All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [45]
That night someone within me, my other self, told me it was impossible that these atrocities could be committed in the middle of the twentieth century while the world stayed silent. This was not the Middle Ages. My very last resistance broken, I let myself be pulled, pushed, and kicked, like a deaf and mute sleepwalker. I could see everything, grasp it and register it, but only later would I try to put in order all the sensations and all the memories. How stunned I was, for example, to discover another time outside time, a universe parallel to this one, a creation within Creation, with its own laws, customs, structures, and language. In this universe some men existed only to kill and others only to die. And the system functioned with exemplary efficiency: tormenters tormented and crushed their prey, torturers tortured human beings whom they met for the first time, slaughterers slaughtered their victims without so much as a glance, flames rose to heaven and nothing ever jammed the mechanism. It was as if it all unfolded according to a plan decreed from the beginning of time.
And what of human ideals, or of the beauty of innocence or the weight of justice? And what of God in all that?
I didn’t understand, though I wanted to. Ask any survivor and you will hear the same thing: above all, we tried to understand. Why all these deaths? What was the point of this death factory? How to account for the demented mind that devised this black hole of history called Birkenau?
Perhaps there was nothing to understand.
Suddenly, in my feverish brain, I saw myself with Kalman, my Kabalist master with the yellowed beard. Poring over our ancient texts, we tried to grasp the signs that would herald the coming of the Messiah, especially the most spectacular of them: the ingathering of exiles, Jews arriving from everywhere, from the banks of all rivers, from the most distant places, to meet the Savior. Young and old, employer and employee, the happy and the wretched, in ragged caftans and elegant suits, they cross rivers and scale mountains to clasp one another’s hands and greet the blessed day of Redemption. The Third Temple descends from heaven in a conflagration that lights their path. And I felt like tugging at my father’s sleeve and whispering: “Look, Father, look: Kalman and his disciples have succeeded at last. Look, it’s done!” I felt like turning to our companions and rousing them to joy and hope: “Look, the Messiah has come, we have forced him to hasten His coming! Thank him, then, and let us go to him with a song of gratitude on our lips.” But I said nothing. Deep within myself I knew that no Kabalist could ever have foreseen this place.
My intent here is not to repeat what I recounted in Night but to review that testimony as I see it now. Was I explicit enough? Did I miss what was essential? Did I serve memory well? In fact, if I had it to do over again, I would change nothing in my deposition.
Logically, I shouldn’t have survived. Sickly, timid, fearful, and lacking all resourcefulness, I never did anything to stay alive. I never volunteered for anything, never jostled anyone to get a tin of soup. Coward that I was, I preferred to eat less and to let myself be devoured by hunger rather than expose myself to blows. I was less afraid of death than of physical suffering.
Living marginally, sinking into anonymity, I had no interest in the daily or clandestine life of the camp, nor in its upheavals. The landing in Normandy, the July 20 attempt on Hitler’s life, Rommel’s suicide, the Liberation of Paris—of these events I perceived