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By Root 2129 0

with false papers, passing as a Christian, as others claimed? We spoke of the problems my timidity created for me, especially here; the roots of anti-Semitism; the virtues of emancipation; the merits of Zionism—was the Satmàr Rebbe right to fight it; the allure of any mystical quest. I talked to him about mine, and he told me of his, which was not esoteric but human. To aid others—that was his watchword, his law, his ideal. A Jew is defined by his actions more than by his intentions. It is his actions that bind him to his community and, through it, to the larger human community.

Did he still uphold his principles, his humanism? Strangely, he came closer to Hasidism. “What we need is a miracle,” he would often whisper. “We deserve it. But do the times deserve it? That’s the question.”

In Sighet I was the one who had believed in miracles, while he, with his rational bent, attached less value to them. Here it was the other way around. The time of miracles seemed long gone to me. I felt that the world had condemned itself and would find no redemption. Why hadn’t I asked Kalman, my Kabalist master, to initiate me into the art of making myself invisible? I would have seen to it that my father benefited from my powers too, and I pictured us walking out through the gate under the unseeing eyes of the SS guards. We would climb aboard a supply train, cross cities and valleys, and rouse slumbering inhabitants everywhere: Aren’t you ashamed to sleep while they are killing our people?

Like everyone else, I dreamed a lot in those days. It helped.

I was lucky enough—if I may be forgiven that expression—to have a former rosh yeshiva (director of a rabbinical academy) of Galician origin as a teammate. I can see us now, carrying bags of cement or large stones, pushing wheelbarrows filled with sand or mud, all the while studying a Law of the Mishna or a page of the Talmud. My teammate knew it all by heart, and thanks to him, we were able to escape. We went to Rabbi Hanina ben Dossa and begged him to pray for us. We accosted Resh Lakish. Would he use his herculean strength to free us? We wandered the alleys of Pumbedita and the hills of Galilee. I listened to sages debating whether the Shma Israel should be recited standing up or lying down.

In the morning my father and I would rise before the general wake-up call and go to a nearby block where someone had traded a dozen rations of bread for a pair of phylacteries (tefillin). We would strap them onto our left arm and forehead, quickly recite the ritual blessings, then pass them on to the next person. A few dozen prisoners thereby sacrificed their sleep, and sometimes their rations of bread or coffee, to perform the mitzvah, the commandment to wear the tefillin. Yes, we practiced religion even in a death camp. I said my prayers every day. On Saturday I hummed Shabbat songs at work, in part, no doubt, to please my father, to show him I was determined to remain a Jew even in the accursed kingdom. My doubts and my revolt gripped me only later.

Why so much later? My comrade and future friend Primo Levi asked me that question. How did I surmount these doubts and this revolt? He refused to understand how I, his former companion of Auschwitz III, could still call himself a believer, for he. Primo, was not and didn’t want to be. He had seen too much suffering not to rebel against any religion that sought to impose a meaning upon it. I understood him, and asked him to understand me, for I had seen too much suffering to break with the past and reject the heritage of those who had suffered. We spent many hours arguing, with little result. We were equally unwavering, for we came from different milieus, and even in Auschwitz led different lives. He was a chemist; I was nothing at all. The system needed him, but not me. He had influential friends to help and protect him; I had only my father. I needed God, Primo did not.

There in the camp, I had neither the strength nor the time for theological meditation or metaphysical speculation about the attributes of the Master of the Universe. The daily bread