by Elie Wiesel
I was wrong, of course. Raissa did come back as promised. She wanted to hear my poems.
And here I am, a victim of my poetry.
Lublin suffered less than many other large cities. There was little debris in the streets. Life was almost normal. The churches were filled, the restaurants crowded. Polish and Russian soldiers fraternized. Under the trees, boys and girls rediscovered love.
Still weak, I walk with difficulty. I lean on Raissa, my right arm on her shoulder. Whenever I make an abrupt movement, I inadvertently touch her breast, and the blood rushes to my head. I often stop to rest. “Let’s stop at this bench,” I say. She helps me sit down. “Well?” she says. “What about your poems?” “You really want to hear them?” “Read them. I’ll tell you after.” “But you won’t understand.” “Don’t be insolent, soldier.” “I meant—you won’t understand them because I don’t write in Russian but in Yiddish.” “So what?” she says without blinking. “I understand Yiddish.” Oh, yes, she had learned it in her childhood; her grandparents had spoken Yiddish to her. “Where are they?” I ask. Her eyes darken. “They were killed.” “When?” “I don’t know.” “Where?” “In Vitebsk.” And suddenly I no longer see the whiteness of the sky, nor the foliage of the trees, nor the human torrent flowing toward the center of Lublin. I take a few sheets out of my pocket and begin reading aloud. She interrupts me impatiently: “How depressing, that’s enough, haven’t you anything more cheerful?” I shake my head. I am annoyed with myself for having given in to her. She is too cold, too indifferent to understand my poetry. I fold my poems and put them back into my pocket. “Poets are supposed to sing of love or the fatherland, or both,” Raissa says spitefully. “Why can’t you do that?” Of all things, she is the one who’s offended, cheated! Her cold eyes seem hateful to me. She gets up abruptly. “Let’s go back.” “I was going to suggest that. The walk’s exhausted me.” I don’t want to feel the warmth and strength emanating from her body, so I try to walk by myself. She leaves me at the door and goes off without a word. I drag myself to my bed; I collapse with a single thought in my mind before falling asleep: As a poet, I have no luck; and as for women, I’m not doing so well either.
Raissa shows up again that same afternoon. She shakes me: “Wake up!” I rub my eyes; she seems even angrier than in the morning. She hisses at me through tight lips and I think: A blond serpent. I say: “I’m tired, I walked too much.” “Come on.” I get up and follow her, I climb into her car. We drive along for ten minutes or so, not more, and Majdanek, surrounded by barbed wire and elevated searchlights, rises up before us in all its serenity and icy horror. “Since you’re fascinated by the morbid,” says Raissa, “go ahead: take a look, fill your eyes.” I get out of the car, sure she will follow me, but she surprises me once more. She issues a terse command and her driver takes off. A moment later, the car is far away, leaving behind a cloud of white and gray dust resembling human ashes.
I made my way into Majdanek—and I shall not tell you, Citizen Magistrate, what I felt; that would be almost indecent. Let me say only this: I forgot my fatigue, my ailments, my disappointments, my illusions, I forgot everything; I walked and walked for hours and hours, until nightfall. I went into all the barracks, all the cells; I touched and caressed the stones, embraced the doors behind which an entire people, my own, had disappeared in a cloud of fire. No, I shall not tell the story of Majdanek; others have done it before me; let the words of the survivors live and resound; I have no wish to cover them with mine. But let me say one more thing: I felt the desire to rest there. Forever. I felt the desire to remain with the invisible dead and beat my head, as they had done, against the walls, the ceiling, to gulp the air that was escaping, to bury myself in madness, whispering and crying, cursing and praying, and repeating to myself: None of this is true, they are not dead and I am not alive.… Never have I wanted so much to enter into madness and death as I did that evening at Majdanek.
Huddled in a barracks off to one side, I let the shadows envelop me. I listened to the moaning, the screams of terror carried by the night fog; I saw the children pressed against their mothers, I caught their silences touched by eternity, by a dead, sullied eternity. And I vowed never to leave them.
I was alone—never have I been more alone. And yet, there was a voice comforting me: “Don’t stay here, go back to the living.” And, a moment later: “Raissa is right, you’re attracted to the macabre.” Then, after another silence: “Raissa is young and beautiful, you like her, what more do you want? Go after her, love her.” “Don’t ask for the impossible,” I said. “This is not the time or the place.” “You’re wrong, it is here and now that you can and must overcome the call of the abyss, for the abyss is deeper and blacker here than elsewhere.”
I recognized the voice. I wanted to submit, to accept it, but I couldn’t. I had just glimpsed the truth of truths, I had just perceived man in his final convulsions; it was impossible for me to look away; I had to follow him beyond the camp and the present, into the heavens, all the way to the Celestial Throne, and there the taciturn gravedigger was addressing God in a whisper: “As a child I was a believer, because I was told that it was impossible to give You a name and equally impossible to deny You or defame You in words. Only now I know! You are a gravedigger, God of my ancestors. You carry Your chosen people into the ground, just as I carried the soldiers fallen on the battlefields. Your people no longer exist. You have buried them; others killed them, but it is You who have put them into their invisible, unknown tomb. Tell me, did You at least recite the Kaddish? Did You weep for their death?”
My words met a stony silence. God chose not to respond. But the hoarse voice of a former companion echoed within me: “You exaggerate, my friend; you go too far. God is resurrection, not gravedigger; God keeps alive the bond that links Him and you to your people; is that not enough for you? I am alive, you are alive; is that not enough for you?” “No, that is not enough for me!” “What do you want? Tell me what you want.” “Redemption,” I said. And I hastened to add, “In this place I have the right to demand and receive everything; and what I demand is redemption.” “So do I,” said my companion sadly. “So do I. And so does He.”
Feverish, delirious, carried by angels in the service of death, I returned to the hospital. I took out my notebook. And in a dream I wrote to my father what I had seen.
Repatriated, demobilized, I went back to my job as proofreader at the foreign section in the State Publishing House. The days were gray and sad, the nights long and lonely. Nothing interested me, my life disgusted me even though it may have seemed enviable to others. As a wounded war veteran decorated with the Medal of the Red Flag, I enjoyed a variety of useful privileges: no standing in line for the streetcar, free entry to cinemas and the zoo, priority for certain foods. I had returned to the same small room in the home of my former landlady. A volume of my verse was about to appear in Moscow: Markish and Der Nister had read and warmly recommended it. Visits to the Jewish Writers’ Club improved my morale, and I managed to multiply them. I attended meetings and lectures organized by the Anti-Fascist Committee in honor of Jewish intellectuals—Communists or sympathizers—from Europe or the United States. I heard novelists and poets who had been invited to present their work in progress. I liked going to see Mikhoels and his theater company perform The Revolt of Bar Kochba. In short, I was doing my best to return to normal by convincing myself that the killer had not won the game, that the gravedigger in me could leave the cemetery, that the Jewish people was still living, even if my own family was gone. But to recover my balance, if not my enthusiasm, I needed something or someone—I needed Raissa’s presence. That was precisely what I needed.
One September morning, on my way to the office, I stopped in front of a shop window near the National Hotel. I planned to buy myself a winter overcoat. I hesitated. I am the perfect customer: sales clerks can sell me anything, I never protest, I never bargain, I take it and pay for it, knowing all the while I shall never wear it.
/> I had just decided not to go in when I saw, inside, a woman ordering salesgirls around. Amazed, I pushed open the door. “Yes, comrade?” asked a plump young woman. I took off my army cap and went over to Raissa. “What, it’s you?” she cried, and shook my hand warmly. “What’s happening to you, my macabre poet?” Ignoring employees and customers who looked at us askance, we went into a back office to be able to talk more freely. Raissa had changed. Without her uniform she seemed even more feminine, more sensual. Her blond hair done up in a bun, her eyes hard and glittering, she had that “special something,” as they say. She stood out in a crowd, no question about that. We made an appointment to meet after the store closed. Dinner at the Writers’ Club, and then to the theater to see Mikhoels as King Lear. “If it’s sad, we’ll leave,” I promised her.
Warmed-over loves and soups are generally not recommended. No doubt rightly so. Only I catch fire quickly. That’s how I am, I can’t do anything about it. It’s enough for a woman to lean toward me to start my blood racing. When a stranger smiles at me, I blush like a schoolboy and instantly endow her with every virtue. So aware am I of my shortcomings that I am grateful to the woman who is not discouraged by them; to thank her I would offer her the moon. Oh, I know it is just one complex among others I have been carrying around since Liyanov and Krasnograd: I am just a Talmudic student who refuses to liberate himself. As for Raissa, after our third meeting I was ready to propose marriage. And I did. She did not seem surprised. “Are you sure you love me?” “I’m sure, Raissa: a poet is sure of at least one thing—of his loves. And you? Do you love me a little?” Her answer was bizarre: “If only my poor parents could see me …” “Your parents?” Her eyes were veiled. She looked at me without seeing me: “Paltiel Kossover, Jewish poet,” she said. “When you don’t depress me you amuse me.” To prove that she was not indifferent to me, she went with me three times in a row to the Jewish theater, where that particular week they were performing a verbose but patriotic abomination. She begged me to read and reread my poems to her and offered intelligent comments on them while mocking my moroseness. She predicted a greater future for me as poet than as husband. Flattered, euphoric, I lived only for Raissa. As for her, though she had never said she loved me, she had accepted my proposal. We filled out a mass of forms and went to the marriage bureau with Mendelevich and his wife as witnesses. An official puffed out his chest and pronounced us man and wife. The ceremony had not lasted five minutes. “If my poor parents could see me,” Raissa murmured. I was thinking of my own parents, but said nothing.
Mendelevich invited us to a restaurant. Raissa was smiling, though there was mockery in her smile. I found it difficult to overcome my melancholy. I thought of those who were absent: my father, my mother, my sisters, my uncles, my teachers, my friends. I thought of Liyanov; had the wedding taken place there … I imagined the ceremony, the blue-and-purple satin canopy, the candles, the rabbi, the fiddlers, the speech I would have made. Here, the celebration consisted of a meal at a restaurant frequented mostly by artists; the dinner was copious, washed down with vodka and—for the special occasion—Crimean champagne. Mendelevich entertained us with his theater stories; Raissa applauded.
I was silently remembering our old traditions: an orphaned groom is supposed to go to the cemetery to invite his deceased parents to the wedding. How could I have done that? Liyanov was far away, and, in any case, Raissa would not have understood. She would have said, “Why do you need a cemetery? Your heart is one; say your little prayer and let’s get it over with.” “Why are you sad?” Mendelevich’s wife asked me. “That’s the tradition,” her husband answered for me. “Couples are supposed to be sad on their wedding day: they break a glass and put ashes on their foreheads to recall the destruction of the Temple. It’s theatrical, of course, but so moving.” “What?” asked his wife. “Paltiel is sad because of the past?” “Of course not,” Raissa chimed in. “He’s sad because of the future … except that he doesn’t know it yet.” And suddenly I felt in an obscure way that we were not going to be happy.
Writing these lines today, in this place, where things seem clear and luminous, I realize that Raissa knew it too, and even before me. Then why did she marry me? Attractive, educated, with a Communist past like hers, she did not lack suitors and certainly could have found a better husband. I learned later that she had, in fact, used me to exorcise her own demons.
She had been engaged before the war. But her father had opposed the marriage: Anatoly was not Jewish. The mother wept, Raissa became angry: “He’s not a Jew, he’s not a Jew, so what? I am, and I don’t give a damn!” “Raissa, remember,” her father implored. “Remember whom? What? Leave me alone with your memories, I want to live my life, not yours.” In the end she broke with her parents and moved in with Anatoly. The war separated them. Anatoly fell in Minsk, and Raissa’s pain turned into rage. She began hating her parents, then all Jews; without them she would have married her Anatoly; they would have had children; they would have lived happily.… In the army she could not tolerate being near Jews, and when she had to be with them, she bullied them to punish her parents. She changed when she learned of the massacres in Vitebsk: all the members of her family had been buried alive. From that time on, a new feeling—guilt?—drew her to Jews—and me. Was she thinking of appeasing her dead parents in this way? Did she know that by punishing herself she made me suffer? But—excuse me, Citizen Magistrate, let’s change the subject. My private life is my business.
Our wedding day passed quickly. In the evening we went to the theater to see Mendelevich in a play by Sholem Aleichem. Our friend and protector managed to insert into his text a line meant specially for us: “Mazel tov, good luck, best wishes for the young couple.” It had nothing to do with the play, but it gave us pleasure and the audience didn’t know the difference.
After the show we went to see Mendelevich in his dressing room. We thanked him. He laughed. “Did you see? They didn’t notice a thing. I could say whatever I please. Luckily Sholem Aleichem is dead.”
We went home to Raissa’s apartment. And there, in her bed, in her habitat, among her objects, I failed on my wedding night. Absentminded, Raissa did not seem offended. She fell asleep, but I lay there with open eyes, making plans, dreaming incoherently of a thousand futures. I had to make decisions. Galperin, the rustic poet with the childlike voice, had suggested that I translate his war cantata into French, on condition that I officially join the Party. I had discussed this with Raissa, who strongly advised me to do so. In fact, why not? The USSR had beaten Hitler and paid the price. The Red Army had liberated Majdanek and Auschwitz. Why not show my gratitude? In addition, my oldest friendships came to mind: Inge, Traub, Ephraim.… Of course, there were also Yasha, Paul Hamburger, the purges and the disappearances; but history is made up of many chapters.
I decided to join the Party.
My collected poems came out at the end of 1946. The reception was qualified. Certain critics praised it, others demolished it, not having understood it at all. I must say I did everything to confuse them. The volume was called I Saw My Father in a Dream, and not a single poem mentioned my father. At the last minute I had decided to eliminate a sort of lyrical, mystical vision in which I described a funeral procession led by my father. I ask him where he is going, and he does not answer; I ask him whence he comes, he does not answer; I wait for the procession to pass and I follow it at a distance—we walk, we walk in silence, but I hear someone talking to me and I do not know who, he speaks to me and I know I am forbidden to know who it is; I look before me and see no one, then I lower my eyes and see a little boy growing, growing; he motions to me, I recognize him; he questions me without saying a word—and I understand that it was his silence that had spoken to me earlier—he questions me without looking at me: “What have you made of me?” And behind him my father appears and he too motions to me and asks, “What have you made of me?” And my collection of poems is my answer.
Why did I withdraw this first poem? I was afr
aid of upsetting and shocking the Communist reader.
By and large I had no complaints. Markish generously arranged a party in my honor. A critic from Izvestia, invited by Mendelevich, wrote a short but laudatory column about me. It was even rumored that an account of the book and of the evening would appear in the Literaturnaya Gazeta. I therefore had every reason in the world to be happy, and I was, so far as possible. Our economic situation was improving. The foreign section of the State Publishing House commissioned me to do a French translation of Feffer and a Yiddish one of Zola. A second printing of my volume of poetry was in the works and I was asked to do another collection. An article of mine in Pravda on the poetic application of Lenin’s ideas aroused considerable interest. In short, I was becoming a celebrity.
And I rather liked the fame. Not only because of the material advantages it gave me—a more spacious apartment, readings to mass audiences, lectures on collective farms, invitations to official and private dinners for distinguished visitors—but also for the power it gave me; suddenly my judgment and my actions carried weight.