All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [16]
Yet there were many harbingers of evil. Though no one was yet talking of liquidation or extermination, news of massacres in Poland began to filter through. And that should have been enough to awaken us. In 1941 more than a thousand “foreign” Jews—those unable to document their Hungarian citizenship—were expelled from Hungarian territory to Polish Galicia. I remember going to the station to say goodbye. Everybody was there. We thought we would see them again someday, but only one managed to escape, and that was Moshe the beadle. Dazed, madness in his eyes, he told a hair-raising story: Those expelled (they were not yet called deportees) had been slaughtered and buried naked in ditches near Kolomyya, Stanislav, and Kamenets-Podolski. He talked on and on about the brutality of the killers, the agony of dying children, and the death of old people, but no one believed him. The Germans are human beings, people said, even if the Nazis aren’t. The more convincing Moshe the beadle tried to be, the less seriously he was taken. He has suffered too much, people said, so much that he doesn’t know what he’s saying. Then he would lose his temper. “Listen to me!” he would shout. “I’m telling the truth, I swear it! On my life I swear it, and on yours! If I’m lying, how come I’m alone? Where is my wife and our children? What about the others, your former neighbors? Where are they? I’m telling you, they killed them. If you don’t believe me, you’re crazy.” Poor guy, everyone said. Raving mad. Which only made him angrier: “You’re irresponsible, I’m telling you! What happened to us will happen to you. If you want to look away, go ahead! But if I’m lying, why do I say Kaddish morning and night? And why do you say, ‘Amen’?” That much was true. He recited the prayer for the dead ten times in the morning and ten times in the evening, attending every service, rushing from synagogue to synagogue seeking a minyan so he could say another Kaddish, and yet another. But the people were deaf to his pleas. I liked him and often kept him company, but I, too, could not bring myself to believe him. I listened, staring into his feverish face as he described his torment, but my mind resisted. Galicia is not exactly the end of the world, I told myself. It’s only a few hours from here. If what he’s saying were true, we would have heard.
Besides which, my mother was not entirely wrong. Her optimism was understandable. Things had been relatively quiet for the Jews since Admiral Horthy had taken power in Hungary. He had influential Jewish friends, some of whom had converted. The most outrageous forms of collective harassment ceased, and expulsions to Galicia were suspended. Though allied to Germany, Hungary treated its own Jews as it saw fit. Apart from the numerus clausus in the university and the major academies, the Jews had little cause for complaint. The vociferous insults of the Nyilas fascists were troubling, but no more than that, for they were not in power. Exempted from military service, young Jewish males were drafted into the Munkaszolgálat, a kind of auxiliary force that accompanied the troops as quartermasters, digging antitank trenches in summer and cutting wood in winter. They did not complain unduly, nor did their families. Synagogues and Jewish elementary and secondary schools were packed and yeshivas flourished, as did Jewish commerce. Sports clubs, cultural centers, and Zionist organizations conducted their activities openly and legally: there were field trips, seminars, public debates.
Still, Regent Horthy was anything but a democrat. He tolerated no opposition. His police persecuted and tortured Communists—especially Jewish Communists—and terrorized their families. There was talk of this in the Houses of Study. I didn’t know it at the time. I only found out long after the war, when I was researching my book The Testament.
I am still fascinated by the phenomenon of religious Jews opting for communism. How could a Jew imbued with Moses and Isaiah adopt the theories—or the faith—of Marx and Stalin? In the course