From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences Read online

  Books by Elie Wiesel

  Night

  Dawn

  The Accident

  The Town Beyond the Wall

  The Gates of the Forest

  The Jews of Silence

  Legends of Our Time

  A Beggar in Jerusalem

  One Generation After

  Souls on Fire

  The Oath

  Ani Maamin (cantata)

  Zalmen, or the Madness of God (play)

  Messengers of God

  A Jew Today

  Four Hasidic Masters

  The Trial of God (play)

  The Testament

  Five Biblical Portraits

  Somewhere a Master

  The Golem (Illustrated by Mark Podwal)

  The Fifth Son

  Against Silence (Edited by Irving Abrahamson)

  Twilight

  The Six Days of Destruction (With Albert Friedlander)

  From the Kingdom of Memory

  Sages and Dreamers

  The Forgotten

  Copyright © 1990 by Elirion Associates, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Schocken Books Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Originally published in the United States by Summit Books, a division of

  Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York, 1990.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wiesel, Elie, 1928-

  From the kingdom of memory : reminiscences / Elie Wiesel.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80643-7

  1. Wiesel, Elie, 1928- —Biography. 2. Authors, French—20th century—Biography. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Influence. 4. Civilization, Modern—20th century. 5. Jewish meditations.

  I. Title.

  PQ2683.I32Z464 1995

  813′.54—dc20

  [B] 94-3678

  v3.1

  FOR ELISHA, AGAIN

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Why I Write

  To Believe or Not to Believe

  Inside a Library

  The Stranger in the Bible

  A Celebration of Friendship

  Peretz Markish

  Dialogues

  Pilgrimage to the Kingdom of Night

  Sighet Again

  Kaddish in Cambodia

  Making the Ghosts Speak

  Passover

  Meeting Again

  Trivializing Memory

  Bitburg

  Testimony at the Barbie Trial

  When Memory Brings People Together

  More Dialogues

  What Really Makes Us Free?

  Are We Afraid of Peace?

  The Nobel Address

  The Nobel Lecture

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Preface

  IF THERE IS a single theme that dominates all my writings, all my obsessions, it is that of memory—because I fear forgetfulness as much as hatred and death. To forget is, for a Jew, to deny his people—and all that it symbolizes—and also to deny himself. Hence my desire to forget neither where I come from, nor what influenced my choices: the haunted sites of my childhood; the land of malediction where in an instant youngsters grew old; the people I met along the way.

  Remember … Remember that you were a slave in Egypt. Remember to sanctify the Sabbath … Remember Amalek, who wanted to annihilate you … No other Biblical Commandment is as persistent. Jews live and grow under the sign of memory. “Do not forget that you are Jewish,” are the words—perhaps the last—Jewish parents used to say to their sons and daughters when they left home. To be Jewish is to remember—to claim our right to memory as well as our duty to keep it alive.

  Through the recent past I find my distant origins, going back to Moses and Abraham. It is in their name too that I communicate my quest. When a Jew prays, he links his prayer to those of David and the Besht. When a Jew despairs, it is Jeremiah’s sadness that makes him weep. The Jew’s memory draws its strength from that of his people, and beyond it, from humankind.

  For memory is a blessing: it creates bonds rather than destroys them. Bonds between present and past, between individuals and groups. It is because I remember our common beginning that I move closer to my fellow human beings. It is because I refuse to forget that their future is as important as my own. What would the future of man be if it were devoid of memory?

  Why I Write

  WHY DO I WRITE? Perhaps in order not to go mad. Or, on the contrary, to touch the bottom of madness.

  Like Samuel Beckett, the survivor expresses himself en désespoir de cause, because there is no other way.

  Speaking of the solitude of the survivor, the great Yiddish and Hebrew poet and thinker Aaron Zeitlin addresses those who have left him: his dead father, his dead brother, his dead friends. “You have abandoned me,” he says to them. “You are together, without me. I am here. Alone. And I make words.”

  So do I, just like him. I too speak words, write words, reluctantly.

  There are easier occupations, far more pleasant ones. For the survivor, however, writing is not a profession, but a calling; “an honor,” according to Camus. As he put it: “I entered literature through worship.” Other writers have said, “Through anger; through love.” As for myself, I would say, “Through silence.”

  It was by seeking, by probing silence that I began to discover the perils and power of the word.

  I never intended to be a novelist. The only role I sought was that of witness. I believed that, having survived by chance, I was duty-bound to give meaning to my survival, to justify each moment of my life. I knew the story had to be told. Not to transmit an experience is to betray it; this is what Jewish tradition teaches us. But how to do this?

  “When Israel is in exile, so is the word,” says the Book of Splendor. The word has deserted the meaning it was intended to convey—one can no longer make them coincide. The displacement, the shift, is irrevocable. This was never more true than right after the upheaval. We all knew that we could never say what had to be said, that we could never express in words—coherent, intelligible words—our experience of madness on an absolute scale. The walk through fiery nights, the silence before and after the selection, the toneless praying of the condemned, the Kaddish of the dying, the fear and hunger of the sick, the shame and suffering, the haunted eyes, the wild stares—I thought that I would never be able to speak of them. All words seemed inadequate, worn, foolish, lifeless, whereas I wanted them to sear.

  Where was I to discover a fresh vocabulary, a primeval language? The language of night was not human; it was primitive, almost animal—hoarse shouting, screaming, muffled moaning, savage howling, the sounds of beating.… A brute strikes wildly, a body falls; an officer raises his arm and a whole community walks toward a common grave; a soldier shrugs his shoulders and a thousand families are torn apart, to be reunited only by death. Such was the language of the concentration camp. It negated all other language and took its place. Rather than link people, it became a wall between them. Could the wall be scaled? Could the reader be brought to the other side? I knew the answer to be No, and yet I also knew that No had to become Yes. This was the wish, the last will of the dead. One had to shatter the wall encasing the darkest truth, and give it a name. One had to force man to look.

  The fear of forgetting: the main obses
sion of all those who have passed through the universe of the damned. The enemy relied on people’s disbelief and forgetfulness.

  Remember, said the father to his son, and the son to his friend: gather the names, the faces, the tears. If, by a miracle, you come out of it alive, try to reveal everything, omitting nothing, forgetting nothing. Such was the oath we had all taken: “If, by some miracle, I survive, I will devote my life to testifying on behalf of all those whose shadows will be bound to mine forever.”

  This is why I write certain things rather than others: to remain faithful.

  Of course, there are times of doubt for the survivor, times when one gives in to weakness, or longs for comfort. I hear a voice within me telling me to stop mourning the past. I too want to sing of love and its magic. I too want to celebrate the sun, and the dawn that heralds the sun. I would like to shout, and shout loudly: “Listen, listen well! I too am capable of victory, do you hear? I too am open to laughter and joy. I want to walk head high, my face unguarded.” One feels like shouting, but the shout becomes a murmur. One must make a choice; one must remain faithful. This is what the survivor feels; he owes nothing to the living, but everything to the dead.

  I owe the dead my memory. I am duty-bound to serve as their emissary, transmitting the history of their disappearance, even if it disturbs, even if it brings pain. Not to do so would be to betray them, and thus myself. I simply look at them. I see them and I write.

  While writing, I question them as I question myself. I write to understand as much as to be understood. Will I succeed one day? Wherever one starts from, one reaches darkness. God? He remains the God of darkness. Man? The source of darkness. The killers’ sneers, their victims’ tears, the onlookers’ indifference, their complicity and complacency: I do not understand the divine role in all that. A million children massacred: I will never understand.

  Jewish children: they haunt my writings. I see them again and again. I shall always see them. Hounded, humiliated, bent like the old men who surround them trying to protect them, in vain. They are thirsty, the children, and there is no one to give them water. They are hungry, the children, but there is no one to give them a crust of bread. They are afraid, and there is no one to reassure them.

  They walk in the middle of the road, like urchins. They are on the way to the station, and they will never return. In sealed cars, without air or food, they travel toward another world; they guess where they are going, they know it, and they keep silent. They listen to the wind, the call of death in the distance.

  All these children, these old people, I see them. I never stop seeing them. I belong to them.

  But they, to whom do they belong?

  People imagine that a murderer weakens when facing a child. That the child might reawaken the killer’s lost humanity. That the killer might be unable to kill the child before him.

  Not this time. With us, it happened differently. Our Jewish children had no effect upon the killers. Nor upon the world. Nor upon God.

  I think of them, I think of their childhood. Their childhood in a small Jewish town, and this town is no more. They frighten me; they reflect an image of myself, one that I pursue and run from at the same time—the image of a Jewish adolescent who knew no fear except the fear of God, whose faith was whole, comforting.

  No, I do not understand. And if I write, it is to warn the reader that he will not understand either. “You will not understand, you will never understand,” were the words heard everywhere in the kingdom of night. I can only echo them.

  An admission of impotence and guilt? I do not know. All I know is that Treblinka and Auschwitz cannot be told. And yet I have tried. God knows I have tried.

  Did I attempt too much, or not enough? Out of some thirty volumes, only three or four try to penetrate the realm of the dead. In my other books, through my other books, I try to follow other roads. For it is dangerous to linger among the dead; they hold on to you, and you run the risk of speaking only to them. And so, I forced myself to turn away from them and study other periods, explore other destinies and teach other tales: the Bible and the Talmud, Hasidism and its fervor, the shtetl and its songs, Jerusalem and its echoes; the Russian Jews and their anguish, their awakening, their courage. At times it seems to me that I am speaking of other things with the sole purpose of keeping the essential—the personal experience—unspoken. At times I wonder: And what if I was wrong? Perhaps I should have stayed in my own world with the dead.

  But then, the dead never leave me. They have their rightful place even in the works about pre-Holocaust Hasidism or ancient Jerusalem. Even in my Biblical and Midrashic tales, I pursue their presence, mute and motionless. The presence of the dead then beckons so forcefully that it touches even the most removed characters. Thus, they appear on Mount Moriah, where Abraham is about to sacrifice his son, a Holocaust offering to their common God. They appear on Mount Nebo, where Moses confronts solitude and death. And again in the Pardess, the orchard of secret knowledge, where a certain Elisha ben Abuya, seething with anger and pain, decides to repudiate his faith. They appear in Hasidic and Talmudic legends in which victims forever need defending against forces that would crush them. Technically, so to speak, they are of course elsewhere, in time and space, but on a deeper, truer plane, the dead are part of every story, of every scene. They die with Isaac, lament with Jeremiah, they sing with the Besht and, like him, wait for miracles—but alas, they will not come to pass.

  “But what is the connection?” you will ask. Believe me, there is one. After Auschwitz everything long past brings us back to Auschwitz. When I speak of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, when I evoke Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai and Rabbi Akiba, it is the better to understand them in the light of Auschwitz. As for the Maggid of Mezeritch and his disciples, it is to encounter the followers of their followers that I attempt to reconstruct their spellbinding universe. I like to imagine them alive, exuberant, celebrating life and hope. Their happiness is as necessary to me as it once was to themselves. And yet …

  How did they manage to keep their faith intact? How did they manage to sing as they went to meet the Angel of Death? I know Hasidim who never wavered in their faith; I respect their strength. I know others who chose rebellion, protest, rage; I respect their courage. For there comes a time when only those who do believe in God will cry out to him in wrath and anguish. The faith of some matters as much as the strength of others. It is not ours to judge; it is only ours to tell the tale.

  But where is one to begin? Whom is one to include? One meets a Hasid in all my novels. And a child. And an old man. And a beggar. And a madman. They are all part of my inner landscape. Why? They are pursued and persecuted by the killers; I offer them shelter. The enemy wanted to create a society purged of their presence, and I have brought some of them back. The world denied them, repudiated them: so let them live at least within the feverish dreams of my characters.

  It is for them that I write.

  And yet, the survivor may experience remorse. He has tried to bear witness; it was all in vain.

  After the liberation, illusions shaped our hopes. We were convinced that a new world would be built upon the ruins of Europe. A new civilization would dawn. No more wars, no more hate, no more intolerance, no fanaticism anywhere. And all this because the witnesses would speak, and speak they did. Was it to no avail?

  They will continue, for they cannot do otherwise. When man, in his grief, falls silent, Goethe says, then God gives him the strength to sing of his sorrows. From that moment on, he may no longer choose not to sing, whether his song is heard or not. What matters is to struggle against silence with words, or through another form of silence. What matters is to gather a smile here and there, a tear here and there, a word here and there, and thus justify the faith placed in man, a long time ago, by so many victims.

  Why do I write? To wrest those victims from oblivion. To help the dead vanquish death.

  To Believe or Not to Believe

  SOMEWHERE in the Carpathian Mountains, at the other
end of my life, a Jewish child is saying his daily prayers. He closes his eyes to concentrate better, swaying to and fro as if to break out of the rhythm of his daily pursuits. Just before concluding, he repeats the Thirteen Principles of Faith exactly as a certain physician from Cordoba, the great philosopher and codifier Moses Maimonides, the Rambam, formulated them eight centuries earlier—clear and immutable principles which serve to buttress all who need them.

  “I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, Blessed be His name, is the author and guide of everything that has been created … I believe that the Creator is the first and last … He rewards those who keep His Commandments and punishes those who transgress against them … The Torah will not be changed and there never will be any other Law … I believe in the coming of the Messiah, and, though he may tarry, I will wait daily for his coming.…”

  I look at that Jewish child who prays and is afraid to look; I listen and envy him.

  For him, for me, it was once so simple. I feared God while loving him. I came to terms with exile while regretting it. I loved my parents and admired my teachers. I was a believer, as they say. And if I questioned my belief at all, it was only for fear that it might not be sufficiently perfect.

  As for my place in an uncertain world, my aim in an ephemeral life—I had no doubts on that score. It was up to man, as God’s creation, to make the universe more welcoming. To bring redemption closer. Wasn’t this inordinately ambitious? So what? For us, in the Diaspora, being a Jew meant bridging the summit and the abyss, reconciling the worst torment with the most sublime hope. Imprisoned up there in divine time, the Messiah could expect deliverance from none other than man, below. Although a work of God, the Torah is not within God’s grasp: those who study it, and they alone, are qualified to interpret the Law. Do these seem dangerous paradoxes? For us, life itself was a paradox, and danger did not frighten us.

  In those days I simply could not conceive of a Jew who did not define himself through his faith. Jews had the choice: loyalty or denial. A faithless Jew was a renegade, outlawed from the community of Israel, therefore despicable. And dangerous. I had read enough on the subject to know how much distress was caused by renegades; they were to be found at more than one crossroad of Jewish suffering.