbade me. He refused to be separated from his community. I thought I heard him say: Dead or alive, a Jew’s place is with his people.
The sun fell, the shadows lengthened. Night was coming, announced by a dusk heavy with terror. It was time to depart. I recalled a legend that had frightened me as a child. A man fell asleep in a cemetery and spent the night there; the following day his corpse was found; the dead had claimed him. Yes, I should have left, but I could not. Impossible to tear myself away from this place; my feet refused to budge. I prepared myself to implore the dead to free me, when a voice, vaguely familiar, addressed itself to me. “And have you said the prayer for the dead?” “No,” I said. “Why not?” “I can’t.” “You can’t, or you won’t?” “I cannot sanctify His name or glorify His ways—I cannot.” Astonished, the voice continued: “Did you come here to blaspheme?” “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know why I came.…”
The man I was speaking to was tall and slender; he held himself erect; he was strong, majestic. My heart took a leap: David Aboulesia! No, what was I thinking of? What an absurd idea. I put it out of my mind. I questioned him: “Who are you?” “I’m a gravedigger,” he said. “So am I,” I responded. “Do you belong to a holy society? Which one?” “I’m a soldier,” I said. “What are you doing here in my cemetery?” “My parents are buried here.…” The gravedigger shook his head and pronounced the ritual prayer: “The Lord has given, the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord forever.…” In the deepening dusk we were two shadows uniting to confront together the mystery of the night. “The men and women I take leave of,” the gravedigger said, “I make them my messengers. I tell them, ‘Go and present yourselves before the Heavenly Tribunal and say that Shevach-the-Gravedigger, member of the Holy Society of the Messiah Watchers, has come to the end of his patience; say that his fatigue and also his grief are very great; say that it is difficult and inhumane to live and to die waiting, it’s difficult and inhumane to carry a generation of Jews into the earth.’ ”
He described the bloody events that only a gravedigger could have experienced. It was he who had to receive the convoy of the dead, it was he who had to cleanse the mangled corpses. He was the last to cast a living, compassionate look on my father and mother, my sisters and their children.
Messiah Watcher. I thought of my friend Ephraim and his dreams of redemption. I remembered my father’s prayers for Jerusalem. Rebbe Mendel-the-Taciturn and his keys. And—inexplicably, because he belonged to another landscape, another story
—my companion David Aboulesia loomed in my mind; I heard his fantastic tales in which the adventurer leaves in quest of the Messiah the way a policeman sets out in search of a fugitive.
As he left me, Shevach-the-Gravedigger promised to take good care of my family. I thanked him. I knew he would. I also knew he would be unable to do so: I was taking my family with me; my life would become their tomb.
At the camp I met Ilya; he was not sleeping. Stretched out on his bed, he was staring into space. He had been drinking. I told him about my evening. “You can’t understand,” I said. I was wrong. He could. He understood. He was a Jew, Ilya. He knew we are all gravediggers.
In my dream
my father
asked me
if he is still
my father.
I hold his hand
and I ache.
I talk to him
and I ache.
I tell him:
call me,
hold me back,
try to understand.
I tell him
of my escapes
into the future
into the past.
I tell him
of the ashes
and the scars
on my forehead.
I tell him
to stay with me
watch over me
and never leave me.
And so I see my father
in my dream
and fail to see
myself.
Did you know
that the dead also weep?
The dead of yesterday
and before,
why do they weep?
Night loathes itself
it flees and dissolves
into dawn.
Why does night
not wish to be night?
Do you know why?
The ailing stranger
laughs and laughs;
why do I hear
him laugh so loud?
Because night
awaits him?
Because death too
awaits him?
I ask my father
to visit me
in my dreams
and give me his answers.
He listens
and makes me listen.
I know all he knew;
but,
does he know what I know?
Zusia, my Master,
Zusia, my brother,
have you changed your mind?
You said
happiness exists
and fills creation.
You said
God in His grace
prevents man
from suffering
shame
and death.
Zusia, my father,
think of your children and theirs,
your disciples and theirs,
think of them, Zusia,
and tell me then,
tell me that
suffering does not exist.
I see you, Zusia,
smiling at your brother,
the great Rabbi Elimelekh,
I hear you tell him
that everything under the sun
created by the Creator
is grace
and compassion.
Can you see the descendants
of his prophets, Zusia?
Can you see them
in the sealed cattle-cars,
in the blazing forests—
do you hear their shouts,
Zusia?
They are on fire, brother;
they are on fire, teacher,
consumed by fire
on the altar
of our people.
Please, Zusia,
be Zusia
and stop smiling—
or else do not be
Zusia.
In my dream
my father
is laughing.
Only his eyes are not.
Why is my father
laughing
in my dream?
Is it because I told him
of my discovery?
I have found a new Rabbi,
I told him,
a new sage,
a new prophet.
Advocating brotherhood
and equality
and peace among nations.
A new Rabbi preaching joy
for the poor
and the oppressed.
A prophet like Isaiah,
a dreamer like Hosea,
a consoler like the Besht.
He laughed
when I mentioned
his name.
Rabbi Karl,
our teacher Karl,
our prophet Karl Marx.
My father is laughing
and there are tears
in the silence
of my dream.
(Translated from Yiddish)
* Winter 1358
† Spring 1418
* This poem was never found.
Your mother,” says the writer, “your mother will not be coming today.”
Grisha blinks. He is so busy clearing his mind of sleep that he does not grasp the meaning of what his friend is saying.
“I woke you up, forgive me.”
His friend has trouble overcoming his uneasiness. He wipes his lips with the palm of his hand.
“They called me,” he explains. “An urgent message from Vienna. Your mother will not be on the plane.”
For an interminable and hazy moment Grisha remains paralyzed. Nothing moves him, nothing affects him. He feels nothing, weighs nothing. He is floating in a nebulous universe where the dead and the living mingle. Far from Jerusalem.
“Your mother is ill,” says the writer as though to reassure him.
Grisha moves listlessly. I am stupid, he tells himself; I do not seem to be able to speak to anyone. He opens the curtains. Dawn is withdrawing before the harsh brightness that seems to spring from below, from the domes and turrets overlooking the city.
“Would you like me to make you some coffee?”
Grisha makes an effort. He is surprised by his own sorrow. That last evening with his mother, on the eve of his departure for Israel, had been less painful. And yet, at that particular moment, he had no hope of ever seeing her again. Why would she have left Krasnograd, her habits, her comfort and her friend Mozliak? And yet she did leave them. Why? That was the first question he was going to ask her. To prepare the others. Now he knows that he will not be able to ask them.
How fortunate, Grisha is thinking, how fortunate that I spent the night at home! He had almost stayed with Katya, but around two o’clock in the morning he had felt that he should go home. As though he had been waiting for an event, a message, a disaster.
He gets dressed, he feels unhappy. She is not coming, he tells himself. I shall never see her again. I shall never know the true role she played in my father’s life, nor the role my father played in hers. He was too discreet, my father. Though not quite as discreet as his wife. All those adventures and affairs alluded to in the Testament—were they real or imagined? I shall never know that either. Never: that word tears him apart. Why was it so important for him to see her again? Because he no longer loved her or because he still loved her and more than ever before? Scenes from his childhood, images from his adolescence appear in his mind’s eye, at first in sequence, then overlapping in time.… “Did you love him, tell me? My father, did you love him?” “Of course, Grisha, of course I loved him.” “But then, why was his heart broken?” “Who told you that his heart was broken?” “I know it. I read his poems. His heart was broken.” “But, my child, all poets have broken hearts.…” Another time: “Tell me how you met.” “Oh, that was during the war; I don’t like to talk about the war.” “What was he doing?” “He was fighting, like everybody else.” “And you? What were you doing?” “I was also fighting.” “Your first meeting, tell me about your first meeting.…”
She refused. He asked again; in vain. She could not foresee that one day he would know more than she did about their first encounter. She did not know there was a Testament. He had concealed it from her on Zupanev’s advice: “I trust your mother, but as to that Dr. Mozliak, if he gets wind of our project, we’re done for. Be careful, son. You are a Jewish poet’s messenger, it is your duty to be careful.”
That was the week of his departure. Grisha had memorized the last pages, the last verses. Just as many times before, the watchman, notebooks on his knees, was reading in a low, monotonous voice and Grisha was listening, committing every sentence, every comma to his memory, disciplining his mind, motionless, his lips half open, tensed to the breaking point. He listened, he listened gravely, intensely, barely breathing. Only his eyes mirrored life; he listened with his eyes, he listened, registering every word, every nuance, every hesitation. He owed it to himself to remember it all, to store it all, to let nothing slip by. Nobody listened the way he did; no other memory was equal to his. “What luck that you are mute,” said Zupanev, scratching his bald head. “They are letting you go. They do not suspect the power of the mute. Nor did they understand my power; for them a stenographer is just barely a living object. That’s how it is, my boy, the executioners lack imagination—otherwise they wouldn’t be executioners.”
Zupanev asked him for one last favor: “Tell me how you became mute.”
Grisha made a gesture of helplessness: If I could tell, I would not be mute.
“How stupid of me,” said Zupanev.
He opened a drawer, took out a pencil and a notebook and handed them to his young friend.
“Write,” he said, “and …” He thought for a moment, then went on with a smile: “This notebook, I shall keep it together with those of your father.”