by Elie Wiesel
Surrounded by a welcoming committee from the Veterans’ Ministry, Meed is waiting for us at the airport. He looks undone, forlorn. I never would have guessed he could behave so submissively. He tells me it has been decided that we will be taken directly to the Polish monument, the one in the capital. His manner is pathetic. Evidently, for him, our hosts are not much different from the authorities he knew and feared long ago. “I tried to explain to them,” he says, his face crimson with embarrassment, “I really tried.”
In a VIP lounge, sitting around a table with the officials, we try to find a solution to this first crisis. Not being a diplomat, I take a firm stand that surprises even me. (Whatever happened to the shy Talmud student from Sighet?) I tell our hosts that we are here on behalf of the president of the United States for reasons not of foreign policy but of moral conscience linked to the memory of the Holocaust. Therefore either they will take us at once to the Ghetto, or else we shall, however regretfully, leave on the first plane out. The Polish officials stare in amazement and give in. Surely they did not realize what it meant to us, Jewish survivors, to walk on the Ghetto’s hallowed ground. They cannot understand why we insist so much on the Jewishness of the Jewish victims. After all, they lament, Poland lost six million citizens, of which only three million were Jews. They ask: “Weren’t we also victims of the Germans?” I reply: “Yes, you were. But we were the victims’ victims as well.”
This is my first visit to Warsaw, a city I learned to know and love from books. In fact, since Auschwitz, I have not been back to Poland. Is this how I had imagined my return? We move from frustration to frustration. The atmosphere is oppressive. Vanished is the Jewish Warsaw of Roman Vishniac, with its hungry students and their unfulfilled dreams. Aharon Zeitlin’s Tlomacki 13, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s poverty-stricken Nalevki, all these places immortalized by Jewish writers gone up in smoke. Warsaw, the most Jewish of all Jewish cities in the Diaspora, will not be Jewish again. Ever.
Most of the officials we encounter are courteous, even friendly, but I cannot help feeling that we are in inhospitable territory. People are not used to seeing so many Jews here. Are they afraid that we have come to claim what was stolen from us? I have heard too often of survivors being chased away from their former homes by their new occupants: “What are you doing here? Weren’t you killed?”
It is difficult to rid ourselves of the malaise that weighs on us. There is constant tension. The minister of justice, Mr. Buffa, is another disappointment. I expected more from a man entrusted with safeguarding justice. I speak to him of the “deniers,” those who on five continents deny the Holocaust. The discussions are exhausting, endless. There’s a sense of having to fight for every scrap of truth. Exasperated, I finally cry out: “To whom can we turn for justice if not to the minister of justice?” I don’t know why, but at last there is a reaction. He suddenly becomes conciliatory and agrees to most of our requests: the opening of the archives, the exchange of documents, the creation of a joint commission to handle pending problems and unresolved matters.
We leave for Cracow.
Auschwitz. The watchtowers. The barbed wire.
Our guides are waiting for us at the camp entrance. They talk and talk. Marion makes them understand that we don’t need explanations. This is the first time I am back.
Auschwitz a museum! That is what is left—a museum. The plaque is offensive, deceitful. Evidently there have never been any Jews here, or if there were, they arrived here by accident, visitors who lost their way. To satisfy the curiosity and appease the feelings of foreign visitors, especially Americans, a Jewish block has been created. And it is closed, most of the time, “for repairs.” Schiller’s question, “History will judge society, but who will judge History?” comes to mind.
Surely it will be judged by its victims.
I walk past “my” block. The memories rush back: the first days, the first nights at Auschwitz; the apprenticeship of hunger, of death. The terrifying block 11: the prison inside prison. A place one left only for the scaffold or the firing squad. And where is Yossel Rosensaft’s dark cell? They all look alike. Dark. Stifling.
We continue on to Birkenau. Here too, it is the first time I am back in this cursed place. A steel fist is pounding at my lungs. It is daylight, but we are enveloped by night.
The silence of Birkenau is a silence unlike any other. It contains the screams, the strangled prayers of thousands of human beings condemned to vanish into the darkness of nameless, endless ashes. Human silence at the core of inhumanity. Deadly silence at the core of death. Eternal silence under a moribund sky.
As I return to Birkenau, centuries after leaving it, I leave reality behind and find myself face to face with the adolescent I was then. Only now it all seems calm, almost peaceful. I close my eyes, and from the depths of time, hallucinating images appear. The thick smoke, the small heaps of ashes. Blank-faced men running in all directions. In Birkenau, no one moved slowly, especially not Death, which after all must be everywhere at once.
Life, death: a frantic race from one to the other. Here the future was reduced to the instant preceding the selection and departure. “I’ll remember you all my life,” someone said to his neighbor. In an hour he was no more. Here one had to pursue the present before it vanished into nothingness. You ran to wash, you ran to dress, you ran to get your portion of bread, margarine, soup. You ran for roll call, you ran to work, you ran from one block to another, from one man to another, in search of a familiar face, yearning for a word of consolation.
The barking of the dogs—I remember it with painful precision. The howling of the killers. The noise truncheons make when they crack people’s necks. The silent pain of the starving prisoners, weak, defeated, humiliated. I’ll remember all this forever.
Moshe-Chaim Berkowitz, my childhood friend, a generous and deeply religious man, points to something on our left. What is he remembering? He had arrived with the first transport, a week before me. He may well be showing me the Chief Rabbi, the Rebbe of Borshe, or the Rebbe of Kretchenev, all gone without leaving a trace. I watch his lips moving. He is reciting a psalm. So am I.
How peaceful it all looks now, on this sunny day in August. The wind ruffles the gray-white clouds above us. And I remember.
The third week of May. It was cold. Hilda and Bea were silent. Jumping down from the cattle car, a small golden-haired girl put on her coat. “Button up,” said her mother. The little golden-haired girl, so beautiful, so calm, obeyed. My eyes followed her. I see her still, through my tears, I see her carried away by the crowd, disappearing into the distance, a well-behaved little girl, so very well behaved, with a poignantly beautiful smile, a little Jewish girl with a dreamy but worried face, a shining light high above a shipwreck. It is enough to close your eyes a second for time to grab you and sweep you back to the past. There, nothing has changed. There is a level of existence where nothing ever changes.
Birkenau: I had not realized that the camp was quite small; could this really be the black hole of time, like the one scientists situate in space? It has swallowed an entire people, with its princes and its beggars, its old people and its children, a people with hopes and memories.
Between Birkenau and Auschwitz, it is Birkenau that continues to resonate most strongly in my memory; Auschwitz today is too well tended, too well maintained. And the reality of Auschwitz surpassed anything a museum could display. As the years go by, I have less and less confidence in museums as sanctuaries of memory. That is not the case with Birkenau. Birkenau today resembles the Birkenau of long ago. You only have to bend down to the ground to find the ashes that fell from the sky long ago, dispersing to the four winds the pitiful remains of Jewish children.
We walk through the camp. Here too, a guide wishes to be helpful by providing explanations and commentaries. We pretend to be listening. Here is the ramp, and the railroad tracks that linked this place to every Jewish center of the Continent, ultimately converging on the immense altar of fire whose flames touched, must have t
ouched, the celestial throne. The night of our arrival, in May, we had no way of understanding the meaning of that ramp. We were stunned; we thought we had blundered into a nightmare. So this was where the ramp was. The crossroads. The turning point. Josef Mengele. With a flick of his wrist he showed the way to death. By dawn there was little left of our convoy.
I believe I’ve read all that has been written about this supreme site of evil. I believe I know everything, can guess everything, about the victims’ final hours. I shall say nothing. As we get closer to the place where the killers built their gas chambers and their crematories, we clench our teeth and repress the desire to scream, to yell, to sob. As we stand in what was once the antechamber of death those of us who had been there hold each other’s arms. Time is suspended. We remain silent, each with his or her own thoughts. And then, softly at first, then louder and louder, I recite the prayer of the Jewish martyrs; the others join in. “Shma Yisrael….” Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. Once, five times…. Why? Because back then, the victims, knowing the end was near, recited that prayer. We needed to show our solidarity with those we loved and still love. And then because, on the threshold of death, all words become prayers, and all prayers become one.
In the open railroad cars that transported us, in a violent snowstorm, in January 1945, from Auschwitz to Buchenwald, we had also shouted that same prayer. With our last breath we wanted to proclaim our faith in Him Who is the source of all faith. Yes, in spite of Auschwitz, God is unique; yes, in spite of the killers, God is our God.
Once again a heavy silence envelops us. I imagine it is not unlike the one that preceded the Revelation at Sinai. The Talmud has this poetic description: “the silence was such that the cattle stopped bellowing, the dogs stopped barking, the wind stopped blowing, the sea stopped heaving, and the birds gave up chattering…. The universe held its breath, in expectation of the Divine word….”
Sixteen years later, during the ceremonies of the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and Birkenau, I say these words, which will offend some Christians:
God of forgiveness, do not forgive those who created this place. God of mercy, have no mercy on those who killed Jewish children here. Do not forgive the murderers or their accomplices whose work was to kill…. Remember the nocturnal processions of children, so many children, all so wise, so frightened, so beautiful….
God of compassion, have no compassion for those who had none….
I spoke without hatred. With anger? Yes. And grief. It was at Birkenau that I had discovered the kind of evil that saps all joy.
When I return to Cracow on February 6, 1995, I am welcomed at the airport by the American ambassador, Nicholas Rey, and several Polish officials. I get the full VIP treatment, no police formalities. Three bodyguards are assigned to me full-time. Cars with gyroscopes and sirens rush me through seemingly empty streets. In short, much noise and solemnity. This time I represent President Bill Clinton. Together with Undersecretary of State Richard Holbrooke, I lead the U.S. delegation to the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of the liberation of Auschwitz.
My heart is heavy with anguish. I wonder if I did the right thing in coming. I have attended a great many ceremonies of remembrance. This time it’s different. The number fifty has special meaning and symbolism. That is why heads of state, dignitaries, and survivors have gathered here, invited by Lech Walesa, president of the Polish Republic.
But this event has provoked many polemics, and the world media have a time of it for several weeks. There are two sides: on the one, the Warsaw authorities; on the other, the Jewish organizations, and in particular, the World Jewish Congress. Until November, the International Auschwitz Committee—presided over by a former Belgian deportee, Baron Maurice Goldstein—had been in charge of the program. Then the chancery of the president took over. Weighed down by bureaucracy, it seems to have gone from misstep to misstep: invitations sent out too late or not at all, ambiguous statements and decisions that offend Jewish sensitivities.
For example, the official program that was sent to me in New York included the Jewish prayers for the dead in a manner that was disconcerting, not to say insolent. Scheduled to start off the event were sirens and the welcoming of crowned heads and dignitaries, followed by accolades and speeches, and then, after all the dignitaries had left, those who wished to recite the prayers for the dead could do so. In other words: the Kaddish and the El Maleh Rakhamim were to be kind of optional appendices. In response to a question from a New York Times reporter, I said that if no change were made, I would not make my speech and instead would recite the Kaddish myself.
Faced with the scandalous attitude of the organizers, I even considered staying away altogether. Why should I go to Poland to participate in a media operation that could only dishonor the Jewish memory of the victims?
One thing was clear: The Polish officials meant to de-Judaize the tragedy of Auschwitz. This is not new. Beginning in 1945 and under the Communist regime until the nineties, every effort was made to remove or at least curtail the intrinsic Jewish aspect of that tragedy. There was talk only about anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi victims, of Polish citizens and political prisoners. They forgot—or at least wanted other people to forget—that even non-Jewish historians had postulated that 90 percent of the murdered victims in this death factory had been Jews. And all this was still going on under the administration of Solidarity’s founder, Lech Walesa, whom I had taken with me to Birkenau and Auschwitz in 1988. Had he understood nothing of what I had said to him then?
In fact, the problem transcends individuals. It must be posed in psychohistorical terms: Why, when it came to the Jewish past, did the Polish people, in its collective conscience, seek to forget? Because it felt guilty? Because it envied the Jews’ martyrdom? Or was it merely convenient to remove the Jewish component from the general suffering under the German Occupation?
It may seem paradoxical, but if in the end I decided to accept President Walesa’s invitation, it was precisely because of the controversies surrounding this fiftieth anniversary. I convinced myself that I did not have the right to evade the issues. Perhaps in my dual role of Nobel laureate and representative of the American president, and with a little luck, I might succeed in building some kind of consensus.
I miss Marion: I need her advice, her support. But she refused to join me. She has never liked ceremonies.
Two friends accompany me: Sigmund Strochlitz, himself a survivor of Auschwitz, and Pierre Huth, a Paris dentist whose father was the Schreiber, the scribe, of the infamous block 11, the punishment block, at Auschwitz.
The Forum Hotel in Cracow is a real anthill, its atmosphere that of a huge international convention. Polish security agents and bodyguards are whispering into tiny microphones. Delegates and journalists are calling out to one another in every European language. Everyone is busy, rushing here or there. All the foreign delegations are expected at the ancient Jagiellonian University for a solemn session to be addressed by President Walesa. I’m not going. My empty chair—between Polish President Walesa’s and German President Herzog’s—will raise eyebrows. It will be interpreted, rightly, as a protest against the official policy of de-Judaization.
Moreover, at the same time, the Jewish representatives are organizing an entirely Jewish ceremony at Birkenau. I choose to join them.
The day before, Marion had transmitted to me from New York an invitation to a private luncheon with Walesa at Wawel Palace. I would have accepted, of course, if only to try to resolve the conflict. But there is no way for me to return from Birkenau in time. After some negotiation, U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Rey informs me that the meeting has been changed to that evening.
I feel better. Surely Walesa will realize that if he maintains his stand on the prayers, his country’s image will be tarnished. After all, what am I asking for? A few minutes to recite a few prayers. Is that too much? No. I’m no longer concerned: This unique commemoration will take place with dignity after all.
I leave for Birkenau.
The ceremony there is moving. The speaker of the Israeli Parliament, Shevah Weiss, who is of Polish origin, speaks in both Hebrew and Polish. I begin in Yiddish and continue in English. I speak at length on a topic that has haunted me since 1945: the children. I keep seeing them, that first night. And I keep seeing a beautiful little girl with blue eyes and golden hair. I keep seeing my little sister whom my father made laugh, my little sister who makes me weep every time I think of her and her smile.
Later that day, at Wawel Palace, there is a meeting of Nobel laureates, representatives from several international organizations, and heads of foreign delegations. The purpose is to compose and adopt an “Appeal from Auschwitz” aimed at mobilizing peoples and nations to work toward preventing another Auschwitz. Walesa chairs the session. He reads us a proposed text prepared by his staff. And—I cannot believe my ears—the word “Jew” is not mentioned. Already that morning, in his speech at Jagiellonian University, he had startled the Jewish participants by omitting all reference to the Jewish tragedy. How to explain his insensitivity? Surely he must know that his behavior can only make matters worse?
On Holbrooke’s advice, I ask for the floor the moment Walesa finishes speaking. Politely, I point out the omissions in the text proposed to us. I particularly emphasize the fact that it seems unthinkable to adopt an appeal to mankind on the lessons of Auschwitz without mentioning the Jewishness of the great majority of its victims. I do not deny—I have never denied—that there were other peoples in the accursed realm that was Auschwitz; but I state that, however much against their will, Jews constituted the overwhelming majority there. Shevah Weiss supports me. So do other delegates. The first battle is won. The wretched victory leaves me feeling nauseous.
