All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [30]
My friends were there, and we talked things over. Everyone agreed that the German occupation would be bad for the Jews, but that was as far as our imagination went. After all, the Red Army was so near, just across the mountains. Yerahmiel, the ardent Zionist, suggested we take the opportunity to escape to Palestine. “Let’s go, right now! Take advantage of the fact that the Germans aren’t here yet.” Someone reminded him that there was a war on. “Exactly,” he retorted. And how were we supposed to get across the border? “Never mind, we could do it if we wanted to.” Everyone but me was skeptical. I was secretly convinced that we would soon meet again in the Holy Land, and that the Messiah himself would lead us there. The war was the climactic battle between Gog and Magog—“the torments of redemption,” it’s called. The enemy now preparing to invade us would be vanquished, and his defeat would mark the Savior’s triumph. “You and your mystical hallucinations,” my friends said.
Elie Wiesel’s childhood home in Sighet, Romania, as it looked in 1965.
Elie with his mother and his sister Tziporah, shortly before the Nazis entered Sighet.
Behind Elie (left to right), his sister Bea, his mother, and his sister Hilda.
Hilda and her mother.
Elie’s mother (left) and cousin Golda.
Elie’s father.
Elie’s maternal grandfather, Dodye Feig
The Jewish cemetery in Sighet.
Elie, age 15, not long before the deportations.
On the boat taking him to Israel for the first time, 1949.
At a press conference with Maurice Fisher, the Israeli ambassador to France, 1950. Elie is third from right.
I slipped out and went to visit my two sick comrades, but they still refused to recognize me. Granted, they were not about to betray our secret, but why did they hide from me? Why did they pretend not to see me, or not to know me? Alone in the shadows with each of them, I whispered that our adventure was about to bear fruit. Another few days, another few weeks, and God Himself would slay the Angel of Death. Did they hear me? They smiled, or was it only an illusion? Perhaps they resented me for not following them into madness.
It was a feverish day, but everyone went about his own business. One customer came to buy salt, another sugar. My mother and older sisters worked all day without a break. Tsipouka played hoops in the yard with a playmate. My father went in search of news, but the other leaders of the community knew no more than he did. Their Christian friends did not answer calls. My father ran from one to another, but no one was home. As for me, I plunged back into contemplation and the Midrash.
No one in Sighet suspected that our fate was already sealed. In Berlin we had been condemned, but we didn’t know it. We didn’t know that a man called Adolf Eichmann was already in Budapest weaving his black web, at the head of an elite, efficient detachment of thirty-five SS men, planning the operation that would crown his career; or that all the necessary means for “dealing with” us were already at hand in a place called Birkenau.
IN MY DREAMS my father always looks at me with a distant air, and I never know whether he sees me. Does he speak to me? I do not hear him.
I ask him about his life and about his death. About the wandering souls he has sent to brighten my path with their evanescent light.
Why does he say nothing? What does he seek to teach me with his silence?
Suddenly shadows loom around him. I beg them not to separate me from him. Far from him I cannot live, even after his death.
Don’t get separated, don’t get separated, my mother kept saying, before our separation.
Don’t allow us to be separated again, don’t, I say to my father, who does not answer. What must I do to make the dead agree at last to speak in my dreams?
The Third Reich was already