All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [60]
How long would we recite the prayer for the dead? The mourning period normally lasts for eleven months after a relative’s death. But what if you don’t know the date of death? Halachic scholars weren’t sure how to resolve our situation.
It was in Écouis that we began to readapt to “normal” life. It was not easy to shed certain habits, certain fears. We had not yet forgotten the camp rules. We didn’t finish everything on our plates, instead we would save something for later, hiding a crust of bread or a piece of cake, just in case. Whether the counselors understood or not, they said nothing. They trusted us, and they were right. After several weeks, few “food reserves” remained under our pillows.
The peaceful atmosphere of the home had a lot to do with that. At night we would sit on the grass under the trees. We lit campfires, told stories, recalled songs. The Zionists dreamed of going to Palestine. The Bundists—yes, there were Bundists among us—were opposed. Dedicated socialists, they called for rebuilding a Jewish cultural life in the Diaspora. A Yiddish journalist came to give us a report on the international situation: Germany was defeated. The nightmare was over. One of the members of our team of counselors was a dark-haired young woman of Alsatian origin, thin and graceful, with a seductive smile. Her name was Niny. She understood our Yiddish and even tried to speak it. How many boys saw her in their dreams? Her upbringing brought her closer to our religious group, and we adopted her immediately. Another counselor, Rachel Mintz, a little older, had a face marked by sadness. The OSE had hired her because she was a poet. In the evening she recited verses and told us stories by Itzhak Leibush Peretz. It was she who, in the fifties, introduced me to the work of Nikos Kazantzakis and told me of the secret that bound them together.
Poor counselors, did they think they could educate us? We who had looked death in the face knew far more than they or their teachers about the mysteries of existence and Creation, about the fragility of knowledge and the end of history. The youngest among us had a fount of experiences more vast than the oldest of them. How could they understand our need to hide leftover bits of cake under our pillows? Or the mistrust we felt for strangers? “You wouldn’t understand,” was the phrase that came most often to our lips. We were polite to them, friendly. We listened to them and obeyed them, or pretended to, so as not to hurt their feelings. But imperceptibly the roles were reversed, and we became their counselors, feigning docile submission to their authority only because ours was superior. We pitied them, but they never knew it, poor things.
The days passed quietly. There were walks, sunbathing, excursions in the forest, and French lessons for those who wanted them. The first crisis was triggered by the arrival of Gustav, who, you might recall, we had last seen in Buchenwald on April 11, his pockets stuffed with grenades.
An elegant, vigorous young man in his thirties, with red hair and a self-satisfied, not to say triumphant, air, Gustav stirred murky and troubling memories in us. In his memoirs, Naftali Lau-Lavi reports that Gustav was the leader of a group of clandestine avengers who tracked down collaborators who had operated in the Polish ghettos. The group tried and executed their prey, strangling them or hanging them in latrines. Gustav was the executioner.
A member of the Stubendienst in the youth block in the “small camp” in Buchenwald, Gustav had not been universally admired. He had been quick to use