From the Kingdom of Memory (13 page)

But the deepest change took place not in the camps, but after their liberation. During the ordeal, I lived in expectation: of a miracle, or death. Atrophied, I evolved passively, accepting events without questioning them. Certainly, I felt revulsion toward the murderers and their accomplices, and anger toward the Creator who let them act as they did. I thought that humanity was lost forever and that God himself was not capable of saving it. I asked myself questions which formerly would have made me tremble: about the evil in man, about the silence of God. But I continued to act as though I still believed. Friendship in the camp was important to me; I looked for it despite the efforts of the killers to belittle and deny it. I clung to family ties despite the killers who changed them into dangerous, even fatal traps. As for God, I continued to say my prayers.

I
T WAS ONLY
later, after the nightmare, that I underwent a crisis, painful and anguished, questioning all my beliefs.

I began to despair of humanity and God; I considered them both enemies of the Jewish people. I didn’t express this aloud, not even in my notes. I studied history, philosophy, psychology; I wanted to understand. The more I learned, the less I understood.

I was angry at the Germans: How could they have counted Goethe and Bach as their own and at the same time massacred countless Jewish children? I was angry at their Hungarian, Polish, Ukrainian, French, and Dutch accomplices: How could they, in the name of a perverse ideology, have turned against their Jewish neighbors to the point of pillaging their houses and denouncing them? I was angry at Pope Pius XII: How could he have kept silent? I was angry at the heads of the Allied countries: How could they have given Hitler the impression that, as far as the Jews were concerned, he could do as he wished? Why hadn’t they taken action to save them? Why had they closed all doors to them? Why hadn’t they bombed the railroad line to Birkenau, if only to show Himmler that the Allies were not indifferent?

And—why not admit it?—I was angry at God too, at the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: How could He have abandoned His people just at the moment when they needed Him? How could He have delivered them to the killers? How could one explain, how could one justify, the death of a million Jewish children?

For months and months, for years, I lived alone. I mistrusted my fellow humans; I no longer believed in the word as a vehicle of thought and of life; I shunned love, aspiring only to silence and madness. Disgusted with the West, I turned toward the East. I was attracted by Hindu mysticism; I was interested in Sufism; I even began to explore the occult domains
of marginal sects here and there in Europe. I was anxious to venture to the other side of reality, of what constituted the basis of reality. Meditation counted more for me than action; I drowned myself in contemplation. The appearance of things repelled me, that of people even more.

If I had been able to settle in an ashram somewhere in India, I would have. But I couldn’t. I had seen, under the incandescent sky of India, an immeasurable, unnameable suffering. I couldn’t bear it. In the face of this suffering, the problem of evil imposed itself on me with a destructive force. I could choose to steel myself against it or flee. I was not anxious to be an accomplice. Hindu friends would cross the street stepping over mutilated and sick bodies without even looking at them. I couldn’t. I looked and I felt guilty.

Finally I understood: I am free to choose my suffering but not that of my fellow humans. Not to see the hungry before me was to accept their destiny in their place, in their name, for them and even against them. Not to notice their distress was to acquiesce to its logic, indeed to its justice. Not to cry out against their misery was to make it all the heavier. Because I felt myself too weak to cry out, to offer a hand to so many disfigured children, because I refused to understand that certain situations couldn’t be changed, I preferred to go away. I returned to the West and its necessary ambiguities.

After this, I practiced asceticism in my own way: in my home, in my little world in Paris, where I cut myself off from the city and from life for weeks on end. I lived in a room much like a prison cell—large enough for only one. The street noises that reached me were muffled. My horizon became smaller and smaller: I looked only at the Seine; I no longer saw the sky mirrored in it. I drew away from people. No relationship, no liaison came to interrupt my solitude. I lived only in books, where my memory tried to rejoin a more immense and ordered memory. And the more I remembered, the more I felt excluded and alone.

I felt like a stranger. I had lost my faith, and thus, my sense of belonging and orientation. My faith in life was covered with ashes; my faith in humanity was laughable; my faith in God was shaken. Things and words had lost their meaning. An image of the Kabbala described the state of my soul at that time: all of creation had moved from its center in order to exile itself. Whom was I to lean on? What was I to cling to? I was looking for myself, I was fleeing from myself, and always there was this taste of failure, this feeling of defeat inside me.

A member of the
Sonderkommando
of Treblinka asked himself if one day he would laugh again; another, of Birkenau, wondered if one day he would cry again.

I didn’t laugh, I didn’t cry. I was silent, and I
knew that never would I know how to translate the silence that I carried within myself; again I found myself in the ghetto.

In a sense I am still there. It’s natural. I can do nothing about it: the ghetto is in me, in us. It will never leave us. We are its prisoners.

A
ND YET
, there has been a change in our behavior. First of all, we express ourselves. I force myself to share the secret that consumes me. I try to make the ghosts within me speak. Does that mean that the wound has healed over? It still burns. I still cannot speak of it. But I can
speak
—that’s the change.

A need for communication? For community perhaps? I evoke memories that precede my own; I sing the song of ancient kingdoms; I describe swallowed-up worlds. I exist by what I say as much as by what I hold back. To protect my silent universe, I speak of the world of others. To avoid painful subjects, I explore others: Biblical, Talmudic, Hasidic, or contemporary. I evoke Abraham and Isaac so as not to reveal the mystery of my relationship with my father. I recount the adventures of the Besht so as not to dwell on the fate of his descendants. In other words, literature has helped me look away. The tales that I recount are never those that I would like to tell, or ought to tell.

The problem is that the essential will never be said or understood. Perhaps I should express my
thought more clearly: it’s not because I don’t speak that you won’t understand me; it’s because you won’t understand me that I don’t speak.

That’s the problem, and we can do nothing about it: the life certain people have lived, you, the reader, will never live—happily for you, moreover. Their experience has set them apart: they are neither better nor worse, but different, more vulnerable and at the same time stronger than you. The least slight wounds them, but death does not frighten them. You look at them askance, and they suffer from your look; and yet, they know how to take the hardest blows, the worst disappointments.

This is true for both their relationship with the rest of humanity and their relationship with God. From God they await everything, and yet they are aware that everything will scarcely suffice. God Himself cannot change the past; even He cannot negate the fact that the killer has killed six million times. How could man redeem himself? I don’t know. I suppose that he cannot.

T
HIS IS
what I thought after the war; this is what I still think. And yet, I am surprised to feel a forgotten need to recite certain prayers, to sing certain melodies, to plunge into a certain atmosphere that defined my adolescence. Like most survivors, I would give everything I own to awaken and see that we are in 1938–1939; that I had only dreamed the future.

I would give much to be able to relive a Sabbath in my small town. The whiteness of the tablecloths, the flickering candlelight, the beaming faces around me, the melodious voice of my grandfather, the Hasid of Wizhnitz, inviting the angels of the Sabbath to accompany him to our home: I ache when I think of these things.

That is what I miss most: a certain peace, a certain melancholy that the Sabbath, at Sighet, offered its celebrants, big and small, young and old, rich and poor. It is this Sabbath that I miss. Its absence recalls to me all else that is gone. It reminds me that things have changed in the world, that the world itself has changed. And I have, too.

Passover

“T
HIS IS THE BREAD
of affliction which our forefathers ate in the land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry enter and eat thereof.…”

Thus begins the Seder, that ancient family ceremony in which from time immemorial all Jews everywhere can and should relive an event that took place thirty-five centuries ago.

Like all Jewish children, I loved this holiday more than any other. Both solemn and joyous, it allowed us an escape from time. Slave of the pharaoh, I followed Moses into the unknown, into the desert, into death. His summons to freedom was stronger than fear.

The Seder transformed our very being. On that evening, my father enjoyed the sovereignty of a king. My mother, softer and lovelier than ever, seemed a
queen. And we, the children, were all princes. Even visitors—the travelers and forsaken beggars we’d invited to share our meal—acted like messengers bearing secrets, or like princes in disguise.

How could I not love Passover? The holiday began well before the ceremony itself. For weeks we lived in a state of anticipation filled with endless preparations.

The house had to be cleaned, the books removed to the courtyard for dusting. The rabbi’s disciples assisted in making the matzoh. Passover meant the end of winter, the victory of spring, the triumph of childhood.

H
ERE
I
MUST
interrupt my reverie, for I see that I’m using the past tense. Is it because none of this is true anymore? Not at all. The meaning of the festival and its rites has scarcely changed at all. But everything else has.

I still follow the rituals, of course. I recite the prayers, I chant the appropriate Psalms, I tell the story of the Exodus, I answer the questions my son asks. But in the deepest part of myself, I know it’s not the same. It’s not as it used to be.

Nothing is. An abyss separates me from the child I once was. Today I know that no happiness can be complete. In fact, I’ll go further and say that now, at this holiday time, the joy I should feel is tainted with melancholy.

It’s understandable, of course. Passover was the last holiday I celebrated at home.

I
RECALL
all this in order to tell you why it’s impossible for me to talk about Passover only in the present tense.

Do I love it less than before? No. Let’s just say I love it differently. Now I love it for its questions, the questions which, after all, constitute its
raison d’être
.

The purpose of the Seder is to provoke children to ask questions. “Why is this night different from all other nights?” Because it reminds us of another night, so long ago, yet so near, the last night a persecuted and oppressed people, our people, spent in Egypt. “Why do we eat bitter herbs?” To remind us of the bitter tears that our forefathers shed in exile. Each song, each gesture, each cup of wine, each prayer, each silence is part of the evening’s ritual. The goal is to arouse our curiosity by opening the doors of memory.

On this evening, all questions are not only permitted, but valid. And not only those which relate to the holiday. All questions are important; there is nothing worse than indifference. The story shows us four possible attitudes toward history: that of the wise son, who knows the question and asks it; that of the wicked son, who knows the question but refuses to ask it; that of the simple son, who knows
the question but is indifferent to it; and finally, that of the ignorant son, who neither knows the question, nor is able to ask it.

In anguish, I wonder: What can we do not to forget the question? What can we do to vanquish oblivion?

W
HAT SIGNIFICANCE
does Passover have, if not to keep our memories alive? To be Jewish is to take up the burden of the past and include it in our concerns, our projects, and our obligations in the present.

We read the news and it’s always the same: violence in Jerusalem, bombings in Lebanon, riots in Hebron.… Were it not for its past and its history, what right would Israel have? It is because of Moses, not only Sadat and Begin, that the peace between Israel and Egypt strikes one as miraculous.

As we recite the Haggadah, which tells us of the exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt, we experience a strange feeling, the feeling that we are living in Biblical times, living at a vertiginous pace.

My contemporaries have witnessed and lived through what no other generation has seen: the power of evil, but
also
the victory of a promise; the kingdom of night, but
also
the rebirth of a dream; Nazism and its victims, but
also
the end of the nightmare; the deaths at Babi Yar, but
also
the defiance of young Russian Jews, the first to challenge the Kremlin’s police dictatorship.