All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [195]
Since then, that has changed. For some time now the event has been central to the reflections of all three branches of Judaism.
Armed with a precious green card and later an American passport, I traveled a lot during the sixties. In 1960, two Israeli colleagues and I were invited to Cuba by Fidel Castro. At the time he simply referred to himself as a revolutionary, nothing more. Hence the popularity of his message. We were greeted by young men, barely more than teenagers, all of them high officials: department heads, ambassadors, and even cabinet ministers. We spent three weeks meeting with the charming young revolutionaries who had overthrown President Fulgencio Batista and his corrupt regime. Factory workers greeted us with the cry “Venceremos!” (We shall win!). The same promise was voiced in Fidel’s speeches, which could last all night, while the excited, mesmerized crowd periodically chanted “Venceremos!” Magnificent young machine-gun-toting militiawomen repeated the phrase with a smile as they guarded the entrances to government offices and the big hotels, stopping all who entered and searching (though none too seriously) those they found suspicious. We wondered how to arouse their suspicion in order to be searched by one of them, for some of Castro’s militiawomen were lovely indeed. Still, we all have priorities and I yearned to get back to New York for Rosh Hashana. Unfortunately, the official in charge of us at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs informed us that all flights were fully booked—for at least two or three weeks. I protested, shouted, begged. Even the Israeli embassy could do nothing. I was eventually offered a seat on a flight from Havana to Prague. That was when I almost panicked. The situation awoke my old anxieties. In the end I got back to New York in time to celebrate Rosh Hashana in my shtibel among the Hasidim of Guer.
I felt as though I were back in Sighet when I went to that shtibel. All the congregants were survivors. They prayed with a fervor I have encountered nowhere else. It was as though they were trying to persuade the Lord to once more become a Father to His people instead of their Judge.
I remember Shimon Zucker and his tales of the Lodz ghetto: the raids, the hunt for Jewish children, the cries of their parents. He fought to hold back his tears when he told of his own little boy who wanted so much to live.
And then there was Reb Avraham Zemba, the gentle, reticent nephew of the chief rabbi of Warsaw. He was quite old and would regularly take me aside and ask whether I knew the Talmudic saying according to which we are not alone when we bring sacrifices to God. Just as regularly, he would answer himself that the angel Michael, who is in heaven, is also bringing sacrifices to God, though his souls are those of the Righteous. “So it continues even on high!” Reb Avraham Zemba would exclaim.
Having tracked down Menashe Klein, my old friend from Buchenwald, Ambloy, and Taverny, I now saw him regularly. He looked older, but I could have picked him out in a crowd of a hundred rabbis. I could not have forgotten his determined glance, his stately bearing, the way he leaned over a tractate of the Talmud.
Never give in, never give up: that had been his motto. He repeated over and over that our people had seen other ordeals. Granted, this one was unique, but it was incumbent upon us to surmount it, as our ancestors had surmounted theirs. They rebuilt their sanctuaries, reopened their schools, helped one another resist the wicked. May we be worthy of their strength and their faith; otherwise the enemy will be victorious.
To this day I see Menashe at least once a month, sometimes more often. We share a project: to build a Beit Hamidrash (House of Study) in Jerusalem in my fathers name.