“Why do you pray?” [Moishe the Beadle] asked after a moment.
Why did I pray? Strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe?
“I don’t know,” I told him, even more troubled and ill at ease. “I don’t know.”
From that day on, I saw him often. He explained to me, with great emphasis, that every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer …
Man comes closer to God through the questions he asks Him, he liked to say. Therein lies true dialogue. Man asks and God replies. But we don’t understand His replies. We cannot understand them. Because they dwell in the depths of our souls and remain there until we die. The real answers, Eliezer, you will find only within yourself.
“And why do you pray, Moishe?” I asked him.
“I pray to the God within me for the strength to ask Him the real questions.”
One day, as the war was ramping up within Europe, all the foreign Jews, including Moishe, were expelled from Sighet. They were taken away by the Hungarian police, carted off in cattle cars; most, never to be seen again. After several months, with life in Sighet returning to some semblance of normal, Wiesel spots Moishe the Beadle sitting on a bench near the synagogue.
He told me what had happened to him and his companions. The train with the deportees had crossed the Hungarian border and, once in Polish territory, had been taken over by the Gestapo. The train had stopped. The Jews were ordered to get off and onto waiting trucks. The trucks headed towards a forest. There everybody was ordered to get out. They were forced to dig huge trenches. When they had finished their work, the men from the Gestapo began theirs. Without passion or haste, they shot their prisoners, who were forced to approach the trench one by one and offer their necks. Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns. This took place in the Galician forest, near Kolomay. How had he, Moishe the Beadle, been able to escape? By a miracle. He was wounded in the leg and left for dead …
Day after day, night after night, he went from one Jewish house to the next, telling his story and that of Malka, the young girl who lay dying for three days, and that of Tobie, the tailor who begged to die before his sons were killed.
Moishe was not the same. The joy in his eyes was gone. He no longer sang. He no longer mentioned either God or Kabbalah. He spoke only of what he had seen. But people not only refused to believe his tales, they refused to listen. Some even insinuated that he only wanted their pity, that he was imagining things. Others flatly said that he had gone mad.
In many ways, this anecdote has the keys that will unlock a central understanding of this book and the seemingly impossible but horrifically truthful events that it documents. And like Moishe the Beadle tried to teach young Eliezer Wiesel, God and His elusive covenant with His tortured creation is at the absolute center of it all.
Step One: God Has Abandoned Me
In due time, Wiesel’s family will be put in the same boxcars and taken to Auschwitz. There, they will be separated, fifteen-year-old Wiesel staying only with his father, his mother and sisters taken in a different direction. His mother, he would never see again.
Not far from us, flames, huge flames, were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there. A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children. Babies! Yes, I did see this, with my own eyes … children thrown into the flames. (Is it any wonder that ever since then, sleep tends to elude me?)
So that was where we were going. A little farther on, there was another, larger pit for adults.
I pinched myself: Was I still alive? How was it possible that men, women, and children were being burned and that the world kept silent? No. All this could not be real. A nightmare perhaps … Soon I would wake up with a start, my heart pounding, and find that I was back in the room of my childhood, with my books …
My father’s voice tore me from my daydreams:
“What a shame, a shame that you did not go with your mother … I saw many children your age go with their mothers …”
His voice was terribly sad. I understood that he did not wish to see what they would do to me. He did not wish to see his only son go up in flames.
My forehead was covered with cold sweat. Still, I told him that I could not believe that human beings were being burned in our times; the world would never tolerate such crimes …
“The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria …” His voice broke.
“Father,” I said. “If that is true, then I don’t want to wait. I’ll run into the electrified barbed wire. That would be easier than a slow death in the flames.”
He didn’t answer. He was weeping. His body was shaking. Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don’t know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.”
“Yisgadal, veyiskadash, shemy raba … May His name be celebrated and sanctified …” whispered my father.
For the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank Him for?”
I came to view this sentiment as the first phase of a spiritual death that Weisel will document in this book, not just for himself, but for countless others that he would encounter and interact with in these camps.
Evenings, as we lay on our cots, we sometimes tried to sing a few Hasidic melodies. Akiba Drumer would break our hearts with his deep, grave voice.
Some of the men spoke of God: His mysterious ways, the sins of the Jewish people, and the redemption to come. As for me, I had ceased to pray. I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice.
Akiba Drumer said:
“God is testing us. He wants to see whether we are capable of overcoming our base instincts, of killing the Satan within ourselves. We have no right to despair. And if He punishes us mercilessly, it is a sign that He loves us that much more …”
Hersh Genud, well versed in Kabbalah, spoke of the end of the world and the coming of the Messiah.
It is a strange and ultimately untenable place for a young believer to be. God exists, but has abandoned His faithful. Or that He is testing you, and that the hardship He brings upon you is a testament to His love. Philosophically, that can only serve as a way station, a place to stand and rest before moving onto darker and more troubling conclusions.
Step Two: God Is My Enemy
Among the many horrors that Wiesel is witness to, there are also hangings, men and sometimes boys, condemned to die by hanging because of some real or perceived disobedience against the ultimate rule of their captors.
The three condemned prisoners together stepped onto the chairs. In unison, the nooses were placed around their necks.
“Long live liberty!” shouted the two men.
But the boy was silent.
“Where is merciful God, where is He?” someone behind me was asking.
At the signal, the three chairs were tipped over.
Total silence in the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting.
“Caps off!” screamed the Lagerälteste. His voice quivered. As for the rest of us, we were weeping.
“Cover your heads!”
Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing …
And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished.
Behind me, I heard the same man asking:
“For God’s sake, where is God?”
And from within me, I heard a voice answer:
“Where He is? This is where -- hanging here from this gallows …”
That night, the soup tasted of corpses.
Wiesel grows more and more angry, still believing that God is real, but unable to understand how He can be both good and allow these atrocities to happen. On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the last day of the Jewish year, Weisel and many of his fellow prisoners gathered in the camp’s open compound for a religious service.
Some ten thousand men had come to participate in a solemn service, including the Blockälteste, the Kapos, all bureaucrats in the service of Death.
“Blessed be the Almighty …”
The voice of the officiating inmate had just become audible. At first I thought it was the wind.
“Blessed be God’s name …”
Thousands of lips repeated the benediction, bent over like trees in a storm.
Blessed be God’s name?
Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because He kept six crematoria working day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days? Because in His great might, He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces? Praised be Thy Holy Name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar?
I listened as the inmate’s voice rose; it was powerful yet broken, amid the weeping, the sobbing, the sighing of the entire “congregation”:
“All the earth and universe are God’s!”
Weisel is unable to accept the bitter and obvious lesson of it all. In times of terrible strife it becomes more clear, but it is always the case. God is worshipped because He is terrible. That is actually the point. It is not to your life and the pleasures that it brings that your fealty belongs. Instead, it is always and forever to His great inscrutable purpose, even as He grinds the very bones within your flesh to dust.
But he does learn a different lesson.
And I, the former mystic, was thinking: Yes, man is stronger, greater than God. When Adam and Eve deceived You, You chased them from paradise. You were displeased by Noah’s generation, You brought down the Flood. When Sodom lost Your favor, You caused the heavens to rain down fire and damnation. But look at these men whom You have betrayed, allowing them to be tortured, slaughtered, gassed, and burned, what do they do? They pray before You! They praise Your name!
“All of creation bears witness to the Greatness of God!”
In days gone by, Rosh Hashanah had dominated my life. I knew that my sins grieved the Almighty and so I pleaded for forgiveness. In those days, I fully believed that the salvation of the world depended on every one of my deeds, on every one of my prayers.
But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy. I was nothing but ashes now, but I felt myself to be stronger than this Almighty to whom my life had been bound for so long. In the midst of these men assembled for prayer, I felt like an observer, a stranger.
He keeps his belief, his belief in God, but now God has not just abandoned him, God has actually failed him.
Step Three: A Great Void Opening
Shortly after Rosh Hashanah comes Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
Should we fast? The question was hotly debated. To fast could mean a more certain, more rapid death. In this place, we were always fasting. It was Yom Kippur year-round. But there were those who said we should fast, precisely because it was dangerous to do so. We needed to show God that even here, locked in hell, we were capable of singing His praises.
I did not fast. First of all, to please my father who had forbidden me to do so. And then, there was no longer any reason for me to fast. I no longer accepted God’s silence. As I swallowed my ration of soup, I turned that act into a symbol of rebellion, of protest against Him.
And I nibbled on my crust of bread.
Deep inside me, I felt a great void opening.
The great void is the lack of belief, a concept truly foreign to Wiesel and to many of his fellow victims, but which, eventually, intrudes in on their consciousness until it can no longer be denied. Constantly facing the selection, the brutal winnowing of the prisoners as the weakest and most infirm are carted off to the crematoria, it will tear the philosophical trappings of divine love and justice any until nothing remains but gaping wounds and terror.
I knew a rabbi, from a small town in Poland. He was old and bent, his lips constantly trembling. He was always praying, in the block, at work, in the ranks. He recited entire pages from the Talmud, arguing with himself, asking and answering himself endless questions. One day, he said to me:
“It’s over. God is no longer with us.”
And as though he regretted having uttered such words so coldly, so dryly, he added in his broken voice, “I know. No one has the right to say things like that. I know that very well. Man is too insignificant, too limited, to even try to comprehend God’s mysterious ways. But what can someone like myself do? I’m neither a sage nor a just man. I am not a saint. I’m a simple creature of flesh and bone. I suffer hell in my soul and my flesh. I also have eyes and I see what is being done here. Where is God’s mercy? Where’s God? How can I believe, how can anyone believe in this God of Mercy?”
The poor old rabbi could no longer believe, and neither could Wiesel, although he often seems loathe to admit it, even in the pages of this document in which he provides so much evidence against the proposition of that merciful God.
Step Four: The God Within
But it gets worse, for even after losing a belief in God, there are still things that dire circumstances can force a man to forfeit.
The door of the shed opened. An old man appeared. His mustache was covered with ice, his lips were blue. It was Rabbi Eliahu, who had headed a small congregation in Poland. A very kind man, beloved by everyone in the camp, even by the Kapos and the Blockälteste. Despite the ordeals and deprivations, his face continued to radiate his innocence. He was the only rabbi whom nobody ever failed to address as “Rabbi” in Buna. He looked like one of those prophets of old, always in the midst of his people when they needed to be consoled. And, strangely, his words never provoked anyone. They did bring peace.
This is late in Wiesel’s narrative. He, his father, and many of their fellow prisoners are being force-marched from camp to concentration camp as the Allies begin to close in on the German system of extermination.
As he entered the shed, his eyes, brighter than ever, seemed to be searching for someone.
“Perhaps someone here has seen my son?”
He had lost his son in the commotion. He had searched for him among the dying, to no avail. Then he had dug through the show to find his body. In vain.
For three years, they had stayed close to one another. Side by side, they had endured the suffering, the blows; they had waited for their ration of bread and they had prayed. Three years, from camp to camp, from selection to selection. And now -- when the end seemed near -- fate had separated them.
When he came near me, Rabbi Eliahu whispered, “It happened on the road. We lost sight of one another during the journey. I fell behind a little, at the rear of the column. I didn’t have the strength to run anymore. And my son didn’t notice. That’s all I know. Where has he disappeared? Where can I find him? Perhaps you’ve seen him somewhere?”
“No, Rabbi Eliahu, I haven’t seen him.”
And so he left, as he had come: a shadow swept away by the wind.
It is a story similar to that of Wiesel and his father, except that they still had each other, and had not been separated by fate, or by something else. For:
He had already gone through the door when I remembered that I had noticed his son running beside me. I had forgotten and so had not mentioned it to Rabbi Eliahu!
But then I remembered something else: his son had seen him losing ground, sliding back to the rear of the column. He had seen him. And he had continued to run in front, letting the distance between them become greater.
A terrible thought crossed my mind: What if he had wanted to be rid of his father? He had felt his father growing weaker and, believing that the end was near, had thought by this separation to free himself of a burden that could diminish his own chance for survival.
It was good that I had forgotten all that. And I was glad that Rabbi Eliahu continued to search for his beloved son.
And in spite of myself, a prayer formed inside me, a prayer to this God in whom I no longer believed.
“Oh God, Master of the Universe, give me the strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahu’s son has done.”
This, for me, is the emotional crucible of Wiesel’s story. The dark and inevitable place that each of us would have to confront in such a horrific set of circumstances, regardless of whether one believes in a merciful God or not. The emotion of losing a mother when forcibly separated from them, to have her disappear and never to be seen again, that emotion must be painful enough. But to lose a father, and to decide to lose him so that your own life can be sustained for what might only be a few more minutes, that emotional pain has to be bottomless.
Wiesel and his father will eventually find themselves in Buchenwald. There, his father will get ill, be abused by the guards and by the other prisoners, and begin to waste away towards seemingly inevitable death.
And in that state, Wiesel will have to make the same kind of choice that Rabbi Eliahu’s son did.
“Is this your father?” asked the Blockälteste.
“Yes.”
“He is very sick.”
“The doctor won’t do anything for him.”
He looked me straight in the eye:
“The doctor cannot do anything more for him. And neither can you.”
He placed his big, hairy hand on my shoulder and added:
“Listen to me, kid. Don’t forget that you are in a concentration camp. In this place, it is every man for himself, and you cannot think of others. Not even your father. In this place, there is no such thing as father, brother, friend. Each of us lives and dies alone. Let me give you good advice: stop giving your ration of bread and soup to your old father. You cannot help him anymore. And you are hurting yourself. In fact, you should be getting his rations …”
I listened to him without interrupting. He was right, I thought deep down, not daring to admit it to myself. Too late to save your old father … You could have two rations of bread, two rations of soup …
It was only a fraction of a second, but it left me feeling guilty. I ran to get some soup and brought it to my father. But he did not want it. All he wanted was water.
“Don’t drink water, eat the soup …”
“I’m burning up … Why are you so mean to me, my son? … Water …”
I brought him water. Then I left the block for roll call. But I quickly turned back. I lay down on the upper bunk. The sick were allowed to stay in the block. So I would be sick. I didn’t want to leave my father.
All around me, there was silence now, broken only by moaning. In front of the block, the SS were giving orders. An officer passed between the bunks. My father was pleading:
“My son, water … I’m burning up … My insides …”
“Silence over there!” barked the officer.
“Eliezer,” continued my father, “water …”
The officer came closer and shouted to him to be silent. But my father did not hear. He continued to call me. The officier wielded his club and dealt him a violent blow to the head.
I didn’t move. I was afraid, my body was afraid of another blow, this time to my head.
My father groaned once more, I heard:
“Eliezer …”
I could see that he was still breathing -- in gasps. I didn’t move.
When I came down from my bunk after roll call, I could see his lips trembling; he was murmuring something. I remained more than an hour leaning over him, looking at him, etching his bloody, broken face into my mind.
Then I had to go to sleep. I climbed into my bunk, above my father, who was still alive. The date was January 28, 1945.
Elie Wiesel was sixteen years old. And when he woke up the next morning, someone else was laying in his father’s bunk.
They must have taken him away before daybreak and taken him to the crematorium. Perhaps he was still breathing …
No prayers were said over his tomb. No candle lit in his memory. His last word had been my name. He had called out to me and I had not answered.
I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears. And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last! …
This sad, final step -- the abandonment of a loved one, for a slim, incremental increased chance of one’s own survival -- is the reality that faced the son of Rabbi Eliahu and the son of Shlomo Wiesel and the sons of untold countless other young men and boys in camps across Germany, and Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Losing faith in God may have been previously unthinkable for Europe’s orthodox Jews, but how many would have understood that they would eventually lose their humanity -- what Moishe the Beadle might have called the God within?
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