Authors: Elie Wiesel
In those days I couldn’t understand. But now, in the cell where you have me locked up, I have brooded over many things. It seems idiotic, Citizen Magistrate, but it is only now that I understand the cruelty in Spain. It is linked to Jewish history. You may laugh if you wish, but I believe that the Spanish civil war is linked to Jewish history. If the Spaniards massacred one another, if they set their country on fire and bled it, it is because, in 1492, they burned or drove away their Jews. It seems idiotic, but I believe it: the cruelty they exhibited toward us backfired. You begin by hating and persecuting others and you wind up hating and annihilating your own. The stakes of the Inquisition led to the destruction of Spain during the time of Franco’s Fascists.
Of course, there must be a more rational explanation: every war releases demented forces. Once released, they are impossible to restrain. The Talmud says it: If allowed to have his way, the Angel of Death will rage indiscriminately;
he will cut down the wicked
and
the just. In time of war, mankind goes insane.
I thought of that in Spain, and later in Soviet Russia, during the attacks and counterattacks. Human beings collapsed, moaning, gasping, cursing the enemy or heaven, or both. Some died praying, crying for their mothers, their wives, their lovers—and I said to myself: This is madness, this is madness.
Am I a romantic or just a fool? Or both? Death, in times of war, always brings me back to madness, a metaphysical madness. Children grow up; they learn to walk, to run, to talk, to laugh, to praise life, to denounce evil. At the cost of tears and effort, men and women come closer to happiness, a very small happiness. For themselves and their children they build a home with their hands and imagine a future filled with light—surely not without clouds, not without obstacles and surprises—and then, suddenly, a chosen one—
their
chosen one?—issues a command and the very rhythm of time is altered: the gesture of one single being cancels years, centuries of work and hopes. Immortality rushes toward death, and I feel like shouting, But this is madness, this is madness.
I accompany Carlos, my German-French-Hungarian friend whose name here is Carlos, as Stern is called Juan and Feldman is gunner Gonzales, as Paltiel Kossover now answers to the name of Sanchez. Sheer madness, all these first names borrowed from operettas, ludicrous masks we donned to run to the battlefield or possibly to death? Whom do we deceive? The Angel of Death is not fooled; he couldn’t care less about our games; he too must whisper that this is madness.
And so I accompany Carlos to Madrid. The capital is besieged, wounded, but it vibrates with enthusiasm. The proud city seems exhilarated.
No pasarán
, the Fascists will not pass, howls Madrid, knowing that sooner or later the
words will give way to the guns, that sooner or later this white and red and purple city will be turned upside down, invaded, punished, despoiled and brought to her knees. Why does she cry
No pasarán?
To bolster her own courage? Why do a hundred other towns, on every continent, echo her:
No pasarán?
To earn themselves a good conscience?
I ask my friend Carlos this question and he answers: “Because. After all, they must shout something. If you want people to fight, tell them to shout.”
“This is madness, Carlos, this is madness.”
“I prefer the madman who shouts to the one who keeps silent.”
“Not I, Carlos.”
“That’s because you have not yet learned to shout, nor to make war.”
Notwithstanding my visits to the front, my knowledge of things military had hardly improved. Prone to palpitations, to violent migraines, I made a wretched soldier. A rifle in my hands would have endangered my life more than the enemy’s. I did in fact carry a revolver in a leather holster clipped to my belt, but that was meant primarily to impress the militiamen and convince them that Comrade Sanchez was somebody.
The street battles are raging. The bastards fiercely defy death. Fiercely, the Reds show their mettle. It is Stalingrad before Stalingrad. Every house is a fortress, every citizen a hero.
Salud
, a captain of twenty or so calls out to us, as he wipes his mouth.
Salud
, cries a young woman bending over to avoid the bullets. The university complex nearby resembles a cemetery where the dead perform macabre dances.
“I am looking for Commanding Officer Longo,” says Carlos. “He must be in this sector.”
The young girl knows nothing, the young captain has heard nothing. We meet wounded fighters and others
carrying the wounded, we ask them whether they know this Commanding Officer Longo, whose real name is no doubt less exotic: Langer? Leibish? Yes, some do know him but they have no idea where he might be, others do not know him but say that he is commanding officer and, moreover, in charge of this sector. He may, in fact, be there, in the shelter, near the entrance to the park:
Salud
, greetings and good luck. Fine, let’s get across to the park, Carlos. The gunfire is intense. Hunched over, crawling along the open road, we advance, greeted by our boys:
Salud, salud
. We answer:
Salud
and
No pasarán
. Finally, in a shelter beneath a three-story building in ruins overlooking the park, a Brigade soldier escorts us to Commanding Officer Longo. He is squatting, studying maps. Sweat is running down his neck. Unkempt, exhausted, red-eyed, he looks like a wild man.
“What do you want?” he barks in a guttural voice without raising his head.
“I have orders to deliver to you,” says Carlos.
“Then, what are you waiting for? Let’s have them.”
“Not here,” says Carlos, looking him over.
“Are you insane? Where would you like us to go? To the drawing room?”
“These are secret orders,” Carlos insists.
“What do you want me to do? Send everybody outside to get knocked off?”
He runs his hand over his forehead, leaving a streak of black grease.
“All right,” he says irritably, “I understand. Let’s go to the corner, over there.”
They are alone in their corner, Carlos, who hands over the orders, and Longo, who receives them. Their eyes meet, a shell explodes and the two borrowed names are no more.
Salud
, Carlos.
No pasarán
, Longo, Leibish, Langer. This is madness, I say to myself.
Salud
, too, to the orders transmitted but not received,
Salud
to the orders lost with Carlos and Longo. They might well have resulted in an important initiative for our side, one that might have been essential for victory. I shall never know. I returned to base, a single thought throbbing in my head: This is madness; war is madness, war begets madness.
Particularly in Barcelona …
In Barcelona another war was being fought within the larger one. A sneaky, ugly, stupid war; I see it now, I didn’t at the time. I knew that the various armed groups and mini-groups of the different movements and factions, leaning more or less toward Socialism or anarchy or Communism, were jealous of one another, opposed one another and on occasion killed one another, but I didn’t know that it was systematic. Comrades, particularly leaders, disappeared into the night: Sent on a mission? Arrested by the NKVD? Doubt lingered for a few days, until one forgot, turned the page and dealt with other crises, only to discover other disappearances. Then one day, it was disclosed by “well-informed sources,” that, in fact, the first to disappear were still—or were no longer—in the sinister dungeons of such and such a prison and that they were suspected of subversive, divisive, therefore criminal, activity. Should one have reacted with indignation? There were more urgent priorities; there was the war against the Fascist enemy. And so the NKVD people carried out their mission as they saw fit, without shame and even without provoking shame. Their victims fell, often without knowing why. And even if they had known, what difference would it have made?
It was stupid, Citizen Magistrate, stupid and absurd, confess it, you who usually make others confess.
On one side, there were the Fascists, united to a man. On the other, the Loyalists and their allies: divided, fragmented,
pitted one against the other, always ready to fight one another.
The Trotskyites—who were staying at the Hotel Faucon, on the Ramblas—were first to disappear. Then followed their old friends. Then came those who were nobody’s friends: the anarchists. Politics above all, you’ll tell me. No, Citizen Magistrate: victory above all, justice above all.
You think I’m naive, don’t you? I was. I am not ashamed to admit it, I even state it with pride. This Spanish war, I am glad to have taken part in it. I believed in it. I was on the right side, I fought for everything that stands for the honor of being a man. I was conscious of that. That is why I disregarded the nocturnal arrests and the executions at dawn of my Trotskyite and anarchist friends—for they were all my friends. Am I indicting myself now? Never mind. I am speaking to myself as I speak to you and I refuse to lie to myself.
I rather liked the Barcelona anarchists—their courage, their bravado, their absurd but poetic slogans. I envied them a little; why couldn’t I sing as they did, with the same kind of carefree, childlike enthusiasm? Interesting: there were only a few Jews among them.
They were grown children. Smiling, exuberant children confronting a society that defied them with its logic, its laws, its hypocritical calculations, its efficacy.
Their ideology did not hold water, that’s true. Anarchy does not exist, cannot exist as a system, for it denies the future by preventing it from being born. One does not militate against an established order by opposing to it another established order: the void is not a tool, nor is disorder. The concept of chaos contains its own contradiction. A true anarchist must eventually repudiate anarchy, become anti-anarchist, therefore … Nonetheless, I loved to walk along the Ramblas or drink in the picturesque bars
of Montjuich with García from Teruel, Juan from Córdoba, Luis from Malaga—were those their real names? Does an anarchist accept the ties and responsibilities of a name? Whenever they repeated themselves too much or uttered a grandiose statement that was meaningless, they would begin to laugh loudly and clap their knees. As for me, as drunk as they, I recited for them—yes, you read it correctly—mystical poems which they inspired in my dizzy head. For they were all unavowed mystics, reluctant mystics, obsessed by the mystery of the end, the explosion of time. They tried to rush into it to reach nothingness and drown in it in a flash of laughter. Anarchists and mystics use the same vocabulary, did you know that? They use the same metaphors. In the Talmud, God forbids Rabbi Ishmael to cry lest He plunge the universe back into its primary state. Is that not the first anarchist image, the first anarchist impulse?
I remember Zablotowski—pardon me, José—a painter of talent, full of fire and fury, explaining to me his involvement with the movement: “I hate white; I like to see it exploded. Covered with mud and blood.”
And Simpson, the student from Liverpool, said, “I hate this life that has been imposed upon us, this earth that has been given to us as one is given charity, this world that is putting us to sleep. I’d like to see them caught in hell, twisted by the flames, terrorizing the gods who have created them. That is why I have broken with my people and my past. Here I feel free!”
Don’t let these declarations lead you to the conclusion that the anarchists were attracted by death. The inane battle cry “Long live death” did not originate with them but with a senile Falangist, General Milan d’Astray. The fool. He did not understand that to express desperate anarchy required both superior intelligence and a sense of humor.
In fact, that beribboned ass was rebuked by Miguel de Unamuno, whose work I didn’t know at the time. I began reading it after learning what had happened at the University of Salamanca, whose rector he was. In a crowded and emotion-charged amphitheater, facing Falangists howling their admiration for General d’Astray by repeating his “Long live death,” the old philosopher spoke slowly, soberly: “I cannot remain silent.… Not to speak up now would be to lie.… I have just heard a morbid, senseless cry: Long live death. For me, that is a loathsome paradox.…”
A speech of astounding courage and nobility. Its echoes reverberated through all of wounded and bloody Spain. It was discussed in the
casas del pueblo
during the long nights under the tents and even in the trucks transporting us to the front. At the time, I was able to recite his entire speech from memory: “This university is a temple to intelligence and I am its high priest.… You, General d’Astray, will prevail because you have the might; but you will not convince.…”
That was his last public speech; he stopped teaching and died shortly thereafter. But there was renewed interest in his writings. I read his
Life of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza
at the time of the Teruel campaign. His
Tragic Sense of Life
I devoured in ’37 at the time of the battle at Guadalajara. I remember that as I read, I thought that the author had to be a descendant of the Marranos. His concept of exile reminded me of Rabbi Itzhak Luria. The tragic sense reflected in his work had been expressed, centuries before, by the disciples of Shammai and Hillel who considered that it would have been better for man never to have appeared in this world. But “Since he was born, let him study Torah.…” Funny, everything seems to bring me back to Jewish memory. Everyone I meet is an old acquaintance.
Would you like another example? It was back in 1938, shortly before the great debacle, shortly before I was repatriated. The German army had just entered Austria, welcomed by a delirious population. The vise was tightening, the clouds were gathering. Night was about to descend on the continent, as it had over Spain. Spain’s history foreshadowed Europe’s. Might prevailed over right, even over divine right. The aimed rifle was indifferent to human values; it was pointed at mankind and mankind first began to notice. Republican Spain was lost and so was Europe. History was tumbling into shame and fear.