Free One Generation After by Elie Wiesel

world, have children, and I will love them, I will love them with all my strength, as I will also love the children we shall never have.”
    In the street below, cloaked in darkness, a stranger crossed the street, stared up at a house with tightly drawn curtains, and slowly walked away.
    “You, too, stranger,” the young girl whispered. “I make you a gift of my love. May your steps lead you toward a desired destination and not toward exile. May your hope free you from the fear which gave it birth. May the love inside you not kill the joy, may the joy inside you become haven and not prison.”
    She spoke to him until he turned the corner. Then, in a voice tinged with neither reproach nor regret, she cried: “What am I to do, dear God, what am I to do? I love everybody, it’s only myself I cannot love.”
    And the young girl, both virtuous and beautiful, threw herself out of the window.
    *
    One of the Just Men came to Sodom, determined to save its inhabitants from sin and punishment. Night and day he walked the streets and markets preaching against greed and theft, falsehood and indifference. In the beginning, people listened and smiled ironically. Then they stopped listening: he no longer even amused them. The killers went on killing, the wise kept silent, as if there were no Just Man in their midst.
    One day a child, moved by compassion for the unfortunate preacher, approached him with these words: “Poor stranger. You shout, you expend yourself body and soul; don’t you see that it is hopeless?”
    “Yes, I see,” answered the Just Man.
    “Then why do you go on?”
    “I’ll tell you why. In the beginning, I thought I could change man. Today, I know I cannot. If I still shout today, if I still scream, it is to prevent man from ultimately changing me.”

THE VIOLIN

    Like most Jewish parents of the
shtetl
, mine wanted their son to study the violin. Not as a profession, God forbid, nor as a hobby. Simply as part of my education. Like the Talmud. Or Latin. It made a good impression. And it certainly couldn’t hurt.
    Without being overly enthusiastic, I was willing to try. I thought: What was good enough for King David will be good enough for me. Still there was the problem of finding a suitable instructor among the several in our town. Some were even ready to come to our house, except that we had no room. And then the neighbors might have raised understandable objections. To study with Miss Tudos was not a good idea either. Not only did she live too far, she was a woman. What would people say?
    Finally, after many inquiries, my father found the ideal instructor in the person of a police captain quartered at the station nearby. I only had to cross the street.
    Out of friendship for my father, he agreed to teach me without fee. Three lessons a week to begin with. Then a lesson a day, so that in a few years I could give my first concert—this was mentioned right away—on a Saturday evening at the BorsherRebbe’s during the traditional ceremony of escorting the Shabbat on its weekly journey into exile.
    So I was given a second-hand violin, and the captain told my father he was expecting me.
    It was a Sunday afternoon. The guard let me in, saluting as though I were an officer. I did not return his salute. I had my hands full: one was holding the violin, the other a bottle of
cuika
—a gift from my father. But even with my hands free I would not have known what to do: no one had ever taught me how a bashful little Jewish boy was to respond when saluted by a gigantic police sergeant.
    The captain, seated at his desk, his knees crossed, welcomed me with a laugh. “Come closer. Don’t be scared. Let me look at you. So you’re our new Paganini.”
    “No, sir,” I said, not knowing what he was talking about.
    “How stupid of me,” he continued. “How can you be Paganini when you’re a Jew? No, you will be our Heifetz.”
    I knew as little about the second gentleman as about the first, but I guessed he was Jewish