Authors: Elie Wiesel
Hauptmann was the typical faithful, unyielding Communist. He had known Kurt Eisner and Ernst Toller at the time of the Red Republic of Bavaria, in which he had been involved. How had he managed to escape? At the moment of the debacle he had taken refuge with some workers, who had hidden him during the critical months. “I trusted the masses,” he would often repeat to us, “and I was right.” He still believed in the masses; they were his religion. This elegant intellectual felt a deep harmony between himself and the anonymous, shapeless masses; he was totally taken with them and believed that they had invested him with a lofty mission. Thus, his resolution reflected theirs. Whenever he pronounced the words “the masses” his voice became grave and solemn.
Inge was a Communist like Hauptmann and just as fervent and ready to sacrifice herself for the party of the Revolution. Where did they differ? Hauptmann could, on occasion, speak about the Party in a relaxed way; not so Inge.
I used to accompany them, with some of our cronies, to public meetings where speakers would preach, lecture, teach, thunder, vociferate, condemn and make demands depending on the slogans of the day. I liked to look at the throngs and merge with them. I liked the composed and confident atmosphere of “the masses,” I liked their way of
accepting the Communist gospel with raised fist; I liked the brotherhood, the sense of common destiny they radiated; I envied them.
I had asked Inge whether she could help me become a Party member. She advised against it. “Later,” she said. “You’re not mature enough.” “Later—but when?” I wanted to know. “Later,” she decreed. And once she made up her mind, there was no way to change it.
She may have been right. I was still too attached to my parents, to Liyanov. I no longer practiced the religion of my ancestors, but I missed it. Sometimes on a Sabbath I found myself humming a Hasidic air, or quoting an old parable or conjuring up some mystical figure in whom to confide my distress or bewilderment. Inge knew this.
I seemed to be leading the life of a Communist, but appearances deceive. Inge often reminded me of that. “You’re not a Communist; I mean, not really.”
“That’s true. I think too much about the Messiah. Some people wait for him; the Communist runs toward him. You’re helping me run.”
Talk like that enraged her: the Messiah, for her, was a sort of rabbi and she hated rabbis. She hated them as much as she hated priests.
“You see?” she would say, upset. “You’re not ready yet.”
“Because I mention the Messiah? Do you know, Inge, that there’s a tradition of messianic
surprise?
It speaks of the redeemer emerging unexpectedly, just when mankind least expects him.”
“I don’t like that kind of surprise, nor that kind of redemption. Communism is something else. It means working in the here and now, it means provoking upheavals not by dint of magic formulas but by work and political action. You still have a lot to learn.”
To please her I worked hard. I shared with the Party—that is, with some Party members—the money my father
sent to meet my needs and pay for my “studies.” To be more precise, I subsidized needy pals and comrades. If on rare occasions I had any money left, I gave it to Inge, who handed it over to Hauptmann, who added it to his special fund.
The 1932 elections were approaching. I turned that campaign into a personal matter, as though my future depended on it. I hardly ever slept. I wrote articles and edited tracts in Yiddish, which Inge helped translate into German; I ran from meetings to demonstrations; I shouted with the masses so dear to Hauptmann, demonstrated with them, fought for them with slogans, and soon, even with my fists. Leading their march, I carried the red flag just as my father, in Liyanov, used to carry the sacred scrolls—with love and resolution.
I was expecting a decisive victory. And so, I thought, were Inge and Hauptmann. Hauptmann had changed; he was getting thinner, as if consumed by a secret flame. Did he doubt the results after all? Was he more lucid than we had thought? He fought hard like all of us, but as the elections drew nearer, he looked increasingly worried.
One evening, as we were going to a demonstration in the suburbs, I told him how worried I was about him.
“What’s wrong with you, Bernard? You’re not your usual self.”
“I’m tired, that’s all. Overworked.”
“Another few days and you’ll be able to rest.”
“Another few days and the real work will begin.”
“Explain that, Bernard.”
“We’re going to win, the people will conquer; then we’ll have to assume our responsibilities,” he said with a smile.
Whatever doubts he had concerned
his
ability to assume the responsibilities of power, for he was convinced that the masses would carry him in with them. We shared his
confidence. We were conducting an earnest struggle for the people, for the militant working class, and our triumph was inevitable. History wanted it that way, and we alone, not the Social Democrats, not any other party, were marching with history.
In the higher levels of the Party, to be sure, coalitions and alliances with other parties, except the Nazis, were under discussion. For us, matters were simpler: all we could see were the contours of the platform the voters were going to shape with their ballots. The poor, the unemployed, the homeless numbered in the millions—they could not help but elect us Communists, who spoke for them, and who proclaimed their right to dignity.
I remember the speech Hauptmann made shortly before the election.
“Workers! Workers’ wives! Pause and reflect. Ask yourselves whether you prefer the shame of alms to a good salary, whether you prefer hatred to solidarity! Pause and reflect, comrades, before committing your future.…”
Inge too spoke that night.
“My parents are rich, so are their friends, they have never put in a day’s work in their lives. Others work for them. I have turned my back on them, and do you know why? To break the chain of evil. To help forge the brotherhood of the workers. I choose you, comrades, I choose you over my parents.…”
And I applauded, I applauded until I was exhausted. As for myself, I never took the floor. Only once did I make a speech—in Yiddish—before a Zionist group. I no longer remember whether the people hissed because of my political ideas or my language: they had expected an address in German. I fled, only to be jeered by Inge:
“Oh, yes, it was a triumph—for the Zionists!”
Election day came. Ensconced at Chez Blum since morning, after a sleepless night, we gulped black coffee while
waiting for the first results. Hauptmann made regular trips to Party headquarters and came back shaking his head: too early to know what was happening. The hours wore on. Inge, unable to sit still, left for the offices of the
Weltbühne
, where she knew one of the political commentators: nothing. She ran back over to the Rumänisches Café on the Budapest Strasse, and came back, out of breath and upset: the first results showed astonishing gains for the Nazis. Hauptmann, with a motion of his hand, kept us from panicking: that particular precinct had been carefully worked over by Goebbels; it did not prove a thing.…
After a second sleepless night we had every reason to panic: it was definitely a Hitler tidal wave. The figures were going up and up; they were entirely out of control. After only two years of political presence, Hitler had won six million votes.
Inge collapsed; she sobbed without restraint. Hauptmann, ashen, put his arm around her shoulder, and, strangely, I was more touched by his gesture than by the tears of my beloved. Was he still in love with her? Had I been wrong to separate them? United, they might, perhaps, have carried off a victory.… Once again I was gripped by old Liyanov complexes, my old guilt feelings. Fortunately, no one was paying attention to me.
For some reason that eluded me, Inge decided not to go home with me; she went to rest at her parents’ villa shaded by linden trees. After parting that night, the three of us went our separate ways.
It was the end of our group. We went back the next day to Chez Blum; we followed our usual routines, but our hearts were no longer there. We saw the inexorable onslaught of the curse: it was soon to strike each one of us in turn.
Inge moved; she rented a room in the apartment of an
actress doing one of Reinhardt’s plays. She was no longer in love with me. At least, so I thought and told her.
“With what’s happening these days, we have no right to think of love,” was all she could find to say.
To which I should have answered, “With what’s happening these days, love is precisely what we must think of.”
Bernard spoke less and less. I questioned him. “And the masses, what do you make of them? Their wisdom, their gratitude—have they suddenly disappeared? Explain to me how six million miserable wretches managed to vote for even blacker misery, more unbearable wretchedness! Explain to me, Bernard, the rabble’s triumph over decency and reason.”
Hauptmann gazed at me without wincing, a penetrating gaze. He said nothing; there was nothing to say. Moscow’s instructions had been unequivocal; there was to be no united front with the others opposing the Nazis. Why not? None of us understood; Bernard was no exception.
Then came the fateful New Year’s Eve. One of Hauptmann’s chic girlfriends had offered us her home to celebrate—celebrate what?—a hope gone up in smoke? It was to be our last party together. We drank, we clinked glasses, we forced ourselves to be merry. Loud laughter, noisy kisses, falsely gay songs, promises of love and fidelity: we were actors determined to play all the roles before leaving the stage.
Someone insisted Hauptmann give a toast. He raised his glass and said hoarsely:
“To defeat!”
We were too shocked to respond. Inge, on the verge of tears, implored him with her eyes to add a sentence, a single word of hope. Hauptmann smiled at her and at every one of us in turn. Then, without drinking a drop, he set down his glass.
That night he put a bullet through his head.
I never would have thought that one day I would be happy and proud to be numbered among the subjects of His Majesty the King of Greater Romania, but here I was. Perhaps I exaggerate. But it surely was useful. Thanks to my Romanian passport, valid in spite of my irregular military status, I was able to leave the Third Reich without difficulty.
My German friends could have come along or followed. It was 1934, and the frontiers were still so loosely guarded that all the Jews could have crossed to the other side; the police actually encouraged them to do so.
I tried over and over again to convince Inge and Traub to leave everything and set themselves up in Prague, Vienna or Paris, to go somewhere, anywhere.… Animated discussions that led nowhere. We each clung to our position.
Inge maintained that it was her duty to remain in Berlin. The Party needed the vital strength of its militant members. The Nazi regime would not, could not last; it was necessary to stay in order to hasten its fall.
Traub answered that this was wishful thinking. The Nazi victory was due not to political or economic considerations but to a mystical situation. Hitler embodied a desire for power and domination he had drawn from the depths
of the German people. Germany might not be Hitler, but Hitler was Germany. One had to be blind not to realize that. He concluded: The Nazi regime would last; it would weigh upon an entire generation.
Though lucid enough to have given up hope, Traub refused to leave. Paris, Vienna or Prague? His friends, all the people close to him, were still in Berlin. And then, despite all the taunting, cruelty and public humiliation that sporadically marked the onset of the Hitler era, the Jews went on living among themselves as well as before, if not better. Ostracized by the Christians, they had fallen back on themselves. The result was an unfolding of cultural activity unprecedented in the history of German Jewry. Forced to renounce all assimilationist ambitions, a substantial number were attending seminaries and evening schools to discover their own identity; that was reason enough to remain in Germany.
Is this the right moment to mention this? Later, much later, I learned that my father, Gershon Kossover, of blessed memory, had confronted the same dilemma in Liyanov. Some friends had offered him refuge in Bucharest; from there, with some money, he could have made his way to Palestine. But he could not make up his mind. He discussed it with my mother and sisters, with neighbors and friends. Should he leave the community to its fate? Or wait and see? What was his duty as a Jew, his responsibility as a man? To settle down into uncertainty, or confront the unknown elsewhere? My mother was of the opinion that he should liquidate the business, sell the house and flee; my father chided her for thinking only of their own situation. They stayed on. You know the rest, I imagine.
On the eve of my departure, Inge and I had one final discussion. She was packing my suitcase and I implored her to pack her own. She had no valid reason to remain.
Her parents were seeking buyers for their department store and luxurious apartment; they had business connections in England and planned to go there. Her friends and comrades were on the run or in prison. The Party, in disarray, was barely functioning any more. Did she belong to an underground network? Undoubtedly. In fact, she hinted at it.
“I’ve got work to do here.”
“You will always have work. In France, just as here. The same kind of work.”
“No, not the same,” she said, and changed the subject.
She did not go so far as to tell me the exact nature of her work; she didn’t have to. I understood what she meant but did not accept her argument.
A feeling of failure oppressed us. We had failed on every level, as militants, as friends and as individuals. Since Hauptmann’s suicide, Inge and I had drifted apart, though we still met daily. The shadow of our friend, his mocking, indulgent smile haunted us. We avoided talking about him but he remained present. Like remorse, his memory kept gnawing at us.
That evening, again, he was in our thoughts. Why did he commit suicide? Had it been fear of what was to come, or disgust with the events of the year just ended? Traub claimed Bernard had been toying with the idea of suicide for a long time, often citing Seneca’s praise of suicide:
The wise man lives as long as he should and not as long as he can
. According to Traub, Bernard was afraid of old age, impotence, decrepitude. Inge, however, maintained that Hauptmann’s act was related to mankind and not to his own person. He had killed himself because, in his view, we had just witnessed the decline, the death of the human race.