All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [44]
I see myself sitting there, haggard and disoriented, a shadow among shadows. I hear my little sister’s fitful breathing. I try to conjure up my mother’s features, and my father’s. I need someone to reassure me. My heart thunders in deafening beats. Then there is silence, heavy and complete. Something was about to happen, we could feel it. Fate would at last reveal a truth reserved exclusively for us, a primordial truth, an ultimate postulate that would annihilate or over-shadow all received ideas. There was a burst of noise and the night was shattered into a thousand pieces. I felt myself shaken, pulled to my feet, pushed toward the door, toward strange shouting beings and barking dogs, a swelling throng that would cover the earth.
In Night I tell of the wrath of the “veterans.” They swore at us. “What the hell are you Schweinehunde doing here?” I was puzzled. Did they think we had come to this hell voluntarily, out of curiosity? Only years later did I understand. Two of their former companions, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, had managed to escape from Birkenau in 1944 to warn Hungarian Jews of what was awaiting them. That’s why they were so enraged. They thought we should have known. Some of them even hit us.
Where were we going? It mattered little, for it was the same everywhere. All roads led to the enemy; it was he who would throw open the invisible black door that awaited us. “Stay together,” my mother said. For another minute we did, clinging to one another’s arms. Nothing in the world could separate us. The entire German army could not take my little sister from me. Then a curt order was issued—men on one side, women on the other—and that was that. A single order, and we were separated. I stared intently, trying desperately not to lose sight of my mother, my little sister with her hair of gold and sun, my grandmother, my older sisters. I see them always, for I am still looking for them, trying to embrace them one last time. We were taken away before I could tell my mother goodbye, before I could kiss her hand and beg her forgiveness for the wrongs I must have done her, before I could squeeze Tsipouka, my little sister, to my heart. What remains of that night like no other is an irremediable sense of loss, of parting. My mother and my little sister left, and I never said goodbye. It all remains unreal. It’s only a dream, I told myself as I walked, hanging on my father’s arm. It’s a nightmare that they have torn me from those I love, that they are beating people to death, that Birkenau exists and that it harbors a gigantic altar where demons of fire devour our people. It’s in God’s nightmare that human beings are hurling living Jewish children into the flames.
I reread what I have just written, and my hand trembles. I who rarely weep am in tears. I see the flames again, and the children, and yet again I tell myself that it is not enough to weep.
It took me a long time to convince myself I was not somehow mistaken. I have checked with others who arrived that same night, consulted documents of the Sonderkommandos, and yes, a thousand times yes: Unable to “handle” such a large number of Hungarian Jews in the crematoria, the killers were not content merely to incinerate children’s dead bodies. In their barbarous madness they cast living Jewish children into specially tended furnaces.
And if I bear within me a nameless grief and disillusionment, a bottomless despair, it is because that night I saw good and thoughtful Jewish children, bearers of mute words and dreams, walking into darkness before being consumed by the flames. I see them now, and I still curse the killers, their accomplices, the indifferent spectators who knew and kept silent, and Creation itself, Creation and those who perverted and distorted it. I feel like screaming, howling like a madman so that that world, the world of the murderers, might know it will never be forgiven.
To this day I am shaken when I see a child, for behind him