All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [196]
HERE IS HOW I sometimes speak to the God of my childhood: “Why, then, did You create man? Is it because You have need of him? But what can he do for You? How can his meager triumphs and absurd defeats have any meaning for You?” I have looked in the books Menashe urged me to study and in others as well, but I have not found the answer.
I made several trips to Europe and Israel. In London my publisher was concerned about Night: It was not selling well—in fact, it was not selling. In Paris I attended the summit conference at which de Gaulle brought Eisenhower, Macmillan, and Khrushchev together. The latter was enraged by the U-2 spy planes flight over Soviet territory.
Friends told me of a novel that had created quite a stir: André Schwarz-Bart’s masterpiece, The Last of the Just. Schwarz-Bart and I first met in a corridor at Le Seuil. When we eventually lunched together, I at last discovered a novelist more timid than I. An immediate alliance was forged. I admired his writer’s talent and his poet’s intuition. There was a curious mixture of fervor and reticence in the way he spoke of himself. Jealous colleagues had falsely accused him of plagiarism and ignorance. It hurt him, and I tried to soothe him by telling him what friends would later tell me when bad reviews of my books appeared: “Pay no attention, the book will survive its critics.” André smiled skeptically. I asked him what he would work on next, and he said he wasn’t sure. He felt he needed to study Jewish texts, but he lacked access to sources. I suggested he either come to New York or go to Jerusalem. I gave him the names of several teachers who would be delighted to take him under their wing. He was tempted by the idea, but between two appointments with me he met Simone, a beautiful young woman from Guadeloupe, who later became a novelist in her own right. Eventually, he followed her to her island.
In Israel I covered the Eichmann trial, writing reports for the Jewish Daily Forward. I also wrote an essay for Commentary and l’Arche. Day after day I went to the Beit Haam, the “People’s House,” to listen to survivors’ depositions. The prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, and his colleagues evoked the Crime and the Tragedy with a chilling intensity that sent shivers through the audience. Some sobbed, others merely seemed dazed. The three judges were living embodiments of moderation and dignity. They listened well.
I could not take my eyes off the defendant, who sat in his glass cage impassively taking notes. He seemed utterly unmoved by the recitation of the crimes against humanity and the Jewish people of which he was accused. He looked like an ordinary man. I was told he ate heartily and slept normally. Considering the crushing pressures of the trial, he seemed to bear up well. Neither the prosecutors nor the judges were able to break him.
I thought I remembered him. I knew that he had been in Sighet to supervise the deportation, and I wondered whether he was the man I had seen at the station, visibly saddened because there were no more convoys to send out of this town now emptied of its Jews.
I spent my evenings with Israeli correspondents covering the trial: Haim Guri (lyric poet of the Palmach, who later translated Night and The Jews of Silence into Hebrew); Shmuel Almog (future television boss), and my friend Eliyahu Amiqam (for Yedioth). Their reports were classics of their kind. I talked with them about Israel’s destiny, upheavals, and dramatic turnabouts. Who could have dreamed in the years from 1941 to 1945 that Eichmann would one day stand trial in an independent Jewish state? For the Jews, their rediscovered sovereignty imposed the ethical duty of shaping history rather than enduring it. Justice and truth, power and understanding, needed to be reconciled. And what of the Eichmann trial in all that?
Hannah Arendt was surrounded by her coterie. Many Israeli journalists avoided her, finding her arrogant and condescending. She knew everything before and better than everyone else. I met her only later, at her home, where we discussed her theories of “the