Free One Generation After by Elie Wiesel Page B

displeasure of my parents. Father was to remind me reproachfully of this not long thereafter.
    We had just arrived at the camp. Both of us were immediately assigned to the orchestra commando. Being a novice, my father naïvely believed that professional musicians had a better chance for survival. And so he told me: “See? If you had listened to me, if you had not given up the violin, you would not only be in the commando, you would now be a full-fledged member of the orchestra.”
    It was as if he were scolding me for having missed an important career elsewhere, on the other side, among the rich and powerful.
    In truth, I was glad then not to possess the mastery required for admission to the orchestra. I could not have played, not there. Or: I could have played, which would have been worse.
    Besides, my father was wrong: the musicians in our commando, so envied by us, did not survive.

FIRST ROYALTIES

    If someone had told me when I was a child that one day I would become a novelist, I would have turned away, convinced he was confusing me with someone else.
    For the pattern of my future had then seemed clear. I would pursue my studies in the same surroundings with the same zeal, probing the sacred texts and opening the gates to the secret knowledge that permits fulfillment by transcending self.
    Novels I thought childish, reading them a waste of time. You had to be a fool to love the fictitious universe made of words when there was the other, immense and boundless, made of truth and presence. I preferred God to His creation, silence to revelation.
    As for France—whose language I chose for my tales—its name evoked visions of a mythical country, real only because mentioned in Rashi and other commentaries on the Bible and Talmud.
    It took a war—and what a war—to make me change my road, if not my destiny.
    The story of that change might not have been mine. And I might not have written it.
    My first royalties were two bowls of soup, awarded me for a creative work never set to paper. The taste of that soup still lingers in my mouth.
     … It happened a long time ago, in a place where all persons wore the same mask beneath the same face, and all faces had the same blank stare.
    I was young, barely out of yeshiva, too young to have become accustomed to the tephillin’s leather straps. My left arm still bore their imprint. In my imagination, I was still running after my teachers; I was their disciple, though not their heir. While carrying on my shoulders stones heavier than my body, I saw myself surrounded by flickering candles, pondering questions formulated centuries earlier in other places, on the other side of the world and perhaps even of history.
    In the beginning, I had enough strength left to resist. Also it was my luck—yes, luck—to work next to a former Rosh-Yeshiva from Galicia. I don’t remember his name; perhaps I never knew it. As for his face, I never really looked at it. Only his voice has stayed with me, unforgotten and unforgettable, deep and sepulchral, the voice of a friend, a sick friend.
    “You are new here? Instead of welcoming you, let me tell you your first duty: you must hold on. Do you hear? Hold on at any cost. You must not allow yourself to be tainted by evil, yours or anyone else’s.”
    Bent over, without looking at me, he continued in a voice weaker but gentler than before: “Think of your soul and you’ll resist better. The soul is important and the enemy knows it;that’s why he tries to corrupt it before destroying us. Do not let him. The soul counts for more than the body. If your soul maintains its strength, your body too will withstand the test. I tell you this because you have just arrived; you are still capable of listening. In a month it will be too late. In a month you will no longer know what having a soul could possibly mean.”
    “Isn’t the soul supposed to be immortal?” I asked innocently.
    We were digging. He stopped, lowered his voice, as if unwilling to hear his