All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [52]
January 1945. Every January carries me back to that one. I was sick. My knee was swollen, and the pain turned my gait into a limp. The merciless Silesian winter had buried us in snow; our bodies were half-frozen. It was hard to walk dragging a body dazed with pain, and impossible to report to the kommando given the fever that racked and deadened me. I had nothing left. I knew that whatever strength I retained would soon desert me. My father guessed, but stayed silent. He knew everything, my father, but could do nothing. Still, in the end I asked him what to do. My poor father opened and closed his mouth. Like me, he must have been thinking of my mother. I used to complain of my troubles to her, but now I had only him. His emaciated face was dark gray. Did his eyes still gleam? He hesitated to make a decision for me. Going to the KB, the infirmary, would be dangerous. Few patients ever got out, except to be transferred to Birkenau. But if I did nothing, I would not last much longer. Finally he decided: “Go to the KB. At least we’ll find out what’s wrong with you.”
That evening before roll call, I went to the KB. My father waited for me outside, trembling with cold and fear, arms dangling, alone and more lonely than ever. Would we ever see each other again? I walked as quickly as I could, not daring to turn back. A Stubendienst stopped me. “What’s the matter with you?” I showed him my knee. With a sneer of disgust he let me pass. I took my place in line, afraid that my father would catch pneumonia or be driven away with clubs. At last my turn came. A doctor glanced at my knee, touched it. I stifled a scream. “You need an operation,” he said. “Immediately.” I managed to make my way back to my father, who hadn’t budged. “They’re going to operate,” I told him. He didn’t react. “They’re going to operate,” I repeated. His gaze was lost in the distance. “Remember when we took you to Satmàr?” he murmured. Appendicitis … the Rebbe of Borsha’s blessing … the train ride in the middle of Shabbat … the nurse’s tenderness—it all seemed so long ago, events in another life. “It’ll be all right,” my father said. I took his right hand and kissed it, my heart breaking. Every time we separated, even to go to the latrine, I felt the same terror: What if this were the last time? I went back to the infirmary, where another human “miracle” awaited me: One of the doctors, a tall, kind-looking man, tried to comfort me. “It won’t hurt, or not much anyway. Don’t worry, my boy, you’ll live.” He talked to me before the operation, and I heard him again when I woke up. I believe he had kept talking the whole time.
Many years later I went to give a speech at the University of Oslo. Afterward, an elegant, distinguished-looking man came up to me. “I believe we were in the same camp,” he said in a voice that I could never forget. Dr. Leo (Sjua) Eitinger, internationally renowned psychiatrist, and I looked at each other in silence for a long moment, then smiled at the same time. He was among the speakers at the official dinner following the Nobel ceremony. He spoke simply, as a survivor. That was something else we have in common: He, too, has devoted his life to defending the survivors. And as he spoke, I pictured us back in the camp, among the ghosts.
There is much talk among psychiatrists—possibly too much—about so-called survivors’ guilt. It is the height of irony that the hangmen suffer no such guilt. The defendants at the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt in the sixties laughed during the proceedings. Only the survivors feel somehow accused: “Why did I survive when so many others perished?” But surely survivors bear no guilt for having escaped death. They had nothing to do with their own survival. Only the executioner had the power to decide who would live and who would die. The victims were told to march and they marched. They were told to halt and they halted. They were told to eat and they ate. They were even told to resign themselves to their fate, and they did that too.
Rumors and images. January 18, 1945. The Red Army is