Free All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs by Elie Wiesel

Israel’s.
    We used to have an open house on Rosh Hashana. After the reading of the Torah and before the particularly solemn service of Musaf, the Borsher Rebbe’s faithful were invited to have a glass of tea in our yard. The children acted as waiters. For my grandfatherit was a moment of pride: he would watch us and bless us with his eyes. Then we would stay with him for the second half of the service.
    Later, dressed in his caftan and his wide-brimmed fur hat, the yellowed
Makhzor
under his arm, a prince among princes, he would sing all the way back to our house. “Happy New Year!” he would call out joyfully. And he exuded so much confidence, so much grace and love, that I knew the year would be good. Yes, even 1943. And yet. That was his last Rosh Hashana.
    In April 1944 my parents invited him and his wife to live with us. “Let’s stay together,” they proposed. There was already talk of a ghetto in Sighet. “Let’s be in it together,” they said. But he refused. He preferred to stay with his three sons, Israel, Chaim-Mordechai, and Ezra, and their children. I don’t know what his last weeks and days were like. I have been told they were all forced into the ghetto of a nearby city and that their transport was attached to the third convoy out of Sighet.
    I try to picture him in the ghetto, and to picture myself at his side. How did he express the joy, the Hasidic joy, he drew from Creation and its Creator? I try to picture him in the sealed cattle car. How did he say his prayers? To whom did he entrust his testament? I try to imagine him walking with the sick and the old toward the fiery site from which there was no return, and … No, I don’t want to imagine that. I cannot. It would be indecent. A man’s encounter with death must remain private. I prefer to avert my eyes, or to close them, and thus to remember him full of spirit, ecstatic, preparing to chant the songs of Judgment Day. “Grandpa,” I ask him, “what is the Sanctuary of Song like?” And he answers: “The Sanctuary blazes and illuminates; its flame warms the most frigid hearts.”
    I had four uncles on my mother’s side: Chaim-Mordechai was the most dynamic and resourceful, Ezra the most timid, Israel the most authoritarian, Moshe-Itzik the most romantic.
    Chaim-Mordechai, a tall, slim redhead with sharp eyes and a melodious voice, charmed me with the moral fables of the Maggid of Dubno. Here is one: A woman has just died, leaving a husband and a little boy too young to comprehend his tragic fate. He doesn’t know that he is now an orphan, doesn’t cry during the funeral, and plays with the black cloth draped over his dead mother’s coffin. “Now, isn’t that what so many Jews are doing today?” my uncle asked. “They ought to be in mourning, but instead they’re having fun.”
    Ezra, poor Ezra, was the neediest. Reserved and withdrawn, a sad smile fluttering on his lips, he was always murmuring inaudibly, probably praying, perhaps begging pardon for bothering someone, though he never disturbed anyone at all.
    Israel, the oldest, came to Sighet only rarely. To see him we had to go to his house, in the village of Krechnev, where he owned a tiny grocery store. Wearing his patched caftan, the Book of Psalms always within reach, he served his customers, peasants who lived in the neighboring small towns.
    Moshe-Itzik had tuberculosis. When you talked to him, you wanted God to take pity on him. But I admired him. He walked with a nervous, rapid gait, and always seemed to be leaving soon after he had arrived. He traveled constantly, though in search of whom or what I don’t know. When asked, he would shrug. I loved to see him smile. His was the smile of a man unafraid of distance or of death. We were afraid for him, yet he outlived his brothers and sisters. Perhaps he was so familiar with the prospect of death that the enemy had no hold on him. I found him in Israel in the early fifties. Spry and ambitious, he was beginning to travel in