All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [121]
“How much is a life worth?”
“I have no idea.”
“Think about it, please.”
“I can’t.”
“Try. You have to admit it’s an important question. The Germans are ready to pay for murdered Jewish lives, so we have to draw up some kind of price list, don’t we? For instance, does a child’s life go for as much as an old man’s? Do a university professor and a beggar fetch the same price? I mean, you can’t just toss all these Jewish lives in the same bag, can you? We’re businessmen here, aren’t we? So let’s do business.”
“Shut up.”
“Why, am I being unreasonable? Illogical?”
“Shut up. For the love of heaven, shut up.”
Both sides considered the conference a success. When it ended, our little group broke up. Alfred held out his hand, but I turned away. He frowned. “I thought the war between our peoples was over.” I didn’t reply. Sam took a plane for Paris, Rosen for Germany. I went home by train, stopping in Antwerp, where I wanted to see my cousins, the Feigs and the Dicks. I checked into a modest hotel on Pelikaans Straat, filed my last dispatch, and went to bed. Early the next morning someone knocked on my door. When I opened it, there stood Wolfmann. I asked what he wanted. He said hello and made a move to come in, but I stopped him. “Go away,” I said. “I don’t want to see you. Not here, not anywhere.” He smiled, then shrugged and left. I went back to bed, but could not fall asleep.
A few weeks later he showed up at my lodgings in Paris. I was about to throw him out when he started talking—in Hebrew. It was surreal, a nightmare. “I win,” he said calmly. Taking advantage of my surprise, he came into the room and sat down in a chair near the unmade bed. Certain that he had practiced a few phrases just to impress me, I asked him to say something else. He did so without the slightest hesitation. The former Wehrmacht officer spoke fluent Hebrew. I waited for what might come next. Was he going to try to convince me he had learned Hebrew since our meeting in Vassenaar? He let me wait a long moment, then said, slowly and deliberately, still in Hebrew: “I lied to you. I was never a Wehrmacht officer. I’m a Jew.” I wanted to grab him and shake him. Was he telling the truth in Vassenaar or in Paris? “I’m a Jew,” he repeated.
He was a strange character and his story was anything but ordinary: childhood in Germany; emigration to Palestine, where he joined the Communist Party; return to East Germany where he became a high party official; ideological disenchantment; flight to the West, where he was now a (anti-Communist) journalist.
But why the lie, why the game? His answer seemed insane: “Two reasons. First of all, for revenge. All you smart-ass Jews from Poland or Russia think you’re so superior. In Palestine they made fun of me because I was a Yekke, a German Jew. I was treated like a well-bred imbecile who would believe anything. So I wanted to show all of you that I could fool you.” And the other reason? “To show you it’s wrong to judge others too hastily An hour ago you found me contemptible because I was German. Now you like me because I tell you I’m a Jew.”
I looked at him and burst out laughing. He had invented that entire ridiculous, childish story, erecting a barrier between us, for “vengeance” and to win a kind of oratorical joust.
“Look,” I told him, “let’s call Sam. He’s probably at the office by now.” He was. “You owe me a hundred florins,” Alfred said to him in Hebrew. Now it was Sam’s turn to laugh. “I