All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [125]
Of course, I continued to cover current events. There was fighting in Indochina, strikes in France, and we learned with dismay of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, where “cosmopolitanism” was treated as a crime against the people and the state. Trials were held in Moscow, Prague, and Sofia, with supposedly freely given confessions. Laszlo Rajk confessed in Hungary, Rudolf Slansky in Czechoslovakia. Their submission seemed inexplicable. How could all these glorious Communist leaders be spies, saboteurs, and traitors? We tried to understand. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon offered the simplest of explanations: In the USSR the end justified the means. Then came the arrest of Jewish doctors, state anti-Semitism. And the Communist press hit new lows. How could they parrot Pravda’s lies about Zionism, cosmopolitanism, and the Jewish charity organizations without disqualifying themselves? There were even some Jewish Communists (such as André Wurmser) among the propagandists, and they showed special zeal. Had they no shame? As yet we were unaware of the murders of Solomon Mikhoels, Peretz Markish, Dovid Bergelson, Itzik Fefer, Der Nister, and other Jewish writers and poets. Stalin signed their death warrants personally. Among the leading Jewish intellectuals arrested, only academician Lina Stern was spared. She later described her encounters with her codefendants in prison—Itzik Fefer, for one: unrecognizable, doubled over, half mad, his hands bloodied and trembling, he had urged her to confess. There were disturbing, murky rumors about others who were driven mad. Only Peretz Markish was not broken by torture. “I am not guilty,” he shouted at his accusers. “None of us is guilty. You are trying us only because we are Jews.”
Even before these revelations we knew that Jews had been publicly denounced, threatened, persecuted, and humiliated. Yet Communist writers in Paris continued to glorify Stalin. What were they afraid of? Did they really believe that Slansky and London had sold out? It was in an effort to understand the Communist mentality that I later wrote The Testament. Was I right to advance the hypothesis that communism was a kind of religion, a messianism without God? It is enough to examine its vocabulary: expiation, confession, redemption—the words sound like entries in a dictionary of mysticism.
One day I went to a Communist demonstration. Its aim was to mobilize the party of the workers against “filthy bourgeois Zionist intellectuals” who dared to criticize Stalin, father of all oppressed peoples, of the poor yearning for peace and freedom, and probably of an illusion or two as well. The truth be damned! Tirelessly—ecstatically—they repeated the same slogans, the same gestures. The crowd applauded frantically. At the end they stood tall, fists raised, and sang the “Internationale.”
I was never attracted to communism. And yet, had I been born at the beginning of the century, I might have succumbed to the lure of its original prophetic message. In the thirties I was too young and too religious, and after the war I had other problems. I often wondered, had I joined the movement, would I have had the courage to break with it in 1952–53? I think Soviet anti-Semitism would have forced me to do so. I have discussed this more than once with the writer Howard Fast, who tried to explain his long delay in leaving the party by explaining how difficult it was to break with an ideal, a religion, and a family, and that communism had been all those things to him. I was not convinced. Communism, like Nazism, ended in inhumanity. And Stalin hated Jews almost as much as Hitler had.
Whether it was a mere coincidence or a consequence of my disillusionment