The Judges

by Elie Wiesel

  “In the beginning you fascinated me; I wondered who you were and what they could have forced you to endure to reduce you to the state of a wreck whose only human attribute was the misery overwhelming him. I began asking you questions again. I thought that if I continued to question you I would be able to break through the carapace that surrounded you. Did you hear me? You appeared to be deaf and dumb and blind. I scratched a polished metal surface but couldn’t get a hold on you. How to explain, how to conquer your lethargy? You ate almost nothing; you hardly drank; your face remained immobile, impenetrable. I grew irritated. I insulted you; I tweaked your ears. You were somewhere else, in a prison more impregnable than our own.

  “Suddenly, I became alarmed. You made me doubt myself. My confidence in the future was sapped. Your indifference frightened me. You see, for me, indifference is the sign of sickness, a sickness of the soul more contagious than any other. I knew contact with it would lead me to become its accomplice or its victim. I would be dead before I died. How could I immunize myself against its poison? I knew only one remedy to counteract the effects of dementia on another person: to root it out. It’s as simple as that. So as not to become mad like you, a corpse like you, I needed to eliminate your madness. And since I quickly understood that your malady took the form of forgetfulness, I decided that the way to heal your impaired if not totally emptied memory was to introduce elements of my own into it.

  “To set an example for you, I danced, I sang, I clapped my hands, I scratched myself with my dirty nails, I made faces, I hurled oaths, I recited prayers. I needed to show you that to be a man is also to do all that. I talked to you about God and about my passion for human suffering: Desire is both strength and fire. Then I conveyed to you my rage against God and especially against those who claim to be speaking, yelling, and acting brutally in his name—as if God had a precise name, as if this name were not unutterable. I told you sad stories from my childhood, letting my tears flow. Then, to make you laugh, I told you happy stories. Finally, I lost my temper. And all the time you listened, like a good boy, without moving a muscle, without raising an eyebrow; you were as unresponsive to all my sallies as a stone statue.

  “In the end, I would seize you violently and hit your chest so hard it left us both breathless. ‘Wake up, for God’s sake!’ I would yell. ‘It’s our only chance! One of us is going to win in the end! And if it’s not me we’re both lost!’ Vain efforts, pointless tears. You occupied a fortress I was barred from entering.

  “And then one day, or one night—how can one tell one type of twilight from another?—you looked at me and I understood that either you or I or both of us were worthy of miracles. You were looking at me in the same way as before, but more intently. You were drinking in my gaze; you were hearing my voice; you were absorbing my words. I wanted to laugh or cry: I was witnessing your birth into the world.”

  He is the real Razziel, Razziel Paritus. I owe him everything. I don’t yet have the truth for which to thank him, but I am indebted to him for the knowledge that the truth of man is within man, that it is accessible to man.

  However, he had not restored my memory to me. Maybe he could not salvage it from the hands of the torturers. The scraps of recollection that came to the surface were without coherence or solidity. My memory, my first true memory, remained hidden in secret corridors—it could make no connection with reality. I continued to know nothing about the years that had preceded my imprisonment. Who were my accusers? Who had risen in court to defend me? Who were my parents? Were they still alive? Did I have any friends? Brothers and sisters?

  As time went by, I learned that I was in a Communist prison somewhere in a mountainous region of Romania. Why had they arrested me?

  “Because of a word, perhaps, or a silent grimace,” Razziel Paritus suggested, stroking his beard. “Or for something your parents were supposed to have done or said. In this country, denouncing people is a social duty, a moral imperative, a kind of state religion. It’s also possible they arrested you for no reason at all. That your only crime is your innocence. Perhaps our executioners wanted to get their hands on it to test your resistance. There’s no way of knowing. I believe what they’ve constructed here is a laboratory for psychological research. We are their guinea pigs, their human mice. For these people, torturing men’s souls has become a science—and a passion too. They’ve evidently grasped that the real battlefield is in the human soul. What if they tried to play tricks with your memory in order to attack the thing it protects—your soul? Once they had probed it, analyzed it, dissected it, they could have refitted it in their own fashion and then emptied it, only to repeat the exercise with other people. Or maybe you were the one who rejected your memory in a defensive reflex, to protect your soul, just as the body sheds things that are foreign or harmful to it. In this day and age all hypotheses are possible.”

  He seemed to go off into a meditation that he was eager to keep to himself and finished with his customary phrase: “One day you will know.”

  One day, one day. Which day? Where is this day hiding? Beneath what cloud? In what calendar? On what tree? What is it made of? Old Razziel Paritus would have liked to be able to answer these questions, but he was unable to do so. And I understood his powerlessness. “Here only the torturers have control of the solutions,” he explained to me. “That, too, is part of their scientific experimentation. What they have at their disposal is the time they steal from their victims. At first, when they took power, they had only one word on their lips, the future. But in this prison what concerns them is the past. The torturers are ambitious: They want every part of our being. One day you will discover Dostoyevsky. In one of his novels a character exclaims, ‘God is me; I am God.’ That is the aim of the torturers: to become gods.”

  I must confess that at first I had difficulty in following my Master’s thoughts. They seemed to me often obscure, complex, made up of words and, later, ideas whose sense and force were lost on me. Slowly, very slowly, I came to understand his language. In time my vocabulary was enriched. And my curiosity became greater. I began to measure the space that lies between the thought and the word, the memory of its source as well as its expression. I contrived to feel happy, happy to be alive, and to join my hopes with those of Razziel Paritus. Then, one evening, or one morning, as we were waiting for a meal that was late in coming, my poor victories vanished in an instant. The door opened and a jailer, with a paper in his hand, muttered, “Number Two,” and ordered me to get up and follow him. I tried to obey him but my body was not ready. I felt broken, defeated. It was old Paritus who helped me. He whispered in my ear, “Fear nothing; they’ll soon bring you back. Whatever they say, whatever they do, remember my name, which from now on is yours. It must never leave you.” Did he know something that had escaped me? Or was this just his way of reassuring me?

  Like an automaton I followed the jailer along passageways lit by dirty gray lightbulbs. I went up staircases, down staircases, and up again. As I had lost the habit of walking, my legs hurt and I trembled at every step. I had the impression I was going around in circles; malevolent forces were swallowing me up, shaking me, dragging me in all directions. I felt giddy.

  Finally, in front of a heavy door, the jailer gripped my arm and told me to stop. He knocked and called out some incomprehensible words. Thereupon the door was opened from inside and I was pushed into a kind of hospital ward. A man with a mustache and a woman with disheveled hair and a huge bosom seemed to be waiting for me. They both wore white coats. The jailer sat down in the corner while the man and the woman busied themselves in silence. Standing there motionless, I had a feeling of mounting panic. When would it erupt? Something strange, serious, dangerous was about to happen to me.

  With a vague gesture, the man indicated that I should lie down on a long rectangular table covered in a more or less white sheet. Lying horizontally, I felt a thousand times more vulnerable. Were they going to hit me—mutilate me, perhaps? Interrogate me? What new confessions did they want to ex
tract? Hammers began thudding in my skull. If only the woman with immense breasts, the man with the mustache, or even the jailer had said something, given an order, I would have felt somewhat reassured. But the silence grew denser. It was as if all three of them together were wrapping me in cotton wool, isolating me from the slightest noise, whether human or otherwise. I was turning into ash in the fire that blazed in my lungs; I was drowning in the blood that flowed in my veins. Toward what abyss was it carrying me? For some unknown reason I was terrified to breathe, and yet my rate of breathing speeded up. Why was the man in white walking with a silent tread toward the table where I lay stretched out? To stop my breathing because it disturbed him?

  He leaned over my face and with his fingers forcibly closed my eyelids, as one does with a dead person. In order to cling to life I invoked the name and face of my cell companion. Razziel, Razziel, come to my aid, help me to preserve the picture I have of you. Tell me what I must do to escape the silence of death. My anguish modulated into panic and my panic into terror: They had just rolled back the right sleeve of my tattered jacket. Suddenly I felt a pain along the whole length of my arm, right up into my shoulder. Through half-open eyelids I saw the man in white with a syringe in his hand; he had injected a burning liquid into me. I had never known such agony. I was about to let out a howl but the woman with disheveled hair covered my mouth with her two hands and stifled it. Weakened, helpless, my will amputated, I sank into darkness.

  I awoke in the cell. An iron bar was bearing down on my chest and on my brow. Was I dead? In my tomb? My arm began moving. Someone was shaking it. I summoned up my last reserves of energy to peer through closed eyelids and perceived a shadow leaning over me. I heard myself murmuring, “I don’t remember anything, nothing.” And the shadow answered softly, in barely audible tones, “Make an effort, my friend; just try, a little effort.” An effort? My shattered body was not capable of such a thing. I too was no more than a shadow. The other persisted. “Tax your memory, just try; your life is at stake, and mine too.” His voice calmed me, reassured me. I had an impulse to ask him, Who are you? But he asked me first. Involuntarily I whispered, “Razziel. Raz-zi-el.” He repressed a little cry of joy. “Thank you, Lord! Well done, well done, my young friend! They didn’t get you. Not quite! So we shall be able to begin again!”

  And we did indeed begin our lessons again. My memory once more unlocked its bolted doors. My precious and unique friend passed on to me the things he knew. Things of the city, the outside world, the country. “The key, my dear fellow, the key, never forget, is in you, it is you; you are the key for me, as I am the key for you.” And also: “It takes so little to hide the sun; if a scrap of paper is laid across your eyes, its light is eclipsed. But then another light wells up. This comes from your soul. And your soul is more powerful than all our torturers’ instruments.”

  He recounted tragic episodes from the occupation. “The war is long since over, but nothing has changed; the dead, your grandparents, are still there. They call out to us. They judge us. Perhaps if they had been buried, things would be different. But they were not. And now it is for you to form a bond with them.” He invoked a world inhabited by madmen, artists, and prophets who each in their own way reconstruct both the tower of Babel, which reached up to the heavens, and the heavens themselves. He told me stories from his own experience or drawn from books about God and his melancholy. About God’s desire to make mortal man immortal. About the Messiah, who awaits a call in order to reveal himself to those who, against all odds, still await him. “All alone,” said Paritus, “it is easy to live an upright life. But there are the others. God is God because he is alone.” And also: “Feel free to fear solitude but not death. Everything is within us, death as well. We speak to death and it takes its time before answering us. It is death that gives life its human dimension. God is not human, for he is immortal.” Whenever Paritus spoke, I felt the dawning of an emotion I would later call happiness. The happiness of not being alone. The happiness of no longer facing emptiness. The happiness of being present, of having a name: Razziel.

  THE HUNCHBACK did not stir. At his screen he watched the prisoners, scrupulously noting their behavior, their reactions, their shifts of mood. It was his accustomed role: observing. That night, however, the Judge had decided to give him another task. The Hunchback was as yet unaware of this.

  Her head bowed pensively, and with a diligent air, Claudia had started to cover a page with her delicate but illegible handwriting. She broke off for a moment, took her lipstick from her purse, hesitated over applying it, and put it away again. Bruce was amusing himself by drawing Spanish women dancing. Yoav, motionless, looked as if he were simply bored, but his mind was seething with energy as he pondered how to escape from this locked room controlled by dangerous madmen. George was putting questions to Razziel, who answered him slowly before questioning the archivist in his turn. All of them were being assailed by memories.

  The Hunchback too. He remembered with terror the night he found himself in hell. Before that he had been a boy who was not especially good-looking and not really happy, but his father worked and his mother smiled as she laid the table. He liked almost everyone, and everyone adored him. At home, peace reigned supreme. At school, his fellows did not envy him the blessings of his childhood.

  Then the accident happened. His father, a steady, cautious man, was driving their car when it collided with a truck. Who was at fault? The police investigation blamed it on the torrential rain. His parents and a baby a few months old were killed instantly. The Hunchback remembered his first encounter with the Judge. Severely injured and traumatized, the little boy had been taken to a special burn center, where for weeks he struggled to survive. He left the hospital handicapped, his face disfigured. Barely an adolescent, he was taken in by the Judge, who had no family. The Hunchback became his valet, his cook, his handyman, and his distorting mirror. Out of a deep sense of gratitude, he refused the Judge nothing. He tolerated his whims and oddities and took part in his “games.” He had grasped that for the Judge life itself was merely a game— often cruel, sometimes funny.

  One day the Judge invited in a passing beggar and made a deal with him: For one week the man would stop begging for alms and he, the Judge, would do so in his place. On another occasion he “married” a rather simpleminded elderly spinster and “renounced” her the next day, the Hunchback fulfilling the double function of sexton and mayor. But this latest game, with the five stranded travelers, went beyond anything the Hunchback had previously known. Let’s hope it all ends well, he told himself. But how could he be certain? He tried to imagine what might happen next. The consequences. If he could have controlled the scenario, he would have pushed the participants into taking initiatives, stepping outside themselves. Let Bruce declare himself to be a builder of temples, let George begin to sing and dance. Let Razziel and Claudia have a quarrel or kiss; let them embrace one another fervently, passionately; let them do what he, the handicapped one, had never done. He had never known the experience of uniting his tormented body with that of a woman, any woman.

  The Judge’s severe voice rang out from a loudspeaker concealed in a corner of the room. He sounded just like a schoolmaster.

  “It is late. No slacking, now! I’ve given you a game to play. Take it seriously. Get to work! Imagine you’re actors. Act out your roles. Claudia, show them how it’s done. Live the situation. It’s serious. Tell yourselves you are really in danger. That Death is on the prowl. Confront and interrogate Death. What is it looking for beneath my roof? Surely it is preparing to choose a sacrificial victim. Which one of you will it be?”

  As ever, when faced with danger, their first reaction is incredulity. “Is all this a dream or what? It can’t be true. . . . It can’t be happening to me, not now. . . . Not here in America!” Vastly different though they were, the five survivors reacted the same way. Surely, it was a prank . . . a charade in bad taste . . . a game for idiots or lunatics. Or maybe it was a psychodrama—yes, a ther
apy session, but one where it was the psychiatrist who needed help. The Judge had spoken of death. What did this mean? Was one of them really under threat? Had the Judge really “received” a message transmitted by supernatural powers? In any case, the whole situation was so absurdly improbable that it would be foolish to take it seriously. . . .

  Suddenly Bruce rushed to the door, turned the handle— which resisted him—and thrust his shoulder against it with violence, then with a fury no longer under control. In vain. “We must get out of here!” he shouted. “Let’s try the window! Let’s smash it.” But the two panes were made of a thick, unbreakable material. “That pervert! He’s locked us in! We’re like rats in a trap!”

  Claudia tried to calm him. There was no sense in panicking. Sooner or later the Judge would return and order would be restored. He would laugh and so would they. She was interrupted by the voice of their host.

  “Do not fritter away the time you have in rebelling against the Judgment. Be advised that it is not yet directed at any particular individual. For the moment Death is not in a hurry. Death takes its time, the choice has not yet been made. You have several hours at your disposal. For God’s sake, use them as best you can!”

  The survivors felt helpless against the fear that took them by the throat: So it wasn’t a game?

  Razziel was the first to react. “People in a similar situation in the Middle Ages would start to say their prayers. But we’re no longer in the Middle Ages.”

  Claudia made an effort to overcome her distress. “All this is stupid. Out there the pilot, the crew, and the other passengers will soon notice our absence. They’ll come looking for us. They’ll alert the police.”

  Shrugging his shoulders, Yoav went further. “Remember, our destination is Israel. Our people there are used to critical situations. No doubt Mossad is in the picture already—”