All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (10 page)

Behind Elie
(left to right)
, his sister Bea, his mother, and his sister Hilda.

Hilda and her mother.

Elie’s mother
(left)
and cousin Golda.

Elie’s father.

Elie’s maternal grandfather, Dodye Feig

The Jewish cemetery in Sighet.

Elie, age 15, not long before the deportations.

On the boat taking him to Israel for the first time, 1949.

At a press conference with Maurice Fisher, the Israeli ambassador to France, 1950. Elie is third from right.

I slipped out and went to visit my two sick comrades, but they still refused to recognize me. Granted, they were not about to betray our secret, but why did they hide from me? Why did they pretend not to see me, or not to know me? Alone in the shadows with each of them, I whispered that our adventure was about to bear fruit. Another few days, another few weeks, and God Himself would slay the Angel of Death. Did they hear me? They smiled, or was it only an illusion? Perhaps they resented me for not following them into madness.

It was a feverish day, but everyone went about his own business. One customer came to buy salt, another sugar. My mother and older sisters worked all day without a break. Tsipouka played hoops in the yard with a playmate. My father went in search of news, but the other leaders of the community knew no more than he did. Their Christian friends did not answer calls. My father ran from one to another, but no one was home. As for me, I plunged back into contemplation and the Midrash.

No one in Sighet suspected that our fate was already sealed. In Berlin we had been condemned, but we didn’t know it. We didn’t know that a man called Adolf Eichmann was already in Budapest weaving his black web, at the head of an elite, efficient detachment of thirty-five SS men, planning the operation that would crown his career; or that all the necessary means for “dealing with” us were already at hand in a place called Birkenau.

The Third Reich was already doomed. The Germans themselves knew it. Hitler had just issued an order drafting young boys and old men. The siege of Leningrad had been lifted in January. The Allies had come ashore on the beaches of Anzio. The advancing Red Army was very near, the Normandy landing not far off. Berlin needed every soldier, every train. Nevertheless, the deportation of the Hungarian Jews was given priority over military convoys. Hitler was determined to keep the promise he had made to his people. To the very last day, with his very last weapons, he would strike inexorably at the last Jewish survivors of his empire. Washington knew it, and so did London. Stockholm knew it, and so did Berne and the Vatican.

But we, in our little town, did not.

The next day my father was visited by a Polish Jewish refugee for whom he had obtained a residency permit two or three years earlier. The refugee was a so-called assimilated intellectual who lived on the fringes of the community. He had been an engineer in Cracow or a lawyer in Warsaw. He was not without resources and had rented a “luxurious” apartment overlooking Sighet’s main square. He had a very blond wife whose jaded air, it must be admitted, was quite becoming. She spoke only Polish, occasionally condescending to throw in a few words of “refined” German. Their only son was my age. At my mother’s request I kept him company from time to time. He knew no one with whom he could share his reading and his games. I remember him well: a puffy yet sensual face, an evasive glance. How was I to communicate with him? He spoke Polish using a lot of body language in a vain effort to make himself understood. Fortunately, he liked
chess, so twice a week I did my good deed by playing with him in his room, winning and losing in silence. In time, to his mother’s open displeasure, I taught him a few phrases of Yiddish. Was that why I had to stop visiting?