We withdraw to the privacy of his office. There is instant camaraderie, no need for preambles. We understand each other. We exchange views, memories, impressions. Survivors from abroad, who are in the country to participate in a conference in Jerusalem, are visiting the kibbutz. I am asked to say a few words to them. I insist that Antek accompany me. But he is sick; he can hardly stand up. They carry him outside and seat him on a bench. I dedicate my speech to him: “Antek, my friend, I am your guest here…. From you and your comrades we have learned humanism and the meaning of a Jewish fighter’s responsibility…. You have taught us a new language…. You have taught us the strength of the individual.”
I compare our experiences. What were the Jews of Sighet doing in 1943 while he and his comrades were fighting against the Germans? My days were spent at the yeshiva. We studied, we ate, and we celebrated our holidays, while in the Warsaw Ghetto young fighters entered the heroic legend of Israel. And now?
I continue:
What are we doing with our books, with your words? We try to educate our children and all the children of the world. We tell them that man is capable of tumbling into inhumanity; of falling as he loses sight of the divine image of which he bears the imprint. That in those days, the Jew clung to his Jewishness and, thus, to his humanity…. Antek, my dear Antek, when I go home, I shall close my eyes and see you with nostalgia, respect, and infinite tenderness.
As I leave, we embrace. He is weeping and inside me someone is weeping as well. He dies the next day.
Standing before the Wall, thousands of survivors are praying. Prime Minister Menachem Begin has just delivered a rousing speech. He has spoken of the Jewish people’s need to be strong, to be armed. As far as he is concerned, that is the lesson to be drawn from the Tragedy. But then he said that it was God who wanted Hiroshima … going so far as to imply that the atomic bomb was a divine gift, for it allowed the Allies to win the war. As I follow him to the microphone I cannot help but express my disagreement: God and Hiroshima don’t go together in my way of thinking. And his comments about strength pose a problem for me: Could this be the lesson the Tragedy has bequeathed to us, to choose strength and celebrate it? I think it important to add: “Here in this city of eternity, where every dream is eternal, we must ask ourselves a painful question: Have we, the survivors, done our duty? Have we acted as honest witnesses should?” And I conclude:
What do we carry away with us from this invincible city, this indestructible city of peace and humanity? We carry with us a spark of its light, a fragment of its song. True, some part of us has remained back there, in Auschwitz and Belsen, Majdanek and Treblinka. But, from today on, something of us will remain linked to this site in Jerusalem, forever…. Just as Auschwitz signifies the end of human hope, Jerusalem symbolizes eternal beginnings.
Another speech remains in my memory. Not that it was particularly remarkable, but it was delivered before several hundred “hidden children” whom compassionate Christian families had sheltered in occupied Europe:
Of all the crimes conceived in fanaticism and hatred, the war against the Jewish children will remain the worst, the most vicious, and the most implacable in recorded history.
… We now know that Hitler’s Germany made the Jewish child its principal target. In condemning our people’s children to death, it sought to deprive us, as a people, of a future. For the children who did survive Hitler’s Germany, laughter and joy were largely eliminated from their lives.
The children who were “hidden” especially have never ceased asking themselves the question: Where is our childhood? So powerful was the enemy’s criminal intent that it succeeded in changing their childhood, in replacing it with another one, a false one, a childhood that did not belong to them, a childhood that was not meant for them. In fact, because of the enemy, the “hidden” children have had to live someone else’s childhood. But in most cases the enemy did not succeed in changing their memory.
Will I ever—as a novelist, as a teacher, as a person, as a Jew, as a father, who loves both to tell stories and to listen to them—will I ever acquire the necessary imagination to describe what goes on in the heart of a father who, moved by a sudden impulse of insane hope, hands his infant child to an unknown passerby, praying that this final fatherly gesture might save the infant’s life? Or will I be able to describe a mother who, on the threshold of muted madness, throws her baby outside the cattle car, hoping that a merciful peasant will catch it? And keep it? Will I ever be able to read in her pain the meaning of her gesture?
I think of the hidden children who survived, and I wonder how they felt at the moment their father or their mother left them. What took place in their still fragile but already wounded subconscious? A rejection? A betrayal, perhaps? How long did it take before they grasped the full meaning of what their parents had to do on their behalf? How long has it taken to overcome the anger some of them might have felt toward their parents as they held them responsible for their separation? When exactly did they understand the fathomless strength their parents needed to give up their children to a stranger in order to spare them their own fatal destiny? On the brink of death, their parents pulled themselves away from their children so as to shield them from death.
Compared with these parents, Abraham seems less heroic. Summoned to sacrifice his son Isaac on the altar, he obeyed a divine commandment. But these parents had to give up a child, sometimes an only child, to an unknown person who, at best, would make of that child a living Christian rather than a dead Jew. Where could they find the faith they needed to offer them some measure of consolation? I have tried to imagine the life and death of a hidden Jewish child in one of my tales.
Taken in and shielded by an old Christian housekeeper, the little boy, named Gregor, must pretend to be mute or retarded so as not to arouse suspicion in the village where he has found shelter with a Christian woman. At the school, he attends a Passion play that is being produced for Easter. The boy is given the part of Judas. As such he is ridiculed, humiliated, and tormented to the point that, unable to bear it any longer, he breaks his silence and begins to talk.
Who among the hidden survivors has not known such trials whose outcome meant life or death? One careless word, one wrong gesture, and it was the end. One frightened look, one sigh poorly suppressed, one prayer poorly remembered, one cloud of sadness on the face, and one could be discovered, and torn away again, and separated again, this time for good. So I wonder, how did they manage? How did they manage not to be sad? How did those who were very young—one or two years old—know that to be sad meant to appear Jewish and to be Jewish meant to die? How did they manage to grow up so fast? How did they manage so quickly to learn terrible and rare ways of keeping alive? How did they manage to hide and/or forget so many things in order to hide the Jewish child in themselves? How did they manage to vanquish fear and loneliness resulting from their parents being absent from their lives? How did they manage to overcome suspicion and not see an enemy in every passerby? How did they manage to remember not to respond to their Jewish names when called? How did they manage all of a sudden to behave as if they were someone else? How did they manage to fall asleep without weeping, without being caressed by a mother and reassured by a father?
A young woman I know told me that she spent eighteen months in silence and solitude in a shelter. She was forbidden to make noise. Once a day the landlord would bring her food. She had to watch herself constantly, not to move, not to snore, not to sigh, not to cry in her sleep. For eighteen months, she lived in total darkness. Not once did she glimpse the stars. How did she manage to stifle her pain and her anguish?
Another young woman I know hid in an attic. A chicken was her only companion. In the beginning, she told me, all was well. Then their relationship deteriorated. The chicken grew arrogant. The chicken felt it could do anything to the Jewish woman. With impunity. She would not shout or hit back. It’s incredible, said the young woman; the chicken had become an anti-Semite.
But what abou
t those who were too young to understand what was happening to them? What about those who were still infants? At what point did the truth reveal itself to them? When did they comprehend that they belonged to other parents, to other places, to another people? And what did they then feel toward the women who had agreed to take care of them and their needs? And their true mothers, those who seemed not to want them, what did they feel toward them? Whom did they love more? Their absent parents who were dead, or their rescuer parents who were not? Later when they thought of their dead parents, how did they think about them? With joy? With remorse?
… In allowing a million and more Jewish children to die, humankind inflicted suffering and punishment on itself. We may find solace in the emerging role of the survivors, the rescuers, and especially the hidden children. I look at them and feel rewarded. They have done something with their orphaned memories, something of which they can and should be proud. They have kept their childhood intact, and they have built on it a temple for future children and parents to worship in, live in, for the sake of one another.
At the Reichstag in Berlin during a Kristallnacht commemoration, I choose to tell Germans of the Hitler generation that their past unfolded under the sign of malediction. I tell young Germans not to despair of us, whereas they have every reason to despair of their elders.
I emphasize that I do not believe in collective guilt. The children of killers are children, not killers. We must never blame them for what their elders did. But we can hold them responsible for what they do with the memory of their elders’ crimes.
An official pilgrimage to Sighet. At the entrance to the cemetery, before the local population, I deliberately speak Yiddish. Chief Rabbi Moses Rosen translates: “How could a human community such as yours show such inhumanity to my people? What happened to our friends? Where were they hiding? What happened to Sighet’s human heart?”
In Warsaw, on Tisha b’Av eve, in the last synagogue to remain open, some ten men mournfully intone Jeremiah’s Lamentations: “Ei’ha yashva badad….” Oh how lonely and solitary she was, the city where, long ago, our people dwelled….
As I reread the text, something troubles me: The Old City of David does not fill me with sadness. Today Jerusalem is neither desolate nor abandoned. In fact, it is vibrant and exuberant. Its sons are strong, its daughters radiant. But then, what city does Jeremiah’s text bring to mind? Suddenly it is clear: The city is Warsaw, the Jewish Warsaw of long ago.
Washington. A few steps from the White House, where Mikhail Gorbachev will be received the next day by President Reagan for the first time. Two hundred thousand demonstrators shout their solidarity with Soviet Jewry. I am exhilarated. Finally my friends and I have succeeded in awakening our people, in jolting them out of their lethargy. Anatoly Shcharansky, Masha and Vladimir Slepak, and many other refuseniks march with us. Did my article in the New York Times help? I hope so. On the Op-Ed page of that paper I had issued an appeal for a march for human rights in the eighties to succeed the march for civil rights of the sixties. This appeal generated considerable response. People wrote offering financial and material help; organizations and activists became involved. American Jewry experienced a groundswell of solidarity. And as I march, I cannot help but wonder: Had there been similar demonstrations in the forties, how many European Jews could have been saved?
Kielce, July 7, 1996. It is the fiftieth anniversary of the pogrom that had outraged the world. Forty-two Jews had been assassinated by a mob in broad daylight. The title of my address: “How Could They?” I give vent to my pain and anger about the past but also about the crosses erected more recently in Birkenau. They thought they were justified by also installing a few Stars of David.
My words arouse violent controversy in the Polish press and in Catholic circles. Simon Wiesenthal takes advantage of this tension and, in his usual spiteful manner, criticizes me in Adam Michnic’s daily Gazeta Wyborska. I do not respond.
There are conferences against hunger, fanaticism, and hatred. A speech on cancer and Alzheimer’s disease during a symposium organized by Professor Claude Jasmin at UNESCO. Remarks made at the opening of the Auschwitz exhibition at the U.N. A talk on ethics at CIA headquarters (in order to stay off its payroll, I decline my honorarium, which is contrary to CIA “rules”). A lecture on Job in front of—yes!—six thousand priests, nuns, and professors of Catholic theology. Professor Irving Abrahamson of Chicago devotes ten years of his life to gathering a large number of these speeches and publishes them under the title Against Silence.
I speak and speak. There is always a text in front of me, but I prefer to improvise, which of course is fraught with risk; it is easy to err and often impossible to correct. Once uttered, words go their own way; it is impossible to take them back. And so sometimes all that remains after a speech is a sense of remorse. What I have said no longer belongs to me.
Most of my speeches are not transcribed—only those with biblical, talmudic, or Hasidic themes; they are my favorites. I devote weeks, months of research to them. The lectures I have given at the Centre Rachi and the Centre Universitaire d’Études Juives at the Sorbonne in Paris, at the 92nd Street “Y” in Manhattan, and at Boston University are eventually published.
On the other hand, speeches delivered on “occasions” are the ones I give reluctantly. It is impossible to deal meaningfully with any subject in the course of a dinner. And then there is the problem that words, no sooner uttered, tend to age and fade. The orally transmitted thought meanders and dissipates. Sometimes I think the best speeches are those I never gave.
Besides, I still suffer from stage fright, an accursed companion who never lets go. I remember in Sighet, one Shabbat afternoon, I had chosen to explain a text from The Ethics of Our Fathers to a group of fellow students. I suffered pangs of hell. Butterflies in my stomach. The expression is apt. As I ascended the podium, my body was seized by a trembling that threatened to paralyze my brain.
I am never sure of myself. Will I be able to communicate, to stimulate, to hold the listener’s attention, to logically articulate my ideas? And what if I forget the necessary quotation or the critical point? Once the last sentence has been uttered, I ache to escape.
I no longer have the strength or the desire to travel. There was a time when I liked being on the road; I was ready to give up everything to go somewhere, anywhere, by any means. No longer.
A journey I did not undertake: December 31, 1991. Bernard Kouchner, a founder of Doctors Without Borders and deputy health minister of France, and now U.N. civil administrator of Kosovo, asks me to join him on a mission to Dubrovnik, which is being bombed by the Serbs. I hesitate. The Belgrade Jewish community is fiercely opposed, fearing the consequences. And then, how is one to ignore the anti-Semitic book written by the Croatian president Franjo Tudjman? As it happens, my body decides for me: I come down with a virus, running a high fever.
Now, as I consider invitations to speak, I think of the words of Rabbi Israel of Rizhin: “Sometimes we speak before a crowd so that one individual will understand, and, sometimes, for the sake of one individual, we remain silent.”
Of Madmen and Visionaries
I HAVE NOT AS YET SPOKEN of my madmen: Like my father in Sighet, I seem to attract them. Aren’t we all a little mad, each of us in his own way? Mad to wish to live and to refuse to live, mad to believe in the future and also to negate it, mad to think that we have eluded death and the dead?
The ones that pursue me belong to a different species. Not all are Jewish. There are among them Christians, Buddhists, agnostics; former musicians and future geniuses; authors of works not yet written and as-yet-unrevealed saviors. In truth I don’t really dislike meeting with them. I would even say that their imagination enriches mine. However, the problem is that one does not choose them, and some of them are burdensome and difficult to shake. Each has something “urgent” to communicate to you, a solution to offer. You speak to them for an hour, and they will come back ten times. And don’t try to avoid them; they will find
the trail that leads to you. Don’t bother to hide; they will outsmart you.
A man calls me and insults me: Every obscenity in the English language pours out. “But who are you?” I ask. His name is Marx, “like Karl.” “Do I know you, dear Mr. Marx?” Yes. No. Another avalanche of insults and curses follows. I hang up. He calls back. I hang up again. The next day it starts all over. When I’m away he leaves messages: “Mr. Marx called.” How to get rid of him? The police claim to be helpless. Never mind. As a matter of fact, he stops calling. Three days and three nights of respite. But on the fourth day, he is back: “Aha, you thought you could escape?” And he spills out his dose of horrors. Oddly, he appears to be informed of all my activities; he “knows” with whom I dined the night before, what play I’ve seen. One afternoon I have a visitor, a woman friend from Paris. The telephone rings. It is he: “I don’t know her,” says Mr. Marx. “Who is she?” I feel as though I’m going mad myself.
A few months later I leave for Europe. When I return, no more Mr. Marx. No letter, no message. A great relief. Could he have disappeared for good?
Of course he reappears. But I have learned my lesson. I shout: “Mr. Marx, whatever happened to you? Were you sick? I was worried about you. What can I do to help you?” Taken aback, he chokes with annoyance. Then he unleashes on me a last stream of obscenities and goes on to look for more vulnerable, more nervous victims, before returning, perhaps, to his insane asylum.
A “romantic” persecution: A young waitress from New Jersey gravely informs me that I am her husband. She knows it, even if I don’t. She knows that I married her, evidently in another life. Hence her solemn warning: If she sees me with another woman, she’ll make me pay dearly. She has connections, she tells me, in the most influential circles. In other words, I would be well advised to be careful, to behave like a faithful husband. Otherwise … Once again the police refuse to intervene. “Let her kill you first and we’ll be right there to arrest her,” is what I am told by a police officer with a macabre sense of humor.