All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [50]
If I insist on this point, it is because I sometimes hear or read harsh comments about my people. Auschwitz, it is said, is a universal phenomenon; what the Germans, their collaborators, and their accomplices did, the Jews could have done as well. But so long as the Jews have not done it, I forbid anyone to charge them with theoretical, speculative crimes. So long as an individual has not killed, one has no right to see him as a potential killer. This interdiction has even greater force when an entire people is being accused.
Let me make it clear: Not all the inmates with privileges were evil. The Greek Stubendienst in my block, Jacob Fardo, wasn’t mean. Ask Jackie Hendeli of Salonika—a fellow Auschwitz inmate—and he will tell you. Fardo never struck a prisoner. The fact is that there were good people even among the ghetto police and the kapos. But then, there were those who were attracted by the killers’ power, such as the son of a great Polish Zionist leader, a kapo in Auschwitz who stubbornly tortured, humiliated, and beat his fellow Jewish prisoners, especially if they were religious, and even more if they were Zionists. Was it to “punish” his father and take revenge against those who had believed in him? How to explain my uncle Nahman-Elye? I cannot. All I know is that I utter his name with embarrassment.
And yet, a story. One day two young lawyers from Brooklyn knocked at the door of my office at Boston University to discuss an urgent problem: They had discovered that a respected Hasid had been the vicious person who beat their father in the camp, leaving him half-dead.
“You know him,” they told me. “Sometimes you go to the synagogue he attends, and even chat with him now and then.” I began to picture the congregation, but quickly decided this was a game I would not play; I would pay no heed to these kinds of accusations. Yet a problem remains: What should be done about the kapos? Should they be prosecuted? Before what court? I have never agreed with Karamazov that “we are all guilty of everything, I most of all.” Jewish tradition denies collective guilt, but could there be such a thing as collective innocence? The Jewish kapos, like their peers, were not innocent. But I will not allow myself to judge them.
I prefer to emphasize the kindness and compassion of my brothers in misfortune. These qualities were found even in the kingdom of darkest night, as I can testify—indeed, as I must. The Jewish soul was a target of the enemy. He sought to corrupt it, even as he strove to destroy us physically. But despite his destructive force, despite his corrupting power, the Jewish soul remained beyond his reach.
I remember a Dutchman who shared his bread with a comrade sicker than he was, a comrade he did not know. “I prefer to be hungry than to feel remorse,” he said.
I remember a Lithuanian preacher, a maggid, who wandered among us every Friday night, accosting everyone, with the hint of a smile: “Brother Jew—don’t forget, it’s Shabbat.” He wanted to remind us that Shabbat still reigned over time and the world despite the smoke and stench.
I remember a Polish rabbi who tried to console those who had not fasted on Yom Kippur. “Jewish law does not order a person to fast at the risk of his life,” he said. “To eat today is more pleasing in the eyes of the blessed Creator than to mortify oneself.” But he himself had fasted. Weakened by hunger, he was “selected” soon afterward, and he implored his barracks comrades to say Kaddish for his soul. The entire barracks did so.
I remember a young Hungarian Jew, his shoulders stooped like an old man’s, who confessed to some infraction