All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [136]
These questions haunted me during the crossing. I was worried sick that I might be making the greatest mistake of my life: Should a man marry a beautiful, intelligent, and impulsive woman with a marvelous voice just because he had once loved her and because she had now proposed to him? And because he did not want to hurt her?
I spent most of the voyage in my cabin working. I was writing my account of the concentration camp years—in Yiddish. I wrote feverishly, breathlessly, without rereading. I wrote to testify, to stop the dead from dying, to justify my own survival. I wrote to speak to those who were gone. As long as I spoke to them, they would live on, at least in my memory. My vow of silence would soon be fulfilled; next year would mark the tenth anniversary of my liberation. I was going to have to open the gates of memory, to break the silence while safeguarding it. The pages piled up on my bed. I slept fitfully, never participating in the ship’s activities, constantly pounding away on my little portable, oblivious of my fellow passengers, fearing only that we would arrive in São Paulo too soon.
We were there before I knew it. Nicolas, an Israeli citizen, was quickly cleared for disembarkation, but as a stateless person, I was an object of suspicion. As I waited to go ashore, I suddenly heard shouts in Hebrew. I turned around and, to my surprise, saw a group of some forty Israeli emigrants who had made the crossing in third class. I was furious at myself. My subject had been right here at hand, and I had wasted my time recording memories that could easily have waited a week or a month. I went to speak to them and found them dismayed, even desperate. They had been forbidden to disembark. A local priest pleaded for them: “But their visas are in perfect order.” Sorry, the officials replied. “Their visas have been annulled. We’re just following orders.” While the priest went for help, I asked one of the ship’s officers what would happen to these poor people when the ship lifted anchor. He said that if their visas were not reinstated, they would have to remain on board. “For how long?” He frowned. “Until someone gives them visas.” My journalist’s instinct was aroused. If I stayed with them, I would get my story.
We sailed from port to port, pariahs rejected everywhere. Since my cabin had been reassigned, I traveled with the others in the hold. For one hour a day we were allowed on deck to get some air. I envied the passengers with passports. What wouldn’t I have given to be granted Peruvian or Salvadoran nationality! Stateless persons were regarded not only as noncitizens but as somewhat subhuman as well.
Down in the hold, children cried and parents vented their anger. Some cried out at having let themselves be duped by the missionaries. Others might have felt a similar bitterness but dared not admit it. I was at a loss to understand them. How could they give up Israel for a little money, a visa, and a boat ticket? Were they that unhappy? How could Jews like them, with their past, have agreed to convert? Their ancestors chose death by sword and fire rather than renounce their faith. And they gave it all up for a trip to Brazil? They protested. “We never renounced our faith. The God of Israel is still our God.” But hadn’t they promised to convert? “Promised? So we promised. Don’t we have the right to make promises?” Haim’ke the tailor remembered that it was the anniversary of his mother’s death. We formed a minyan so he could say Kaddish. Baruch the shoemaker tried to justify himself: “I spent two years in the ghetto and fourteen months underground with the partisans. I didn’t have what it takes to stay in Israel. Life’s too hard there.” Others joined in. “Too much hardship … Too much suffering … Don’t judge us too harshly.… We’re not traitors to our people.… We’re good Jews.…”
At the stopover in Montevideo I contacted a Jewish journalist and told him of my companions’ tragic odyssey. He promised to alert the community. In Buenos Aires my cousins Voïcsi and her husband Moishe-Hersh