All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (15 page)

If anything motivated me, it was my father’s presence. In the camp we were close, closer than ever, perhaps because we thought we might be the last survivors of our family. But there was something else as well: Finally I had my father to myself. At home he had been away often. In the camp I saw him from morning to night, dusk to dawn. I saw no one but him. We depended on each other: he needed me as I needed him. Because of him, I had to live; because of me, he tried not to die. So long as I still lived, he knew he was useful, perhaps even indispensable. In my eyes, he was the same man, the same father, he had always been. If I was gone, he would lose his role, his authority, his identity. And conversely: Without him my life would have neither meaning nor goal.

In this the Germans’ psychological methods often failed. They tried to get the inmates to think only of themselves, to forget relatives and friends, to tend only to their own needs, unless they wanted to become “Mussulmen.” But what happened was just the reverse. Those who retreated to a universe limited to their own bodies had less chance of getting out alive, while to live for a brother, a friend, an
ideal, helped you hold out longer. As for me, I could cope thanks to my father. Without him I could not have resisted. I would see him coming with his heavy gait, seeking a smile, and I would give it to him. He was my support and my oxygen, as I was his.

And yet. Did I really help him, or did I merely sharpen his sorrow? For is there any misfortune, any curse, more devastating to a father than being unable to come to his son’s rescue, unable to release him from the lash of hunger and fear? I asked him countless questions in an effort to show him that his authority over his son was still intact, that my confidence in his judgment was as absolute as ever: Should I try to move to a different kommando or barracks? Should I trade my ration of margarine for a piece of bread, or pick up a string I had found at the work site and sell it despite the risk of twenty-five lashes? He didn’t know what advice to give me, but my questions did him good.

One day I saw him on the verge of tears. He had noticed how emaciated I had become, and he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to pull me through the next selection. He was crying inside, and I felt the weight of his despair. I wanted to console him, reassure him, but didn’t see how I could without making him feel even worse. There is no sharper pain, no more shattering grief, than seeing one’s father shed tears of impotence.

Being closer to him made me love him more than ever. Sometimes I would offer him a spoonful of soup, telling him I wasn’t hungry. He did the same. “My stomach hurts, I can’t eat a thing,” he would say, handing me a crust of bread. I ached to do something to bring back his smile, his strength, his wisdom and dignity. At night, lying side by side, we would talk about the past: a rabbinical marriage we had attended; the burning of the barracks (who were the saboteurs?); the disappearance of a rich merchant’s son—had he fled to Soviet Russia, as people said, or gone to Budapest with false papers, passing as a Christian, as others claimed? We spoke of the problems my timidity created for me, especially here; the roots of anti-Semitism; the virtues of emancipation; the merits of Zionism—was the Satmàr Rebbe right to fight it; the allure of any mystical quest. I talked to him about mine, and he told me of his, which was not esoteric but human. To aid others—that was his watchword, his law, his ideal. A Jew is defined by his actions more than by his intentions. It is his actions that bind him to his community and, through it, to the larger human community.

Did he still uphold his principles, his humanism? Strangely, he came closer to Hasidism. “What we need is a miracle,” he would
often whisper. “We deserve it. But do the times deserve it? That’s the question.”

In Sighet I was the one who had believed in miracles, while he, with his rational bent, attached less value to them. Here it was the other way around. The time of miracles seemed long gone to me. I felt that the world had condemned itself and would find no redemption. Why hadn’t I asked Kalman, my Kabalist master, to initiate me into the art of making myself invisible? I would have seen to it that my father benefited from my powers too, and I pictured us walking out through the gate under the unseeing eyes of the SS guards. We would climb aboard a supply train, cross cities and valleys, and rouse slumbering inhabitants everywhere: Aren’t you ashamed to sleep while they are killing our people?

Like everyone else, I dreamed a lot in those days. It helped.

I was lucky enough—if I may be forgiven that expression—to have a former
rosh yeshiva
(director of a rabbinical academy) of Galician origin as a teammate. I can see us now, carrying bags of cement or large stones, pushing wheelbarrows filled with sand or mud, all the while studying a Law of the Mishna or a page of the Talmud. My teammate knew it all by heart, and thanks to him, we were able to escape. We went to Rabbi Hanina ben Dossa and begged him to pray for us. We accosted Resh Lakish. Would he use his herculean strength to free us? We wandered the alleys of Pumbedita and the hills of Galilee. I listened to sages debating whether the Shma Israel should be recited standing up or lying down.

In the morning my father and I would rise before the general wake-up call and go to a nearby block where someone had traded a dozen rations of bread for a pair of phylacteries (tefillin). We would strap them onto our left arm and forehead, quickly recite the ritual blessings, then pass them on to the next person. A few dozen prisoners thereby sacrificed their sleep, and sometimes their rations of bread or coffee, to perform the mitzvah, the commandment to wear the tefillin. Yes, we practiced religion even in a death camp. I said my prayers every day. On Saturday I hummed Shabbat songs at work, in part, no doubt, to please my father, to show him I was determined to remain a Jew even in the accursed kingdom. My doubts and my revolt gripped me only later.

Why so much later? My comrade and future friend Primo Levi asked me that question. How did I surmount these doubts and this revolt? He refused to understand how I, his former companion of
Auschwitz III, could still call himself a believer, for he. Primo, was not and didn’t want to be. He had seen too much suffering not to rebel against any religion that sought to impose a meaning upon it. I understood him, and asked him to understand me, for I had seen too much suffering to break with the past and reject the heritage of those who had suffered. We spent many hours arguing, with little result. We were equally unwavering, for we came from different milieus, and even in Auschwitz led different lives. He was a chemist; I was nothing at all. The system needed him, but not me. He had influential friends to help and protect him; I had only my father. I needed God, Primo did not.

There in the camp, I had neither the strength nor the time for theological meditation or metaphysical speculation about the attributes of the Master of the Universe. The daily bread ration was the center of our concerns. Would it be a centimeter thicker or thinner? Would they give us margarine or jam? Fear of beatings by the guards was greater than fear of heaven. On that score the enemy triumphed: it was the SS, not God, who governed our world and whose shadow fell upon us. The SS wanted their victims to see them not as superior men but as gods, and they acted like sovereign, omnipotent gods. They had every right; we had none. They knew everything; we knew nothing. They fed us or killed us with the merest gesture, but we had no right even to look at them. He who looks God in the face must die. But the faith that bound me to the God of Israel and of my ancestors remained immune to all that, at least for the moment. It remained nearly intact.

For Primo Levi the problem of faith after Auschwitz was posed in stark terms: Either God is God, and therefore all-powerful and hence guilty of letting the murderers do as they pleased, or His power is limited, in which case he is not God. In other words, if God is God, then He is present everywhere. But if He refuses to show Himself, he becomes immoral and inhuman, the enemy’s ally or accomplice. The philosopher and historian Gerson Cohen would later show me a moving and terrifying passage in one of our books of martyrology. During the Crusades the Jews of Mainz hid in an underground shelter. One night their spiritual leaders, Rabbi Baroukh and his son-in-law Rabbi Yehuda, heard sounds coming from the synagogue above. When they went to investigate, they found the synagogue empty, but heard voices in the darkness. The two sages fell to their knees and cried, “Is it You, Lord, who wish our death? Have You changed sides? Have You
decided to anoint the enemy as Your chosen people?” This is a cruel trap. The suffering and death of innocent children inevitably places divine will in question and arouses men to wrath and revolt. But what if that were just what God intended: that men cry out to Him of their pain and disappointment? Might that be the path to a solution? I prefer to suggest that no solution exists.

There is a passage in
Night
—recounting the hanging of a young Jewish boy—that has given rise to an interpretation bordering on blasphemy. Theorists of the idea that “God is dead” have used my words unfairly as justification of their rejection of faith. But if Nietzsche could cry out to the old man in the forest that God is dead, the Jew in me cannot. I have never renounced my faith in God. I have risen against His justice, protested His silence and sometimes His absence, but my anger rises up within faith and not outside it. I admit that this is hardly an original position. It is part of Jewish tradition. But in these matters I have never sought originality. On the contrary, I have always aspired to follow in the footsteps of my father and those who went before him. Moreover, the texts cite many occasions when prophets and sages rebelled against the lack of divine interference in human affairs during times of persecution. Abraham and Moses, Jeremiah and Rebbe Levi-Yitzhak of Berdichev teach us that it is permissible for man to accuse God, provided it be done in the name of faith in God. If that hurts, so be it. Sometimes we must accept the pain of faith so as not to lose it. And if that makes the tragedy of the believer more devastating than that of the nonbeliever, so be it. To proclaim one’s faith within the barbed wire of Auschwitz may well represent a double tragedy, of the believer and his Creator alike.

How was it possible, in that cursed place, to praise the Eternal One for His supposed love of His people? How was it possible, without telling lies, to say in Auschwitz,
“Ashrainu, ma tov khelkainu”
—how happy we are to bear our heritage? How and by what right can we speak of happiness in Auschwitz? As I have said elsewhere, Auschwitz is conceivable neither with God nor without Him. Perhaps I may someday come to understand man’s role in the mystery Auschwitz represents, but never God’s.

Was I later reconciled to Him? Let us say that I was reconciled to some of His interpreters, and to some of my prayers. If men killed other men, if they massacred Jews, why should Jewish men stop praying? These prayers do not always coincide with reality, and surely not with truth. But so what? It is up to us to modify reality and make the
prayers come true. As the Rebbe of Kotzk affirmed:
“Avinu malkainu
, our Father, our King, I shall continue to call You Father until You become our Father.”

I will never cease to rebel against those who committed or permitted Auschwitz, including God. The questions I once asked myself about God’s silence remain open. If they have an answer, I do not know it. More than that, I refuse to know it. But I maintain that the death of six million human beings poses a question to which no answer will ever be forthcoming.

My Talmudist master Rabbi Saul Lieberman has pointed out another way to look at it. One can—and must—love God. One can challenge Him and even be angry with Him, but one must also pity Him. “Do you know which of all the characters in the Bible is most tragic?” he asked me. “It is God, blessed be His name, God whose creatures so often disappoint and betray Him.” He showed me a passage of the Midrash dealing with the first civil war in Jewish history, provoked by a banal household quarrel: And God wept; His tears fell upon His people and His creation, as if to say, What have you done to my work?

Perhaps God shed more tears in the time of Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz, and one may therefore invoke His name not only with indignation but also with sadness and compassion.

What tormented and revolted me in the physical and moral (or immoral) environment of the camp was the power of evil and its contagiousness. Here was brutality in its purest state. Why did human beings act like savage wolves? Why were even inmates so sadistic? I “understand” the savagery of the Germans, for savagery was their “vocation,” their politics, their ideology, their education—I was about to say their religion. But what about the others? The Ukrainians who beat us, the Russians who struck us, the Poles who humiliated us, the Gypsies who slapped us, the Jewish kapos who clubbed us? Why? To show the killers they could be just like them?

Some have tried to explain their behavior by the killer’s nefarious influence on his victim, the repressed desire of the oppressed to resemble the aggressor, the innate instinct for survival and respect for power, the metamorphosis engendered by extreme situations. All this is no doubt true, and yet it was very much the exception.

I believe it was Jean Améry who noted that the first to bow to the oppressor’s system and to adopt its doctrines and methods were the intellectuals.
But not all of them. Not the rabbis and priests, who, after all, were intellectuals too. With a single exception, no rabbi agreed to become a kapo. All refused to barter their own survival by becoming tools of the hangman. All preferred to die rather than serve death. The lessons of the prophets and the sages became shields for them.

On the other hand, how many secular humanists and intellectuals renounced their value system the moment they grasped its futility and uselessness? Sobered, disoriented, and disillusioned, some allowed themselves to be seduced by the ideology of cruelty. The number was significant.

The Communists aided one another in an exemplary fashion, and their clandestine action compels admiration. Whenever one of their own figured on a bad list, his favored comrades—safely working for the camp administration—did all they could to replace him with an anonymous prisoner. From the standpoint of the rescued Communist, the intervention of his political comrades was praiseworthy. But what gave the Communists the right to decide on the replacement comrades’ fate?