Free Hostage by Elie Wiesel Page B

about my meeting with Piotr.
    “He wanted to know everything about me. It seems that Pavel is a very important person over there. He works for …”
    “Leon Meirovitch? Our relative?” my father asked.
    “Yes. In fact, Piotr promised to come back to see me. I gave him our address.”
    “Who knows what happened to him?” Arele wondered. “The war isn’t over yet. Everything is still chaotic.”
    “He’ll keep his promise,” I said in an obstinate tone of voice.
    Given history’s convulsions, we had every reason not to hold out much hope. Yet my father remarked, “And the fact that we’re here—true, not all of us, but some of us—in our own house, among ourselves, reunited, and the fact that there are still Jews in Europe, isn’t that the sign that miracles can still happen?”
    His face darkened suddenly as he no doubt thought of his wife and others who suffered a similar fate. The word “miracle” resonated like a kind of blasphemy.
    • • •
    Shaltiel summoned memories and faces as a way of protecting himself, shielding himself from the torturers. His moments of complete dejection, the feeling of plummeting into bottomless depths, was thereby mitigated by the glimmers of ecstasy. He shivered with cold, yet was bathed in sweat.
    Outside, life triumphs. There are cries and tears of victory, fascism defeated, Nazism humiliated. The horror of the German dictatorship is unmasked. Suffering the worst defeat in its history, Germany has lost all its pride. Europe is liberated. The Jewish people have survived. Shouts of “Hurrah” are heard in Moscow and Kiev. People dance in the streets of Paris and Amsterdam. There are military parades everywhere. The Resistance is jubilant. “Never again” becomes more than a slogan: It’s a prayer, a promise, a vow. There will never again be hatred, people say. Never again jail and torture. Never again the suffering of innocent people, or the shooting of starving, frightened, terrified children. And never again the glorification of base, ugly, dark violence. It’s a prayer.
    One autumn day, my father is rereading letters sent to friends in Palestine and America: requests for advice and help. It is our joint decision to leave Europe. It feels urgent to escape from the land and the clouds that witnessed the death of so many of our people, abandoned by God and betrayed by His creation. We want to start a new family life elsewhere, far from the cemeteries embedded in our recollections of ashes and blazing skies.
    Arele is engrossed in a history book.
    I’m still clinging to the chessboard.
    Someone knocks at the door.
    “Go see who’s there,” says my father.
    When I see who it is, I shout so loudly that it could wake a deaf person on the other side of the ocean. “Piotr!”
    I fall into his strong arms. He laughs; his whole body is laughing.
    He shouts in a strong, booming voice, “So, little man, you thought I had forgotten you, huh?”
    My father and Arele are standing behind me, waiting for the reunion scene to end. I introduce them to Piotr. He removes his rucksack and opens it. It contains coffee, sugar, flour, chocolate, condensed milk—all American products, the riches of our pitiable world. He hands them to my father, who is so overcome with emotion that he doesn’t take them right away.
    “Before anything,” he says, “I have to shake your hand. My son told me so much about you that I feel I’ve known you since the beginning of my life.”
    Returning home from Berlin, Piotr stays with us for several days. We each talk about our war experiences. “I know Auschwitz,” says Piotr, looking fixedly at my father and cousin. He wants to see their tattooed numbers. He shuts his eyes and opens them, shaking his head incredulously. Some of his comrades liberated Birkenau and other extermination camps. Their thirst for revenge was not to be believed.
    “Whatever sufferings we now impose on the Germans,” he said, “they deserve. They deserve much worse.