All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [53]
My father came to see me in the hospital, managing to slip in amid the general disorder. I told him the patients would be allowed to stay in the KB but …“But what?” he asked. “The thing is … I don’t want to be separated from you.” And I added, “But you could stay with me, couldn’t you?” He asked if that was really possible. I told him it was. There was room, and surveillance had been relaxed. Anything was possible in the mounting chaos. It was a tempting idea, but finally we decided against it. We were afraid. We were sure the Germans would leave no witnesses, that they would kill every last one of us. That was the logic of their monstrous undertaking. They would destroy everything to prevent the free world from discovering the nature and extent of their crimes. We therefore decided to leave with the others, especially since most of the doctors were being evacuated too.
Nearly all the patients who stayed survived, liberated by the Russians nine days later. Had we remained in the infirmary, my father would not have died of hunger and shame in Buchenwald ten days later, and my life would have taken a different course. I would have returned to Sighet. I would have stayed at his side. I would not have gone to France. What books, if any, would I have written?
In 1979, during an official visit to Moscow, I met the Soviet general Vassily Petrenko, whose troops liberated Auschwitz. We spoke about those days. He told me how the units under his command had prepared for the attack, while I told him how we waited for him and his soldiers. “We waited for you the way a religious Jew awaits the Messiah. Why didn’t you come a few hours earlier? A breakthrough by a few patrols would have saved thousands of lives.” He offered technical explanations having to do with strategy, the weather, logistics. I was not convinced. Was it true that Stalin had deliberately decided not to try to free Soviet prisoners of war? So it was said. The fact is that the Soviet army could have made an effort, but did not. Nor did the American army on its front, later. Historians agree: The death camps did not figure among the objectives set by the general staffs of the Allied armies. Their liberation was not given priority. It happened as if by chance.
To this day I am in mourning for my father, perhaps because I didn’t mourn the day I became an orphan. The ordeals that preceded his death remain with me, in all their violence. I described them in Night: the death march to Gleiwitz, sleeping in the snow, the train journey standing up in open wagons exposed to the elements, the demented cries of the living dead before our arrival in Buchenwald. Here again, I could spend my life retelling that story. How can I silence the cries that rage within me? I remember being trampled and then pulled to my feet. We were all hallucinating. Walking dead, we no longer dreaded death. We were stronger than death. I don’t know why, but I saw myself on the evening of Kol Nidre, surrounded by the faithful draped in their ritual shawls, the living and the dead intermingled, ready to rise to heaven to plead the cause of humanity vanquished by Satan. I remember shouting with the others, howling the words of the Shma Israel and the Kaddish and other incantations that spilled out onto the snow. Borne by the wind, they would cover the earth, the universe, from end to end. Hand in hand, our heads buried in heavy, wet blankets, my father and I swung to and fro, like in the old days in the Beit Hamidrash.
The hot shower on our arrival in Buchenwald did us good. But then we were driven outdoors naked. We were in the “small camp,” huge barracks, packed to overflowing. “Let’s stay together,” my father said as we were shoved forward, echoing my poor mother’s words.