From the Kingdom of Memory by Elie Wiesel Page A

me have done so. The young and the no longer young return to the scenes of their youth, to the ruins of their past. Some want to perform the ancient ritual of praying at the graves of their ancestors. Others just want to see their own homes, their yards, their neighbors. There was a time when they were the only tourists here.
    So it was twenty years ago that I first revisited these streets, walking for hours on end. I still remember: Passersby saw me without seeing, and I saw them while beholding only the ghosts that surrounded them, and the ghosts were more real, more vivid than they. I saw friends long dead, comrades long dead, dead rabbis, dead disciples, and they were alive. I hadplanned on staying a few days but fled after only a few hours.
    The second time, I returned with a television crew working on a documentary. It was impossible to go anywhere alone, and, always accompanied, always under surveillance, I felt like an actor in an unsettling role. As soon as the filming was done, I turned my back once again on my city.
    Now I am here on my third visit. I was invited by the Romanian-Jewish community, and I joined its chief rabbi, Dr. David-Moses Rosen, in a melancholy pilgrimage to commemorate the deportation of Transylvania’s Jews forty years ago.
    For four days, all of them superbly and efficiently organized by the authorities, we went from one city to the next, from one ceremony to the next: Dej, Satu Mare, Oradea, Sarmas: How many ceremonies does it take to mark the deaths of thousands and thousands of men, women, and children? How many times must one say El
Molé Rachamim
, the Prayer of Compassion? From everywhere, it seemed, moved by a mysterious call, Jews came out of their towns near and far, came to weep together, to plumb that collective memory from which their brothers and parents, beyond a desert of ashes, spoke to them, speak to them.
    At Sighet I visited the Jewish cemetery where lies the grave of the grandfather whose name I bear. It was strange: I felt more at home among the graves than among the living beyond the gate. An extraordinaryserenity dwelt in the graveyard, and I spoke quietly to my grandfather and told him what I have done with his name.
    Then, with a childhood friend, a fellow pilgrim, we ambled through the streets and alleys in silence, not daring to glance at one another. I recognized each window, each tree. Names and faces sprang before me as if from nowhere, as if preparing to reoccupy their former homes. I stopped before my old house, and with a beating heart, nearly beside myself, I waited for a youth to come out to call me closer, to demand to know what I was doing there in his life. A nameless anguish came over me: What if all that I had lived had only been a dream?
    I N THE SPACE of six weeks a vibrant and creative community had been condemned first to isolation, then to misery, and finally to deportation and death.
    The last transport left the station on a Sunday morning. It was hot, we were thirsty. It was less than three weeks before the Allies’ invasion of Normandy. Why did we allow ourselves to be taken? We could have fled, hidden ourselves in the mountains or in the villages. The ghetto was not very well guarded: A mass escape would have had every chance of success. But we did not know.
    Hear me well, those of you who want to spend your vacation somewhere in Transylvania: You will not meet my friends there. They were massacred becauseno one thought it was necessary to warn them, to tell them not to go quietly into those windowless train cars. If this tragedy of Transylvanian Judaism hurts, if it hurts so terribly, it is not only because its victims are so near to me but also because it could have been prevented: Had the Allies moved faster and their leaders protested louder, many lives would have been saved.
    So, you understand, the beauty of the countryside, the serenity and comfort and the hospitality that awaits the visitor, none of that is for me. But go, if it tempts