From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences Read online

  Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum was a member of the American delegation. Now I needed only eight more. Leo Cherne, the president of the International Rescue Committee, was there as well. Only seven more to find.

  Then I spotted the well-known Soviet dissident, Alexander Ginsburg, and rushed over to him. Would he agree to help me make up a minyan? He looked at me uncomprehendingly. He must have thought I was mad. A minyan? What is a minyan? I explained: a religious service. Now he surely did not understand. A religious service? Here, by the mined bridge separating Thailand and Cambodia? Right in the middle of a demonstration of international solidarity? I began all over again to explain the significance of a minyan. But in vain. Alexander Ginsburg is not a Jew; he is a convert to the Russian Orthodox Church. I still had seven to find.

  Suddenly, I caught sight of the young French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, who was making a statement for television. Only six more to find. Farther on, I found the French novelist Guy Suares. Then a doctor from Toulouse joined us, followed by Henry Kamm, of The New York Times. Another doctor came over. At last there were ten of us. There, in the midst of all the commotion, a few yards from the Cambodian frontier, we recited the customary prayers, and I intoned Kaddish, my voice trembling.

  Then, suddenly, from somewhere behind me, came the voice of a man still young, repeating the words after me, blessing and glorifying the Master of the Universe. He had tears in his eyes, that young Jew. “For whom are you saying Kaddish?” I asked him. “For your father?” “No.” “For your mother?” “No.”

  He grew reflective and looked toward the frontier. “It is for them,” he said.

  Making the Ghosts Speak

  HAVE I CHANGED? Of course. Everyone changes. To live means to traverse a certain time, a certain space: with a little luck, some traces of life are left. Those at the beginning are not the same as those at the end. Of course, my tradition teaches me that the road always leads somewhere, and although the destination remains the same, at different stages of the journey we change and renew ourselves. Drawn to childhood, the old man will seek it in a thousand different ways.

  I AM SEEKING my childhood; I will always be seeking it. I need it. It is necessary for me as a point of reference, as a refuge. It represents for me a world that no longer exists; a sunny and mysterious place where beggars were princes in disguise, and fools were wise men freed from their constraints.

  At that time, in that universe, everything seemed simple. People were born and died, hoped and despaired, understood certain things—not everything. I resigned myself to the idea that the quest is itself a victory; even if it hardly succeeds, it represents a triumph. It was enough for me to know that someone knew the answer; what I myself sought was the question.

  It was in this way that I viewed man and his place in creation: it was up to him to question what surrounded him and thus to go beyond himself. It is not by chance, I told myself, that the first question in the Bible is that which God puts to Adam: “Where are you?”

  “What?” cried a great Hasidic Master, Rabbi Shneour-Zalmen of Ladi. “God didn’t know where Adam was? No, that’s not the way to understand the question. God knew, Adam didn’t.”

  That, I thought, is what one must always seek to know: one’s role in society, one’s place in history. It is one’s duty to ask every day, “Where am I in relation to God and to others?”

  And, strangely enough, the child knew what the adult did not. Yes, in my small town somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains, I knew where I was. I knew why I existed. I existed to glorify God and to sanctify his word. I existed to link my destiny to that of my people, and the destiny of my people to that of humanity. I existed to do good and to combat evil, to accomplish the will of heaven; in short, to fit each of my acts, each of my dreams, each of my prayers into God’s design.

  I knew that God was at the same time near and far, magnanimous and severe, rigorous and merciful. I knew that I belonged to his chosen people—people chosen to serve him by suffering as well as by hope. I knew that I was in exile and that the exile was total, universal, even cosmic. I knew as well that the exile would not last, that it would end in redemption. I knew so many things, about so many subjects. I knew especially when to rejoice and when to lament: I consulted the calendar; everything was there.

  Now I no longer know anything.

  As in a dusty mirror, I look at my childhood and I wonder if it is mine. I don’t recognize myself in the child who studies there with fervor, who says his prayers. It’s because he is surrounded by other children; he walks like them, with them, head bowed and lips firm. He advances into the night as if attracted by its shadows. I watch them as they enter an abyss of flames, I see them transformed into ashes, I hear their cries turn into silence, and I no longer know anything, I no longer understand anything: they have taken away my certainties, and no one will give them back to me.

  IT’S NOT ONLY a matter of questions concerning religious faith. It’s a matter of those, and all others. It’s a matter of redefining, or at least rethinking, my relations with others and with myself: have they changed? I think that I can answer Yes without the slightest hesitation. My attitude toward Christians, for example: before the war, it was mistrustful, if not hostile; after, it became more open and hospitable.

  Before the war, I avoided everyone who came from the other side—that is, from Christianity. Priests frightened me. I avoided them; so as not to pass near them, I would cross the street. I dreaded all contact with them. I feared being kidnapped by them and baptized by force. I had heard so many rumors, so many stories of this type; I had the impression that I was always in danger.

  At school I sat with Christian boys of my age, but we didn’t speak to one another. At recess we played separated by an invisible wall. I never visited a Christian schoolmate at his home. We had nothing in common. Later, as an adolescent, I stayed away from them. I knew them to be capable of anything: of beating me, humiliating me by pulling my payess or seizing my yarmulke, without which I felt naked. My dream back then? To live in a Jewish world, completely Jewish, a world where Christians would have scarcely any access. A protected world, ordered according to the laws of Sinai. It’s strange, but awakening in the ghetto comforted me: after all, we were living among our own. I didn’t yet know that it was only a step, the first, toward a small railroad station somewhere in Poland called Auschwitz.

  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.

  IT 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 gi
ven 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.

  AND 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.

  THIS 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

  “THIS 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.

  HERE I MUS
T 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.