All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [49]
I will never cease to rebel against those who committed or permitted Auschwitz, including God. The questions I once asked myself about God’s silence remain open. If they have an answer, I do not know it. More than that, I refuse to know it. But I maintain that the death of six million human beings poses a question to which no answer will ever be forthcoming.
My Talmudist master Rabbi Saul Lieberman has pointed out another way to look at it. One can—and must—love God. One can challenge Him and even be angry with Him, but one must also pity Him. “Do you know which of all the characters in the Bible is most tragic?” he asked me. “It is God, blessed be His name, God whose creatures so often disappoint and betray Him.” He showed me a passage of the Midrash dealing with the first civil war in Jewish history, provoked by a banal household quarrel: And God wept; His tears fell upon His people and His creation, as if to say, What have you done to my work?
Perhaps God shed more tears in the time of Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz, and one may therefore invoke His name not only with indignation but also with sadness and compassion.
What tormented and revolted me in the physical and moral (or immoral) environment of the camp was the power of evil and its contagiousness. Here was brutality in its purest state. Why did human beings act like savage wolves? Why were even inmates so sadistic? I “understand” the savagery of the Germans, for savagery was their “vocation,” their politics, their ideology, their education—I was about to say their religion. But what about the others? The Ukrainians who beat us, the Russians who struck us, the Poles who humiliated us, the Gypsies who slapped us, the Jewish kapos who clubbed us? Why? To show the killers they could be just like them?
Some have tried to explain their behavior by the killer’s nefarious influence on his victim, the repressed desire of the oppressed to resemble the aggressor, the innate instinct for survival and respect for power, the metamorphosis engendered by extreme situations. All this is no doubt true, and yet it was very much the exception.
I believe it was Jean Améry who noted that the first to bow to the oppressor’s system and to adopt its doctrines and methods were the intellectuals. But not all of them. Not the rabbis and priests, who, after all, were intellectuals too. With a single exception, no rabbi agreed to become a kapo. All refused to barter their own survival by becoming tools of the hangman. All preferred to die rather than serve death. The lessons of the prophets and the sages became shields for them.
On the other hand, how many secular humanists and intellectuals renounced their value system the moment they grasped its futility and uselessness? Sobered, disoriented, and disillusioned, some allowed themselves to be seduced by the ideology of cruelty. The number was significant.
The Communists aided one another in an exemplary fashion, and their clandestine action compels admiration. Whenever one of their own figured on a bad list, his favored comrades—safely working for the camp administration—did all they could to replace him with an anonymous prisoner. From the standpoint of the rescued Communist, the intervention of his political comrades was praiseworthy. But what gave the Communists the right to decide on the replacement comrades’ fate?
No one has the right to judge them, especially not those who did not experience Auschwitz or Buchenwald. The sages of our tradition state point-blank: “Do not judge your fellow man until you stand in his place.” In other words, in the same situation, would I have acted as he did? Sometimes