All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [17]
I believe that even my mother, pious as she was, felt the attraction of the Communist ideal. I remember a laughing, mustached man who would visit her at the store when things were slow. They would talk in low voices. After the war I found out he was an underground Communist activist. Perhaps it was under his influence that at one point she abandoned the broadcasts of Radio London for those of Radio Moscow.
The fall of Paris, German victories in North Africa, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor—there was talk of all this, of course, and previously unknown names became current: Tobruk, El Alamein, Voronezh, Stalingrad. But the war itself seemed distant and unreal, almost mythical, coming home to us only when Italian troops passed through the city on their way to the front (strumming mandolins) or on their way back (silent, their heads hanging). It forced its way into our consciousness indirectly, when Polish refugees arrived. Assigned by the community to look after them, my father listened to their testimony and moved heaven and earth to get them money and false papers and to prevent the gendarmes from expelling them.
Once someone came to tell my father that a young woman had been seen being escorted by two gendarmes. He seemed to hesitate for a moment. Should he get up in the middle of the Shabbat meal? We quickly recited the customary blessings, and my father left. A few hours later he was back. “This is serious,” he said, looking gloomy. “More serious than usual. She told the investigating officer everything. Her flight from a ghetto in Galicia, the murder of her parents. She should have kept silent.”
These officers, thank God, could be bribed with money and a few bottles of pàlinka, their underlings with a single bottle and a bit of small change. When the laws got stricter, my father had a new idea. Having discovered that anyone apprehended with foreign currency would immediately be transferred to the counterespionage bureau in Budapest, he arranged to supply refugees with a few U.S. dollars, Swiss francs, or pounds sterling, which prevented them from being sent back to Poland. In Budapest there was an underground network to help them, and almost all survived. One, however, was arrested in a raid, taken to the police station, and tortured. In his confession he named the person who had helped him.
I will never forget my father’s arrest, nor the look on his face after his release: all the things he never said could be read in his eyes. He spent weeks in prison, first in Sighet, then in Debrecen, and was released, thanks to his friends in Budapest, who managed to buy off either the prosecutor or the judge himself. Bea, the most resourceful of the family, took the train to bring him home. When he saw us waiting at the station, a sad, disenchanted smile I had never seen before flickered across his face. He seemed to have aged. Day after day I watched him. Had he been beaten, tortured? What had they done to him to give his face that grayish color, those lines of exhaustion and resignation? I didn’t dare ask, yet I yearned to know. “I know,” Bea told me years later. I begged her to share the secret with me, but she refused, simply repeating, “I know, I know.” She was already gravely ill, and I didn’t insist. I could have asked him myself in the camp, where we shared our grief and fear, but I was too shy even to mention his imprisonment. I told myself it wasn’t the time or the place. I was wrong.
Why is it that my town still enchants me so? Is it because in my memory it is entangled with my childhood? In all my novels it serves as background and vantage point. In my fantasy I still see myself in it.
I often re-create my town, so like and yet so different from all