One Generation After (5 page)
Read One Generation After Online
Authors: Elie Wiesel
*
Who are you?
A number.
Your name?
Gone. Blown away. Into the sky. Look up there. The sky is black, black with names.
I cannot see the sky. The barbed wire is in my way
.
But I can. I look at the barbed wire and I know that what I’m seeing is the sky.
You mean they have barbed wire up there too?
Of course.
And all that goes with it?
The lot.
The tormentors? The executioners? The victims with neither strength nor desire to resist, to smile at the shadows?
I’m telling you: it’s just like here.
Then we are lost
.
We alone?
*
How old are you?
Fifteen. Or more. Perhaps less. I don’t know. And you?
I’m fifty
.
I envy you. You look younger.
And you, you look older
.
Anyway, we’re both wrong. I’m convinced of it. I am fifty and you’re fifteen. Do you mind?
Not at all. You or I, it’s all the same. Tell me: do you know who you are?
No. Do you?
I don’t
.
Are you at least sure that you exist?
I’m not. Are you?
No, neither am I.
But our faces? What has happened to them?
They are masks. Loaned to him who has no face.
*
Are you asleep?
No. It’s something else.
Are you dreaming? With your eyes open? Letting your imagination run wild? Trying to feel human and fulfilled?
I’m too weak for that.
Then what are you doing? Your eyes are wide open
.
I’m playing.
You’re what?
I’m playing a game of chess.
With whom?
I don’t know.
Who’s winning?
That too I don’t know. I only know who’s losing.
*
Hey, you there! You look like you’re praying
.
Not so.
Your lips keep moving
.
A matter of habit, probably.
Did you use to pray that much?
That much. And even more.
What did you ask for in your prayers?
Nothing.
For pardon?
Maybe.
For knowledge?
Possibly.
Friendship?
Yes, friendship.
For a chance to defeat evil and be linked to what is good? For some certainty of living within truth or of—just—living?
Perhaps.
And you call that nothing?
Precisely. I call that nothing.
*
Were you rich?
Very rich. Like a king.
What did your father do?
He was a merchant. He had to work hard.
I thought that rich people didn’t work
.
My father worked. From daybreak, late into the night. My mother helped him. We all helped, even the children. We had no choice.
Then he wasn’t rich
.
Yes, he was. No beggar ever left us without first enjoying a good
meal at our table, in our company. My mother would serve him first. During holidays our house would overflow with the poor: our guests of honor.
Where did you live?
In a palace. Spacious, immense. And beautiful. Luxurious. Unique.
How many rooms?
Three. No, four. We pushed each other a little, it didn’t matter. There was no running water. Still, it was a palace.
Will you go back one day?
Never. The place is gone.
What will you do when all this is over?
Build a house and fill it with food. Then I’ll invite all the poor of the earth to come share my meals. But …
Yes?
… but nobody will come, because all this will never be over.
*
Do you know you are like one possessed? You have only one thought, one wish: to eat to your heart’s content
.
I’m hungry.
It’s not becoming to think of food all the time
.
It’s not becoming to be hungry all the time.
You mean to tell me nothing else counts?
There
is
nothing else.
And what about ideas? Ideals? All the great dreams of man imposing
his will on the universe? The old man’s joy of discovering at last the secret of the wait?
You may have them all for one crust of bread.
And God?
Let’s not talk about God. Not here.
Could it be you no longer believe in Him?
I didn’t say that.
Am I to understand your faith has not deserted you?
I didn’t say that either. I said that I refuse to speak about God, here in this place. To say yes would be to lie. To say no—also. If need be, I would confront Him with an angry shout, a gesture, a murmur. But to make of Him—here—a theological topic, that I won’t do! God—here—is the extra bowl of soup pushed at you or stolen from you, simply because the man ahead of you is either stronger or quicker than you. God—here—cannot be found in humble or grandiloquent phrases, but in a crust of bread …
Which you have had or are about to have?
… which you will never have.
*
Will you remember me?
I promise.
But how? You don’t know who I am, not even I know that
.
It doesn’t matter: I shall remember my promise.
For a long time?
For as long as possible. All my life perhaps. But … why are you laughing?
So that you may remember my laughter as well as the look in my eyes
.
You lie. You laugh because you are going mad.
Perfect. Remember my madness
.
Tell me … am I the reason you’re laughing?
You’re not the only one, my boy, you’re not the only one
.
Treblinka, Birkenau, Belsen, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Belzec, Ponar, Sobibor, Majdanek: somber capitals of a strange kingdom, immense and timeless, where Death, as sovereign, assumed the face of God as well as his attributes in heaven and on earth and even in the heart of man.
The time: 1941–1945. In the middle of the holocaust, a term implying the mystical dimension of the “concentrationary” phenomenon. Nazi Germany is collapsing under the weight of its evil, but for all that, the Jews will not win the war. Many will not see victory.
Written off and abandoned, no power will grant them protection. Their fate has no place on the agendas of the Big Three. Nor does it rouse the conscience of nations. Writers, artists, moralists: some are absorbed by their work, their immortality, others by the conflict in its totality. Everything proceeds as though the Jews did not exist, as though they existed no more. As though Auschwitz were but a peaceful town somewhere in Silesia. President Roosevelt refuses to bomb the railroad tracks leading to it. When consulted, Winston Churchill concurs in the refusal. Moscow condemns German atrocities perpetrated
against civilian populations, but blankets in silence the massacre of the Jews. On both sides, they are sacrificed in advance. People say: History will judge. Indeed. But it will judge without understanding. As for Adolf Hitler, he understands. Moreover, he is convinced that his adversaries themselves will be grateful to him for having resolved for them the eternal Jewish Question. Justice will be rendered him one day and he will be proclaimed the benefactor of humanity; he is persuaded of that.
A gigantic and efficient organization is already at work. Theoreticians, executives, guards, secretaries, typists, engineers and technicians of various kinds: all devote to it their energy and enthusiasm. For them, it is the great adventure, the ideal, the exhilarating rise of their star: they are taking part in the most profound mutation of all times, they are reconstructing humanity on new foundations. Thanks to them, this chosen but weakened people will sink into oblivion. The process is everywhere the same. All roads end in night.
Rejected by mankind, the condemned do not go so far as to reject it in turn. Their faith in history remains unshaken, and one may well wonder why. They do not despair. The proof: they persist in surviving—not only to survive, but to testify.
The victims elect to become witnesses.
On his way to the mass grave, the historian Simon Dubnow exhorts the Jews of Riga, his companions in misfortune: “Open your eyes and ears, remember every detail, every name, every sigh! The color of the clouds, the hissing of the wind in the trees, the executioner’s every gesture: the one who survives must forget nothing!”
In Birkenau, a member of the Sonderkommando in charge of maintaining the furnaces, compiles, by the light of the flames, reports and detailed statistics for future generations.
Everywhere, at the very core of distress and death, young militants and wizened old men make notes, consign to paper events, anecdotes, impressions. Some are only children: David Rubinstein and Anne Frank.
Behind the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto, Emmanuel Ringelblum and his hundred scribes have but a single thought: to gather and bury as many documents as possible—so much suffering, so many trials must not be lost to History. Since European Jewry is doomed, it becomes imperative to at least preserve the scorched vestiges of its passing.
Poems, litanies, plays: to write them, Jews went without sleep, bartered their food for pencils and paper. They gambled with their fate. They risked their lives. No matter. They went on fitting together words and symbols. An instant before perishing in Auschwitz, in Bialistok, in Buna, dying men described their agony. In Buchenwald, I attended several “literary” evenings and listened to anonymous poets reciting verses I was too young to understand. They did not write them for me, for us, but for the others, those on the outside and those yet unborn.
There was then a veritable passion to testify for the future, against death and oblivion, a passion conveyed by every possible means of expression.
Terse documents. Precisely kept ledgers of horrors. Accounts told with childlike artlessness. What they have in common is their desire to tear from the clutches of night the life and death
of what was once a flourishing, vibrant community before it became a hunted pack at bay. Haunting, terrifying, they waver between scream and silent anger. Established facts, known episodes, examined and reexamined, yet endlessly astounding, episodes which are comic and therefore all the more harrowing: one always thinks one knows this or that aspect of the holocaust. Wrong: everything remains to be discovered. Reading certain books by authors who do not know each other, one wonders: they describe the same scenes, the same partings. It all begins and it all ends the same way. It has all been said, yet all remains to be said.
Autobiographical accounts or imagined texts, the principal character remains the camp or the ghetto, each with its diminishing population devoured by time or death.
The ghetto with its ghosts, its gravediggers, the empty, glassy or demented stares of its children. The inside of a nightmare one gets used to, and even very quickly: in a single night, a single hour, one acquires knowledge and wisdom. The child discovers the old man within himself. Overnight, familiar patterns and concepts give way. To be replaced by new ones. Soon accepted. One loves, invokes the purity and irreducibility of love, celebrates marriages and religious holidays. One sings, hides, deceives and mocks oneself. One begs for a potato, a shred of consolation. One sees oneself as other and elsewhere. And what if tomorrow one dies of hunger, of illness, of exhaustion or simply of hope—yes, hope.
Crazed with pain, tortured, an eight-year-old cries out: “I want to steal, I want to eat, I want to be German. So I can eat, eat without shame, and sleep, sleep without fear.” He dies without eating. Other children mature too early, succumb to
the cold, to the anguish of seeing their parents humiliated and beaten. Some become targets for soldiers who as good warriors must practice their aim.
And then there are the camps. And the fear they arouse in the inhabitants of the ghettos. The children are taken first. Then come the old, the jobless, the sick, the resigned, all those who do not possess a working permit, either yellow, red or green, stamped by the military, the police or the German employer. Anyway, one never knows which color is the right one.
Ultimately, nobody believes in permits or pledges any more. Here and there, young people arm themselves or join the partisans in the woods. Here and there, they build subterranean shelters, fortified bunkers, lines of defense. Here and there, they prepare an insurrection to teach humanity and history a lesson they hardly deserve. The one in Warsaw will not be forgotten. There were others less well known. And yet, every revolt had its poet, every massacre its historian. How many documents still lie buried at the bottom of how many pits? One day they will be discovered. For the moment, every account from every ghetto is valid for all. The same anger animates them. Will there come a day when it will be appeased?