All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [15]
We were at war, but I did not feel threatened. For me life went on as before. I had to prepare myself for the Jewish New Year, not an easy task. Salvation requires sincerity: cheating is forbidden. On the Day of Judgment an incorruptible celestial tribunal will decide who shall live and who shall die, who shall perish by the sword, who by fire, and who by thirst.
My grandfather came to spend the High Holidays with us. I gave him my bed and slept on a bench, delighted to gain on two fronts: The discomfort would help me expiate my sins while also making my grandfather happy. I remember that he wept more than usual during the arduous Rosh Hashana service, especially during the last part, the Musaf. Perhaps he sensed what I was too young to imagine: that this war, once unleashed, would sweep away thousands upon thousands of destinies in its torrent.
We knew something of what was happening beyond the borders. The Hungarian and Yiddish newspapers offered vague reports, but we knew things were bad. These were trying times for Jews in German-occupied territories. That was only to be expected. Hitler had made no secret of his criminal intentions toward our people, and we knew very well that hatred backed by power always meant catastrophe. And Hitler’s hatred of the Jews was so visceral and his power so absolute that we had to expect the worst. But we could not anticipate the horror of reality. From Polish refugees passing through our town, all bearing bad news, we heard tales of the German army’s invincibility and brutality. We were told of arbitrary arrests, systematic humiliation, collective persecution, and even of pogroms and massacres. And yet.
The truth is that, in spite of everything we knew about Nazi Germany, we had an inexplicable confidence in German culture and humanism. We kept telling ourselves that this was, after all, a civilized people, that we must not give credence to exaggerated rumors about its army’s behavior.
Yes, that’s what many of the Jews in our town thought, including my mother. We all fell into the trap history had set for us. During World War I the German army had rescued Jews who, under Russian occupation, had been beaten, ridiculed, and oppressed by savage Cossacks whose mentality and traditions were steeped in anti-Semitism. When they left, our region enjoyed a spell of calm. The German officers had been courteous and helpful, unlike the Cossacks. Lulled by memories of the Germans of that era, the Jews refused to believe that their sons could be inhuman. In this the Jews were not alone. Neville Chamberlain reacted in much the same way.
One of the consequences of the Phony War (1939–40), was that Stalin and Hitler redrew the borders of Poland, Hungary, and Romania. The Soviet Union came closer to Sighet, and about a dozen young Jews took the opportunity to slip across the frontier to help build the workers’ paradise. Their Communist “brothers” imprisoned them immediately upon arrival and dispatched them to that empire of oppression that would later be called the Gulag. Leizer Bash and his young fiancée, both distant relatives of my father, spent more than ten years there. I learned of their experience in Canada in 1954. Arrested just after setting foot on Soviet soil, they were accused of spying for the bourgeois fascists. They were sentenced, sent from prison to prison and camp to camp, and finally wound up in Siberia. In his suffering Leizer discovered in himself a vocation as a Yiddish writer. His works are eyewitness accounts of life in the Gulag ten years before Solzhenitsyn.
Another consequence was the German invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Jews nevertheless were optimistic. The beginning of the real war, we felt, would mean the end of Hitler’s Germany.
A third consequence was that Sighet became Máramarossziget again. The population joyfully greeted the first “motorized” units of the Hungarian army: troops on bicycles. My mother, too, was pleased with our change of nationality. For her it was a kind of return to her childhood