Legends of Our Time by Elie Wiesel

Author:Elie Wiesel [Wiesel, Elie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80641-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-13T16:00:00+00:00

11.

The Last Return

Somewhere in Transylvania, in the shadow of the Carpathians, very near the most capricious frontier of Eastern Europe, there is a dusty little town called Sighet. It is a town like many others, and yet it is not like any other. Quiet, withdrawn, resigned, it seems almost petrified in its own forgetfulness; and in the shame that springs from that forgetfulness. It has denied its past; it is condemned to live outside of time; it breathes only in the memory of those who have left it.

This was my town once; it is not my town now. And yet it has scarcely changed at all since I left it twenty years ago. The low, gray houses are still there. The church and the butcher shop are still facing each other. The synagogue, deserted now, still stands at the corner of the little market square.

It is this fidelity to its own image that makes the town seem strange to me. By looking like itself, it has betrayed itself. It has lost the right to its name and to its destiny. Sighet is not Sighet any more.

For a long time I had had a burning desire to go there. For a week, an hour, a minute—just long enough for a single look. To see it one last time and then to depart, never to see it again.

Nowadays, in spite of the Iron Curtain, distances no longer matter. Anyone at all may leave from anywhere at all and arrive at Sighet, by way of Bucharest, Cluj, and Baia-Mare, by airplane, by train, by car, in less than seventy-two hours. But not I. For me the journey was longer. It was to take me back to where everything began, where the world lost its innocence and God lost his mask. It was from Sighet that I started on my journey to Sighet.

For twenty years I had done nothing but prepare for this journey. Not with joy—on the contrary, with anguish. In a dim way I felt where the danger lay: this pilgrimage would be a watershed. From that time on there would be a “before” and an “after.” Or rather, there would no longer be a “before.” What would be waiting for me when I arrived? The dead past or the past revived? Total desolation or a city rebuilt again and a life once more become normal? For me, in either case, there would be despair. One cannot dig up a grave with impunity. The secret of the Maase-B’reshit, the beginning of all things, is guarded by the Angel of Death. One approaches it only at the risk of losing his last tie to the earth, his last illusion, his faith, or his reason.

After the liberation, at Buchenwald, the Americans wanted to repatriate me. I objected. I did not like the idea of living alone in an abandoned place. They insisted: “Do you mean to say you refuse to go home?” I no longer had a home, I said. “And you’re not curious

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