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Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Moishe the Beadle came back to Sighet in 1942 to describe his own death. Deported with the town’s foreign Jews, he had been driven into a forest near Kolomay and made to dig a trench; then the Gestapo shot the deportees one by one as they offered their necks, tossing infants in the air for machine-gun practice. A bullet caught his leg and he was left for dead. He walked back to Transylvania and went from house to house: “Jews, listen to me! That’s all I ask of you. No money. No pity. Just listen to me!” The town decided he had lost his mind. Elie Wiesel, then a boy who studied Talmud by day and Kabbalah at night, listened often and felt only pity. Eighteen months later the yellow star came, then the ghetto, then the cattle cars, and the boy who had not believed the witness became one.

Elie Wiesel on SummaryShelf

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