All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [210]
Ilya Ehrenburg was an example. During the last years of the war, along with Vasily Grossman (author of the brilliant Lije and Fate), he scoured cities and villages, gathering chronicles and testimony from survivors of the ghettos and the camps. Together they compiled an anthology of human cruelty and Jewish suffering reaching from Vilna to Minsk, Berdichev to Kiev, Kharkov to Odessa. This “black book” contained accounts one cannot read without feeling despair. It was not published because by 1945 Stalin had changed his policy toward both Germany and the Jews. The Kremlin’s spokesmen and propagandists received orders to no longer emphasize German atrocities or the calvary of their Jewish victims. Ehrenburg had to relinquish the original manuscript, and it was thought that the secret police had destroyed it, an assumption that proved not entirely correct: A single copy had been preserved and covertly transmitted to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Only twenty years after Ehrenburg’s death was it revealed that the writer himself had taken steps to protect this work of Jewish memory. It was he who had entrusted a copy of the manuscript to a reliable friend who was to convey it to Jerusalem when the chance arose. Novelist, pamphleteer, propagandist, and Communist, if not Stalinist, Ehrenburg nevertheless had remained a Jew at heart.
My stay in the Soviet Union had brought encounter upon encounter, adventure upon adventure. I had promised everyone I spoke to that I would not forget them, that I would transmit their greetings to their uncles and cousins in Tel Aviv and Brooklyn, and most of all that I would try to be their spokesman. Though I did try my best, I was later to acknowledge that I had failed in America and France. Yes, my testimony did cause a stir, but despite the publication of excerpts of my book in L’Express in France and The Saturday Evening Post in America, the movement to support Soviet Jews remained largely lethargic. Because Arthur Cohen wanted the book to be published as soon as possible, he asked Neal Kozodoy to translate it from my Yedioth articles written in Hebrew.
I decided to return to the USSR about a year later. Thinking that it would be safer not to go alone, I asked my friend, the physician and poet Michel Salomon, to go with me. The KGB, it seems, was more brazen when dealing with lone travelers. Michel was doubtful: “Do you really think they’ll give you a visa after what you’ve written?” I explained that I had submitted my application before my book was published. He agreed to come along. We left from Paris, determined to keep a low profile. The first thing I saw when we deplaned was that the Israeli chargé d’affaires, David Bartov, and his wife, Esther, had come to greet us. I called out to them, and David answered in Hebrew. Michel nudged me to remind me that we were supposed to be inconspicuous. We sped through the city in David’s diplomatic vehicle. Two spacious rooms had been reserved for us at the National Hotel. That very evening the Bartovs took us to a performance by a traveling Yiddish troupe. It was an enthusiastic audience, with many young people. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. There were standing ovations for the actors. After the performance people gathered around us, asking questions about what was happening “outside” and especially in Israel. I remembered some of them from the year before. When they asked if they would see me at the synagogue, I told them nothing could keep me away, but the next day David said it was “out of the question” for me to go to services. “You’re not going anywhere except to the airport,” he said. “It’s imperative you get on the first plane for any Western capital.” He had learned from a reliable source that the KGB had just realized that the author of The Jews