All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [63]
Many months passed before Bea found out I was alive. Someone told someone who saw her in Sighet. We made arrangements to meet in Antwerp, and so it was that I finally found myself in that city of diamond merchants. My beautiful cousin Reizi had died in the camps, but I did find Shiku, who had survived by hiding with a Christian family. It was at his home that the reunion of Sarah and Shlomo Wiesel’s three orphans took place.
Shiku could not hold back his tears. We were stronger.
Survivors are often asked, How did you manage to readjust to life, to joy, to love? The truth is, it was not that difficult—less difficult than adjusting to death. Having slept with the dead and spent a lifetime—indeed, many lifetimes—in death’s company, we had come to view it as ordinary, expected, a daily presence, the norm, not the exception. We had, after all, been brought to the camp not to live, but to die, and when we stumbled over a corpse, we walked on without so much as a second look. It was like pushing aside a dry twig.
Now we had to reinvent ourselves mentally, reconstructing a system of values so as to understand a Talmudic Law that is permeated with a poignant humanism: If the High Priest happens on an anonymous corpse in a public place, he must drop all other obligations and bury it immediately, even if he is on his way to the Temple. Respecting the dignity of the dead takes priority even over services on the holiest day of the year.
In the camp we were all future anonymous corpses, walking cadavers. Even when a friend or relative died, you didn’t cry, didn’t mourn, didn’t rend your clothes or smear your forehead with ashes. You didn’t show your grief. You did nothing to mark the event. You couldn’t.
I recall a boy from my region, very tall and thin, who thought he was already dead. “No one will ever convince me that the Germans let even a single Jew escape alive,” he used to say. Granted, he ate and drank, but as he pointed out, “Perhaps the dead, too, eat and drink as we do.” A constant smile hovered about his lips because he firmly believed that the dead were smiling at him. He therefore returned the favor, out of politeness. In my notebook I gave him a nickname: the dead man.
Where did he get that gentleness? Were all the dead like him?
One evening we were chatting under a tree, and he shared his happiness with me. Yes, that was the word he used: happiness. “I’m happy because I’m not afraid anymore,” he said. “I’m not afraid to die, because I’m already dead.”
He is still alive as I write these lines, living in Brooklyn with his wife and children. Those who know him say he believes he’s in heaven.
After a few weeks in Écouis, we moved. The leaders of the OSE decided to divide the four hundred “children” into two groups: the observant Jews and the nonobservant Jews. The first group—there were about a hundred of us—was transferred to the Château d’Ambloy, in Vaucelles.
We said goodbye to a third group, the lucky ones who were leaving for Palestine. Among them were Naftali Lau-Lavi (future adviser to Moshe Dayan) and his brother Israel Meir Lau (future chief rabbi of Israel), then eight years old and nicknamed Lolek. Forty years later, during a commemoration ceremony in Birkenau, he mentioned that it was I who taught him to say Kaddish by heart.
I had signed up to go to Palestine too, but the British bureaucrats who issued immigration “certificates” denied my application.