All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [142]
We were shown to comfortable chairs, but I couldn’t sit still. Two adolescents joined us. Our hostess looked at her sons proudly. Givon chatted with them about their studies. I nodded, agreeing with everything they said. A relaxed, intimate atmosphere was suddenly interrupted by the ringing of a telephone. Madame Mendès-France went out. My heart pounded. It was bad news. “My husband asks you to excuse him. He’s been detained at the National Assembly.” End of dream. I felt my stomach turn over but managed to conceal my disappointment. Oh well, I would write an article about how I almost met Mendès-France, a sort of interview in absentia.
Dov’s reaction: “Why give up? You’re a friend of the family now.” I intended to prevail once more upon Givon, who, after all, really was a friend of the family. Unfortunately, he had to leave Paris. International developments required his presence elsewhere. Ho Chi Minh? Khrushchev? I bombarded him with questions, but he merely shrugged. I wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not, but he had brought me to Mendès-France’s home, and if he knew the French prime minister, he might well be on speaking terms with other world leaders too. In any case, he vanished from Paris.
He reappeared at Orly Airport sometime later, when the Israeli ambassador and his entourage came to welcome General Moshe Dayan, who was on an official visit to Paris. The rest of us had to stand in a special waiting room, but there was Givon, limping out onto the tarmac and shaking hands with the illustrious visitor just as he came down the ramp. Who had given him authorization? The ambassador was as puzzled as I was, and his advisers knew no more than he did.
I saw Givon again in Geneva in 1955, during the summit conference attended by Soviet marshals Zhukov and Bulganin (covered with medals), British prime minister Anthony Eden (more elegant than his colleagues), French prime minister Edgar Faure (the most intellectual of the group), and Eisenhower (godfather, if not father, to the meeting). I was most interested in Zhukov, conqueror of Berlin, the man who had vanquished Hitler. If only I could approach him, I would ask him to confirm Givon’s claim that they were friends.
Givon intrigued the press by accompanying the chief of East German intelligence everywhere. From that moment on we communicated only through the mail: cards and letters from Warsaw, Peking, Prague, and Moscow, where he became a movie producer. It was also in Moscow that he married the daughter of one of the physicians imprisoned on Stalin’s orders during the time of the so-called Doctors’ Plot. “I will never return to the West,” he wrote to me. “It’s too late to turn back now.” Izvestia (or was it Pravda?) published an article denouncing him for dealing in “contraband.” Arrested as a smuggler, he was sentenced to ten years in prison. “I’m innocent,” he told me in a pathetic letter. “The truth will out in the end.” The truth—the word seemed flexible coming from Givon. But he was right. He was released—“thanks to the intervention of several Western ambassadors”—with the court’s apologies. Disgusted with the Soviet system, he returned to Prague and then resurfaced in Paris, where he lived in my old room at the Lenemans’ home. After that, he settled in Israel, where he died of a heart attack.
Newspapers and magazines in Tel Aviv published many obituaries and articles about him and the many sides of