All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [220]
Twenty minutes before we landed, the stewardess was back, as pretty as before but less affable. Earlier she had leaned toward me and spoken softly. Now she stood up straight and raised her voice so the whole cabin could hear her accuse me of lying to her: “I don’t know who you are, sir—” “It’s about time,” I interjected, but she went on triumphantly, “—but I know you’re not André Schwarz-Bart.” I said: “Prove it.” Savoring the moment, she paused dramatically before delivering the final blow: “You’re not André Schwarz-Bart, because André Schwarz-Bart is sitting right there!” I looked over to where she was pointing, and there was my friend André, in a seat three rows behind me. I unbuckled my seat belt, made my way past the stewardess, and hurried over to him. We fell into each other’s arms. “André, what are you doing here?” He asked me the same question. Even as the pilot announced that we were about to land, we were still standing and talking in the aisle, not hearing the stewardess, who was asking us to sit down. What were we doing here? We knew we had come for the same reason and with the same aim: to be there and to testify.
My people’s quest was mine, its memory my country. Everything that happens to it affects me. I have lived its anguish and been scorched by the fire of its dreams. I belonged to the community of night, the kingdom of the dead, and henceforth I would also belong to the wondrous, exhilarating community of the eternal city of David. It is incumbent upon the Jewish writer to be witness to all that has haunted the people of Israel from its beginnings. That is his role—not to judge but to testify. And in our tradition the responsibilities of the witness are greater than those of the judge; if the testimony is true, the verdict will be just.
The next day, before the reconquered Wall in the Old City, I began writing A Beggar in Jerusalem.
It was an unforgettable day War was still raging in the Sinai and had not yet broken out in the Golan, but everyone’s imagination was fired by the long-awaited liberation of Jerusalem. “The Temple Mount is ours!” shouted Colonel Motta Gur, commander of the parachutists. His cry was heard on every radio in every tank and vehicle. Soldiers and officers burst into tears. People wept throughout the Holy Land. Suddenly the war seemed suspended. Isolated Jordanians were still firing from rooftops, but thousands of Jews rushed to the Old City. No force could deter them.
Rabbis and merchants, Talmudic students and farmers, officers and schoolchildren, artists and scholars—all left whatever they were doing and converged on the Wall, and, when they reached it, kissed the stones and shouted ancient prayers and requests. On this day everybody was running.
I did too. Never did I run so fast, never did I say “Amen” with so much fervor as when I heard the parachutists reciting the minha prayer. On that day, more than ever, I grasped the true meaning of ahavat Israel, devotion to the people of Israel.
An old man, who looked as if he were stepping out of a novel I was to write later, murmured as if to himself, “Do you know how we managed to defeat the enemy? Six million Jewish souls prayed for us.” I touched his arm. “Who are you?” I asked. He looked at me gently: “I am one who prays.”
Entries from my (Yiddish) diary of the time:
… Before telling the story, it is incumbent on us to recall its genesis: the first miracle, the first prayer, the first spark of the fire that lit its path. We must tell everything, but I don’t know where to begin. Doesn’t the Bible itself begin with a beth, and not an aleph? So be it. But this I know: Now, more than ever, we must begin with Jerusalem, city of a thousand generations of men who dreamed of deliverance and paved the way for today’s heroes, Jerusalem, ancient and renewed city bridging the beginning of beginnings and the end of time.
To be sure, young warriors have died to sanctify