Just as I am silent every time the image comes to my mind of the Rebbe in Warsaw who stood erect, unyielding, unconquerable, before a group of SS; they were amusing themselves by making him suffer, by humiliating him; he suffered, but did not let himself be humiliated. One of them, laughing, cut off his beard, but the Rebbe stared right into his eyes without flinching; there was pain in his expression, but also defiance, the expression of a man stronger than evil, even when evil is triumphant, stronger than death, even when death assumes the face of a comedian playing a farce—the expression of a man who owes nothing to anyone, not even to God.
I have long since carried that expression buried within me, I have not been able to part with it, I no longer want to part with it, as though wanting always to remember there are still, there will always be, somewhere in the world, expressions I will never understand. And when such an expression lights upon me, at the dinner table, at a concert, or beside a happy woman, I give myself up to it in silence.
For the older I grow, the more I know that we can do little for the dead; the least we can do is to leave them alone, not project our own guilt onto them. We like to think the dead have found eternal rest: let them be. It is dangerous to wake them. They, too, have questions, questions equal to our own.
My plea is coming to an end, but it would be incomplete if I said nothing about the armed assaults which, in spite of what the prosecution may think, Jews did carry out against the Germans. If I have difficulty understanding how multitudes went to their death without defending themselves, that difficulty becomes insurmountable when it comes to understanding those of their companions who chose to fight.
How, in the ghettos and camps, they were able to find the means to fight when the whole world was against them—that will always remain a mystery.
For those who claim that all the Jews submitted to their murderers, to fate, in common cowardice or common resignation, those people do not know what they are saying or—what is worse—knowingly falsify the facts only to illustrate a sociological theory, or to justify a morbid hatred which is always self-hatred.
In truth, there was among the victims an active elite of fighters composed of men and women and children who, with pitiful means, stood up against the Germans. They were a minority, granted. But is there any society where the active elite is not a minority? Such groups existed in Warsaw, in Bialystok, in Grodno, and—God alone knows how—even in Treblinka, in Sobivor, and in Auschwitz. Authenticated documents and eye-witness accounts do exist, relating the acts of war of those poor desperadoes; reading them, one does not know whether to rejoice with admiration or to weep with rage. One wonders: but how did they do it, those starving youngsters, those hunted men, those battered women, how were they able to confront, with weapons in hand, the Nazi army, which at that time seemed invincible, marching from victory to victory? Where did they take their sheer physical endurance, their moral strength? What was their secret and what is its name?
We say: weapons in hand. But what weapons? They had hardly any. They had to pay in pure gold for a single revolver. In Bialystok, the legendary Mordecai Tenenbaum-Tamaroff, leader of the ghetto resistance, describes in his journal—miraculously rediscovered—the moment he obtained the first rifle, the first ammunition: twenty-five bullets. “Tears came to my eyes. I felt my heart burst with joy.” It was thus with one rifle and twenty-five bullets that he and his companions were going to contain the vast onslaught of the German army. It is easy to imagine what might have happened had every warrior in every ghetto obtained one rifle.
All the underground networks in the occupied countries received arms, money, and radio equipment from London, and secret agents came regularly to teach them the art of sabotage: they felt themselves organically linked to the outside world. In France or Norway a member of the resistance who was caught could comfort himself with the thought that somewhere in that town as well as on the other shore, there were people who feared for his life, who lived in anxiety because of him, who would move heaven and earth to save him: his acts registered somewhere, left traces, marks of sorrow, produced results. But the Jews were alone: only they were alone.
They alone did not receive help or encouragement; neither arms nor messages were sent them; they were not spoken to, no one was concerned with them; they did not exist. They cried for help, but the appeals they issued by radio or by mail fell on deaf ears. Cut off from the world, from the war itself, the Jewish fighters participated, fully aware they were not wanted, they had already been written off; they threw themselves into battle knowing they could count on no one, help would never arrive, they would receive no support, there would be no place to retreat. And yet, with their backs to the burning wall, they defied the Germans. Some battles are won even when they are lost.
Yes, competent elite existed even at Sobivor, where they organized an escape; at Treblinka, where they revolted; and at Auschwitz, where they blew up the crematoria. The Auschwitz insurgents attempted an escape, but in the struggle with the SS, who obviously had an advantage of superiority in weapons and men, all were killed. Later the Germans arrested the four young Jewish girls from Warsaw who had obtained the explosives for the insurgents. They were tortured, condemned to death, and hanged at a public ceremony. They died without fear. The oldest was sixteen, the youngest twelve.
We can only lower our heads and be silent. And end this sickening posthumous trial which intellectual acrobats everywhere are carrying on against those whose death numbs the mind. Do we want to understand? There is no longer anything to understand. Do we want to know? There is nothing to know anymore. It is not by playing with words and the dead that we will understand and know. Quite the contrary. As the ancients said: “Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know.”
But we prefer to speak and to judge. We wish to be strong and invulnerable. The lesson of the holocaust—if there is any—is that our strength is only illusory, and that in each of us is a victim who is afraid, who is cold, who is hungry. Who is also ashamed.
The Talmud teaches man never to judge his friend until he has been in his place. But, for the world, the Jews are not friends. They have never been. Because they had no friends they are dead.
So, learn to be silent.
Elie Wiesel, Legends of Our Time
(Series: # )
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