All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [192]
For me survivors constitute a family like no other, an endangered species. We understand one another intuitively. We are haunted by the same past, the same problems concern us, the same mission moves us. We often have the same friends and always the same enemies. There are all kinds of survivors, sages and whiners, optimists and pessimists, generous ones and bitter ones. Some decided to celebrate their survival by making money. Having lost everything, they re-created a family, a life, preferably a comfortable one. Wealthy, often very wealthy, it took some of them years to become aware of the importance of joining the battle against forgetfulness. As they get older, they are catching up.
Night and my articles in the Yiddish press were at the root of my friendship with Yossel Rosensaft and his Bergen-Belsen group.
Brimming with vitality, Yossel was short and stocky, shrewd and imaginative, a man who loved telling off-color jokes and irreverent anecdotes. Though rough, his language was brilliant and his lifestyle was princely. Yossel first impressed me as a study in contrasts. He lived in a luxurious apartment filled with canvases of Impressionist masters. Originally from Poland, a former inmate of Auschwitz and Belsen, he talked about the camps endlessly and without the slightest inhibition. I confess that at first I was taken aback. I thought he was trivializing our common experience and I couldn’t understand what motivated him. Yet he radiated a charm that was difficult to resist. He was a self-made man who respected writers and intellectuals and liked to surround himself with them. He had a sure taste—and was a good adviser—in art, as demonstrated by the quality of his Picassos, Chagalls, Renoirs, and Manets. He loved to laugh and make you laugh. He enjoyed life and was always ready to have a good time. Yet he was easily moved to tears. His friends adored him.
When I came to interview him for Yedioth Ahronoth, he told me about the transformation of Belsen just after war’s end. As president of the camp, which had become a center for displaced persons, he managed to establish a kind of temporary, autonomous Jewish town, with its own security, courts, hospitals, schools, and synagogues, even its own theaters, newspapers, clubs, and political parties. He must have liked my article, for he invited me back, but when I stepped off the elevator into his apartment, he wasn’t there. I waited five minutes, ten minutes. I scribbled a few harsh words—“Money gives you certain rights, but not the right to waste my time”—and walked out.
He phoned immediately to apologize. There had been a misunderstanding, a mistake, a message that somehow went astray. Would I please come back? He would send his driver for me. I told him I was too busy—and I stayed busy for another few years.
His best friend, Sam Bloch, a former partisan and born conciliator, was the Bergen-Belsen Association’s most likable and dynamic member. Like the high priest Aaron, he found quarrels intolerable. I know few people who invest so much time and energy in fostering harmony among his fellows. However, with me he failed: I refused to see his friend again, at least until 1965.
Once again Yossel called and asked to see me. His group was organizing a pilgrimage to Belsen and he wanted to invite me. Something in what he said made me relent. I agreed to join the “Belseners,” as they called one another. After that we saw each other often. No matter what part of the world he happened to be in, he was always surrounded by his Belsen buddies, always rehashing funny or pathetic memories with them. “Remember the guy who showed up with his cow? And the British officer who came to harass us because of the way we were aiding illegal immigration to Palestine? And the stir our delegation made at the Zionist Congress in Basel?” He loved making speeches in Yiddish (his English was anything but polished). “When we look back on it