Free Elie Wiesel by The Forgotten Page B

village there was a man, a porter, who refused to learn the alphabet. One day I asked him, ‘What have you got against the alphabet?’ And he answered, ‘Words say the same thing to everybody; I want them for myself.’ ‘But prayers,’ I asked him, ‘how then do you pray?’ And he answered, ‘That’s easy. I don’t like to repeat other people’s prayers. I prefer to make them up.’ ”
    Later he would hold me spellbound with his stories of other times. He often described his childhood to me, and his adolescence. The wise men, thugs, madmen, beggars—he remembered all in such detail that I was constantly amazed. “In those days,” he used to say, “the whole village meant a few people—a few relatives, a few friends, a few rivals. I knew the others existed, but only in a vague way. Now I love them all. The poor, I wish I could enrich them; the rich, I would like to save them.”
    I admired my father not only for his kindness and intelligence, but also for his memory. He could quote long passages of the Talmud and Plato, the Zohar and the Upanishads. He could recall in rich detail his visit to the ghetto in Stanislav, his first skirmish as a partisan, his arrival in Palestine. He envied the character of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, who remembered what he had done in his mother’s womb and even in his father’s desire.
    Immersed in his own past and the world’s, my father was nevertheless a man of his times, reacting to all its convulsions. Politics stimulated him, and so did the international situation. Famine in Africa, racial persecution in Indonesia, religious conflict in Ireland and India: what men did to other men they did to him. When someone said that as a Jew he was wrong to care about anything but Israel, he answeredangrily, “God did not create other people so we could turn our backs on them.” And yet he loved Israel with all his heart and soul. Why didn’t he go back there to end his days? He did not know, and admitted that to me. “Maybe it’s cowardice on my part. Maybe in Jerusalem every stone and every cloud would remind me of your mother; I’d be too unhappy.” Another time he told me, “I know it’s convenient to love Israel from a distance. It’s even a contradiction, but I’m not afraid of contradictions. In creating man in his own image, didn’t God contradict Himself? Except that God is alone and free while man, still alone, is never free.”
    When he was already sick and felt himself going under, he said something that made me want to cry out, or die, every time I thought of it: “Soon I will envy the prisoner: Though his body is imprisoned, his memory is free. Whereas my body will always be free, but …” He never finished the sentence, but his face betrayed such anguish and sorrow that a lump came to my throat and I wanted to console him. “Soon,” he said, “I will be absent from myself. I’ll laugh and cry without knowing why.”
    Now nothing excites him. Nothing interests him. Everything happens outside him. And I, his son, take his hand in mine and no longer know what to do.

H er name was Talia, and she trailed happiness in her wake. All she had to do was toss her thick head of hair, and her gloomy friends perked up. She rejected their gloom: “I refuse to see you like that. Cheer up or I go.” As if by a miracle, they felt better, uplifted. They promised the young tyrant any gift from any shop, any color from any rainbow, if only she’d stay. “All right, then, I’ll stay,” she said, “but make me want to stay. I want to see smiling faces. Understand?” Yes, they all understood. No more long faces when she was around.
    Elhanan Rosenbaum had also understood, but his sadness was stronger than he, stronger than the young girl. Elhanan was chronically depressed. The others sang; he withdrew. Boys his age found ways to amuse themselves, but not he. To please Talia he made an effort to appear happy, but he never succeeded.
    Germany, 1946, a camp for