Where did you live?
In a palace. Spacious, immense. And beautiful. Luxurious. Unique.
How many rooms?
Three. No, four. We pushed each other a little, it didn’t matter. There was no running water. Still, it was a palace.
Will you go back one day?
Never. The place is gone.
What will you do when all this is over?
Build a house and fill it with food. Then I’ll invite all the poor of the earth to come share my meals. But …
Yes?
… but nobody will come, because all this will never be over.
*
Do you know you are like one possessed? You have only one thought, one wish: to eat to your heart’s content.
I’m hungry.
It’s not becoming to think of food all the time.
It’s not becoming to be hungry all the time.
You mean to tell me nothing else counts?
There is nothing else.
And what about ideas? Ideals? All the great dreams of man imposing his will on the universe? The old man’s joy of discovering at last the secret of the wait?
You may have them all for one crust of bread.
And God?
Let’s not talk about God. Not here.
Could it be you no longer believe in Him?
I didn’t say that.
Am I to understand your faith has not deserted you?
I didn’t say that either. I said that I refuse to speak about God, here in this place. To say yes would be to lie. To say no—also. If need be, I would confront Him with an angry shout, a gesture, a murmur. But to make of Him—here—a theological topic, that I won’t do! God—here—is the extra bowl of soup pushed at you or stolen from you, simply because the man ahead of you is either stronger or quicker than you. God—here—cannot be found in humble or grandiloquent phrases, but in a crust of bread …
Which you have had or are about to have?
… which you will never have.
*
Will you remember me?
I promise.
But how? You don’t know who I am, not even I know that.
It doesn’t matter: I shall remember my promise.
For a long time?
For as long as possible. All my life perhaps. But … why are you laughing?
So that you may remember my laughter as well as the look in my eyes.
You lie. You laugh because you are going mad.
Perfect. Remember my madness.
Tell me … am I the reason you’re laughing?
You’re not the only one, my boy, you’re not the only one.
READINGS
Treblinka, Birkenau, Belsen, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Belzec, Ponar, Sobibor, Majdanek: somber capitals of a strange kingdom, immense and timeless, where Death, as sovereign, assumed the face of God as well as his attributes in heaven and on earth and even in the heart of man.
The time: 1941–1945. In the middle of the holocaust, a term implying the mystical dimension of the “concentrationary” phenomenon. Nazi Germany is collapsing under the weight of its evil, but for all that, the Jews will not win the war. Many will not see victory.
Written off and abandoned, no power will grant them protection. Their fate has no place on the agendas of the Big Three. Nor does it rouse the conscience of nations. Writers, artists, moralists: some are absorbed by their work, their immortality, others by the conflict in its totality. Everything proceeds as though the Jews did not exist, as though they existed no more. As though Auschwitz were but a peaceful town somewhere in Silesia. President Roosevelt refuses to bomb the railroad tracks leading to it. When consulted, Winston Churchill concurs in the refusal. Moscow condemns German atrocities perpetrated against civilian populations, but blankets in silence the massacre of the Jews. On both sides, they are sacrificed in advance. People say: History will judge. Indeed. But it will judge without understanding. As for Adolf Hitler, he understands. Moreover, he is convinced that his adversaries themselves will be grateful to him for having resolved for them the eternal Jewish Question. Justice will be rendered him one day and he will be proclaimed the benefactor of humanity; he is persuaded of that.
A gigantic and efficient organization is already at work. Theoreticians, executives, guards, secretaries, typists, engineers and technicians of various kinds: all devote to it their energy and enthusiasm. For them, it is the great adventure, the ideal, the exhilarating rise of their star: they are taking part in the most profound mutation of all times, they are reconstructing humanity on new foundations. Thanks to them, this chosen but weakened people will sink into oblivion. The process is everywhere the same. All roads end in night.
Rejected by mankind, the condemned do not go so far as to reject it in turn. Their faith in history remains unshaken, and one may well wonder why. They do not despair. The proof: they persist in surviving—not only to survive, but to testify.
The victims elect to become witnesses.
On his way to the mass grave, the historian Simon Dubnow exhorts the Jews of Riga, his companions in misfortune: “Open your eyes and ears, remember every detail, every name, every sigh! The color of the clouds, the hissing of the wind in the trees, the executioner’s every gesture: the one who survives must forget nothing!”
In Birkenau, a member of the Sonderkommando in charge of maintaining the furnaces, compiles, by the light of the flames, reports and detailed statistics for future generations.
Everywhere, at the very core of distress and death, young militants and wizened old men make notes, consign to paper events, anecdotes, impressions. Some are only children: David Rubinstein and Anne Frank.
Behind the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto, Emmanuel Ringelblum and his hundred scribes have but a single thought: to gather and bury as many documents as possible—so much suffering, so many trials must not be lost to History. Since European Jewry is doomed, it becomes imperative to at least preserve the scorched vestiges of its passing.
Poems, litanies, plays: to write them, Jews went without sleep, bartered their food for pencils and paper. They gambled with their fate. They risked their lives. No matter. They went on fitting together words and symbols. An instant before perishing in Auschwitz, in Bialistok, in Buna, dying men described their agony. In Buchenwald, I attended several “literary” evenings and listened to anonymous poets reciting verses I was too young to understand. They did not write them for me, for us, but for the others, those on the outside and those yet unborn.
There was then a veritable passion to testify for the future, against death and oblivion, a passion conveyed by every possible means of expression.
Terse documents. Precisely kept ledgers of horrors. Accounts told with childlike artlessness. What they have in common is their desire to tear from the clutches of night the life and death of what was once a flourishing, vibrant community before it became a hunted pack at bay. Haunting, terrifying, they waver between scream and silent anger. Established facts, known episodes, examined and reexamined, yet endlessly astounding, episodes which are comic and therefore all the more harrowing: one always thinks one knows this or that aspect of the holocaust. Wrong: everything remains to be discovered. Reading certain books by authors who do not know each other, one wonders: they describe the same scenes, the same partings. It all begins and it all ends the same way. It has all been said, yet all remains to be said.
Autobiographical accounts or imagined texts, the principal character remains the camp or the ghetto, each with its diminishing population devoured by time or death.
The ghetto with its ghosts, its gravediggers, the empty, glassy or demented stares of its children. The inside of a nightmare one gets used to, and even very quickly: in a single night, a single hour, one acquires knowledge and wisdom. The child discovers the old man within himself. Overnight, familiar patterns and concepts give way. To be replaced by new ones. Soon accepted. One loves, invokes the purity and irreducibility of love, celebrates marriages and religi
ous holidays. One sings, hides, deceives and mocks oneself. One begs for a potato, a shred of consolation. One sees oneself as other and elsewhere. And what if tomorrow one dies of hunger, of illness, of exhaustion or simply of hope—yes, hope.
Crazed with pain, tortured, an eight-year-old cries out: “I want to steal, I want to eat, I want to be German. So I can eat, eat without shame, and sleep, sleep without fear.” He dies without eating. Other children mature too early, succumb to the cold, to the anguish of seeing their parents humiliated and beaten. Some become targets for soldiers who as good warriors must practice their aim.
And then there are the camps. And the fear they arouse in the inhabitants of the ghettos. The children are taken first. Then come the old, the jobless, the sick, the resigned, all those who do not possess a working permit, either yellow, red or green, stamped by the military, the police or the German employer. Anyway, one never knows which color is the right one.
Ultimately, nobody believes in permits or pledges any more. Here and there, young people arm themselves or join the partisans in the woods. Here and there, they build subterranean shelters, fortified bunkers, lines of defense. Here and there, they prepare an insurrection to teach humanity and history a lesson they hardly deserve. The one in Warsaw will not be forgotten. There were others less well known. And yet, every revolt had its poet, every massacre its historian. How many documents still lie buried at the bottom of how many pits? One day they will be discovered. For the moment, every account from every ghetto is valid for all. The same anger animates them. Will there come a day when it will be appeased?
Some witnesses answer no. They value their anger and cling to it. It constitutes their link with a world gone by. In their rage, they spare neither the living nor the dead. To better illustrate the evil which dominated all levels of the “concentrationary” kingdom, they challenge even the victims by reproaching them for their docility. That evil had an absolute coefficient is beyond doubt. At Auschwitz one breathed contempt and indignity: a crust of bread was worth more than divine promises, a bowl of soup transformed a sensitive human being into a wild animal. Principles, disciplines and feelings only feebly resisted the implacable laws of Majdanek.
A killer, for his amusement, simulated the execution of a Jew; he knocked him unconscious and fired a shot into the air. Opening his eyes, the Jew saw his killer bent over him, sneering: “You thought you could escape us by dying? Even in the other world we are the masters!”
Anecdote which contains a part of truth: in dealing with the victims, in an effort to break their morale before annihilating them, the executioners assumed the role of God. They alone could, by decree, proclaim the limits of good and evil. Their idiosyncrasies were law and so were their whims. They were above morality, above truth.
Prisoners of such a system, many deportees chose the easy path of abdication. How is one to judge them? I do not. I cannot condemn anyone who failed to withstand trials and temptations. Guilty or not, the ghetto police, the kapos, may plead extenuating circumstances. They arouse pity more than contempt. The weak, the cowardly, all those who sold their soul to live another day, another anxious night, I prefer to include them in the category of victims. More than the others, they need forgiveness. More and in other ways than their companions, they deserve compassion and charity. Their guilt reflects on their tormentors.
Still, I sometimes read books presented as evidence for the prosecution. Their authors are harsh, their judgments devoid of compassion. Whether their words hurt or shock matters little: they will be heard. Of necessity fragmentary, they do not reflect the whole but are part of it. In fact, this can serve as a general rule: every witness expresses only his own truth, in his own name. To convey the truth of the holocaust in its totality, it is not enough to have listened to the survivors, one must find a way to add the silence left behind by millions of unknowns. That silence can have no interpreter. One cannot conceive of the holocaust except as a mystery, begotten by the dead.
We question today, and will continue to wonder for a long time, how such crimes and horrors could have been committed. We shall never know. Or why one people chose murder and another martyrdom. We shall never know why. All questions pertaining to Auschwitz lead to anguish. Whether or not the death of one million children has meaning, either way man is negated and condemned. Auschwitz defies the novelist’s language, the historian’s analysis, the vision of the prophet. Survivors and witnesses have done their best to describe their experiences, yet their writings have perhaps no substantial relationship with what they have seen and lived through. They have written because they could not do otherwise: after all, one needed to lift the tombstone, however slightly, and grope one’s way out of the night. By speaking out, they have forced us to see that the mystery endures. Which, if it means anything, means defeat. In its presence, words ring hollow. In its shadow, we may well be impostors. Will there be a day when we will know what was the reality of Auschwitz? Perhaps Auschwitz never existed, except for those who left there, beneath the ashes, a part of their future in pledge.
The Talmud relates: when the Temple in Jerusalem was set on fire, the priests interrupted the sacred services, climbed on the roof and spoke to God: “We were not able to safeguard Your dwelling, therefore we surrender to You its keys.” And they hurled them toward heaven.
Sometimes I think that somewhere the sanctuary is still burning and that the survivors are its priests. But they are keeping the keys.
SNAPSHOTS
A Jew, on his knees, is digging a grave. You imagine him dazed, barely conscious. His blackened face, dimly seen, is blurred, half-obscured by night. You can see his parents, his brothers; broken, twisted masks of clay. From behind, arms crossed, legs spread wide, the killers in uniform calmly observe the digging man. Relaxed and jovial, they exchange remarks. They laugh.
*
An old woman, a yellow star on her chest, turns to cast a last bewildered glance at the station before disappearing inside the train already carrying a hundred tangled anonymous bodies. We see her still, leaning on the steps, but we are no longer looking at her: her shadow is what we see. No, not even her shadow.
*
And this faceless corpse, what country and what landscape did he choose as a setting for his abdication? Discreetly he has turned his head away. Did shame for his fellow men compel him to cover his eyes with his shabby vest? He had reached the end, he wanted to see nothing more. He had seen it all, measured it all. He died blind. Here he is, lying lifeless across a pile of stones, his fist brandished as though to chase away some distant foe. Look closely at his feet: his right shoe is missing. And the left foot? A bone, without a trace of skin.
These snapshots, taken by German officers and soldiers, collectors of exotic souvenirs, appear in various albums devoted to the holocaust. Examine them and you will forget who you are. You will no longer want to know. Nothing will be important any more. You will have glimpsed an abyss you would rather not have uncovered. Too late.
Leafing through these collections of photographs, you feel yourself sinking, numbed and dizzy, into a bottomless and glacial night. Fellow humans seem to recede, your ties with them more fragile. But the very next day, there you are, facing those pages again.
Deep down I know that every eye staring into mine cuts off the new branch of a tree and adds yet another stain to the sun. I know that every image robs me of another reason for hope. And still my fingers turn the pages, and the shriveled bodies, the gaping twisted mouths, their screams lost in space, continue to follow one another. Then the anguish clutching me, choking me, grows darker and darker; it crushes me: with all these corpses before my eyes, I am afraid to stumble over my own.
At every page, in front of every image, I stop to catch my breath. And I tell myself: This is the end, they have reached the last limit; what follows can only be less horrible; surely it is impossible to invent suffering more naked, cruelty more refined. Moments later I admit my error: I underestimated the assassins’ ingenuity. The p
rogression into the inhuman transcends the exploration of the human. Evil, more than good, suggests infinity.
How can you explain the masochistic urge that impels you to leave opened before you the book of a past in shrouds but without a grave? Above all, there is the thirst for knowledge, the desire to understand. The tales about atrocities, the survivors are the ones who read them. So as to decipher, belatedly, the truth that had eluded them. So as to know all there is to know about the event that mutilated them. Because, in fact, they still do not understand what happened. And how—and why—they were spared. By delving into documents and diagrams, studies and memoirs, they hope to gain a new perspective on themselves, and perhaps beyond. Photographs are even more evocative than words, any words; they are ruthless, definitive, precise. Fascinated by the memory they imprison, the survivor studies them to rediscover an image of himself he had thought extinct: his own way of saying Kaddish, with his eyes rather than his mouth. That mouth—surely it is guilty of too many wrongs: remaining silent when it ought to have spoken, speaking when there was nothing left to say. More faithful, the eyes are better witnesses: they have forgotten nothing.
Seen in profile, the prisoner seems strangely serene. One might think him seated, were it not for the belt tightened around his neck, its other end fastened to a pipe screwed into the ceiling. The hanged man could not have chosen a more fitting or symbolic place: the latrines. Hereby elevated to courtroom, where the suicide has come to deliver a sentence of death.
And more. Under a dull gray sky, in the very middle of a wheat field, five men topple like stalks of wheat under the scythe. Another page: an ageless mother, livid with terror, grimly clutches her child to protect it from the oncoming bullets. Behind her, a soldier, his face an impassive blank, pulls the trigger. And so she falls, the mother, as does her child, they fall and fall, there is no end to their falling.