All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [38]
It was a black Saturday in May. I have told the story and will tell it again, will tell it forever, hoping to find in it some hidden truth, some vague hope of salvation.
Events unfolded faster and faster. By imposing his own pace, the enemy became time’s master, and time itself became our enemy. Two high-ranking Gestapo officers arrived (we were later told that one of them was Eichmann himself, which is why I think I recognized him during his trial in Jerusalem). The Council of Elders was summoned for an emergency meeting. We waited anxiously for my father, who had gone out in search of news. Neighbors gathered, and a rumor spread like fire—transports, something about transports.
The first convoy was to leave the following morning, but our street would not be part of it. We spent the night helping friends and neighbors get ready. “Do you need clothes? Cookies, eggs, flour?” There were scenes of wrenching resignation, but of tenderness as well. I knocked on neighbors’ doors, murmured words of farewell, clasped hands, said goodbye to Yerahmiel, asked the blessing of the Slotvener Rebbe, respectfully kissed the hand of the Borsher Rebbe, went away and came back. Ovens burned everywhere. Everyone prepared for the long journey, comforted one another: We won’t be separated long, we’ll see each other again soon … after the war. At dawn the men said their prayers before slipping their talit and tefillin into their rucksacks. It was a beautiful, unusually hot, sunny day. The streets teemed with distraught men and women. They were thirsty, but the gendarmes prevented them from going back into what had been their last shelter, even for an instant. My sisters and I moved among them with pots and bottles filled with water. Little Tsipouka had never seemed so small, nor so grown up. She gave sick people many times her age a drink of water. At last the convoy set out—in a hush, a kind of religious contemplation. The chief rabbi, his beard cut off, walked wearily, his bag slung over his shoulder. I averted my eyes; to see him like that was unbearable. And my teachers, my classmates—each of them took along a part of me. I felt ill, I had never felt so ill. I wanted to shout, to scream like a madman. I wished I were mad, like my two friends, God’s madmen, who had lost their minds on a battlefield strewn with dreams and mystic dreamers. Where was the Messiah now, my friends? Then suddenly there they were, too weak to walk, being carried on stretchers. I said goodbye to them, called out for them to hold on.
Soon it would be our turn, but for now we simply followed the convoy to the ghettos exit. We were ashamed to be staying behind. Numb, filled with anguish, we went home and gathered in the kitchen, as if in mourning. The convoy had not yet left town. We were told that the people would spend the night at the synagogue, far from us, already so far. An eerie calm fell over the abandoned homes. Those who remained in the main ghetto went from house to house simply to shake hands, to start conversations which reassured them they were still alive.
We spent that night in the yard, listening to Soviet artillery, whose firings lit the mountaintops. They were only a dozen miles or so away. With a little luck the Red Army would arrive before the cattle cars. One attack, one small shift of the front, and we would be saved. That would be too beautiful, too miraculous. But this was not a time of miracles. God held them back. For whom? For when?
And yet. Human miracles do exist, or rather, they could. That Saturday night someone came and knocked on our shuttered and nailed window facing the street that marked the ghetto’s edge. We caught our breath and looked at one another. Who could it be? A policeman ordering us to turn out the light? A friend of my father’s coming to warn him, as he had promised, of impending catastrophe? By the time we got the window open, the unknown visitor was gone.
Certainly it had been Maria, gallant, courageous, and loyal Maria, a believer who never complained of her fate. Have I said