by Elie Wiesel
“Come in,” I said after he had already entered.
He didn’t take off his coat. Silently he walked over to the table, picked up the few books that were there, riffled their pages, and then put them down. Then he turned to me.
“I know who you are,” he said. “I know everything about you.”
His face was tanned, expressive. His hair was unruly, one strand perpetually on his forehead. His mouth was hard, almost cruel; thus accentuating the kindness, the intensity, and warm intelligence in his eyes.
“You are more fortunate than I, for I know very little about myself.”
A smile came to his lips. “I didn’t come to talk about your past.”
“The future,” I answered, “is of limited interest to me.”
He continued to smile.
“The future,” he asked, “are you attached to it?”
I felt uneasy. I didn’t understand him. The meaning of his questions escaped me. Something in him set me on edge. Perhaps it was the advantage of his superior knowledge, for he knew who I was, although I didn’t even know his name. He looked at me with such familiarity, such expectation, that for a moment I thought he had mistaken me for someone else, that it wasn’t me he had come to see.
“Who are you?” I asked. “What do you want with me?”
“I am Gad,” he said in a resonant voice, as if he were uttering some cabalistic sentence which contained an answer to every question. He said “I am Gad” in the same way that Jehovah said “I am that I am.”
“Very good,” I said with mingled curiosity and fear. “Your name is Gad. Happy to know you. And now that you’ve introduced yourself, may I ask the purpose of your call? What do you want of me?”
His piercing eyes seemed to look straight through me. After several moments of this penetrating stare he said in a quite matter-of-fact way:
“I want you to give me your future.”
Having been brought up in the Hassidic tradition I had heard strange stories about the Meshulah, the mysterious messenger of fate to whom nothing is impossible. His voice is such as to make a man tremble, for the message it brings is more powerful than either the bearer or the recipient. His every word seems to come from the absolute, the infinite, and its significance is at the same time fearful and fascinating. Gad is a Meshulah, I said to myself. It was not his physical appearance that gave me this impression, but rather what he said and the way he said it.
“Who are you?” I asked again, in terror.
Something told me that at the end of the road we were to travel together I should find another man, very much like myself, whom I should hate.
“I am a messenger,” he said.
I felt myself grow pale. My premonition was correct. He was a messenger, a man sent by fate, to whom I could refuse nothing. I must sacrifice everything to him, even hope, if he asked it.
“You want my future?” I asked. “What will you do with it?”
He smiled again, but in a cold, distant manner, as one who possesses a power over men.
“I’ll make it into an outcry,” he said, and there was a strange light in his dark eyes. “An outcry first of despair and then of hope. And finally a shout of triumph.”
I sat down on my bed, offering him the only chair in the room, but he remained standing. In the Hassidic legends the messenger is always portrayed standing, as if his body must at all times serve as a connecting link between heaven and earth. Standing thus, in a trench coat which seemed as if it had never been taken off and were an integral part of his body, with his head inclined toward his right shoulder and a fiery expression in his eyes, he proceeded to tell me about the Movement.
He smoked incessantly. But even when he paused to light a cigarette he continued to stare obliquely at me and never stopped talking. He talked until dawn, and I listened with my eyes and mind wide open. Just so I had listened as a child to the grizzled master who revealed to me the mysterious universe of the Cabala, where every idea is a story and every story, even one concerned with the life of a ghost, is a spark from eternity.
That night Gad told me about Palestine and the age-old Jewish dream of recreating an independent homeland, one where every human act would be free. He told me also of the Movement’s desperate struggle with the English.
“The English government has sent a hundred thousand soldiers to maintain so-called order. We of the Movement are no more than a hundred strong, but we strike fear into their hearts. Do you understand what I am saying? We cause the English—yes, the English—to tremble!” The sparks in his dark eyes lit up the fear of a hundred thousand uniformed men.
This was the first story I had ever heard in which the Jews were not the ones to be afraid. Until this moment I had believed that the mission of the Jews was to represent the trembling of history rather than the wind which made it tremble.
“The paratroopers, the police dogs, the tanks, the planes, the tommy guns, the executioners—they are all afraid. The Holy Land has become, for them, a land of fear. They don’t dare walk out on the streets at night, or look a young girl in the eye for fear that she may shoot them in the belly, or stroke the head of a child for fear that he may throw a hand grenade in their face. They dare neither to speak nor to be silent. They are afraid.”
Hour after hour Gad spoke to me of the blue nights of Palestine, of their calm and serene beauty. You walk out in the evening with a woman, you tell her that she is beautiful and you love her, and twenty centuries hear what you are saying. But for the English the night holds no beauty. For them every night opens and shuts like a tomb. Every night two, three, a dozen soldiers are swallowed up by the darkness and never seen again.
Then Gad told me the part he expected me to play. I was to give up everything and go with him to join the struggle. The Movement needed fresh recruits and reinforcements. It needed young men who were willing to offer it their futures. The sum of their futures would be the freedom of Israel, the future of Palestine.
It was the first time that I had heard of any of these things. My parents had not been Zionists. To me Zion was a sacred ideal, a Messianic hope, a prayer, a heartbeat, but not a place on the map or a political slogan, a cause for which men killed and died.
Gad’s stories were utterly fascinating. I saw in him a prince of Jewish history, a legendary messenger sent by fate to awaken my imagination, to tell the people whose past was now their religion: Come, come; the future is waiting for you with open arms. From now on you will no longer be humiliated, persecuted, or even pitied. You will not be strangers encamped in an age and a place that are not yours. Come, brothers, come!
Gad stopped talking and went to look out the window at the approaching dawn. The shadows melted away and a pale, prematurely weary light the color of stagnant water invaded my small room.
“I accept your offer,” I said.
I said it so softly that Gad seemed not to hear. He remained standing by the window and after a moment of silence turned around to say:
“Here is the dawn. In our land it is very different. Here the dawn is gray; in Palestine it is red like fire.”
“I accept, Gad,” I repeated.
“I heard you,” he said, with a smile the color of the Paris dawn. “You’ll be leaving in three weeks.”
The autumn breeze blowing in through the window made me shiver. Three weeks, I reflected, before I plunge into the unknown. Perhaps my shiver was caused not so much by the breeze as by this reflection. I believe that even then unconsciously I knew that at the end of the road I was to travel with Gad, a man was waiting, a man who would be called upon to kill another man, myself.
Radio Jerusalem…Last-minute news flashes. David ben Moshe’s execution will take place at dawn tomorrow. The High Commissioner has issued an appeal for calm. Curfew at nine o’clock. No one will be allowed on the streets. I repeat, no one will be allowed on the streets. The army has orders to shoot on sight…
The announcer’s voice betrayed his emotion. As he said the name David ben Moshe th
ere must have been tears in his eyes.
All over the world the young Jewish fighter was the hero of the day. All the wartime resistance movements of Europe held rallies in front of the British embassies; the chief rabbis of the capital cities sent a joint petition to His Majesty the King. Their telegram—with some thirty signatures at the bottom—ran: “Do not hang a young man whose only crime is fidelity to his ideal.” A Jewish delegation was received at the White House and the President promised to intercede. That day the heart of humanity was one with that of David ben Moshe.
It was eight o’clock in the evening and completely dark. Gad switched on the light. Outside the child was still crying.
“The dirty dogs,” said Gad; “they’re going to hang him.”
His face and hands were red and perspiring. He paced up and down the room, lighting one cigarette after another, only to throw each one away.
“They’re going to hang him,” he repeated. “The bastards!”
The news broadcast came to an end and a program of choral singing followed. I started to turn the radio off but Gad held me back.
“It’s a quarter past eight,” he said. “See if you can get our station.”
I was too nervous to turn the dial.
“I’ll find it,” said Gad.
The broadcast had just begun. The announcer was a girl with a resonant, grave voice familiar to every one of us. Every evening at this hour men, women, and children paused in their work or play to listen to the vibrant, mysterious voice which always began with the same eight words: You are listening to the Voice of Freedom…
The Jews of Palestine loved this girl or young woman without knowing who she was. The English would have given anything to lay hands upon her. In their eyes she was as dangerous as the Old Man; she too was a part of the Legend. Only a very few people, no more than five, knew her identity, and Gad and I were among them. Her name was Ilana; she and Gad were in love and I was a friend to both of them. Their love was an essential part of my life. I needed to know that there was such a thing as love and that it brought smiles and joy in its wake.
You are listening to the Voice of Freedom, Ilana repeated.
Gad’s dark face quivered. He was bent almost double over the radio, as if he wanted to touch with his hands and eyes the clear, deeply moving voice of Ilana, which tonight was his voice and mine and that of the whole country.
“Two men are preparing to meet death at dawn tomorrow,” said Ilana, as if she were reading a passage from the Bible. “One of them deserves our admiration, the other our pity. Our brother and guide, David ben Moshe, knows why he is dying; John Dawson does not know. Both of them are vigorous and intelligent, on the threshold of life and happiness. They might have been friends, but now this can never be. At dawn tomorrow at the same hour, the same minute, they will die—but not together, for there is an abyss between them. David ben Moshe’s death is meaningful; John Dawson’s is not. David is a hero, John a victim…”
For twenty minutes Ilana went on talking. The last part of her broadcast was dedicated exclusively to John Dawson, because he had the greater need of comfort and consolation.
I knew neither David nor John, but I felt bound to them and their fates. It flashed across my mind that in speaking of John Dawson’s imminent death Ilana was speaking of me also, since I was his killer. Who was to kill David ben Moshe? For a moment I had the impression that I was to kill both of them and all the other Johns and Davids on earth. I was the executioner. And I was eighteen years old. Eighteen years of searching and suffering, of study and rebellion, and they all added up to this. I wanted to understand the pure, unadulterated essence of human nature, the path to the understanding of man. I had sought after the truth, and here I was about to become a killer, a participant in the work of death and God. I went over to the mirror hanging on the wall and looked into my face. I almost cried out, for everywhere I saw my own eyes.
As a child I was afraid of death. I was not afraid to die, but every time I thought of death I shuddered.
“Death,” Kalman, the grizzled master, told me, “is a being without arms or legs or mouth or head; it is all eyes. If ever you meet a creature with eyes everywhere, you can be sure that it is death.”
Gad was still leaning over the radio.
“Look at me,” I said, but he did not hear.
“John Dawson, you have a mother,” Ilana was saying. “At this hour she must be crying, or eating her heart out in silent despair. She will not go to bed tonight. She will sit in a chair near the window, watch in hand, waiting for dawn. Her heart will skip a beat when yours stops beating forever. ‘They’ve killed my son,’ she will say. ‘Those murderers!’ But we are not murderers, Mrs. Dawson…”
“Look at me, Gad,” I repeated.
He raised his eyes, shot me a glance, shrugged his shoulders, and went back to the voice of Ilana. Gad doesn’t know that I am death, I thought to myself. But John Dawson’s mother, sitting near the window of her London flat, must surely know. She is gazing out into the night, and the night has a thousand eyes, which are mine.
“No, Mrs. Dawson, we are not murderers. Your Cabinet ministers are murderers; they are responsible for the death of your son. We should have preferred to receive him as a brother, to offer him bread and milk and show him the beauties of our country. But your government made him our enemy and by the same token signed his death warrant. No, we are not murderers.”
I buried my head in my hands. The child outside had stopped crying.
IN ALL PROBABILITY I had killed before, but under entirely different circumstances. The act had other dimensions, other witnesses. Since my arrival in Palestine several months before, I had taken part in various tangles with the police, in sabotage operations, in attacks on military convoys making their way across the green fields of Galilee or the white desert. There had been casualties on both sides, but the odds were in our favor because the night was our ally. Under cover of darkness we took the enemy by surprise; we set fire to an army encampment, killed a dozen soldiers, and disappeared without leaving any traces behind us. The Movement’s objective was to kill the greatest number of soldiers possible. It was that simple.
Ever since the day of my arrival, my first steps on the soil of Palestine, this idea had been imprinted upon my brain. As I stepped off the ship at Haifa two comrades picked me up in their car and took me to a two-storey house somewhere between Ramat-Gan and Tel Aviv. This house was ostensibly occupied by a professor of languages, to justify the comings and goings of a large number of young people who were actually, like myself, apprentices of a school of terrorist techniques. The cellar served as a dungeon where we kept prisoners, hostages, and those of our comrades who were wanted by the police. Here it was that John Dawson was awaiting execution. The hiding place was absolutely secure. Several times English soldiers had searched the house from top to bottom; their police dogs had come within a few inches of John Dawson, but there was a wall between them.
Gad directed our terrorist instruction. Other masked teachers taught us the use of a revolver, a machine gun, a hand grenade. We learned also to wield a dagger, to strangle a man from behind without making a sound, and to get out of practically any prison. The course lasted for six weeks. For two hours every day Gad indoctrinated us with the Movement’s ideology. The goal was simply to get the English out; the method, intimidation, terror, and sudden death.
“On the day when the English understand that their occupation will cost them blood they won’t want to stay,” Gad told us. “It’s cruel—inhuman, if you like. But we have no other choice. For generations we’ve wanted to be better, more pure in heart than those who persecuted us. You’ve all seen the result: Hitler and the extermination camps in Germany. We’ve had enough of trying to be more just than those who claim to speak in the name of justice. When the Nazis killed a third of our people just men found nothing to say. If ever it’s a question of killing off Jews, everyone is silent; there are twenty centuries of history to prove it. We can rely
only on ourselves. If we must become more unjust and inhuman than those who have been unjust and inhuman to us, then we shall do so. We don’t like to be bearers of death; heretofore we’ve chosen to be victims rather than executioners. The commandment Thou shalt not kill was given from the summit of one of the mountains here in Palestine, and we were the only ones to obey it. But that’s all over; we must be like everybody else. Murder will be not our profession but our duty. In the days and weeks and months to come you will have only one purpose: to kill those who have made us killers. We shall kill in order that once more we may be men…”
On the last day of the course a masked stranger addressed us. He spoke of what our leaders called the eleventh commandment: Hate your enemy. He had a soft, timid, romantic voice, and I think he was the Old Man. I’m not quite sure, but his words fired our enthusiasm and made us tremble with emotion. Long after he had gone away I felt them vibrate within me. Thanks to him I became part of a Messianic world where destiny had the face of a masked beggar, where not a single act was lost or a single glance wasted.
I remembered how the grizzled master had explained the sixth commandment to me. Why has a man no right to commit murder? Because in so doing he takes upon himself the function of God. And this must not be done too easily. Well, I said to myself, if in order to change the course of our history we have to become God, we shall become Him. How easy that is we shall see. No, it was not easy.
The first time I took part in a terrorist operation I had to make a superhuman effort not be sick at my stomach. I found myself utterly hateful. Seeing myself with the eyes of the past I imagined that I was in the dark gray uniform of an SS officer. The first time…
THEY RAN LIKE RABBITS, like drunken rabbits, looking for the shelter of a tree. They seemed to have neither heads nor hands, but only legs. And these legs ran like rabbits sotted with wine and sorrow. But we were all around them, forming a circle of fire from which there was no escape. We were there with our tommy guns, and our bullets were a flaming wall on which their lives were shattered to the accompaniment of agonized cries which I shall hear until the last day of my life.
