All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [103]
Still, not everyone was prepared to sacrifice himself for the city. Religious anti-Zionists prodded the population to despair; they wanted defeat. They were few in number, but it hurt.
Who will console the violated and defeated city? When will it be consoled?
That was my last entry.
The religious anti-Zionists reminded me of Flavius Josephus. He, too, sought to demoralize the inhabitants by preaching resignation and inciting fighters to despair. Is there nothing new in the annals of our history? The question fascinated me, but I doubted it would interest my employers in Paris. They wanted a reporter, not a historian. I had been sent here to speak of living Jews, not dead Romans, of a wandering, dispossessed people who had become proud citizens. Flavius Josephus could wait. He had waited this long, he could wait a little longer.
Elie with his friends Dov and Lea Judkowski in Florence, 1953.
Sharing some light moments with friend Teddy Pilley (with bow tie) and other interpreters, Geneva, 1953.
Summit Conference, Geneva, 1955. Elie is front row left.
At the Western Wall in Jerusalem with Dov, immediately after the Old City was recaptured in the Six-Day War.
Shortly after the war, at Sharm-el-Sheikh with Mordehai Bar-On, Moshe Dayan’s chief of staff.
At a rally for Soviet Jews in New York, 1968.
With four Israeli Prime Ministers (counterclockwise): David Ben-Gurion, Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, and Yitzhak Rabin.
With President Lyndon Johnson, 1964.
The new immigrants had some surprises for me. As I talked to them in the absorption centers, towns, and villages, I began to hear complaints and recriminations that left me disappointed and disillusioned. There were protests against bureaucracy, economic hardship, and housing shortages. That much I could understand. But the problem ran deeper. “They don’t like us, won’t accept us,” some told me. Astonished, I asked them to elaborate, and when they did, it hurt.
They said “it” had been going on since 1945. That in Palestine too, survivors of the camps were treated like outcasts, victims to be pitied at best. They were given housing and commiseration, but little respect. They were made to feel that they themselves were to blame for their suffering: They should have left Europe earlier, as they had been advised to do, or risen up against the Germans. In other words, the immigrants were seen to embody what young Jews in Palestine refused to be: victims. As such they represented the saddest image in Jewish history: the weak, stooped Jew in need of protection. They personified the Diaspora and its indignities.
“We came here hoping to escape humiliation,” a former teacher from Lodz told me. “But in their eyes I am human wreckage,” a former merchant from Radom told me sadly.
Things had gotten steadily worse since 1948. Proud Israelis sometimes openly manifested their contempt for the new immigrants, the olim ’hadashim. “Six hundred thousand of us defeated six well-equipped Arab armies. Six million of you let yourselves be led like lambs to the slaughter.” How to explain it to them? How to tell them that they didn’t understand, could never understand?
They looked down on the new immigrants, who were seen as cowards and smugglers, and schemers who dreamed only of enriching themselves illicitly, of deceiving the government and sowing disorder in the land. Some were even told that they weren’t fooling anyone, that since they survived, they had probably been members of the Judenrat or, worse, kapos.
It doesn’t seem possible, but at school pupils called their immigrant classmates sabonim, little “soap cakes.