All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [180]
I looked at myself in the mirror. A skeleton stared back at me.
Nothing but skin and bone.
It was the image of myself after death. It was at that instant that the will to live awakened within me.
Without knowing why, I raised my fist and shattered the glass, along with the image it held. I lost consciousness.
After I got better, I stayed in bed for several days, jotting down notes for the work that you, dear reader, now hold in your hands.
But …
… Today, ten years after Buchenwald, I realize that the world forgets. Germany is a sovereign state. The German army has been reborn. Ilse Koch, the sadist of Buchenwald, is a happy wife and mother. War criminals stroll in the streets of Hamburg and Munich. The past has been erased, buried.
Germans and anti-Semites tell the world that the story of six million Jewish victims is but a myth, and the world, in its naïveté, will believe it, if not today, then tomorrow or the next day.
So it occurred to me that it might be useful to publish in book form these notes taken down in Buchenwald.
I am not so naïve as to believe that this work will change the course of history or shake the conscience of humanity.
Books no longer command the power they once did.
Those who yesterday held their tongues will keep their silence tomorrow.
That is why, ten years after Buchenwald, I ask myself the question, Was I right to break that mirror?
By the time Night was published in France, I was at work on another book. One critic, René Lalo, expressed surprise; he was convinced I would write nothing more after Night. In one sense, he was right: There was nothing more I could say about Auschwitz, since words that seek to grasp its reality are doomed to fail from the start. But then, what to do with all this acquired knowledge? Is it not imperative to testify if only so as to leave a trace? For whom? For what? Who will decipher it? Understand? And yet …
Writing for me is a painful pleasure. The most difficult part is to begin. Once the first sentence appears on paper, the rest follows. The path is clear. “Somewhere a child began to cry.” That was Dawn. From those few words I knew my characters would live and die in Palestine. “Outside dusk fell upon the city like a vandal’s heavy fist.” Thus begins The Town Beyond the Wall The Gates of the Forest opened with a phrase suggesting encounter and parting, the gulf of forgetfulness and the discovery of sharing: “He had no name, so he gave him his own.” In The Forgotten it was Elhanan’s prayer that served as lure: “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, forget not their son who calls upon them now.”
There are some words I cannot bring myself to use; they paralyze me. I cannot write the words “concentration,” “night and fog,” “selection,” or “transport” without a feeling of sacrilege. Another difficulty, of a different type: I write in French, but I learned the language from books and therefore I am not good at slang.
All my subsequent works are written in the same deliberately spare style as Night. It is the style of the chroniclers of the ghettos, where everything had to be said swiftly, in one breath. You never knew when the enemy might kick in the door, sweeping us away into nothingness. Every phrase was a testament. There was no time or reason for anything superfluous. Words must not be imprisoned or harnessed, not even in the silence of the page. And yet, it must be held tightly. If the violin is to sing, its strings must be stretched so tight as to risk breaking; slack, they are merely threads.
To write is to plumb the unfathomable depths of being. Writing lies within the domain of mystery. The space between any two words is vaster than the distance between heaven and earth. To bridge it you must close your eyes and leap. A Hasidic tradition tells us that in the Torah the white spaces, too, are God-given. Ultimately, to write is an act of faith.
Spring 1958. The war in Algeria was at its height, gaining destructive momentum on both sides. Incredibly, some men invest more passion in killing than in living and bringing