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"No sun ever shines here. Those who perished at Birkenau have not even a cemetery. We are their cemetery." Sigmund Strochlitz, a Connecticut automobile dealer, recalled his arrival at Birkenau: "The day I got here I saw the chimneys vomiting black smoke. That day I became an orphan. But I did not know it. The next day I learned my friends were no more. On the third day they told me I was dead. And may be I am."
In Poland, Wiesel met again and again with government officials to try to persuade them to share materials and records of Polish Jewry that they had withheld for almost 40 years. Repeatedly he managed to gain concessions. Exhausted, as lean as a Giacometti sculpture, Wiesel walked through the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw, past the forest of neglected tombstones, until he found one that seemed to summarize his mission: the carved figure of a man who died in 1943, holding in his hand the final symbol of the ghetto struggle, a grenade.
In the Soviet city of Kiev, the group stood at Babi Yar, where during two years of Nazi occupation some 80,000 Jews were killed and thrown into a mass grave. Here a stark sculpture of monumental figures rises from a knoll. But the only evidence that Jews died here were the Hebrew words from Job, "Earth do not cover my blood," on the memorial wreath presented by the commission. Oddly, it was two non-Jews who did most to recollect the past. In his great poem, Babi Yar, Yevgeni Yevtushenko reminded his countrymen back in 1961, "I stand terror-stricken. Today I am as ancient in years as the Jewish people themselves are ... I myself am like an endless soundless cry, over these thousands and thousands of buried ones." Eighteen years later, Black Activist Bayard Rustin stood before a vast assemblage of commissioners and Soviet sightseers and sang the spiritual that once nurtured Martin Luther King Jr.:
Before you 'd be a slave
You 'd be buried in your grave
And go home with your God and
be free.
We'll remember, we'll remember
thee.
In Moscow, the only monument was a single synagogue. About 100 old men, their Rembrandt faces limned by faith, prayed as their ancestors have done for thousands of years. Here Rabbi Michael Berenbaum, 34, deputy director of the commission, read from Lamentations:
"Remember our days as of old, except if you have scorned us utterly."
Again in Moscow, Wiesel pressed for records withheld since the end of the war.
And again he succeeded. Roman Rodenko, the Soviet prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, praised Wiesel's mission as "noble"; Soviet historians and writers first insisted that only Soviet citizens died in the war, not Jews as such. But they ended by promising copies of documents and inviting an exchange of scholars.