The light is dimming within me, and I don’t know if it’s night or weariness or the rain. It’s exasperating, but my eyes are heavy as their gaze wanders around me, far from me, drawing nameless images. Who has stepped between me and the world, between things and their shape?
Malkiel my son, you are in me but you are somewhere else; you are my life but you are on the other side of my life; I no longer know what you’re looking for. I wonder if I’ll still be here when you come back: I mean, I wonder if I’ll know it’s you.
All I know at this moment is that God has punished me. Our sages are right: the Tempter is not sin but punishment.… Ah, my son, I will not rise up against God’s will. I have no doubt deserved His punishment. But why this one and not another? I’d have preferred anything, even death. I’d have preferred death to this agony of memories wrestling and drowning.
What have I done to be reduced to this? If you hear me, God, answer me. No, I take it back, forgive me: answer me so that I can hear You.
But even if You answer, my question remains: What can I have done, as a Jew or as a man, to bring down upon me not damnation but obscurity, not death but dissolution?
Taking your advice, Malkiel, and Tamar’s, too—love her, my son, love her as I love you, as I loved your mother; I mean, love her with utter and ever greater love—I began to trust in the word, that is, in the human voice. I told you, I told both of you, so many things.… I forget what they were.
But I think I know this: I did not tell you the essential. Yes, Malkiel, I am still lucid enough to admit it: there is something important, vital, that I especially wanted to pass on to you, perhaps a kind of testament. And each time, I said to myself, That can wait. I said to myself, This is so essential that I won’t forget it, even if I forget all the rest. And now I’ve forgotten that, too.
But I am trying to remember. I must. More than my honor is at stake; my right to survive is at stake. I must not take this essential thing to my grave with me. It must stay on here, in this world, as an offering or a sign, all that remains of a vanished life.
I try, believe me. I turn pages, I dig up graves, I search every corner of my being. Who or what was it about? A person? Friend or enemy? An event? A glorious moment, or an infamous plot? I don’t know, my son; I no longer know. There are words I will never be able to speak again.
I don’t even know why I sent you to that remote village where I knew happiness as a child and a youth, Sabbath eve with your grandparents, and the anguish afterward, at midnight, when I heard the Tempter’s icy laugh.
What message were you to bring back to me?
What answer to what riddle?
I will forget everything; I know that. Talia’s name, too? No. Not hers. Nor yours. Names are important to a Jew. You will have a son one day; what will you call him?
Nothing is more important to a father than to earn his
son’s admiration. Have I earned yours? You won’t hold it against me too much if I desert you along the way? Will you forgive me, will you?
Is it not a father’s duty to help his son remember, to magnify his past, to enrich his memory? I cannot shake the depressing thought that I have failed you in this respect. In leaving you, I bequeath to you a black curtain.
Is that enough for you to think of me without bitterness?
How I wish I could have seen you in the role of father! Will you tell your son how I yearned for it? Will you tell him I did my best to reach you, in the name of my parents and ancestors? To remain a Jew? Never to abandon the memory of his forefathers? To remain faithful to the image a Jew ought to have of himself? Never to deny the Jew in him but to urge him to solidarity with his people—our people—and through them with all of humanity? Will you tell him about his grandfather’s love for the strange and magnificent community of Israel, which extends from you to Moses? And from you, Tamar, to Sarah? Thanks to them, I shall live on; thanks to you, Abraham lives. What will I become without you two? Don’t tell your son, and don’t tell your father, that we must belong to the world at large, that we must transcend ourselves by supporting all causes and fighting for the victims of every injustice. If I am a Jew, I am a man. If I am not, I am nothing. A man like you, Malkiel, can love his people without hating others. I’ll even say that it is because I love the Jewish people that I can summon the strength and the faith to love those who follow other traditions and invoke other beliefs. A Jew who denies his Jewishness brings shame upon all who preceded him. Tell your son not to bring shame upon me. A Jew who denies his Jewishness only chooses to lie. If he lies to himself, how can he be honest with others?
All that, Malkiel my son, all that, Tamar my daughter, is part of the essential thing but is not all of it. And even this I can tell you only thanks to the rare flashes of light that God in His mercy still grants me.
They say that before dying a man sees his whole past. Not I. All I see is bursts and fragments. But perhaps that is because I am not yet going to die, not physically, at any rate. Is that why I still cannot recall the essential thing that I want so much to pass on to you, Malkiel?
That doesn’t matter, my son.
Even as I speak to you I tell myself that you will discover in your own way what my lips cannot say.
God cannot be so cruel as to erase everything forever. If He were, He would not be our father, and nothing would make sense.
And I who speak to you cannot say more, for
E
LIE
W
IESEL
received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, on December 10, 1986. His Nobel citation reads: “Wiesel is a messenger to mankind. His message is one of peace and atonement and human dignity. The message is in the form of a testimony, repeated and deepened through the works of a great author.” He is Andrew Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University and the author of more than forty books.