by Elie Wiesel
“Not here,” says Carlos, looking him over.
“Are you insane? Where would you like us to go? To the drawing room?”
“These are secret orders,” Carlos insists.
“What do you want me to do? Send everybody outside to get knocked off?”
He runs his hand over his forehead, leaving a streak of black grease.
“All right,” he says irritably, “I understand. Let’s go to the corner, over there.”
They are alone in their corner, Carlos, who hands over the orders, and Longo, who receives them. Their eyes meet, a shell explodes and the two borrowed names are no more. Salud, Carlos. No pasarán, Longo, Leibish, Langer. This is madness, I say to myself.
Salud, too, to the orders transmitted but not received, Salud to the orders lost with Carlos and Longo. They might well have resulted in an important initiative for our side, one that might have been essential for victory. I shall never know. I returned to base, a single thought throbbing in my head: This is madness; war is madness, war begets madness.
Particularly in Barcelona …
In Barcelona another war was being fought within the larger one. A sneaky, ugly, stupid war; I see it now, I didn’t at the time. I knew that the various armed groups and mini-groups of the different movements and factions, leaning more or less toward Socialism or anarchy or Communism, were jealous of one another, opposed one another and on occasion killed one another, but I didn’t know that it was systematic. Comrades, particularly leaders, disappeared into the night: Sent on a mission? Arrested by the NKVD? Doubt lingered for a few days, until one forgot, turned the page and dealt with other crises, only to discover other disappearances. Then one day, it was disclosed by “well-informed sources,” that, in fact, the first to disappear were still—or were no longer—in the sinister dungeons of such and such a prison and that they were suspected of subversive, divisive, therefore criminal, activity. Should one have reacted with indignation? There were more urgent priorities; there was the war against the Fascist enemy. And so the NKVD people carried out their mission as they saw fit, without shame and even without provoking shame. Their victims fell, often without knowing why. And even if they had known, what difference would it have made?
It was stupid, Citizen Magistrate, stupid and absurd, confess it, you who usually make others confess.
On one side, there were the Fascists, united to a man. On the other, the Loyalists and their allies: divided, fragmented, pitted one against the other, always ready to fight one another.
The Trotskyites—who were staying at the Hotel Faucon, on the Ramblas—were first to disappear. Then followed their old friends. Then came those who were nobody’s friends: the anarchists. Politics above all, you’ll tell me. No, Citizen Magistrate: victory above all, justice above all.
You think I’m naive, don’t you? I was. I am not ashamed to admit it, I even state it with pride. This Spanish war, I am glad to have taken part in it. I believed in it. I was on the right side, I fought for everything that stands for the honor of being a man. I was conscious of that. That is why I disregarded the nocturnal arrests and the executions at dawn of my Trotskyite and anarchist friends—for they were all my friends. Am I indicting myself now? Never mind. I am speaking to myself as I speak to you and I refuse to lie to myself.
I rather liked the Barcelona anarchists—their courage, their bravado, their absurd but poetic slogans. I envied them a little; why couldn’t I sing as they did, with the same kind of carefree, childlike enthusiasm? Interesting: there were only a few Jews among them.
They were grown children. Smiling, exuberant children confronting a society that defied them with its logic, its laws, its hypocritical calculations, its efficacy.
Their ideology did not hold water, that’s true. Anarchy does not exist, cannot exist as a system, for it denies the future by preventing it from being born. One does not militate against an established order by opposing to it another established order: the void is not a tool, nor is disorder. The concept of chaos contains its own contradiction. A true anarchist must eventually repudiate anarchy, become anti-anarchist, therefore … Nonetheless, I loved to walk along the Ramblas or drink in the picturesque bars of Montjuich with García from Teruel, Juan from Córdoba, Luis from Malaga—were those their real names? Does an anarchist accept the ties and responsibilities of a name? Whenever they repeated themselves too much or uttered a grandiose statement that was meaningless, they would begin to laugh loudly and clap their knees. As for me, as drunk as they, I recited for them—yes, you read it correctly—mystical poems which they inspired in my dizzy head. For they were all unavowed mystics, reluctant mystics, obsessed by the mystery of the end, the explosion of time. They tried to rush into it to reach nothingness and drown in it in a flash of laughter. Anarchists and mystics use the same vocabulary, did you know that? They use the same metaphors. In the Talmud, God forbids Rabbi Ishmael to cry lest He plunge the universe back into its primary state. Is that not the first anarchist image, the first anarchist impulse?
I remember Zablotowski—pardon me, José—a painter of talent, full of fire and fury, explaining to me his involvement with the movement: “I hate white; I like to see it exploded. Covered with mud and blood.”
And Simpson, the student from Liverpool, said, “I hate this life that has been imposed upon us, this earth that has been given to us as one is given charity, this world that is putting us to sleep. I’d like to see them caught in hell, twisted by the flames, terrorizing the gods who have created them. That is why I have broken with my people and my past. Here I feel free!”
Don’t let these declarations lead you to the conclusion that the anarchists were attracted by death. The inane battle cry “Long live death” did not originate with them but with a senile Falangist, General Milan d’Astray. The fool. He did not understand that to express desperate anarchy required both superior intelligence and a sense of humor.
In fact, that beribboned ass was rebuked by Miguel de Unamuno, whose work I didn’t know at the time. I began reading it after learning what had happened at the University of Salamanca, whose rector he was. In a crowded and emotion-charged amphitheater, facing Falangists howling their admiration for General d’Astray by repeating his “Long live death,” the old philosopher spoke slowly, soberly: “I cannot remain silent.… Not to speak up now would be to lie.… I have just heard a morbid, senseless cry: Long live death. For me, that is a loathsome paradox.…”
A speech of astounding courage and nobility. Its echoes reverberated through all of wounded and bloody Spain. It was discussed in the casas del pueblo during the long nights under the tents and even in the trucks transporting us to the front. At the time, I was able to recite his entire speech from memory: “This university is a temple to intelligence and I am its high priest.… You, General d’Astray, will prevail because you have the might; but you will not convince.…”
That was his last public speech; he stopped teaching and died shortly thereafter. But there was renewed interest in his writings. I read his Life of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza at the time of the Teruel campaign. His Tragic Sense of Life I devoured in ’37 at the time of the battle at Guadalajara. I remember that as I read, I thought that the author had to be a descendant of the Marranos. His concept of exile reminded me of Rabbi Itzhak Luria. The tragic sense reflected in his work had been expressed, centuries before, by the disciples of Shammai and Hillel who considered that it would have been better for man never to have appeared in this world. But “Since he was born, let him study Torah.…” Funny, everything seems to bring me back to Jewish memory. Everyone I meet is an old acquaintance.
Would you like another example? It was back in 1938, shortly before the great debacle, shortly before I was repatriated. The German army had just entered Austria, welcomed by a delirious population. The vise was tightening, the clouds were gathering. Night was about to descend on the continent, as it had over Spain. Spain’s history foreshadowed Europe’s. Might prevailed over right, even ove
r divine right. The aimed rifle was indifferent to human values; it was pointed at mankind and mankind first began to notice. Republican Spain was lost and so was Europe. History was tumbling into shame and fear.
I was depressed, we all were. The end was approaching, we were moving toward unspeakable disaster. Nothing remained of that early enthusiasm when the Brigades were forming under the sign of solidarity. The governments of France, Great Britain and the United States had abandoned Spain to its fate, delivered it to its executioners. How was one to explain, without any attempt at justification, such cowardice in otherwise honorable, honest and politically lucid men? We no longer even tried to understand.
Soviet Russia remained faithful, she alone remained faithful. That made us proud and determined. But the die was cast. There was no more chance of winning. We were still fighting, but it was for the sake of honor, not victory.
My depression also had a personal side. Bercu, a Hungarian-Jewish comrade whom I loved like a brother, had disappeared.
I went to see Yasha to solicit his intervention. Yasha was working for the Security services, everybody knew that. In certain quarters he was even thought to be their all-powerful chief.
He was lodged at the Hotel Monopol, renamed Libertad. He received me cordially. Large head, engaging smile, curly hair, swarthy face: the archetype of the Jewish Communist intellectual, such as one imagined him in the thirties. To put me at ease, he discussed with me—in Yiddish—the general situation, and his views appeared to me less pessimistic than my comrades’ and my own. The Spanish war is only an episode, said he; others will follow. What matters is to have an overview. What matters is that Soviet Russia honored its commitments. The workers, the outcasts, the free men who have been betrayed know that they can rely on her; the rest is not as important, the rest will change and be forgotten. Make a jump, a jump of ten years, and you will see: these painful episodes will no longer be of concern.…
I was sitting, playing with Sheina’s unlit pipe—I enjoyed playing with it; I didn’t smoke. Obliquely I observed my powerful friend. His right hand in his pants pocket, he was striding back and forth in the room as he talked. To listen to me, he stood still. At intervals he took out a cigarette, lit it slowly, savoring the smoke as he closed his left eye, only to open it again as he exhaled.
Knowing him to be very busy and not wishing to take advantage of his generosity, I came directly to the point.
He interrupted me: “I know. I know why you asked to see me.”
“So?”
“So, nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing? Listen, Yasha: Bercu has disappeared and …”
“And nothing, I am telling you.”
“What does it mean, Yasha? That you have nothing to do with it?”
“It means that you’d do well not to get involved.”
“But Bercu is one of ours, an idealist, you know that.…”
In the hall, outside, there was a noise. He stiffened, his voice turned harsh—hut not the look in his eyes. He continued in French:
“In fact, we have nothing to say to each other, in any case, not on that subject. If Bercu has been arrested by our services, which is possible though not certain, that is their business; they know what they’re doing and do only their duty.…”
He went to the door and opened it; there was nobody.
“Sorry,” he whispered in Yiddish, squeezing my hand. “Your friend is lost. Forget him.”
And, aloud, in French, “Think of afterward, of the total picture. We shall win, Sanchez, we shall win.”
In that hour, I aged ten years. I thought of Bercu: Was he still alive? Was he suffering? What crimes could he have committed to deserve a traitor’s fate? A chilling thought occurred to me: Where was he being held? Perhaps in the very cellars of our Hotel Libertad?
Drained of energy and life, I wandered aimlessly down the Ramblas, losing my way in the twisting alleys where a few months earlier I had walked with Bercu.
Born in a village close to the Romanian border, he had rebelled against his father, a rich merchant. To administer punishments to his son, his father had hired the butcher’s apprentice. Every time the young Bercu came home from school declaring that he would not go back—and this happened frequently—his father, without a word, would send for the butcher’s apprentice and his stick, “It hurt,” my friend told me, “I suffered like a thousand devils in hell; but I bit my lips so as not to show it; I never did show it. This went on for weeks and months. I don’t know whom I hated more: my father who impassively witnessed the canings or the butcher’s helper who, equally indifferent, was breaking my bones for a few coins. One day I met somebody who belonged to the clandestine Party; I followed him and that is where the real surprise was waiting for me: the butcher’s helper had preceded me there; in fact, he was already chief.…”
Thus it is possible, I discovered, to serve rich and pitiless merchants, to punish defenseless children at their behest—and prepare the liberation of mankind! It is possible to be chastised first by religion and then by Communism. It is possible to be both Bercu’s friend and Yasha’s. Yasha … What would I have done in his place? He knew Bercu; we had spent evenings together, singing, comparing our adventures. Now Bercu was his prisoner. His victim?
On the market square, I saw an anarchist convoy, red and black flags fluttering in the wind, preparing to move toward the front. Antonio, in the first vehicle, motioned to me:
“Sanchez, Sanchez, why so grim?”
“I’ve lost a friend. One? Two.”
“Come with us and you won’t think about it any more,” said Antonio. “You’ll see one of those battles. Why don’t you come?”
“No, thank you. I’m not good at battles, you know that very well.”
In truth, I was tempted by his invitation. I refused because, unexpectedly, Yasha’s image appeared before me, scolding me: You should not have gone with the anarchists, no, you should not have joined them.… Yasha asked me: Why did you follow them? And Antonio, how long have you known him? Why do you consort with our enemies?
“No, Antonio,” I repeated. “I cannot.”
Cowardice? Caution? Let’s not play with words: it was cowardice.
The result: monstrous, all pervasive gloom. The moon sought refuge behind veils. The stars went into mourning. The town became accursed. I could find no place for myself; I felt out of tune with the world, with the body that linked me to the world. For the first time, I regretted having come to Spain. I would have done better staying in France. Or Palestine. Or Liyanov … Once again, my father’s face loomed before me, as in a dream: Be a good Jew, Paltiel, be a good Jew, my son.… Was I still? I no longer observed the commandments of the Torah, I transgressed its laws, I no longer put on my phylacteries, but … but what? They are in my knapsack, the tephilin, I am dragging them from camp to camp. I don’t put them on because … because I am fighting a war. A war, for whose sake? Spain’s? Also for the sake of the Jews, Father, and for you, and for all the oppressed people on earth. But you came to fight in Spain, for Spain, says my father, but it wasn’t my father. Who was it? He had appeared out of nowhere and now he was standing on my left, leaning on the ramparts overlooking the city:
“But you came to Spain, to fight for Spain,” David Aboulesia’s hoarse voice is telling me in Yiddish. “At least have the courage of your convictions: the real Jew is no longer inside you; he remained in Liyanov. It’s the Communist who came here to shed his name and his past in order to become an international soldier.”
“But,” I protested, “the Jew in me came to join other Jews, they are many in our ranks. Haven’t you noticed them? I did not forsake the Jews by coming to Spain; this is where we met again.”
“What does that prove? That many others did as you did: one hundred candles can go out as quickly as one.”
I glanced at him sideways: Was this David Aboulesia or someone who resembled him? What would he be doing in Spain? Following the Messiah’s trail all the way here, when i
t has been forbidden to tread this ground since the anathema that followed the expulsion and exodus of 1492? True, there were lives to be saved. Had he come for that? Or was it me he had come to save? Was I then in danger?
“Do you know the history of my illustrious ancestor Don Itzhak Abravanel?” he asked me in his calm, even voice, as though we were sitting peacefully in a House of Study. “He occupied the post of Minister at the court of Portugal toward the end of the fifteenth century. For this Jewish philosopher, intensely religious to boot, to be accepted by the Catholic court of Lisbon, he had to be truly great, and the country had to need his services badly. Came the time of the ordeals: forced to choose between denial of his faith and exile, he chose exile in Spain. Though a Jew, and a refugee at that, he again succeeded in attaining a high position and became Minister to King Ferdinand the Catholic. But in 1492, Don Itzhak Abravanel again confronted the same dilemma: to repudiate his faith and live in glory or leave for another strange country that would permit him to remain faithful. He chose fidelity and exile and moved to Venice where he began work on his messianic writings. Well, this man who had contributed so much to the welfare of Portugal and Spain, you will find practically no trace of him in their history books. His name shines in the history of only one people, his own and ours. This demonstrates clearly that the place a Jew occupies in universal history is determined by his place in Jewish history. In other words, if you believe you must forsake your brothers in order to save mankind, you will save nobody, you will not even save yourself.”
There was something bewildering and unreal in this raucous voice invading the night to tell me of an illustrious character who may well have trod this very same ground and listened to the same nocturnal silence. I felt his hand on my arm—then I felt nothing, not even a presence.
In the distance, a sudden burst of gunfire. Then another. Two executions at dawn? Bercu? In whose memory will he survive? I pondered the question as though it mattered. Actually, nothing mattered any more.
