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I asked to see Bo Cohen, who, after all, was the educational director of the OSE. It was his duty to guide us. A timid yet demanding man, he was our older friend. He and his young wife, Margot, attended to us with a devotion bordering on sacrifice. They were always ready to listen to us and support us. Bo’s view was that we should complete our studies first. A diploma was always useful, one way or another. Kalman did not agree. He ached to leave.

I also confided in Israel Adler, who was not only from Jerusalem but also a shalia’h, or emissary, of the Jewish Agency. His response was unequivocal: “When the time comes we will ascend’ together.” For the moment he helped me with the choir. Our most beautiful songs were for Jerusalem.

I continued my studies. Shushani led me surreptitiously toward a subject that had always fascinated me: asceticism, the lure of and quest for suffering, the will to suffer so as to infuse one’s own suffering and that of others with meaning. We talked of the ascetic and his self, enriched or mutilated by suffering, the relation between suffering and truth, suffering and redemption, suffering and spiritual purity, suffering as a gateway to the sacred; the prophetic, rabbinical, mystical point of view. Was it necessary, even indispensable, to punish the body so as to allow the soul to soar to new heights? Why was the nazir (ascetic) considered a sinner in Scripture? Why was he compelled to bring a sacrifice to the Temple? How to understand the variety of ascetics? Even Samson, the greatest womanizer of his generation, was a born ascetic. It took me a long time to understand: Asceticism warns us that language is sacred, that words must never be uttered lightly. I took copious notes and then began to write, pages and pages. Maybe someday it would make a book. Why not? I had wanted to write ever since childhood. In Sighet I often went to the offices of the Jewish community to write a page of Bible commentary on the only available Hebrew typewriter.

Of course, I could write my memories of the camp, which I bore within me like poison. Though I never spoke to anyone about this, it weighed upon me. I thought about it with apprehension day and night: the duty to testify, to offer depositions for history, to serve memory. What would man be without his capacity to remember? Memory is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. What does it mean to remember? It is to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading and to call upon the future to illuminate it. It is to revive fragments of existence, to rescue lost beings, to cast harsh light on faces and events, to drive back the sands that cover the surface of things, to combat oblivion and to reject death. All this I knew. And because I knew it, I told myself I should write. But I had to be patient. Someday, in years to come, I would celebrate memory, but not yet. Even then I was aware of the deficiencies and inadequacies of language. Words frightened me. What exactly did it mean to speak? Was it a divine or diabolical act? The spoken word and the written word do not reflect the same experience. The mysticism with which my adolescence was imbued made me suspicious of writing. Rabbi Itzhak Lurie set nothing down on paper. His disciple Rabbi Hayyim Vital did it for him, perhaps without his approval. Rabbi Nahman ordered that his writings be burned. The Zohar speaks of galut hadibur, the exile of the word, for words, too, are exiled. A chasm opens between them and their content; they no longer contain the meanings they once harbored. Having become obstacles more than points of reference, words broke my spirit. I had no confidence in them, for I sensed what I would later come to feel with greater certainty: Human words are too impoverished, too transparent to express the Event. The problem was clear: how to surmount the dilemma that either the teller lies or the words do. Why proliferate lies? The Hebrew poet Bialik was right: “Words are whores. Decked out in their finery, they offer themselves