I heard the wind rushing through the trees, but it was not really the wind. I heard the murmur rising from the earth, but it was not the earth that spoke. It was night. It was death.
What hasn’t been said about this place? Philosophers and historians, psychologists and novelists, dramatists and filmmakers, explorers of the human soul and the unconscious, moved by honest emotions or practical considerations, have all found in this universe of ashes a subject to be investigated, and rightly so: no subject is more vital to our generation. To understand its deepest concerns, one must only connect them with the phenomenon of Birkenau. The anger of the young, the weariness of their parents, their common religious or quasi-religious yearnings for absolutes, all these things are rooted here. And yet … words, even the most profound, the most human words, mean little here. In the past, in the universe of barbed wire, force was all that counted. And yet … and yet.
I stood alongside the former inmates of Birkenau and Auschwitz, at the place where we had lost our families, and I did not know what to say.
There was nothing to say.
Terrified Jewish children, stubborn Gypsies, the resigned old people and the sick, living dead brought from the four corners of Christian and enlightened Europe perished here. No, there were no words.
A prayer, then? Which one? There is no prayer in any book for such places. Only the victims had the right, and perhaps the strength, to pray. But there was no one there to hear them.
No one? Yes, no one. Except for members of the Sonderkommando, those desperate and tragic inmates who were forced by the killers to incinerate the corpses before they themselves were burned. They saw and heard everything. And they were determined to testify. Their diaries were recovered from beneath mountains of ashes. Leib Langfus, Zalmen Leventhal, Zalmen Gradowsky: these ill-fated chroniclers related the victims’ final moments. Some had screamed, others had meditated, still others had cursed their killers, and there were those who had prayed to the God of Israel to remain faithful to the people of Israel.
No, for us there was nothing to say. But suddenly, inexplicably, a cry arose. The cry was ours and it reverberated in the wind, the cry of Jewish martyrs since the beginning: Shma Israel. “Hear, O Israel, God is our God, God is one.” After a long silence, we withdrew, slowly stepping backward; we were shivering. Behind us a man began to chant softly, Ani maamin. “I believe with all my heart in the coming of the Messiah.…”
Surely he will come some day. We all believe it. But it will be too late.
THE RETURN to Birkenau was the high point of our pilgrimage, which did not lack dramatic moments. Some were moving, others disappointing. Our visit to Babi Yar, on the outskirts of Kiev in the Soviet Union, was both.
I had been there before, in 1965. At that time, there was no monument to the Jewish victims. Naturally I had protested. In my book on Russian Jewry, The Jews of Silence, an entire chapter is devoted to Babi Yar, the ravine where, over the course of ten days beginning on September 29, 1941, close to one hundred thousand Jews were massacred by the Nazis and buried in mass graves.
Now, as a result of pressure from abroad, there is a monument at Babi Yar. It is majestic, grandiose, like all the monuments in Soviet Russia. But … nowhere does there appear the word “Jew.”
Though sensitive to all that relates to the Nazi era, officials turned a deaf ear to our complaints. The Mayor of Kiev and his aides, the Deputy Minister for Culture, Soviet Prosecutor General Roman A. Rudenko (who served as Russian Prosecutor General at Nuremberg), and officials of the Writers’ Union all offered the same answer: In our country, we make no distinction between Jews and non-Jews.
The same discussions occurred as in Poland, the same arguments. The same pleas: Do not erase the Jewishness of the Jewish victims. The Christian members of the delegation—Bayard Rustin, Robert McAfee Brown, Franklin Littell, Alice and Roy Eckardt—never missed an opportunity to lend us their support. Publicly, at receptions, and privately we pleaded our case. In vain. The Russians simply refused to understand our point of view, our concerns, our fears that if the Soviet line were to prevail, history would be distorted and forgotten in one generation or two.
RUSSIAN JEWS want to remain Jews—a fact that no one dreams of denying anymore. I witnessed this during my trips to the Soviet Union in 1965 and 1966. In those days, the Jewish renaissance was still clandestine. Except on the Simhat Torah holiday, when thousands of young people gathered before the great synagogue in Moscow to sing and dance and to celebrate their faith, one saw nothing but fear on Jewish faces. Since then, things have changed. The doors have opened: hundreds of thousands of Jews have left the Soviet Union for Israel and the United States, and the flow is increasing.
Aspiring emigrants demonstrate extraordinary courage. Their leaders wished to meet with us. We visited their homes, we listened. They ask for little, only not to have to wait more than five years for their exit visas.
Alerted only the evening before, hundreds of Moscow Jews came eagerly to the Moscow synagogue to greet their American visitors. The hall was packed. The service was solemn and joyous. On this “Sabbath of Consolation,” a chapter of Isaiah is read: “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people.” This time the chapter was meaningful on a more immediate level, too: Russian and American Jews found in one another reason to hope.
I had received permission to address the congregation from the pulpit; never has a speaker had a better audience. As in the 1960s, men and women urged us, Don’t forget us, please don’t forget us! An old man looked at me and a glimmer of recognition lit up his wrinkled face. “I remember you,” he said as he embraced me. “You have not forgotten us.” I smiled. Never has a messenger been so rewarded.
The most welcome guest, however, was a young boy called Elisha who had come with us from the United States. The Moscow Jews could not stop admiring him, caressing his hair and kissing his hands longingly, as though he were a prince from a faraway land. It had been years since they had seen a little Jewish boy saying his prayers in their synagogue.
I thought of my father. The Russian soldiers could have saved him. But they arrived late, too late—for us. We had already been marched off to Gleiwitz, and from there, in open cattle cars, to Buchenwald. We were surrounded by corpses; we no longer knew who was alive and who was not. I remember a man—my father—murmuring to himself, or to the icy wind that lashed his face: “What a pity, what a pity.…” Did he regret not having tried to stay behind? Did he feel sorry for those of us who were to survive? I remember another man shouting crazily. Others recited the last confession. Still others chanted prayers for Yom Kippur. The collective hysteria lasted for days and nights, for years and lives.
And there is nothing left to say. Another Kaddish? And another one? How many prayers can one say for an entire world? How many candles must one light for mankind? So as not to betray ourselves by betraying the dead, we can only open ourselves to their silenced memories.
And listen.
Sighet Again
FOR MOST Americans, the name Transylvania evokes a country haunted by Dracula. For me, who was born there, it means something entirely different. In fact, I never learned of the existence, or rather the legend, of that malevolent count, one whose bizarre habits could not help but make him a star of Broadway and Hollywood, until after my arrival in the United States. When asked about my birthplace, I would naively reply that I came from a little city deep in a forgotten province called Transylvania, and no one would let me say more before the laughter started. The laughter would grow all the heartier because I understood nothing of it. “Ah, Dracula,” they would say, with a wink. All right: now I know.
Yet you should not think that the Jewish children of Transylvania lived happily and without fear. They lived happily, but not without fear. We were always worried, anxious, threatened from all sides. Bandits, we were told, were spying on us from high in the mountains. And there were the louts and cowards, steeped in some ancestral hatred, who would attack us and beat us; like Dracula, they a
pparently needed to draw some blood—Jewish blood—to feel proud of themselves.
I am no longer a child, but even today Transylvania still chills me, or rather, a little corner of Transylvania does: Sighet, my native city. I live there no longer, yet it lives within me. It has been forty years since I left there for good, yet I am still a little fearful each time I see the place again. If I were a tourist seeking that perfect place to spend a holiday, to learn a little and to relax as well, I would go there without hesitation.
Why not, after all? Easily reachable, picturesque and inexpensive, Sighet has everything you could want: mountains, rivers, hotels, and memories.
You would take the plane or a train from Bucharest to Baia Mare, in Maramures, and from there a bus or a cab would take you to the other side of the mountain, into a valley. Yet another twisting road climbs over Satu Mare, wandering through villages, small towns and hamlets so bright and colorful and yet so apparently untouched by time, so nearly primitive, that they seem to belong to an earlier age.
Here, peasants look as they do in picture books, dressed as they have been through the ages, representing today as always that durable connection with their livelihood: the earth, trees, animals, flowers, the sky. For them, official communism is but an abstraction, and like their parents they feel most at home in church.
SIGHET, my birthplace, is a little city, so much like any other and so little like any other. Except for a few new apartment buildings, the houses are the same ones I used to pass on my way to school or on my way to my grandmother’s.
Back then, before the torment, it was a little Jewish city, a typical shtetl, rambunctious and vibrant with beauty and faith, with its yeshivas and its workshops, its madmen and its princes, its silent beggars and noisy big shots. We spoke Yiddish among ourselves, responded to others in Romanian or Hungarian or Ruthenian, and we prayed in Hebrew. In the Jewish streets the businessmen argued in the morning and made up by evening; in the shtiblech the Hasidim said their prayers, studied the Midrash, told wonderful stories about their miracle-working rabbis.
Immersed in Jewish life, following the rhythms of the Hebrew calendar, the city rested on the Sabbath, fasted on the Day of Atonement, danced on the eve of Simhat Torah. Even the Christians knew there was no point in asking for bread in a Jewish bakery during Passover week, and that you should never offer to buy a glass of Tzuica for a Jewish bartender on the ninth day of the month of Av, for that day, marked by mourning, recalls the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem.
All that is now gone. The Jews of my city are now forgotten, erased from its memory. Before, there were some thirty synagogues in Sighet; today, only one survives. The Jewish tailors, the Jewish cobblers, the Jewish watchmakers have vanished without a trace, and strangers have taken their place.
IT HAS BEEN twenty years since I first returned. Maybe it was just out of simple curiosity. Others like me have done so. The young and the no longer young return to the scenes of their youth, to the ruins of their past. Some want to perform the ancient ritual of praying at the graves of their ancestors. Others just want to see their own homes, their yards, their neighbors. There was a time when they were the only tourists here.
So it was twenty years ago that I first revisited these streets, walking for hours on end. I still remember: Passersby saw me without seeing, and I saw them while beholding only the ghosts that surrounded them, and the ghosts were more real, more vivid than they. I saw friends long dead, comrades long dead, dead rabbis, dead disciples, and they were alive. I had planned on staying a few days but fled after only a few hours.
The second time, I returned with a television crew working on a documentary. It was impossible to go anywhere alone, and, always accompanied, always under surveillance, I felt like an actor in an unsettling role. As soon as the filming was done, I turned my back once again on my city.
Now I am here on my third visit. I was invited by the Romanian-Jewish community, and I joined its chief rabbi, Dr. David-Moses Rosen, in a melancholy pilgrimage to commemorate the deportation of Transylvania’s Jews forty years ago.
For four days, all of them superbly and efficiently organized by the authorities, we went from one city to the next, from one ceremony to the next: Dej, Satu Mare, Oradea, Sarmas: How many ceremonies does it take to mark the deaths of thousands and thousands of men, women, and children? How many times must one say El Molé Rachamim, the Prayer of Compassion? From everywhere, it seemed, moved by a mysterious call, Jews came out of their towns near and far, came to weep together, to plumb that collective memory from which their brothers and parents, beyond a desert of ashes, spoke to them, speak to them.
At Sighet I visited the Jewish cemetery where lies the grave of the grandfather whose name I bear. It was strange: I felt more at home among the graves than among the living beyond the gate. An extraordinary serenity dwelt in the graveyard, and I spoke quietly to my grandfather and told him what I have done with his name.
Then, with a childhood friend, a fellow pilgrim, we ambled through the streets and alleys in silence, not daring to glance at one another. I recognized each window, each tree. Names and faces sprang before me as if from nowhere, as if preparing to reoccupy their former homes. I stopped before my old house, and with a beating heart, nearly beside myself, I waited for a youth to come out to call me closer, to demand to know what I was doing there in his life. A nameless anguish came over me: What if all that I had lived had only been a dream?
IN THE SPACE of six weeks a vibrant and creative community had been condemned first to isolation, then to misery, and finally to deportation and death.
The last transport left the station on a Sunday morning. It was hot, we were thirsty. It was less than three weeks before the Allies’ invasion of Normandy. Why did we allow ourselves to be taken? We could have fled, hidden ourselves in the mountains or in the villages. The ghetto was not very well guarded: A mass escape would have had every chance of success. But we did not know.
Hear me well, those of you who want to spend your vacation somewhere in Transylvania: You will not meet my friends there. They were massacred because no one thought it was necessary to warn them, to tell them not to go quietly into those windowless train cars. If this tragedy of Transylvanian Judaism hurts, if it hurts so terribly, it is not only because its victims are so near to me but also because it could have been prevented: Had the Allies moved faster and their leaders protested louder, many lives would have been saved.
So, you understand, the beauty of the countryside, the serenity and comfort and the hospitality that awaits the visitor, none of that is for me. But go, if it tempts you. And why wouldn’t Transylvania tempt you? Despite the barely concealed police state, despite the poverty, you may be happy there. The gardens are splendid, the hotels are new, the reception that awaits you is warm.
Only, while you explore the cities and the villages, while you enjoy their special picturesqueness, try to evoke within yourself the memories of the men and women, and the children—especially the children—who forty years ago were driven away from this place and who today travel endlessly through mankind’s wounded memory, signaling us invisibly, and yet so needfully, for the sake of our own survival.
Kaddish in Cambodia
ON THE EIGHTEENTH DAY (in the Hebrew calendar) of Shevat I found myself in the dusty, noisy village of Aranyaprathet, on the border between Cambodia and Thailand, searching desperately for nine more Jews.
I had Yahrzeit for my father, and I needed a minyan so that I could say Kaddish. I would have found a minyan easily enough in Bangkok. There are about fifty Jewish families in the community there, plus twenty Israeli Embassy families, so there would have been no problem about finding ten men for minchah. But in Aranyaprathet?
I had gone there to take part in a March for the Survival of Cambodia organized by the International Rescue Committee and Doctors Without Frontiers. There were philosophers, novelists, parliamentarians, and journalists—myriad journalists. But how was I to find out who might be able
to help me with my problem?
I would have liked to telephone one of my rabbi friends in New York or Jerusalem and ask his advice on the Halakhic aspects of the matter. What did one do in such a case? Should one observe the Yahrzeit the following day, or the following week? But I was afraid of being rebuked and of being asked why I had gone to Thailand precisely on that day, when I should have been in synagogue.
I would have justified myself by saying that I had simply been unable to refuse. How could I refuse when so many men and women were dying of hunger and disease?
I had seen on television what the Cambodian refugees looked like when they arrived in Thailand-walking skeletons with somber eyes, crazy with fear. I had seen a mother carrying her dead child, and I had seen creatures dragging themselves along the ground, resigned to never again being able to stand upright.
How could a Jew like myself, with experiences and memories like mine, stay at home and not go to the aid of an entire people? Some will say to me, Yes, but when you needed help, nobody came forward. True, but it is because nobody came forward to help me that I felt it my duty to help these victims.
As a Jew I felt the need to tell these despairing men and women that we understood them; that we shared their pain; that we understood their distress because we remembered a time when we as Jews confronted total indifference.…
Of course, there is no comparison. The event which left its mark on my generation defies analogy. Those who talk about “Auschwitz in Asia” and the “Cambodian Holocaust” do not know what they are talking about. Auschwitz can and should serve as a frame of reference, but that is all.
So there I was in Thailand, in Aranyaprathet, with a group of men and women of good will seeking to feed, heal, save Cambodians—while I strove to get a minyan together because, of all the days of the year, the eighteenth day of Shevat is the one that is most full of meaning and dark memories for me.