All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [22]
I feel fine, I told her whenever I noticed her anxiety. Have faith in me. She need not have worried. My friends’ illnesses had undoubtedly been smoldering for a long time. Anyway, I was all right. She, too, begged me to be careful.
I promised her I would be, but I knew it was a promise I wouldn’t keep. In fact, I was prepared to confront far greater perils, for my friends’ illness had convinced me of the importance of our mission. If Satan struck at us so hard, it was because we were hindering him. We therefore had to press on, going all the way.
Now as I recount this episode of my adolescence, I realize how naïve I was. I really believed that a few prayers and Kabalistic formulas could halt the hangman and save his victims. My friends believed it too. Was it because they came to understand their mistake that they slid into madness?
Alone with my master, I found him confident and full of ardor. “The Messiah will come,” he told me. “You’ll see, Eliezer, in the end He will come. It’s enough for a single being to want it, to want it sincerely and completely, and the universe will be saved.” That very evening we set to work again.
April 1943. It was the middle of Passover. My mother, busy in the kitchen, commented on a report she had just read in a newspaper. The Warsaw ghetto had rebelled, and the German army was conducting reprisals. The ghetto was in flames. “Why did our young Jews do that?” she mused. “Why couldn’t they have just waited calmly for the war to end?” That was the word she used—calmly.
My poor mother.
Years later I would learn the truth about the uprising, one of the most noble and admirable of Jewish history, the first civilian insurrection in occupied Europe. It lasted as long as the French army held out against the German invasion in 1940. The Jewish combatants knew they had no chance of winning, or even of surviving. Their battle was lost in advance. But they were determined to salvage what they called Jewish honor. On the first night of the revolt the insurgents congratulated themselves, embracing before the bodies of the first dead German soldiers. The hangmen were mortal after all. Mordechai Anielewicz, commander in chief of the Jewish Resistance, wrote: “The ghetto has risen.… It is the most beautiful day of my life.” But his aide, Antek Zuckerman, sent into the Aryan zone to purchase weapons, faced a wall of incomprehension and indifference. The ghetto burned, and on the other side lovers came to gaze upon the spectacle. Czesław Miłosz drew inspiration from this for his moving poem “Campo di Fiori.” “We were betrayed,” wrote Anielewicz before committing suicide in the underground shelters of Mila 18. In London, Artur Zygelbojm, a leader of the Zionist Bund and a member of the Polish parliament-in-exile, killed himself in an effort to arouse the conscience of humanity. But no one took notice of the poor man’s “gesture.”
The days passed quickly in my little town. We were getting ready for the next holiday, Shavuot, which commemorates the revelation at Sinai. “Thou shalt not kill,” the Lord ordered man on that day.
But men would be killers, as I would soon enough discover.
We didn’t take any vacation in 1943. Usually we went to Fantana, a mountain village near Borsha, where my father would join us for Shabbat. I loved that monthlong “change of scene.” Sometimes I played chess with my father’s friends. I often lost, but was delighted to be playing with adults, since it meant I was being taken seriously. In the afternoon I would take long walks by myself. But one day, as I left the village, I noticed a man and a woman lying on the grass. They were laughing. I recognized them and averted my eyes. A saying of the Besht came to my mind: If you see someone committing a sin in secret,