The Judges

by Elie Wiesel

“It’s a subject very close to his heart,” G’dalia added. “Did you give him an answer?”

  To his surprise, Razziel felt he could trust G’dalia and talk to him. He told him about Paritus. All through the night they walked up and down together. Thrusting his head forward, G’dalia wanted to know everything about this episode in Razziel’s life. Now and then he interrupted him with a question or a remark, to clarify a particular detail. Thus, thanks to him, Razziel came to recall words and actions buried long ago in his subconscious.

  When Razziel had nothing more to tell, he fell silent. For a long while G’dalia did nothing to break the silence, contenting himself with putting his arm around his new companion’s shoulder, like an elder brother. After they had walked around the courtyard one more time, G’dalia said to him, “Don’t wait for Paritus. Marry. But when he comes, let me know. I might have need of him myself.”

  But Paritus never came back.

  Razziel finally allowed Kali to persuade him and the wedding took place. It was a magnificent affair: G’dalia accompanied the groom under the huppah; the Rebbe officiated at the ceremony and recited the seven blessings. Hasidic and other celebrities were present. Two masters preached the sermons for the occasion. Klezmer songs had been composed in the couple’s honor. A postcard arrived from Paritus, mailed from Tashkent: Achieving the goal does not signify the end of the quest. For the first time there was harmony between body and soul. The young couple thrived. Kali was alternately joyous, tender, and full of mischief. She was passionate and curious, constantly questioning him about his life. Had he known women before? At what precise moment had his senses opened to desire? She wanted to know all about his parents, and his childhood, and found it hard to accept that this topic belonged in the zone of darkness that surrounded him. Then he talked to her about Paritus. She insisted that he reveal everything about him. Was it simple female jealousy on her part? She found her husband’s attachment to this mysterious old character bizarre and sinister. Razziel came to believe that at the basis of all human truth there is a wounded consciousness, a bruised heart.

  If only there were someone in the world who might one day continue my quest, mused Razziel, in great distress. Kali had so much hoped to have a child, and he even more so. They had spoken of the child they so desperately longed for many times. He so wanted to be a father, because he had not been able to be a son. When Kali discovered she was pregnant they spent the whole night with their arms about each other. Then came that morning when the doctor shattered their hopes. Razziel held his wife’s hand all night, but they did not exchange a single word. Soon after that she succumbed to the relentless disease.

  Kali still smiled sometimes, but her smile was no longer the same. Before, when she smiled, earth and heaven united to sing of man’s joy. But ever since her illness, she enveloped herself in silence. One day when Razziel played a record that she liked, she signaled for him to turn it off.

  “Does it hurt you to listen?” Razziel asked her.

  “No, I like listening.” She choked back her tears and, struggling for composure, answered, “I prefer . . . listening to you.”

  He sang her melodies that reminded her of happy nights spent with the Hasidim.

  “What becomes of life when it leaves us?” asked Kali. “Where does it go? Tell me, what will become of my life when I am no longer here to contain it?”

  Razziel remembered a question Paritus had put to him: “What becomes of the sound the wind makes when it shakes the tree?”

  “I don’t know,” Razziel had replied.

  “That’s because you don’t know how to listen. Know, then, that the sound remains within the tree. It will never leave it.”

  Now Razziel paraphrased these words for Kali. “Your life will remain within me. It will never leave me.”

  “And I? ”

  “You as well. You will remain within me.”

  Then one night the eyes of the sick woman, who had already lost all memory, absorbed the darkness in which she was drowning.

  IT WAS two o’clock in the morning, and the Judge had still not reappeared. The anxiety weighing more and more heavily on the prisoners was tangible. There is nothing worse than uncertainty. A mad thought, which Yoav quickly banished, flashed through his mind: Was it thus that his grandparents had found themselves in a little room, prisoners in the ghetto, and then in the railroad car whose skylights were closed off with barbed wire? Take care, he told himself. No comparisons. It’s vital not to draw analogies. Tirelessly Bruce went on banging on the door, but no one responded. Claudia too lashed out in anger, but to no avail. They were not aware that the Hunchback was watching them and the total absence of reaction unnerved them. The Judge is waging psychological warfare on us, thought George. Is that part of his plan?

  A month earlier, when consulting the archives relating to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, George had been surprised to discover a document written in German that clearly had been misfiled. It concerned a ghetto in Eastern Europe that had been liquidated in 1942. A Wehrmacht captain was giving an account to his divisional general of the logistical support he had provided for the Einsatzkommandos charged with the extermination of the Jews in the area. Although not a Jew himself, George had read the document with more than usual interest: Pamela was Jewish. Besides, the Holocaust had fascinated him for a long time. The fact that the killers thought it necessary to write everything down, to record it all on paper—in other words, to serve as bookkeepers and archivists—intrigued him above all else. Little by little he had read everything on the subject he could lay his hands on: histories, memoirs, and eyewitness accounts, as well as transcripts of the various trials of war criminals in Europe and in Israel. These studies had brought him closer to his Jewish colleagues and to Pamela’s Jewish friends, and it was she who introduced him to a certain Boaz, an “archivist” in the Israeli secret service. Pamela was convinced that, at a certain period in his career, Boaz had taken part in operations designed to track down and arrest those primarily responsible for the “final solution” in occupied Poland. On the advice of the Department of Justice and with the agreement of the State Department, George had contacted his Israeli colleague and accepted his invitation to come and see him in Jerusalem. Boaz would certainly help him to discover more about the case that preoccupied him.

  The document in question bore the signature of an Austrian politician, a current member of the government, known for his pro-Jewish and pro-Israeli views. If his past came to the surface, his political future would be called into question and perhaps irrevocably compromised. Now, sitting in this room, he considered what action to take. Destroy the document before it fell into the hands of the Judge, whose moral character was, to say the least, doubtful? Swallow it as spies do in the movies? Moved by a sudden inspiration, George decided to share his secret with Yoav. He took him into a corner and, very quietly, told him about his dilemma. The others, believing the two were discussing a plan of escape, spoke louder in order to cover up their whispering.

  “Can a man expiate his crimes and repent?” asked George. “And become innocent in his own eyes?”

  Yoav replied that, being neither a rabbi nor an expert in matters of ethics, he did not feel qualified to give him an opinion.

  “I understand you,” said George. “I think like you. I don’t believe I have the right to judge. But I’m relying on my colleague, your fellow countryman, to help me. He must have a dossier on this Austrian officer. The Nuremberg Tribunal only sat in judgment on the Gestapo and the SS, not the Wehrmacht. Thus, my man must have slipped through the denazification process without too much difficulty. Did he try to redeem himself in some way or other? Has he repented? More to the point, is the influential minister of today the same man who assisted—and maybe took part in—the massacre of twelve hundred and forty Jews in the Kovno ghetto? ”

  As he spoke, George became more and more excited. Occasionally, he took out his handkerchief to mop his brow, moist with perspiration. He wanted the other man
to understand what was at stake: It was a question not only of the honor of an individual but also of members of his family who were in no way responsible for his actions. And then there were the implications of the affair for the Austrian people on the one hand and the people of Israel on the other.

  “Believe me,” said George, betraying his distress, “I’ve never been in a situation like this before. I’ve always lived in a world of paper. My research could harm no one. Whereas now . . .”

  Yoav did nothing to interrupt him. In his thoughts he was back in the room at Sloan-Kettering. A particularly attentive young German was among the group of doctors clustered around the senior oncologist considering his case. Sharp-nosed and with his blue-gray eyes hidden behind horn-rimmed spectacles, this doctor showed a particular interest in the young patient from a distant land, and they had had occasion to converse, especially in the evenings, when Carmela went back to her hotel and the sounds in the hallway became muffled.

  During the first few weeks they discussed the situation in Israel, about which Dr. Heinrich Blaufeld, “for obvious reasons,” as he put it, displayed great curiosity and indeed profound sympathy. Later, their conversations revolved chiefly around the terrible illness that was sapping the Israeli officer’s body, thrusting him inexorably toward death.

  “Why did you choose the military?” asked the doctor.

  “Where I come from,” replied Yoav, “it’s not a question of choice but of necessity; we Jews in Israel plan to survive. Weak and defenseless, we would have no chance; recent history—ours and yours—is proof of this. Jewish weakness may arouse either scorn or pity, but not support and certainly not respect. So we had to look for something else. It’s true that our military strength provokes envy, but we couldn’t survive without it.”

  The doctor looked uneasy. “Do you hold it against me that I’m German?”

  “No,” said Yoav, after a moment’s thought. “You’re too young to be responsible for—”

  “Suppose I were not so young?”

  “You should thank heaven that you are.”

  “Heaven has nothing to do with it.”

  He left the room on the pretext of an urgent errand, but an hour later he returned, took a chair, and drew it up to the bed.

  “I want to be truthful with you,” he said. “I’m German, and I grew up in a family where love of the Fatherland was a sacred tradition, even when our country had been debased. Then one day I learned to my horror that my father—a doctor renowned as much for his skills as for his compassion— had served in the SS. Worse, he had taken part in the ‘selections’ at Birkenau. That day I was tempted to abandon my studies and travel as far away as possible. More precisely, I wanted to turn my back on everything, to become another person, to die. I’d had enough. And yet I lacked nothing. As the eldest son of a well-to-do family who moved in the highest social circles, there was nothing I couldn’t have— in terms of what money can buy, at least. Becoming aware of my distraught state, my mother questioned me for days. I told her nothing; why upset her? Did she know her husband had committed crimes against humanity, the same humanity he was now trying to save?

  “One night I decided to seek an explanation from my father. ‘How could you?’ I asked. He did not even defend himself. He simply said, ‘Just as there are predatory birds, so there are predatory ideas: I came under their spell.’ Then: ‘Just as the survivors say that no one will ever understand the victims, what I must tell you is that you will never understand the executioners.’ Then, changing his tone, he added a little sentence that still haunts me. ‘I could have been judged then, but not now.’ Well, our conversation made me even more unhappy. I thought, I want to understand; with all my heart I burn to understand. And I’m afraid that one day I shall no longer want to. I said this to my father, and he received it like a slap in the face.”

  Slumped on his chair, his face pale, the young doctor held his head in his hands and fell silent. Discreetly, Yoav looked away, lest he might catch him in tears.

  “My father died shortly after that,” continued the doctor. “And I continued my studies of medicine. I set myself the goal of making reparation for my father’s crimes by specializing in extreme cases: I want to help those the world has turned its back on. You understand me, don’t you?” Then, after a pause: “I would give everything to save your life, or at least to prolong it; you know that too, don’t you?”

  Yoav raised himself on his pillow. “Maybe Ivan Karamazov was right: I might possibly be able to forgive what has been done to me as a Jew, but not what was done to us as men.” Then he went on. “No, I can’t forgive anything. Do you know the writings of the great French philosopher, Vladimir Jankelevitch? He said there are cases where there should be no forgiveness. He was Jewish.”

  He held out his hand to the doctor, with a smile. “Just think, if I had not been ill we should never have met.”

  The doctor smiled back at him. “This time I really think providence may have had a hand in it.”

  The next day, Yoav told Carmela about their conversation. She exclaimed, “Well, if he can make you better, I’ll forgive him anything he likes.”

  While he was listening to George, Yoav was asking himself, If that young doctor had been here tonight what would he have done? Would he have volunteered to be a scapegoat? In that case, why shouldn’t I? My days are numbered, whatever happens. Dying to save human lives—isn’t that a soldier’s duty? It’s true I’m not alone in the world. I have Carmela. Do I have the right to make such a decision without consulting her? How would she advise me?

  He recalled the words of the German doctor at their last meeting. “Don’t forget that the Jews were not the only victims of my father and his accomplices: we, their children, are victims too. In our own way, we too have been uprooted and left on the scrap heap. For the children of the executioners too, midnight will always be sounding. Don’t forget that.”

  “I won’t forget,” Yoav had said. He had not expected to be so deeply touched.

  “I know,” said the German doctor. “You are Jewish, and the Jews forget nothing. But being a Jew, you also ought to believe in miracles. That is important for a sick man like you. Faith is as important as the most powerful of drugs.”

  Yoav had a sudden vision of his father, who had believed in miracles. “But do I?” he asked himself.

  Miracles were for other people. It’s always other people who need them. They happen for all kinds of people but not me. I have to get by without them. The prisoner cannot free himself from his own prison, says the Talmud. Nor can the sick man heal himself. But what about God, Father? God has need of man in order to be God. Who knows? Perhaps he too needs miracles.

  The Judge returned just before three o’clock in the morning. He looked preoccupied as he sat down amid icy silence. His eyes fixed on the ceiling, he began ruminating on guilt and death.

  “What is innocence? Personally, I don’t believe in it. What is it, other than an excuse for imbeciles and a matter of luck for the lucky and the fools? For them, as for the rest of us, it’s the tip of the iceberg that rises above the mountain of sins and crimes committed in its name that we all carry around with us. And what is life? A tiny wretched island amid the infinite and majestic ocean of death.”

  The survivors did not dare look at one another. Was he still making fun of them? Why did he choose this night to hold forth on metaphysical questions as old as humanity? Was it a new game? The guy’s crazy. What lunatic asylum has he escaped from? What bar has he stumbled out of? Either he’s been drinking or else he’s just plain nuts. But he went on rambling in a monotonous drone that in other circumstances would have put his listeners to sleep. He quoted from Plato and Seneca, Nietzsche and Augustine, Gypsy legends and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. As he became more and more excited, his arguments grew confused and he completely lost the thread of his harangue. Eventually, he calmed down, stared fixedly at his five prisoners, and continued in solemn tones.

  “True innocence is not li
fe but death. The death of one person absolves the others. So that some men may live, another man must die. This is what I have learned from my Masters, who repeat it to me every month in my dreams, so as to afford you—or people like you—salvation. Listen to them. Listen to me. To wash away his guilt, man must submit and enter into death. And Death, graciously and peacefully, welcomes him with open arms. But in return Death must be welcomed in the same manner. Are you ready to assume your innocence?”

  Did he expect a reply, a commitment? Applause, perhaps? As they all remained silent, he shook his head in disgust and went out, leaving behind him an acrid smell that none of his victims could identify.

  The door opened noiselessly and the Hunchback appeared, his customary teapot in his hand.

  “Who’s cold? Who’s thirsty? The tea’s hot, the coffee’s strong. I’m here to serve you.”

  They bombarded him with questions that he left unanswered. Inexplicably, their attitude toward him had changed. They smiled at him, they promised him gifts, they tried to win him over: Was he not the messenger, the representative of the gods, of the other side? Grimacing politely, he listened to what they said to him, heard their promises, but affected to be deaf. Nevertheless, being human after all, he cast timid glances in Claudia’s direction. Did he think she was smiling at him? He made her a gift of his most beautiful thought.

  And suddenly, as he was filling their cups, as if it had been his function from birth, from the beginning of the world, he waxed eloquent.

  “Drink up, drink up, my friends, it will do you a world of good. I’ve made this tea myself, and the coffee too. I’m your friend, you must believe me. I wish you no harm; I wish no one to harm you. The Judge is deliberating with his superiors. That’s all part of the game—if it is a game. . . .

  “Don’t ask me who his superiors are. I don’t even know if they exist. But he exists, there’s the rub. What has made him cruel? When did he encounter evil? How did he come to espouse it? What tragedy has he lived through that has made him so bitter? I think he married young, but that’s not certain. Nothing’s certain where he’s concerned.