The Testament by Elie Wiesel Read Free Book Online Page A

Jewish poet charged with subversion, deviation and treason, plead guilty: from the age of five—or was it four?—my love hasbeen centered on one people, my own, who obey only God, and that God is not yours. In other words: even at four or five I was already guilty of nationalist Jewish plots and agitations against your law, for your law is the enemy of mine.

Krasnograd after the Second World War—how can it be described? Those born there swear their city is a real metropolis. But in fact, Krasnograd is a provincial town, neither better nor worse, neither uglier nor more stimulating than any other.
    Perhaps more picturesque. At night you can hear the distant roar of a waterfall. In the summer, young couples venture into the woods. The bolder ones climb the mountain, a mountain whose summit seems a challenge, especially to children. If you don’t care for either the mountain or the river, you can stroll through one of the five parks that are the pride of our municipality. Gorky Square is the finest spot. But it is often deserted. For good reason: the Security offices are nearby. People prefer the small romantically unkempt park that lies in the shadow of the Hill of the Seven Repentant Bandits, named in memory of seven eighteenth-century bandits who saw the light and changed professions.
    Krasnograd numbers one hundred to one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants of very diverse origins. This is hardly surprising in this region, since Krasnograd is the third point of a triangle between Zhironev and Tosahin. Five languages are used here, plus two just for bickering.
    Like all Soviet urban centers, Krasnograd boasts tramways, factories, daily newspapers and houses of culture, theaters, movie houses and all kinds of schools. The city has its share of heroes and villains, drunkards and whores. There are two churches and a synagogue: the aged must be kept busy, after all. The young people prefer the “special” clubs, most of them under the aegis of the Pioneers andthe Komsomol, notwithstanding the spate of lectures they must endure. They go there to play chess, to meet friends, or simply to hear the local news. It’s pleasant enough; the rooms are spacious, the canteen offerings passable.
    As happens elsewhere, people live among their kind: old with old, young with young, and the same is true for engineers, war veterans, the sick, the retired, the bureaucrats and the Party members. Teachers socialize only with other teachers, members of the Secret Police associate only with other members of the Police, Jews see only Jews.
    Not many Jews are left in Krasnograd. Large numbers were massacred at the beginning of the German invasion; others joined the partisans in the forest. The young people fought, the old took care of supplies. They had to defend themselves against both the invaders and the local inhabitants. The Jews had no friends at all at that time. Their isolation continued after the occupation. That Jewish aloneness tinges Grisha’s earliest memories; it comes back to haunt him whenever he thinks about the past.
    He was very young when, on his own, he discovered the walls and limits of his world. His solitude was magnified by his mother’s. She seldom spoke to him, and encouraged his conversation even less. Mother and son lived as outcasts, pariahs of the community; people pointed at them and whispered as they passed. The father’s absence was enough to create a void around them: after all, you don’t rub shoulders with the family of a saboteur, a spy, an enemy of the people; you don’t smile at a schoolboy whose father has been involved in a political plot; you don’t shake hands with a woman whose husband has vanished.
    Every morning Raissa left Grisha at the school gate and rushed to the factory where she worked as a bookkeeper. As he watched her being swallowed day after day by the morning crowd or carried off in a jammed streetcar, Grisha feared he would lose her forever. To hide his anxiety he had to conceal