The Oath

by Elie Wiesel

  BOOKS BY ELIE WIESEL

  Night

  Dawn

  The Accident

  The Town Beyond the Wall

  The Gates of the Forest

  The Jews of Silence

  Legends of Our Time

  A Beggar in Jerusalem

  One Generation After

  Souls on Fire

  The Oath

  Ani Maamin (cantata)

  Zalmen, or The Madness of God (play)

  Messengers of God

  A Jew Today

  Four Hasidic Masters

  The Trial of God (play)

  The Testament

  Five Biblical Portraits

  Somewhere a Master

  The Golem (illustrated by Mark Podwal)

  The Fifth Son

  Against Silence (edited by Irving Abrahamson)

  Twilight

  The Six Days of Destruction (with Albert Friedlander)

  A Journey into Faith

  (conversations with John Cardinal O’Connor)

  From the Kingdom of Memory

  Sages and Dreamers

  The Forgotten

  A Passover Haggadah (illustrated by Mark Podwal)

  All Rivers Run to the Sea

  And the Sea Is Never Full

  Conversations with Elie Wiesel (with Richard D. Heffner)

  Copyright © 1973 by Elie Wiesel

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Schocken Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in 1973 by Random House, Inc., and subsequently in paperback in 1986 by Schocken Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Wiesel, Elie

  The oath.

  Translation of Le serment de Kolvillàg.

  I. Title.

  PQ2683.1325413 1986 843’.914

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83379-2

  v3.1

  For Elisha, his sister Jennifer and their mother

  Had the peoples and the nations

  known how much harm they brought upon

  themselves by destroying the

  Temple of Jerusalem, they would

  have wept more than the children

  of Israel.

  THE TALMUD

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One: The Old Man and the Child

  Part Two: The Child and the Madman

  Part Three: The Madman and the Book

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  The Old Man and the Child

  NO, SAID THE OLD MAN. I will not speak. What I have to say, I don’t care to say. Not to you, not to anybody. Not now, not tomorrow. There is no more tomorrow.

  Once upon a time, long ago, there was a small town with a mysterious past, a black stain under a purple sky. Its name in Hungarian was Kolvillàg, Virgirsk in Russian and Klausberg in German. Nobody knows what the Romanians called it, or the Ruthenians, the Ukrainians and the Turks, all of whom, at one time or another, were its rulers.

  Don’t look for it on any map, in any history book; it isn’t there. Too unimportant to occupy even a modest place. A regrettable oversight, particularly since it seems irreparable. I should know. Painstaking, detailed research over many years has yielded few clues, few points of reference; not enough to endow it with any semblance of objective reality.

  Casual references to Kolvillàg are to be found in five places. Three of these are rather surprising.

  One of the letters the Austro-Hungarian colonel Turas von Strauchnitz dispatched to his spouse is dated Kolvillàg, April 4, 1822. Unfortunately, the officer, though a keen observer and expansive by nature, did not take the trouble to explain what he had come to do or discover there: not a word about its citizenry, its homes or local customs.

  Klausberg is also mentioned in the correspondence maintained by the Scandinavian theologian Jan Saalbor with an obscure Romanian monk—Father Yanku—of Transylvania: “Could you, my venerable friend, do me a great service? It is a matter of some importance to me to know whether the castle of Virgirsk, better known as the Mute Mountaineers’ Monastery, was built in the tenth or the thirteenth century.” The monk’s reply, if reply there was, has not been recorded. And for the benefit of anyone interested, I should like to add that the monastery in question still stands. Its collection of icons is well worth the journey. On the other hand, nothing in its archives indicates even the slightest kinship with Kolvillàg, Klausberg, or even Virgirsk.

  That the hamlet attracted prominent travelers we know from Abraham ha-Katan who, in his Diary (Oppenheimer, ed., 1847), praises its hospitality: “I understand that one might wish to spend a Shabbat here. The merchants, though shrewd, are honest; the women, though charming, are devout; and the children are turbulent but respectful. In Klausberg the stranger will never feel unwelcome.”

  Evidently a sage named Yekutiel ben Yaakov must have held court there in the sixteenth century, since his opinion is quoted in the collection of Responsa of the famous Rabbi Menashe, with regard to an abandoned woman—an aguna—who anxiously wished to remarry in order to discourage the local squire who pursued her with his infatuation.

  Finally, we come across Kolvillàg in the writings of the great poet Shmuel ben Yoseph Halevi, whose litanies form part of certain liturgical services for the High Holy Days. This is what he tells us: “On the fifth day of the month Heshvan in the year 5206, a frenzied mob ransacked the holy community of Virgirsk. All the children of Israel, beginning with the three judges, were lined up in the marketplace, facing the church. There, under the eyes of an amused populace, they chose to die rather than renounce their faith. By nightfall three hundred and twenty corpses lay strewn across the marketplace stained with blood—and there was nobody to bury them.”

  These are the scant bits of information I succeeded in uncovering about this ill-starred town. And so I shall know it only through the voice of its last survivor. His name is Azriel and he is mad.

  No, said the old man, I will not tell the story. Kolvillàg cannot be told. Let’s talk of other things. Men and their joys, children and their sorrows—let’s talk about them, shall we? And God. Let’s talk about God: so alone, so irreducible, judging without truly understanding. Let’s talk about everything, except …

  I had met him one autumn afternoon. I remember, I shall always remember. The sun was setting, red and violent. I thought: This is the last time—and the thought made me sad. Then I said to myself: No, not so. It will rise again, as always, perhaps forever—and that thought too made me sad.

  Where do I come from? You are a curious young man. Do I ask where you are from? Oh well, today’s youth respects nothing and nobody; and worse, even boasts about it. In my day old age conferred certain privileges. The closer man came to death, the more consideration he received. The oldest man was the most privileged; people would rise as he passed, solicit his advice and listen in silence. Thus he would feel alive and useful, a part of the community of man. Today things are different. You consider old men embarrassing, cumbersome, fit only for the old-age home or the graveyard. Any means of disposing of them is acceptable. They are a nuisance, those old people. You find their presence an unbearable burden. It is the Bible in reverse: you are prepared to sacrifice your parents. In my day, in my country, men were less cruel.

  Oh yes, I am old—four times your age—but fortunately I have nobody in the whole world, which means that nobody wishes me dead …

  Yes, I come from far away. From the other side of
oceans. From the other side, period. Driven from my small town, somewhere between the Dniepr and the Carpathians, a town whose name will mean nothing to you.

  A small town, like so many others, a small town unlike any other: a handful of ashes under a glowing red sky, its name is Kolvillàg and Kolvillàg does not exist, not any more. I am Kolvillàg and I am going mad. I feel it, maybe I already am. There is, deep inside me, a madman claiming to be me. Kolvillàg is what drove him mad.

  Don’t ask me how it happened, I have no right to divulge that. I promised, I took an oath. With the others, like the others. Bound by oath as much as they. True, I was the youngest, but age is irrelevant. I was present at the conspiracy, I participated in it. And now it is too late: I shall not go back on my word. It ties me to a destiny that is not mine; it belongs to that part of me that yearns to remain faithful unto death, unto madness, faithful to the madness which consists in declaring over and over: It is too late, too late.

  Yes, one cannot push back night as one cannot contain the waves of a raging sea. The clock will tick off the hours even while the dwelling is engulfed by flames. Am I that dwelling? wonders the madman. Or the clock? You are the fire, answers the old man.

  Anyway, what does it matter who I am. What I have seen, nobody will see, what I am keeping back, you will never hear; that is what matters. I am the last, do you understand? The last to have breathed the fiery, stifling air of Kolvillàg. The last to witness its ultimate convulsions before the beast withdrew, satiated but unappeased, monstrously immense yet weightless, almost graceful, like the morning breeze, like the flame that caresses the body before consuming it. The beast did not see me—do you understand?—that was my good fortune, my salvation. But I saw it. I saw it at work. Alternately savage and attentive, radiant and hideous, sovereign and cunning, it won with ease, reducing to shreds whoever saw it at close range, inside the bewitched and cursed circle. It turned the town into a desecrated, pillaged cemetery. Crushing all its inhabitants into a single one, it twisted and tortured him until in the end he had a hundred eyes and a thousand mouths, and all were spitting terror.

  Scenes of apocalypse, nightmares begotten by sleeping corpses—I wish I could describe them, I wish I could tell all there is to tell. I shall not. I am sworn to silence. They made me take an oath. To break it means excommunication. Such a vow is sacred. One’s commitments to God can be undone by a simple incantation. One’s commitment to man, and certainly to the dead, cannot. Your contracts with the dead, the dead take with them, too late to cancel or modify their terms. They leave you no way out. Formidable players, the dead; they hold you and you are helpless.

  That is why you will not succeed in making me talk. I will circle around the story, I will not plunge into it. I’ll beat around the bush. I’ll say everything but the essential. For you see, I am not free. My voice is a prisoner. And though at times words bend to my will, silence no longer obeys me: it has become my master. More powerful than the word, it draws its strength and secret from a savagely demented universe doomed by its wretched and deadly past.

  And so it is to him I owe my experience of Kolvillàg. And much more. Mysterious messenger from an imaginary city, he showed it to me from afar, one autumn night, when the only call I could perceive came from the other side.

  You want to die? How can one blame you. This rotten world is not worth lingering in, I know something about it: I covered it from one end to the other. To repudiate it, you have chosen suicide? Why not, it’s a solution like any other, neither better nor worse. I myself have explored all the possibilities. Action, inaction. Penitence, escape. I turned friendship into a cult and the word into an adventure. I alternately preached faith, blasphemy and forgiveness. I made people cry, I made them dream. Vain attempts: the game is rigged since death wins in the end. I even made them laugh. The cripples, the unfortunate, the condemned, I made them laugh. Only to have death laugh louder still. I understand your invoking it. I followed all other avenues, ended up in every hell. I lived in cities, in forests, with men and away from them. I survived more than one war, took part in more than one mourning. I tried oblivion and solitude, more than once was I ready to abdicate—but I did not: my life does not belong to me, neither does my death. All I can call my own is a forbidden city I must rebuild each day, only to watch it end in horror each night. You don’t understand? Don’t try. This invisible city exists only for me and subsists only in me. I cannot tell you more; to speak of it is to betray it.

  And yet, the old man will speak. He doesn’t know it now, but before the tale reaches its conclusion, before the two strangers part ways, they will have traded their secrets. Each driven by his despair, his helplessness. In the final stage of every equation, of every encounter, the key is responsibility. Whoever says “I” creates the “you.” Such is the trap of every conscience. The “I” signifies both solitude and rejection of solitude. Words name things and then replace them. Whoever says tomorrow, denies it. Tomorrow exists only for him who does not seek it. And yesterday? Yesterday is Kolvillàg: a name to forget, a word already forgotten.

  So you have had enough, the old man is thinking as he scrutinizes the young man’s profile. You prepare yourself to die and I inevitably become judge or witness. Except that I am tired, too tired to play destiny.

  Above them, the streets and alleys have sprung alive with workers on their way home. Lovers are walking hand in hand, laughing and embracing. Below, the river succumbs to dusk. The reddish sky turns gray; soon it is dark. A chilly breeze blows through the barren trees. The buildings across the street seem dark and threatening. Here and there a window lights up, mysterious and reassuring. And you, you are waiting for night, the old man muses. You wait so as to follow it. Never mind, don’t deny it, I see through you. Despair that sticks to the skin. Disgust that drives away curiosity. Thoughts that are heavy, opaque. And then this weight crushing your chest, this pasty tongue cluttering your mouth. Don’t deny it. I know those things. You are only waiting for night to come and swallow you. And it is up to me to hold you back. Why me? Because I am here. Because I have eyes to see, a mouth to protest. I could have been elsewhere, I could have been looking the other way.

  In the distance, near the city hall square, there is bedlam. People milling about, shouting insults at one another. The electoral campaign is in full swing. Vote for this, vote for that. Vote for this one because he personifies promise. No, vote for that one because he personifies promise. Orators harangue the crowds. Applause, whistles. Trust me: I who this, I who that. There is no end to candidates. And each says the same thing. Each sacrifices his interests for those of the people: it should consider itself fortunate, the people, to have such defenders, such devoted friends. But the friends of the people are not each other’s friends. Provocations, fights, pandemonium. Accusations fly back and forth. Exhortations: Let us change society, let us change man. In the name of mutations, one does away with systems. Down with the Establishment, long live the Revolution. Disorders, riots. Coups d’état. Down with government, long live imagination. Down with life, long live death. I have heard these slogans before, in another place. Barcelona, Berlin. Men change, their cry remains. I am too old to let myself be taken in. These battles no longer concern me. Yet your particular choice does. Here I am, responsible for your next step. As though you were my son. As though I had a son.

  The old man recalls Prague in the twenties, Berlin in the thirties. The tragic gaiety of some, the sham devil-may-care attitude of others. For Azriel, death is an old acquaintance; he knows how to track it down, how to unmask it, fight it. To men in the throes of despair, he would say: “To face death lucidly is one thing, to surrender out of weakness or inadvertence is another. I don’t ask you to go back on your decision; I only tell you to act freely.” Freedom: the big word. Supreme temptation. In the name of freedom, I put you in prison. In the name of the future, I condemn you to capital punishment. Do people still kill themselves out of despair? How is one to know.

  Here is twilight trail
ing its heavy, silvery shadows. And here are the first stars playing with the waves and reflections of another somber and silent world. You usually come here for walks with your girl, right? You speak to her, you tell her things, all sorts of things, right? Not tonight. Tonight you are alone as only a rejected lover can be. Foolish, but your heart is heavy. Foolish, but you don’t believe in love. Life? A huge joke you might as well be rid of. Your reasons? You have many, I wager. They never vary. One either loves too much or not enough. One either suffers or makes others suffer. One engages the whole world in battle; not easy to fight the whole world. It’s all foolish, so why cling to a barren existence? God committed an injustice by giving Himself a toy made to His own scale, and man must set it right, erase it by erasing himself, is that it?

  The old man and the young man stare at each other for a moment, their eyes locked, unblinking, uncompromising.

  “Who are you?”

  The old man does not answer. Who am I? Azriel? Who am I? Moshe? Question of questions. When he opened his eyes, Adam did not ask God: Who are you? He asked: Who am I?

  “What do you want of me? I don’t know you, I have never seen you before.”

  He thinks I am mad, the old man muses. With reason. One must be mad to want to speak to a stranger, to hope to save him. One must be mad to hope. Do I frighten him? Madness frightens him more than death …

  Sky and river become one and suddenly Azriel understands that one may want to drown in darkness where all is beckoning and mystery.

  “You must not,” says the old man. “You must not commit the irrevocable. You must not oppose despair to despair. Or fire to fire. One evil can add to another but not diminish it. If you kill yourself, you commit one more injustice. What will you have proven? I advise you rather to stay. And face night.”

  “And life too?”

  “Yes. Life too.”

  “And death too?”