All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [14]
It shames me to admit that I was sorry to leave the hospital after only a week.
I was ten in 1938, the year of Munich, Daladier and Chamberlain, Léon Blum’s “cowardly relief,” and Churchill’s prophetic wrath. The first refugees began arriving from Czechoslovakia, that small country so devoted to democracy, the country of Masaryk and Beneš, of tolerance and liberty, the envy of Central and Eastern Europe.
Among the refugees were disillusioned soldiers and resigned civilians betrayed by the grandiloquent promises of their Franco-British allies. Toward what lands were these exiles headed? They had little to say and asked for nothing. I don’t even know if they spent the night in Sighet. It all came back to me in 1968, the year of the West’s second betrayal of Czechoslovakia. If Václav Havel inspired such support throughout the world in 1989 and 1990, I want to believe it was due in part to the “civilized world’s” feeling of guilt toward his nation.
Tragedy loomed, but life went on. I paid little attention to the outside world. I was growing up, maturing, learning more difficult and obscure texts. Hitler’s howling failed to penetrate my consciousness. The Nuremberg laws, the Olympic Games, the assassination of Von Rath, Kristallnacht? Hadrian and the Inquisition had done worse. We hoped that the Third Reich would crumble of its own weight, that the great powers of Europe would hold the line, that Hitler and his acolytes would founder. We hoped there would be no war.
But there was. It broke out on a Friday in the month of Elul, when we were all preparing for the High Holidays. In the morning the blowing of the shofar called upon sinners to repent. During Elul, they say, even the fish tremble in the waters. In a corner of the Beit Hamidrash my father and his friends, draped in their prayer shawls and wearing their phylacteries, talked about the latest news. Their excited voices rose, and their elders hissed at them to be quiet: “Ssh, we’re praying here!” To this day I can still hear that “Ssh,” and I know so well what it meant: What an idea to chatter and fret when Jews are addressing the King of the Universe. What an idea for peoples and their armies to slaughter one another over a few scraps of land or a few slogans while God was listening to His faithful.
The discussion was halted and the service continued, concluding, as usual, with the prayer for the dead, the Kaddish. Cannon fire could already be heard in the distance. The dying had begun, and the first orphans were learning to bear their grief. Yet my own existence was not disturbed unduly. That Friday I received my usual braided bread from my grandmother. I went to the ritual baths to purify myself for the approach of the Queen of Shabbat. I put on a white shirt, my best suit, and prepared myself for the peace of the seventh day of Creation, which the passions of men must not disturb.
Nothing exceptional occurred that Shabbat. At the morning service I heard that a famous preacher was in town and would deliver a sermon that afternoon. He was so thin you could hardly see him. How could such a tiny man have such a deep, resonant voice? I expected him to talk about current events, but he had other priorities. Using an intonation customary among Lithuanian preachers, he described the fierce, implacable punishment that awaited the wicked, those guilty of sexual transgressions and depravities I was too young to understand. They said he was so nearsighted as to be almost blind, but he seemed to know his way around hell