Elie Wiesel

The beloved objects that we had carried with us from place to place were now left behind in the wagon and, with them, finally, our illusions.

The absent no longer entered our thoughts. One spoke of them who knows what happened to them? but their fate was not on our minds. We were incapable of thinking. Our senses were numbed, everything was fading into a fog. We no longer clung to anything. The instincts of self-preservation, of self-defense, of pride, had all deserted us. In one terrifying moment of lucidity, I thought of us as damned souls wandering through the void, souls condemned to wander through space until the end of time, seeking redemption, seeking oblivion, without any hope of finding either.

Most people thought we would remain in the ghetto until the end of the war, until the arrival of the Red Army. Afterward everything would be as before. The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion.

"The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria..."

"The yellow star? So what? It's not lethal..."

(Poor Father! Of what then did you die?)

They called him Moishe the Beadle, as if his entire life he had never had a surname.

The barbed wire that encircled us like a wall did not fill us with real fear. In fact, we felt this was not a bad thing: we were entirely among ourselves. A small Jewish republic...

"For God's sake, where is God?"

And from within me, I heard a voice answer:

"Where He is? This is where hanging here from this gallows..."

That night, the soup tasted of corpses.

The bell. It was already time to part, to go to bed. The bell regulated everything. It gave me orders and I executed them blindly. I hated that bell. Whenever I happened to dream of a better world, I imagined a universe without a bell.

The Hungarian lieutenant went around with a basket and retrieved the last possessions from those who chose not to go on tasting the bitterness of fear.

"There are eighty of you in the car," the German officer added. "If anyone goes missing, you will all be shot, like dogs."

The two disappeared. The doors clanked shut. We had fallen into the trap, up to our necks. The doors were nailed, the way back irrevocably cut off. The world had become a hermetically sealed cattle car.

"Faster! Faster! Move, you lazy good-for-nothings!" the Hungarian police were screaming.

That was when I began to hate them, and my hatred remains our only link today. They were our first oppressors. They were the first faces of hell and death.

PRIEST: Are you taking their side, daughter? You’ll burn in hell.

MARIA: Better in hell with them than in paradise with you.