Legends of Our Time (7 page)

One day he saw my father and me near the barracks. As he always did, my father was handing me his half-full bowl and ordering me to eat. “I’m not hungry anymore.” he explained and I knew he was lying. I refused: “Me neither, Father, really, I’m not hungry anymore.” I was lying and he knew it, too. This same discussion went on day after day. This time the barracks-chief came over and turned to my father: “This your son?”—Yes.—“And you aren’t ashamed to take away his soup?”—But … —“Shut up! Give him back that bowl or I’ll teach you a lesson you won’t soon forget!”

To keep him from carrying out that threat, I grabbed the bowl and started eating. At first I wanted to vomit but soon I felt an immense well-being spread through my limbs. I ate slowly to make this pleasure, stronger than my shame, last longer. Finally, the barracks-chief moved on. I hated him, and yet, down deep, I was glad that he had intervened. My father murmured, “He’s a good man, charitable.” He was lying, and I lied too: “Yes, Father, charitable.”

How do you plead: guilty or not guilty?

My father did not conceal his pride: his son had
obeyed him. As in the past. Even better than in the past. So there was, in the camp, in the midst of this organized insanity, someone who depended on him and in whose eyes he was not a servile rag. He did not realize that it had not been his will I had been performing, but yours. I was aware of that, and so were you, but I refused to think of it; you did not. I also knew that by obeying you both as your slave and your accomplice, I was cutting short my father’s life by one breath, by one awakening. I buried my remorse in the yellowish soup. But you were wiser and certainly shrewder than my father; you were not deceived. As you moved away, you had an air of assurance, as if to say: “That’s the way it is, that’s life, the boy will learn, he’ll find his way and who knows? someday maybe he’ll succeed me.” And I did not give the soup back to my father. I did not hurl myself at you and tear from you your eyes and your tongue and your victory. Yes, I was afraid, I was a coward. And hunger was gnawing at me: that’s what you had counted on. And you won.

Has the accused anything to say in his defense?

You always won, and sometimes, at night, I thought that maybe you were the one who was right. For us, you were not just the whip or the ax in the murderer’s hand: you were the prince who played the game of death, you were its prophet, its spokesman. You alone knew how to interpret the rages of the executioner, the silences of the earth; you were the guide to follow; whoever imitated you, lived; the others would perish. Your truth was the only valid truth, the only truth possible, the only truth that conformed to the wishes and designs of the gods.

Guilty or not guilty?

Instead of rejoining the ranks of the victims, of suffering like us and with us, instead of weeping without tears and trembling before the incandescent clouds, instead of dying like us and with us, perhaps even for us, you chose to reign over the work of darkness, proclaiming to whomever wanted to hear that pity was criminal, generosity
fruitless, senseless, inhumane. One day after the roll-call you gave us a long lecture on the philosophy of the concentration camp: every man for himself, every man the enemy of the next man, for each lived at the other’s expense. And you concluded: “What I am telling you is true and immutable. For know that God has descended from heaven and decided to make himself visible: I am God.”

How do you plead?

The judge hears the stifled moans of the witnesses, living and dead; he sees the accused beat up one old man who was too slow in taking off his cap, and another because he did not like his face. “You, you look healthy to me,” says the accused, and punches him in the stomach. “And you, you look sick to me, you’re pale,” and he slaps his face. Itzik has a heavy shirt: the accused takes it away from him. Itzik protests and he is already writhing in pain. Izso has held onto his old shoes: the accused claims them. Izso, clever, hands them over without saying a word. The accused takes them with a contemptuous smile: look at this imbecile, he does not even resist, he does not deserve to live.

Well, then? Guilty or not guilty?

And what if everything could be done over again? What are you now compared to what you were then? Tell us about your repentance, your expiation. What do you tell your wife when she offers you her pride, when she speaks of the future of your children? What do you see in the eyes of the passerby who says to you “good morning,” “good evening,” and “
shalom
,” “peace be with you”?

“Well?” yells the driver. “How many times do I have to tell you we’re here?”

He looks at us in his rear-view mirror, shouts louder. Our inertia is too much for him. He turns around in his seat and shouts again: “Boy, you must be deaf! Don’t you understand Hebrew?”

My prisoner pretends not to understand any language.
He sleeps, he dreams, transported somewhere else, in another time, the end of another line. He is waiting for me to make the first move, to break the curse that separates us from other men. As in the past with his masters, he will follow, he will obey.

The driver is getting angry. These two speechless and immobile phantoms apparently want to spend the night in his bus. Do they think they are in a hotel? He gets up, grumbling, “I’ll show you, you’ll see.” He moves toward us, looking furious. My prisoner waits for him without flinching, indifferent to whatever may happen. I touch his arm.

“Come on, let’s go.”

He complies mechanically. Once down, he stands stationary, and wisely waits for me on the sidewalk. He could make a dash for the dark little streets that lead to the ocean. He does not. His will has defaulted. He is not about to upset the order of things, to speculate on an uncertain future. Above all, no initiative, that was the golden rule at camp.

The bus starts up and leaves: here we are alone. I have nothing more to say to him. A vague feeling of embarrassment comes over me, as if I had just done something foolish. All of a sudden, I become timid again. And in a weak voice I ask him: “You really don’t remember me?”

In the darkness I can no longer make out his face. I no longer recognize him. Doubt chokes me: and what if it was not he?

“No,” he says, after a long silence, “I don’t remember you.”

I no longer recognize the sound of his voice. It used to be gruff, cutting. It has become clear, humane.

“And yourself? Do you remember who you were?”

“That is my business.”

“No. It is my business, too.”

I suddenly think I must put an end to this: but how? If he whimpers and justifies himself and begs my forgiveness,
I will have him arrested. And if he keeps on denying everything? What would he have to say for me to let him go? I do not know. It is up to him to know.

Abruptly he stiffens. I know his eyes have regained their coldness, their hardness. He is going to speak. At last. In defending himself he is going to throw all the light on this mystery to which we remain chained forever. I know he will speak without altering the thin line of his lips. At last he is speaking. No: he is shouting. No! he is yelling! Without preparation, without warning. He insults me, he is offensive. Not in Hebrew—in German. We are no longer in Israel but somewhere in the universe of hate. He is the barracks-chief who, his hands clasped behind his back, “advises” one of his slaves to leave at once or he will regret the day he was born. Will he hit me, break my bones, make me eat dirt, as he is threatening to do? No one would come to my aid: in camp it is the strongest and most brutal who is in the right. Is he going to crush me in his claws, murder me? If he does, I will carry his secret with me. Can one die in Auschwitz, after Auschwitz?

The barracks-chief is lecturing me the way he used to and I do not hear what he is saying. His voice engulfs me, I let myself drown in it. I am no longer afraid. Not of dying nor even of killing. It is something else, something worse. I am suddenly aware of my impotence, of my defeat. I know I am going to let him go free, but I will never know if I am doing this out of courage or out of cowardice. I will never know if, face to face with the executioner, I behaved like a judge or a victim. But I will have acquired the certitude that the man who measures himself against the reality of evil always emerges beaten and humiliated. If someday I encounter the Angel of Death himself in my path, I will not kill him, I will not torture him. On the contrary. I will speak to him politely, as humanely as possible. I will try to understand him, to divine his evil; even at the risk of being contaminated.

The barracks-chief is shouting obscenities and threats; I do not listen. I stare at him one last time without managing to distinguish his features in the night. My hands in my pockets, I turn around and begin to walk, slowly at first, then faster and faster, until I am running. Is he following me?

He let me go. He granted me freedom.

Once upon a time there was a poor visionary who set out to rescue the damned from the darkness in which they dwelt. So that they might be compelled to live, he proclaimed himself immortal.

I cannot remember his name, nor how old he was: perhaps I never knew. I remember only his face and, above all, the eyes which dominated it. He had the face of a madman and the eyes of a saint, as though two persons were at war within him. When he spoke, his lips barely moved and his voice seemed to come from a long way off. It was the voice of a man who challenges mountains.

The place where I met him was dark, as though some
magician had plunged it into eternal night. It was peopled with phantoms. There were countless thousands of them. They had no past and no future. They were outside of time, beyond history. They were building a one-way Jacob’s Ladder, gigantic and invisible, which they were all waiting to climb, so that the heavens might be purified by fire. Man was leaving the earth, recalled by God. Everything was to start again. Creation had failed. The age-old vision had degenerated into a curse.

But my visionary friend refused to believe all that. He claimed that we were in the Holy of Holies, in the presence of the Messiah. What he lacked in humor he made up in imagination.

He was one of the Righteous; we called him “the Prophet.” Affectionately, meaning to tease and provoke him. I do not know who first called him by that name, nor why. Nor do I know whether it pleased or irritated him. All I know is that it suited him. The Prophet talked like a prophet. Making us relive our past, he gave us back our homes and our memories. And yet, as we listened in silence, with lumps in our throats, it was always of the future that he spoke. The truth was that we needed a future.

There was something reassuring and comforting in his presence, tall, gaunt, and emaciated. We thought, if he, with his ravaged body, can endure so much, so can we. He worked like all the others, and, like all the others, he suffered cold and hunger and the brutality of the guards. I never heard him complain. His cheerfulness and vitality amazed us. What was the source of his strength and his faith? We had no idea.

We had no idea, either, where he came from, or what he had done before the war. We were staggered by what he knew, the number of countries he had seen, the many languages he spoke.

He could have been a Pole, a Belgian or an Austrian.
He could have been a doctor or a philosopher, a rabbi or a poet, a beggar or a gardener. Every group felt that he belonged to them. When asked, he would evade the question with a smile. “My past wouldn’t interest you. What matters is my future.”

Well, if he chose to be secretive, we forgave him. We loved him too well to hold it against him. His secrets and his weaknesses were no concern of ours. It was what he was doing now, frankly and openly, that concerned us and won our gratitude: his persistent endeavors to make our lives bearable. We loved him because he responded to every appeal for help, he set his face against evil, he clung to his humanity in a world where humanity was denied—and he took very little credit for it.

He wanted no thanks. He would say:

“All that I do is done in your name. I am only your representative.” Or, “It is you who have made me what I am; it is I who owe you a debt of gratitude.” We loved him because he wanted to restore our self-respect, to make us think better of ourselves when we thought of him, who was so different from us. And when, as sometimes happened, he was withdrawn and silent, we respected his reserve. His private thoughts were nobody’s business but his own.

Until the day when, transformed, he announced his decision to reveal himself to a world that had ceased to expect his coming.

It was a Saturday in autumn, a Saturday red with blood. We were clearing up rubble in a factory which had been bombed the night before. Foaming at the mouth with rage, the masters took it out on their slaves. Pointing to the rubble, the officer in charge of the working party warned us: “You’d better not start gloating too soon. Whoever wins this war, it won’t be
you
.” The guards, to prove it to us there and then, launched into a ferocious attack. They laid about them indiscriminately. There were three dead and nine injured in our party alone.

Morale had never been so low. The struggle, it seemed to us, was futile. We would not be there to celebrate the defeat of Germany. Worn out, with heavy hearts, we felt that the end was near. We had touched rock bottom.

But not the Prophet. Blows could not crush him. Maimed as he was, he walked with firm step, head held high and resolution in his eyes. Tirelessly he went from one to another of us, imploring us to stick it out, not to lose hope. In vain. We had not the strength to listen to him.

At night, after the roll-call, he would make us sit on our bunks while he stood and preached endurance. “Brothers, fellow Jews, listen to me. I only ask that you should hear me out. We have no right to go under. If we are not there to bear witness on our own behalf, who will do it for us? Where, after the long night, should the first ray of light come from, if not from us? The day will come when everything will have to be told, and if we do not tell what we know, no one will.