Free Hostage by Elie Wiesel Page A

Germans had taken them away …
    “What’s your name?” the soldier asked me.
    I told him.
    “Are you Jewish?”
    “Yes.”
    Another stroke of luck: The man I stood in front of, Mendel, was Jewish.
    “Come with me,” he said.
    Everything happened very quickly. The police chief had to apologize to me; he almost had to get on his knees. Then he walked us back to my house. The tall, skinny man who had chased me away was told that the house, as well as the furniture and the objects, had to be returned to me, and thoroughlycleaned and spotless from top to bottom, within twenty-four hours.
    “But the official document,” the man stammered.
    The policeman looked at the Russian soldier, took the document, tore it up and threw it on the ground.
    “We’ll be back tomorrow morning,” said the soldier. “If we find you here, you’ll be sorry. You don’t mess with the Red Army, you filthy anti-Semites!”
    I thought of my Communist brother who had been gone for so long: If all the Soviets were like these soldiers, I could understand his passion for world revolution.
    How was I to adapt to this new life?
    This war wasn’t like the others. In the past, death struck down adults at the front, but children and old people were protected. In this war, that wasn’t true.
    Little by little, the survivors started returning to Davarowsk. Most of them were young people. There were no children or old people. A small community was forming to help the lost and the needy. A rabbi officiated at a study and prayer house, and I went there. Like my father, I liked to pray with others.
    It was there in that shrine, weeks after the Germans had left, that one Sabbath day a miracle befell me. As tradition required, the rabbi was reading the weekly passage of the Torah, when the door opened. My father and Arele appeared. I rushed to them, breathless. And all the faithful turned to look at us, as well as the rabbi, who quickly interrupted his reading.
    Three Jews embraced one another as they wept.
    My father and Arele were returning from the kingdom ofdarkness where humanity had been brought down, crushed, almost annihilated beyond recall.
    Auschwitz.
    I asked about Mama.
    They shook their heads.
    She had been trampled on, wounded, humiliated, suffocated and burned on the very night of her arrival. A member of the Sonderkommandos had confirmed it.
    My opponent, the count, that bastard, I thought. My German protector had lied to me, misled me, betrayed me. How could I forgive that?
    We spent days and nights holding hands in our house, looking tenderly at one another, exchanging our recollections and experiences with inadequate words, and our silences, especially our silences—there were some things we couldn’t say.
    One day when we were talking about the war, Father said, “I survived thanks to Arele. He was my support.”
    “And you, mine,” said Arele.
    “I survived thanks to chess,” I said, “and a German officer.” My father nodded.
    “Where is he? What became of him?” Arele asked.
    “I was hoping to see him again and tell him what I think of him. I have a score to settle, questions to ask. He should be tried and sentenced, punished. He was an officer of the Sicherheitsdienst, it turns out, not without influence. He could have prevented the hanging of the Jewish boy, Mama’s deportation andyours. He made a fool of me, of all of us. The only thing that interested him in life was chess. The power to defeat his opponent, to win. Human lives didn’t count for him. He trampled us Jews as if we were scum.”
    “I wonder where Pinhas is,” my father said.
    “It was such a long time ago. We were so miserable when he left, but he did well to leave.”
    “Maybe we’ll know one day,” I said, thinking of the first Jewish Red Army soldier who rescued me at that tragic moment in my life.
    “How?”
    A spark of joy lit up inside me. It chased away shadows and ghosts and revealed a brother, an older brother in full force.
    I told them