The Fifth Son

by Elie Wiesel

  The door on the left opens, a man appears and invites me to come in. The office is spacious, elegant, filled with light. No superfluous object. Perfect taste. You can see: Wolfgang Berger is a man of culture.

  “Please sit down. I am told that you have just arrived. I hope that, thanks to you, our city will become famous. It deserves it, believe me.”

  “Of course I believe you.”

  To break the ice he launches into a monologue on the responsibilities and abuses of the press.

  “You are right,” I tell him. “Sometimes journalists have nothing to say so they say anything at all.”

  “Not you.”

  “Oh, well, I’m neither better nor worse than my colleagues.”

  He protests smiling. I watch him intensely.

  “What do you think of the German nation?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  I have not understood his question. He repeats it.

  “The German nation, the German nation,” I say while forcing myself to think logically and coherently enough not to appear suspect in his eyes. “To which German nation are we referring: yesterday’s or today’s? The hate that prevails in this divided country reminds me of another, a thousand times bloodier, except that today’s is also directed inward: the fanatic militants, the bloodthirsty extremists, the preachers of destruction, the Black and Red Brigades of arbitrary death. Your generation hated the Jews; now your youth in turn repudiates you, their elders. Not for the sake of the Jews, of course, but for the sake of authority. Such are the dynamics of hate: it overflows. One begins by hating a social group and one ends up despising society; one begins by persecuting the Jews and one ends up threatening mankind. All hate becomes self-hate.”

  Herr Direktor Wolfgang Berger listens attentively; his hands clasped before him on the table he concentrates his energy in his eyes. When he decides to ask me a question, his voice is nasal and unsure:

  “Why are you so preoccupied with hate, sir? What I mean is: why do you approach it with such passion?”

  I study him and, curiously, I have a clearer vision of the objects surrounding us; I even notice the paintings on the wall behind me. I glimpse a fly on the ceiling.

  “I am Jewish, Herr Direktor.”

  “I know. I knew it from the first moment.”

  Only natural, I tell myself. He possesses great experience in the matter; he knows how to recognize a Jew. Like a well digger smells water, he smells Jews. In their presence his killer instinct awakens.

  “Would you permit me a question?”

  I nod.

  “Is it because you’re Jewish that you hate me? Do you hate all Germans?”

  Asked in a neutral, almost scientific tone, his questions trouble me. Does he suspect my identity? A mad thought races through my mind: I resemble my brother. Nonsense. The explanation is much simpler: the killer in him has recognized me as a victim.

  “No, Herr Direktor. I feel no animosity toward the German people; I don’t believe in collective guilt. I belong to a people that has suffered its consequences too long to ever apply it to others. I shall go one step, six million steps, further and tell you that even the executioner does not inspire hate in me: it would be too foolish to reduce an ontological Event to a word, a gesture, an impulse of hate.”

  “But then, dear sir, what are you seeking in Germany?”

  I feel like answering him: one man, one man alone, one killer has motivated my journey; one malevolent being, an ally of Evil, it behooves me, in the name of my flesh and blood, to remove from life, for there ought not to be room on the planet earth for him and us. Too soon. Should I answer directly that I came to Germany out of a sense of justice that has nothing to do with hate?

  “I know that your time is precious …”

  I almost said limited; I caught myself.

  “… but, with your permission, I should like to tell you a story.”

  He flinches: he must have made some connection. No doubt he mentally calculated my age, the years elapsed since the war, the various possibilities.… His nostrils quiver. His posture stiffens perceptibly.

  “I am at your disposal,” he says amiably.

  “It’s a story of suffering and war,” I say.

  “I like stories but I detest wars.”

  “It’s a story of Jewish suffering and it takes place during the war against the Jews. In a ghetto somewhere in Central Europe.…”

  His pupils have changed color; the fly changes position on the ceiling.

  “Yes,” says he.

  Now he knows that I know. The beast tensed on his haunches, waits. I sense the danger. I rise, I sit down again. I act without a plan, I improvise.

  “In a ghetto somewhere,” he says with the same nasal inflection. “Please go on.”

  I call upon all those whose destinies have fashioned mine. I mobilize all my resources of energy, imagination and memory to give each sentence, each pause, the intensity and fire of authenticity. I speak and I am transported elsewhere. I speak and I know that it is to speak here to this man, that I have lived through more than one life, accepted so many challenges and deciphered so many symbols.

  I describe the ghetto of Davarowsk: its famished children, its talented beggars, its fallen princes. In the early morning hours a man leaves his family and goes to work; he never returns. At night, a mother discovers her five sons: shot down in the woods. A couple lives locked in an airless room and dies of suffocation. Vignettes of misery, fragments of despair: I could multiply them to infinity.

  “Go on,” says Wolfgang Berger.

  I go on. The sessions of the Jewish Council. The deportations. The “actions.” Death? There was worse; there was the humiliation that preceded death. There was the executioner who meant to have his victims crawl at his feet before he slaughtered them or sent them to be exterminated. There was the killer who demanded that his victims listen to him with admiration and worship him as a God. There were the prayers that the Jews refused to recite upon command, there was the soldiers’ sneering, the death rattle of old men sprawling in their blood, there were the mass graves where the corpses lay piled into high mountains, their shifting summits reaching into the dark and menacing clouds.

  There were so many events, so many mutilated, buried destinies, that I could spend my life and that of my people evoking them. Even if all the Jews in the world were to do nothing but testify, we would not succeed in filling more than one page. However, the Book contains six million pages.

  As I speak, the lines of his face grow sharper and deeper; he is turning paler and paler minute by minute, episode by episode. He is afraid, oh, yes, the Angel of fear is dominated by fear, transfixed by fear; Death has finally caught up with the Angel of Death. Briefly, I feel vindicated: bravo Ariel! So you are capable of inspiring, of inflicting terror! Are you satisfied, Ariel? Are you proud of what I’ve achieved?

  “I have not finished,” I tell him.

  I am filled with dazzling insight: the words come to me easily as though they were seeking me.

  “One more story. Just one. The last. It is about a Jewish child, five or six years old. You knew him; you also knew his father. Reuven and Ariel Tamiroff, do those names mean anything to you?”

  I tell him the story of my little brother. The Angel had noticed my father and mother at the station. The cattle cars were there waiting next to the platforms. The Germans had completed their count of those leaving when the military governor issued a brief order: “Wait!” Barely able to conceal his resentment, he came closer to confront my parents: “You have a son, where is he?” My father did not reply. The Angel slapped him: “Where is your son?” My father bit his lips and said nothing. Then my mother came to his aid: “Our son is dead, sir. Carried away by a terrible fever, our son left us two months ago. Ask the people, they will confirm it.” “I don’t believe you,” shouts the military governor. “She is telling the truth,” says a voice from behind my parents. “Who are you?” “My name is Simha Zeligson. I have known the Tamir
off family for years. I buried the maternal grandparents, the paternal grandparents; I also buried the son. I swear it on my life.” Other voices join his. The military governor is not satisfied; he dispatches a group of SS to the ghetto: “If you have to turn it upside down, bring back the little Tamiroff!” The SS searched the ghetto from one end to the other and came back empty-handed. “Never mind,” said the Angel to my parents. “I shall catch your little boy, I promise you; you won’t be here anymore to see it and that I regret.” He kept his word. He initiated an elaborate manhunt and ultimately succeeded in tracking down my little brother. His vengeance was terrible and cruel, people spoke of it in all the ghettos near and far.

  “I shall not ask you why you committed all these crimes,” I said to him. “I shall ask you only how you could commit them. How you could be present at so many executions, decree so much torture without giving up your sleep, your mind, your taste for lovemaking and wine, your memory? How could you inflict such suffering without it leaving its mark on your face? How could you perpetrate death and not endure it? You were Death, how did you succeed in staying alive?”

  My head touched his, almost. To avoid mingling our breaths, I moved back a centimeter.

  “Ariel Tamiroff, do you remember Ariel Tamiroff, sir? You made him endure a slow death in front of the ghetto’s last Jews as they stood under a frozen sky: how could you inflict such pain on a small boy whom a thousand mouths were silently blessing, hoping to make him into their messenger in heaven?”

  Had he answered, I would have killed him. A killer’s life is as fragile as his victim’s. One move and Wolfgang Berger was finished. Nothing would have been easier. End of the Angel. Any answer, any attempt at self-justification and I would have committed the irreparable. But he merely frowned and narrowed his eyes, focusing on me as if to better place me. The silent confrontation lasted but one second. I glanced at my watch: two hours had elapsed since I appeared in his office. Any moment now, his secretary would knock at the door to announce another visitor, or the office closing hour or the end of the world.

  And now? In just two hours I had crossed centuries of horrors; the journey had exhausted me.

  “Who are you?”

  His question was an arrow. Should I inform him that I was his judge and he my prisoner?

  “Who are you, sir?” he asked again, his voice harsh and tense. “I demand an answer!”

  He spoke easily, all trace of fear gone from his face. His choice of words, his slow and heavy delivery, the icy inflection of his voice made me shiver: was this how he addressed my little brother and my father?

  “Who am I? My name is Ariel.”

  I paused and then:

  “Like my little brother; I am named Ariel for my brother. I am a child. A child of the ghetto of Davarowsk. Every Jew of the ghetto was my parent. Every wall imprisons me, every lie betrays me.”

  Another pause.

  “And every dead victim is my brother.”

  He ran his tongue over his parched lips; he was having difficulty breathing. Yet, he appeared neither defeated nor chastened.

  “What do you plan to do?”

  I had not really given it any thought.

  “Hand me over to the police? Denounce me in the press?”

  In my thoughts I summon my father and his friend Simha, my sick mother and my friend Bontchek to help me, advise me. An old saying crosses my mind: “The Lord may wish to chastise, that is His prerogative; but it is mine to refuse to be His whip.” Where had I picked that up? From my father? From Rebbe Zvi-Hersh, our neighbor? I saw myself with the Rebbe during our conversation about vengeance. Abruptly I realized that the individual sitting across from me no longer held any real interest for me. Once the words had been exchanged, I could leave. The Angel no longer provoked in me either hatred or thirst for revenge. I had disturbed the pattern of his existence, renewed his memory, spoiled his future joys, that was enough for me. He could no longer act, live, laugh as though he had never used the ghetto of Davarowsk as his stage and his universe.

  I shall speak. I shall tell the tale. The Angel must be, will be, unmasked. I shall describe the solitude of the survivors, the anguish of their children. I shall relate the death of my little brother. I shall set forth, I shall recall the wounds, the moanings, the tears. I shall speak of the voices of dusk, the mute violence of night. I shall recite the Kaddish of dawn. The rest is no longer within my scope.

  And my father? Will he be angry with me? And Simha, will he take offense? I don’t think so. Neither one looks upon the act of murder as an answer. Wittingly or unwittingly, they had done what was right. Their failure must be viewed within a larger context. Nor should it embarrass them or shame them. Justice must be human, it passes through language which must be justified by memory. Only in life are just words translated into acts of justice; never in death.

  “You will never know peace,” I say as I get to my feet.

  My head afire, I am no longer certain that I said it. I am no longer certain that I stood up. This encounter, this confrontation, could I have lived them in a dream?

  “Wherever you are you shall feel like an intruder pursued by the dead,” I say. “Men will think of you with revulsion; they will curse you like the plague and war; they will curse you when they curse Death.”

  Like my brother before me, I leave moving backward. For fear that he may shoot me in the back? That he may pierce me with a poisoned dagger? I detect his aborted motions, his somber glances, his thoughts, I search them, I rummage through them, through him, I track them down, I weigh them, I examine them: is there an evil thought, a diabolical thought in that head? What trick is he about to play on me? What must I do to avoid the trap, what means must I seize to save my little brother? Fever has gripped my whole body, I know that I am living the gravest moment of my life and perhaps even of my brother’s life and yet I know that all this may be nothing but a dream, a demented hallucination; I see myself breathing and choking, I observe myself sitting and standing, victor and victim, living and dead, I see myself walking backward as I look upon the Angel, as I stare at him saying to myself over and over: he must look at me as long as possible. I am already at the door, my hand grips the knob, I feel my heart pounding and at the same time I feel a great calm come over me and I can hear myself saying slowly, very slowly:

  “You wanted to know who I am, I shall tell you: I am a Jewish child named Ariel and you are my prisoner; you are the prisoner of Davarowsk Ghetto, the prisoner of the dead Jews of the ghetto of Davarowsk.”

  The last image I take away of him surprises me nevertheless; I realize that the Angel is, after all, different from most human beings: one day I shall know in what way.

  IT IS 1984 when I reread these writings, some of which go back twenty years and others ten. Times have changed. And I? I—who?

  Until today I maintain complex relations with my name. Ariel Tamiroff designates another than myself: a small Jewish boy, son of Rachel and Reuven Tamiroff of Davarowsk, whom History’s violence carried away in a storm of ashes. I had observed in myself a gradual splitting into two: Ariel was and was not dead; I was and was not alive. Ariel lived inside me, through me; I talked to him to convince myself of his existence; I listened to him to persuade myself of mine. At first, it was: He, Ariel. Then: You, Ariel. And finally: I, Ariel.

  Were Ariel alive, he would be forty-six years old; he would be a father, a professor of literature or philosophy, a liberal, a humanist. I am thirty-five years old. Lisa has left me; I miss her.

  My father will soon complete his definitive commentary on the Meditations of his dear Paritus; my mother is no longer at the clinic, she died shortly after my return from Germany. We were not at her bedside, Simha was. He told us that one hour before she died, she regained all her faculties: she asked him questions about us, about what was happening in the world, about the physicians taking care of her. She died in the middle of a question regarding my relationship with Lisa. Strange: she never mentioned Ariel.

 
Simha has aged; he has not yet hastened the coming of the Messiah, but he will surely succeed; I believe in him. His calculations of the mystical Gematria have been erroneous till now but that does not mean he should abandon them. Besides, he has no intention of doing so, no more than he has any intention of closing down his business. He continues to buy and sell shadows; I think he manages quite well.

  And so does Bontchek, thank you. From the time my father began treating him as Simha’s equal, he has been content, sometimes even happy, with or without his slivovitz.

  As for myself, I teach in a small university in Connecticut. I love my students and feel hurt when they don’t reciprocate my love.

  Since my journey to Reshastadt I have visited many countries as—you will laugh—correspondent for a weekly newsmagazine. I have been sent—on assignments of varying lengths—to France, India and Israel. Though I am a Jew of the Diaspora, I am attached to Israel with every fiber of my being. Jerusalem is the only place where I feel at home. May I quote Agnon? “Like every Jew, I was born in Jerusalem but the Romans invaded my city and pushed my cradle all the way to Galicia.”

  I have made a conscious effort not to forget; subconsciously, I have tried no less to forget. An Oriental sage made me see this one day: “As you articulate one word, you suppress another; as you evoke one image, you must repress another. This is true also of memories: to remember certain events, you must forget certain others.” Often I fail, they are too tangled.

  Still, it’s no good deceiving myself, I look upon my life not as a failure but as a defeat. Son of survivors, I feel ill at ease in a complacent world that, in order to rest easier, has repudiated me even before my birth. For me all is constraint: language and silence, love and the absence of love. What I wish to say, I shall never say. What I wish to understand, I shall never understand.

  The era we are now living through brings us closer to the catastrophe foreseen by Orwell, the prophet, not the writer. What he predicted would happen, has already happened. We live outside ourselves, beside ourselves. To paraphrase a noted philosopher: my contemporaries create small circumstances out of great events. What will the year 2000 be made of? Like Simha, I see shadows lifting the horizon; from afar I glimpse the immense shadow, not unlike a monstrous, poisonous mushroom, linking heaven and earth to condemn and destroy them. Could this be the ultimate punishment? Simha, the kabbalist, claims that after the punishment will come redemption. But of what kind? A Hasidic Master sees with greater accuracy: the Messiah may well come too late; he will come when there will be no one left to save. Never mind, I shall wait nonetheless.