Legends of Our Time (16 page)

Had it not ever been thus? No doubt it had, but I had been too young at the time to understand it. The population had always thought that Jews did not become strangers, they were born that way. Only, these peaceful inhabitants go further than that. Today, for them, I am not even a stranger robbed of his childhood, not even a phantom in search of memories. Have they forgotten everything? No. Rather, they give the impression of having nothing to forget. There never were any Jews in Sighet, the former capital of the celebrated region of Maramures.

Thus, the Jews have been driven not only out of the town but out of time as well.

The only place where I felt at home, on familiar ground, was the Jewish cemetery. And yet I had never set foot in it before. Children had been forbidden to enter. Why? Because. When you grow up, you’ll understand. I would imagine the dead conversing with God, or I would be among them, brushing against the walls, keeping my ears open; I wanted to listen, but there had always been someone to send me back to school or back home. Now I was free to enter. There was no longer anyone to tell me what was permitted and what was not. I had grown up.

This was the only place in Sighet that reminded me of Sighet, the only thing that remained of Sighet. Outside, I was on foreign soil; here I was in the bosom of a great and powerful family ready to welcome me, to protect me.

Perhaps it was simply because the dead who were here had been luckier than the others. They had not been deported. Remaining where they were, they had not had to undergo any humiliation. They had been let alone, left in peace. Perhaps that was why I had come to them: not so much to bid them farewell as to entrust them with the town, with the town’s Jewish past.

I wandered from one grave to another. I had bought some candles. I lit them, placing one wherever I found a familiar name. The wind blew them out. I struggled against it, in vain.

In the old days people had come here from far and near, especially between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, to lie down on the graves of the
Tzadikim
and implore them to intercede with the heavenly power to stop pursuing the people who had been too much chosen for too much suffering. Useless prayers, useless tears. The intercession had done no good. God had closed his ears and let it all happen.

Finally, I stopped in front of a monument to the memory of a generation that had died elsewhere. A slanting block of stone, with a few words engraved on it. A tomb with no corpses. A gravestone with no graves instead of innumerable graves. I held a match to the last candle. To my great surprise, the wick caught at the first attempt and flamed upward. Was it a miracle? Would the flame rise to the seventh heaven and still higher to the tenth sphere, and still higher, to the celestial throne, and still higher than that?

Suddenly I was aware of a presence—an old Jew was standing at my side. Without greeting me, without saying a word, he took a
siddur
from his pocket and began to recite the funeral chant:
El mole rachamim shokhen bimromim
. Where had this apparition come from? How had he found out I was there? I do not know. Perhaps he came to the cemetery day after day for the sole purpose of praying that all the Jews of Sighet, swallowed up by the night, might at last rest in peace. As he prayed I closed my eyes and shame came over me again.

The last candle burned for a long time. Sometimes I tell myself that it is still burning.

I met a second Jew in front of the Sephardic synagogue. The very sight of this extraordinary person, this bearded man dressed like a Hasid, took me back twenty years. I accosted him in Yiddish. Surprised, he shook my hand and looked at me lingeringly.
Sholem aleichem, aleichem sholem:
Peace be with you, my companion. A bond was established at once. Simple answers to harmless questions. No, he was not from Sighet. No, he had never known my father. What was he doing in this de-Judaized town? He was attending to the living. A rabbi? No. A
shamash
—a sexton? No. Was he teaching children the sacred language? No, not that either. Besides, there were no longer any children who would be willing to learn it.
“I am the
shochet,”
he said—the ritual slaughterer. Incredible but true; in Sighet and the surrounding villages there were still Jews who ate kosher food. Not many. Ten here, ten there. At Borshe, a mountain town, there were not more than five. Three at Stremtere, another three at Dragmerest. It was for their sake that he had decided to stay, after sending his wife and children abroad; he would go to join them only when nobody here needed his services. For the moment he did not consider himself free. Going from village to village, from house to house, he did his work without complaint—on the contrary, he said he was happy, for he was more useful here than he could be anywhere else.

I gazed at him in silence. I felt like giving him everything I possessed, but he had no need of anything. In the face of such generosity, a man feels poor; in the face of such humility, he feels humble. “I could not make up my mind to go,” he told me, smiling. “After all, I could not abandon an entire Jewish community that way, without a
shochet.”
He did not realize how much cruelty was contained in his words. Fifty families, a community. And to think that long ago this community had been a center of learning, a wellspring of life and wealth.

If the legend of the Thirty-six Just Men is true, this slaughterer is one of them.

Twenty-four hours after arriving in the town, I hastened to leave. One dawn, one dusk: that was enough. Already, remorse was coming over me: I had been wrong to come. Of the four wise men who, the Talmud tells us, made their way into the fields of knowledge, only one emerged unscathed; and even he did not dare go in again.

The car was waiting for me, the driver was impatient. “Are we leaving?” Yes, we were leaving. Was it fatigue that I found it so hard to lift my little suitcase, put it on
the front seat, and then dump myself into the back? The slightest movement required a painful effort. A part of me wanted to remain. From here on it would be a one-way trip; every step would take me farther away from this place. “Are we leaving?” Yes, we were leaving. He let in the clutch, and the car started off. “Don’t go so fast,” I said in a low voice. Not so fast. I had seen everything, I wanted to see more. The little girl holding on to her mother’s arm. The couple stopping in front of a store window. The policeman on duty in front of the courthouse. The passersby who had not seen me arrive and now did not see me leaving.

Here was the main street, the main square, the movie theater, the pastry shop, the girls’ high school. A last glance toward my own street: the belfry of the church, the new school building, and further on, at the intersection of two streets, my house.

Sighet had long sunk below the horizon, and I still kept my head turned toward it, as though it were possible for me to carry it away in my gaze. And then I understood that I could not do so, and that in my heart I did not wish to do so. I had brought no part of it away with me, nothing but the feeling of emptiness. My journey to the source of all events had been merely a journey to nothingness.

For it had never existed—this town that had once been mine.

Seventeen years after I had left Germany—left it, as we say, forever—I went back.

I returned, in 1962, not to exorcise a few aging, probably dated demons, but to make a kind of pilgrimage to the source. The criminal is not alone when he returns to the scene of the crime; he is joined there by his victim, and both are driven by the same curiosity: to relive that moment which stamped past and future for each. So I undertook to retrace my steps, to seek a double confrontation: between them and myself, between the self I had left at Buchenwald and the other self that thought it was healed.

I came away from the confrontation with my head bowed in humiliation. I had been sure of finding my hate for Germany intact; seventeen years before I had thought it eternal. But even eternity changes its face.

After the war, I had deliberately avoided all contact with Germans. Their presence sickened me physically. The blood rushed to my head whenever I received a letter from a cousin in Frankfort. I could hardly bear it. Where Germany was concerned, logical arguments no longer had any force.

Hence it was with apprehension that I prepared for the journey to the place where my hate was waiting for me. I did not know it would break the appointment. Baudelaire calls hate a drunkard in the gloom of a tavern who can never fall asleep under the table. But there are drunkards who die in their sleep.

Yet for me the task should not have been difficult. What could be easier than to detest this people? They had started and lost the most ignominious war in history, and afterward had managed to surpass their conquerors in wealth and happiness. Above all, in complacency.

In the Paris-Stuttgart plane, a man sat beside me who was a student of philosophy at Heidelberg. He asked me what I thought his country was like. I replied: I imagine it abject and kneeling, filled with ruins and cemeteries, sobbing with fear and remorse; I imagine it famished and tormented, its inhabitants crawling on the ground, begging for pardon and oblivion. He burst out laughing. I can promise you a surprise, he said.

He was right to laugh. Of course, I was not thinking of his country’s material condition, for I knew it was at the peak of its productivity. The cold war requires a “German shield,” military strength matched by economic power. German industry once again plays a preponderant role in world markets, the Krupp factories work at top speed, there is no unemployment. Berlin organizes film festivals to rival those at Cannes and Venice; Volkswagens and
Mercedes streak the dusty roads of Asia, not to mention the super-highways of America. Living conditions have never been better, houses hold every comfort and convenience, the worker is better off than in France or Italy, and is, perhaps, happier too. Frankfort and Baden-Baden swarm with foreign tourists, and in Paris and Rome one tourist out of two speaks German. A journalist in Munich told me: Winning the war is good, losing it is better.

It was not all this that I found irritating, not the country’s prosperity, but the people’s complacency—a self-satisfaction unhaunted by the past. It is just we who think about the past. The Germans are not doing much thinking about the future either. People in Norway or Holland, for instance, seem more concerned with the fate of Berlin than do the West Germans. The Germans do not seem anxious about their split into two enemy camps and the possible danger this holds for the world. They look straight into your eyes when you talk to them, as if they have nothing to fear or hide—are accountable to no one. Ready to admit they are no longer our superiors, they insist on being our equals. The German does not permit himself to be judged, he is as good a man as any.

We—the victims—had not imagined, during the war, this is the way things would be after Germany’s defeat. We were convinced a great deal of water would have to flow under the bridges of the Rhine before a member of the nation of executioners would dare look with unwavering glance into the eyes of a free man.

The Germans themselves were convinced of this. They were certain that the curse would pursue them, that they would never be allowed to forget. Fear kept them awake at night: thirst for vengeance on the part of survivors, they thought, would surely be insatiable. In the years immediately after the war, if you stopped a man in Munich or Kassel he would begin trembling and stammering: “I didn’t do anything, see anything, know anything. I was at the front, in the hospital, at my office; I
knew nothing of what was happening. I saw a column of smoke in the distance, but—I didn’t know, no one told me.”

Then came the Nuremberg Trials, and the execution of the major war criminals. The Germans could scarcely believe what they heard and saw: “Then they don’t blame us?… They’re leaving us alone, they’re not going to make us pay?” When they came face to face with Jews, they could not help being suspicious. “What do they want from us, what are they up to? They can’t forgive us so quickly, what’s on their minds?” But finally the Germans understood they had nothing to fear, and so their fear turned into contempt. “Look at those Jews: they’re not even capable of revenge!”—and a new phase began, the phase of self-justification. “If we are not judged, it is because we have done nothing, we are innocent. Hitler? The world could and should have stopped him in time; it did not, and it must share our guilt. The camps? Their existence was known in Washington, in London, in the Vatican: no voice was raised in protest against Auschwitz. The German people were not the only silent ones: great leaders accustomed to speaking in the name of conscience and of civilization were also silent. Why blame only us?”

Nevertheless, the Germans did admit a certain guilt toward the Jews. The Bonn government signed the reparations agreement with Israel and the Claims Conference in acknowledgment of that guilt—and that was that. What more did anyone want?

Why then should the Germans be embarrassed any longer before a foreign visitor, or play the innocent to impress anyone? They are as they are, and if you do not like them, too bad. They will neither change nor lie to please a foreigner. It is as if the Germans were saying to Israel: It is over, we no longer owe you anything. Israel has ceased being a moral problem for Germany—the
issue is now political. The converse, unfortunately, is also true.

The Germany that swarmed with impersonators and cowardly liars during the years immediately following the capitulation of the Wehrmacht, it is that Germany that no longer exists. You no longer hear anyone cursing Hitler in the hope of exonerating himself. No one, these days, feels he has to exclaim: “It wasn’t me, it was those others!” One young intellectual told me: “Hitler wasn’t a bad man; he was wrong to surround himself with scum.” Another repeated what Heinrich Gruber, the famous bishop of Berlin and the only German witness at the Eichmann trial, had said to a visitor from America: “Hitler was only the scourge of God to chastise his people.” In which case are we permitted to judge the divine instrument?