All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [97]
I couldn’t accept it. I told myself it wasn’t true even as I read the articles and dispatches and examined the photographs. It couldn’t be true. The prime minister of the newly risen Jewish state had not issued such orders. The officers of the Palmach had not carried them out. They had not denied the wounded medical care. The soldiers had not fired upon camp survivors and former partisans floundering in the sea. The dead were not dead.
Like a disillusioned lover, I sought in vain for some reasonable explanation. The Irgun people had one: Ben-Gurion has always hated what we are and what we stand for. They cited his official program during what was called “the season,” when his opponents were persecuted and hunted. To combat the Irgun all those suspected of membership were to be fired and refused aid and shelter. Their threats were to be resisted, if necessary by collaborating with the British police. At the time the main enemy of the Jewish establishment in Palestine was not the British occupier but the Irgun fighter. That’s how it was, I was told. The leopard does not change his spots, nor the Haganah its tactics.
I could not accept this portrait of Ben-Gurion. A great Zionist, a Jewish idealist like him, could not be a monster. But I would not be seen again at the recruitment office at Avenue de la Grande Armée. I bore a secret wound whose scar would be a long time healing. It was a case of loyalty not so much to the Irgun as to my adolescence. In any event, there was no Irgun in Israel anymore, no Lehi either. Both were dissolved. But they still functioned in the Diaspora, carrying on activities that today would be considered public relations.
I decided to visit Bea again. She was still waiting for her visa, and I had to go through the usual procedure: long lines at the police station, requests for visas, irritating, humiliating interrogations, lifesaving stamps.
Bea’s camp was gradually emptying. Many people left for Israel, others for more distant lands. The Germans seemed happy to be rid of these Jews. Ben Shlomo—yours truly—wrote an article on the subject, entitled “Victors and Vanquished,” which raised the question: Even if the Germans are vanquished, are we the victors?
I was now writing a lot, mostly for the trash can. Joseph didn’t want me to deal with politics anymore, and I too had had enough of issues that divided the Jewish people. To support one side while criticizing another, to defend one group while condemning another, was not at all to my taste. I was more interested in literature and philosophy. I wrote a long study on Spinoza and another on Muhammad and the Koran. Neither, of course, had anything to do with the Irgun or current events, and one of our “superiors” was kind enough to call attention to that fact. What was the renegade of Amsterdam doing in a paper in which “renegade” meant Ben-Gurion? Fortunately, Joseph backed me up. He hoped to broaden our readership by appealing to intellectuals. We were no longer an underground publication—if indeed we ever had been—and, like any self-respecting newspaper, we could no longer be content with tendentious news reports and polemics. Thus reassured, I prepared several cultural articles and background pieces for the months to come. But in January 1949, shortly after the Altalena catastrophe, the Irgun offices in Europe shut down. Élie Farshtei and his lieutenants, Joseph among them, were recalled to Israel. I received no orders or aid from anyone. “Why don’t you come with us?” Joseph asked. I promised to think about it.
Now unemployed again, I turned back to my studies with renewed vigor, reading everything I could get my hands on. I finally discovered modern French literature: Malraux’s La Condition humaine, Mauriac’s Le Baiser des lépreux, Roger Martin du Gard’s Jean Barois, and of course the existentialists. I devoured novels and memoirs about the Resistance. There were days when I was so absorbed in my reading that I never left my room. I had nothing to seek in the desert.
Shlomo Friedrich