Open Heart

by Elie Wiesel

  There are still so many things I want to share with my two grandchildren, for whom my love is without limits.

  When Elijah smiles at me, I know that happiness exists after all.

  His little sister, Shira, both charming and authoritarian, orders me around and makes me laugh.

  To watch them play together, to listen to Elijah reading to his sister, is the most beautiful present I could receive.

  Am I ready to lose their love?

  9

  THE PAIN of the incision wakes me up. As well as the surgeon’s voice, perceived through heavy fog:

  “It’s over. Everything is fine. You’ll live.”

  His face! I shall never forget the smile on his face. My surgeon is happy. Yes, happy to have brought back to life a human being he had never met before. He tells me, “You’ve come back from far away.”

  A question: Had I really dreamed during the operation? Had my brain really continued to function while my heart had stopped?

  I later learned the exact procedure of bypass surgery: dramatic and impressive on every level.

  I didn’t know, I couldn’t know, just how complicated it is, with risks and dangers that defy imagination. For the layman that I am, this surgery is not unlike a walk on the moon. There is the frightening discovery of the need to temporarily stop the heart, to replace it with a machine while the surgeon operates. He begins by opening the thoracic cage—via an incision down the entire length of the sternum—and then makes a second incision on the inside of one leg in order to remove a vein that will replace the blocked arteries.

  I was “coming back” from far away, very far away indeed. And I could just as easily have stayed on the other side.

  I am overcome with a feeling of gratitude.

  Still under the influence of anesthesia, I try to whisper: “Thank you. Thank you, doctor.”

  At that moment, did I think of thanking God as well? After all, I owe Him that much. But I am not sure that I did. At that precise moment, only the surgeon—His messenger, no doubt—moved me to gratitude.

  I ask weakly, so weakly that I’m afraid I’m not heard, “Do they know?”

  No need to be more specific; do Marion and Elisha know that I’m all right?

  Yes. Even before I woke completely, the surgeon himself went to give them the good news.

  We are reunited an hour later. The three of us, in our own way, try to cover up our emotion.

  10

  IS IT dawn or dusk? Elisha is with me, in my room. How long has he been here?

  I glance at the clock on the wall. Around me and my son, objects dissolve. “Elisha,” I say breathlessly.

  I don’t know if he hears me. But it does me good to pronounce his name. As always, I cling to him to defeat anxiety, and that helps me pull myself together.

  Now too?

  As always.

  I perceive voices coming from the hallway. But only his has meaning and purpose.

  11

  NUMEROUS SCENES appear before me. Elisha as a child, an adolescent, an adult.

  Elisha’s birth changed my life. From that moment, I felt more concerned and responsible than ever before. This tiny creature looking at me without seeing me would have to be protected. And the best way to protect him would be to change the world in which he would grow up.

  For the circumcision ceremony we had invited friends, among them the great violinist Isaac Stern, the philosopher Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, many writers and survivors. All had come, naturally, for legend tells us that this is the only invitation one may not decline, since a circumcision always takes place “in the presence” of the patriarch Abraham and the prophet Elijah.

  I remember it as if it were yesterday.

  We had also invited a number of Hasidim from Brooklyn, and when the name of the newborn—Shlomo Elisha son of Eliezer, son of Shlomo—was pronounced for the first time, an old Hasid cried out, “A name has come back to us.” And he and some of the other Hasidim formed a circle and began to dance around, and in honor of, the newly arrived Jew. I, who do not know how to dance, joined in.

  After the ceremony, I sat down and wrote a letter to my friend Georges Levitte, one of the great intellectuals of France, father of Jean-David Levitte, the future diplomatic counsel to Jacques Chirac and then to Nicolas Sarkozy. We were close friends and saw each other often whenever I was in Paris.

  Some time earlier, he had heard me on the radio saying that I planned never to marry and surely not to have children. Why? I quoted a Talmudic sage: “When God punishes a sinful world, it is wiser not to marry.” Georges did not agree and disapproved of my response. He felt I had no right to discourage young people and thus contribute to their despair. Our discussion had lasted several hours, and we had parted with neither having convinced the other.

  My letter was brief: “You were right. My son bears my father’s name, Shlomo. One more name regained, for we have lost too many. He is also called Elisha.”

  To say that the love I felt for my son was filled with fervor and hope would not be enough. I would spend hours and hours just looking at him. To leave him for more than a day was painful. And whenever I had to go out of town, I somehow managed to return before Shabbat. To hold him in my arms as I made Kiddush fulfilled a strong emotional need.

  Mornings, when he left for nursery school, Marion and I would walk him to the yellow school bus. As I watched the vehicle draw away, my heart beat faster. I see him still, his little hand motioning to us. And deep inside me I prayed to God to protect him.

  After graduating from college, Elisha decided to go to Israel for a semester, to join other young non-Israelis in a training camp for the Israel Defense Forces. On the way to the airport, I found myself repeating the prayer my mother recited at the end of every Shabbat, imploring God to bless our house and our family.

  12

  “ELISHA,” I say very quietly.

  My son hears me: “What can I do for you?”

  During his first year at Yale, Elisha studied philosophy, history and literature. Secretly, I was hoping that he would follow in my footsteps, but he was recruited by Wall Street. The economy, the markets: alien territories to me.

  And now he is a father. In my view, the best father in the world.

  I motion him to approach. Now he is very close to my bed. He takes my hand in his and caresses it gently. I try to squeeze his hand but don’t succeed. I know that he wishes to transmit to me his strength, his faith in my recovery.

  13

  BY DINT of searching for him in the past, suddenly I picture him as an orphan. I remember promising myself to watch over him even after my death, and here I am, on the threshold of the beyond.

  Have I followed the advice of the Talmudic sage: “It is incumbent on you to live as if you were to die the next day”?

  The first question the angel asks the dead is “Were you honest in your dealings with others?” And then: “Did you truly live waiting for the Messiah?”

  When will the angel interrogate me?

  Images rise up from ancient midrashic and mystical sources, crowding my brain and my memory. In my adolescence at the yeshiva, they used to make me tremble. Many texts describe the beyond. Few take place in paradise; most unfold in hell. The sinners and their punishment in the flames. Their deafening screams, their unimaginable suffering, which ends only with the arrival of Shabbat.

  Am I, in fact, already on the other side? If not, would I have been permitted a glimpse into the beyond?

  I am lying on my hospital bed, but it is hell. My skin is ripping apart; my entire body is aflame. I see myself in hell, ruled by cruel, pitiless angels. My head filled with medieval descriptions of unimaginable punishments, I think I know—I do know—what takes place in these dreadful abysses.

  Tears and screams fill the subterranean hells.

  That is the fiery universe inflicted upon sinners. Men hanged by their tongues, women by their breasts. I try to identify them; in vain. Their faces are disfigured, unrecognizable. Is
mine among them?

  And then my gaze turns to the others, the Just: They are imploring the supreme Judge to show mercy to His people in exile. The ancestors, the prophets, the visionaries and their friends, the masters and the poets—one more step ahead and I shall be their student; I shall be one of them.

  Am I ready?

  14

  IS ONE ever ready?

  Some of the ancient Greek philosophers, as well as some Hasidic masters, claimed to have spent their lifetimes preparing for death.

  Well, the Jewish tradition, which is my own, counsels another way: We sanctify life, not death. “Ubakharta bakhaim,” says Scripture: “You shall choose life” and the living. With the promise to live a better, more moral, more humane life.

  That is what man’s efforts should be directed to. To save the life of a human being, whomever he or she may be, wherever he or she is from, a Jew has the right to transgress the strictest of the Torah’s laws. That is what I learned in heder when I was very young, and later at the yeshiva, and later still by studying the sacred books. Death—any death—renders impure all who come in contact with it. Even the death of Moses, which is why God undertook to bury him Himself.

  Of course, we must accept the idea—the reality—that every man is mortal. But Jewish law teaches us that death is not meant to guide us; it is life that will show us the way. And the choice is never ours. All decisions are made up above on Rosh Hashanah, the New Year. On that day—this is what our prayers affirm—God inscribes in the Book of Life all that will happen to us in the year to come: who shall know joy and who shall experience sorrow; who shall become ill and who shall live and who shall die.

  Evidently, I have prayed poorly, lacking concentration and fervor; otherwise, why would the Lord, by definition just and merciful, punish me in this way?

  Hardly have I formulated this conclusion than I reject it: Were it valid today, how much more valid it would have been then, there.

  15

  SUCH ARE the thoughts that the patient, a prisoner of his condemned body, confronting his fate, is experiencing with ferocious intensity. As I face the gravity of this moment, I feel the need to search my soul.

  I am eighty-two years old. As it has often before, and now more so than ever, the fact that I am who I am leads me to look back: What have I done, and what have I toiled to do, during this long journey filled with dreams and challenges?

  Strange, I suddenly remember Baudelaire’s outcry in his Mon cœur mis à nu (My Heart Laid Bare): “There exist in every man, at every hour, two simultaneous impulses; one leading toward God, the other toward Satan.” Have I distinguished the path to Good from the one leading to Evil?

  My life unfolds before me like a film: landscapes from my childhood; adventures in faraway, sometimes exotic places; my first masters, followed by my first moments of adolescent religious ecstasy as I and my friends at the yeshiva received from our old masters the keys that open the secret doors of mystical truths.

  Have I performed my duty as a survivor? Have I transmitted all I was able to? Too much, perhaps? Were some of the mystics not punished for having penetrated the secret garden of forbidden knowledge?

  To begin, I attempted to describe the time of darkness. Birkenau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald. A slight volume: Night. First in Yiddish, “And the world remained silent,” in which every sentence, every word, reflects an experience that defies all comprehension. Even had every single survivor consecrated a year of his life to testifying, the result would probably still have been unsatisfactory. I rarely reread myself, but when I do, I come away with a bitter taste in my mouth: I feel the words are not right and that I could have said it better. In my writings about the Event, did I commit a sin by saying too much, while fully knowing that no person who did not experience the proximity of death there can ever understand what we, the survivors, were subjected to from morning till night, under a silent sky?

  I have written some fifty works—most dealing with topics far removed from the one I continue to consider essential: the victims’ memory. I believe that I have done all I could to prevent it from being cheapened or altogether stifled, but was it enough? And if I often published works—articles, novels—on other themes, I did so in order not to remain its prisoner. My battle against the trivialization and banalization of Auschwitz in film and on television resulted in my gaining not a few enemies. To my thinking, it was my duty to show that the sum of all the suffering and deaths is an integral part of the texts we revere.

  In my imagination, I turn the pages.

  The Bible and the prophets, the Talmud and Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov and his disciples, mysticism and ethics: All that I received from my masters, present and gone, I attempted to transmit. Involuntarily, unwittingly, my experience of what some among us so poorly call the Shoah, or Holocaust, slipped in, here and there, between the lines, into the silences that surround a text. Just as I inevitably situate my novels in the shadow of invisible flames. But have I been prudent enough?

  My very first works of fiction are set not during the Event, but after. Why?

  In Dawn—about the clandestine struggle of the Jews against the British army in Palestine—a survivor of the death camps is ordered to execute a British officer.

  In Day, a young journalist is run over by a taxi in New York. Accident or attempted suicide?

  The Town Beyond the Wall? A book on man’s fascination with madness.

  The Gates of the Forest? An homage to friendship, and the story of a young orphan who pretends to be deaf and mute and who is given the part of Judas in a Passion Play at school.

  I often think of these entirely fictional works, losing myself in an elusive elsewhere, searching for my inner compass.

  The Jews of Silence, set in Communist Russia, derives from another source. That work makes me proud, for it helped brave men and women free themselves of dictatorship and join their brothers and sisters in the land of our ancestors.

  The same is true of my novel The Forgotten, which deals with Alzheimer’s disease and the fear of forgetting. I compare the patient to a book whose pages are torn out day after day, one by one, until all that remains is the cover. I wonder whether this disease could strike an entire community. Or an entire era. In Jewish religious texts, there is great emphasis on the fact that the Lord forgets nothing. Is that because the possibility of divine neglect is not excluded from our subconscious? And so it is with our devotion to the Holy City. King David, in his Psalms, sings: “If I forget thee, Jerusalem …” I am his distant disciple, and I say it in my own way.

  A Beggar in Jerusalem—I shall bring the title character along when I appear before the celestial Tribunal as a witness for my defense. I had met him in front of the Wall during the Six-Day War. There I stood, hands outstretched, my soul on fire, writing with my lips. I found him handsome, this beggar who sought to explain to me the miraculous aspect of the Jewish army’s great victory over its enemies. You see, he said, our army included another six million souls.… That evening, alone in my hotel room, I wrote down all I had heard and felt it with renewed fervor.

  The Testament represents my attempt to unmask communism—in particular, the liquidation of the great Jewish novelists and poets during the Stalin era. Begun as a messianism without God, invented as a marvelous message of comradeship, a noble concept of brotherly humanism, communism was transformed by Stalin into a gigantic laboratory for deception, torture and murder.

  What to say about “Ani Maamin”? “I believe in the coming of the Messiah,” declared Maimonides, and we repeat it with him. “Even though he may be late—and he shall be so indefinitely—I shall go on waiting for him every day.” It is a song of deep and gracious beauty. It speaks of a secret hope without which life would become but a handful of dust. It is a song I learned at the Rabbi of Wizsnitz’s court, to which my mother and I had journeyed to celebrate the Shabbat Shira, the morning service during which we read of the miraculous Red Sea crossing.

  On that day, we had met the Rabbi’s
nephew, who had escaped, no one knew how, from a ghetto in Poland. At that time, Hungarian Jews had no inkling of the tragedy that was about to befall their communities. Auschwitz and Treblinka were unknown names to us.

  This nephew, what is he doing in my hospital room? Why do I see him now just as I did long ago at his uncle’s? On that day, this small, skinny, melancholic young man, who seemed locked in his solitude, never stopped moving his lips as he prayed in silence. What made me think of that afternoon, between the service of Minha and the Third Mystical Meal, when the students surrounding him asked him to tell us what happened to him? He had refused to answer. We insisted. But he remained huddled in a corner, a shadow among so many shadows, and remained silent. Until, in the end, he shook himself and gave in: “Fine,” he said very softly, “I shall tell you.” And he began to sing “Ani Maamin,” the most beautiful, most moving nigun I had ever heard. He added nothing: For him, the song said it all.

  Shall I be able to sing up above? Shall I too be able to intone this nigun that contains all that I have tried to express in my writings?

  16

  THE YEAR 2011 will forever remain for me a year of malediction.

  In mid-January, Marion and I were in Florida. For several years I have been co-teaching a class in philosophy, history and literature with a local colleague at a small, prestigious college.

  Ten days after I arrived in Florida, I became ill. The doctors diagnosed double pneumonia and ordered what we thought would be a week of hospitalization. After I’d been at the hospital for a few days, my condition worsened. I asked Marion to do everything, anything, to convince the doctors to allow me to leave. She argued that she was afraid I would become seriously depressed and begged them to find a way to care for me at our hotel.