Following
an operation, I am lying in the surgical ward of a camp hospital. I
cannot move. I am hot and feverish, but nonetheless my thoughts do not
dissolve into delerium, and I am grateful to Dr. Boris Nikolayevich
Kornfeld, who is sitting beside my cot and talking to me all evening.
The light has been turned out, so it will not hurt my eyes. There is
no one else in the ward.
Fervently
he tells me the long story of his conversion from Judaism to Christianity.
I am astonished at the conviction of the new convert, at the ardor of
his words.
We know
each other very slightly, and he was not the one responsible for my
treatment, but there was simply no one here with whom he could share
his feelings. He was a gentle and well-mannered person. I could see
nothing bad in him, nor did I know anything bad about him. However,
I was on guard because Kornfeld had now been living for two months inside
the hospital barracks, without going outside. He had shut himself up
in here, at his place of work, and avoided moving around camp at all.
This meant
that he was afraid of having his throat cut. In our camp it had recently
become fashionable to cut the throats of stool pigeons. This has an
effect. But who could guarantee that only stoolies were getting their
throats cut? One prisoner had had his throat cut in a clear case of
settling a sordid grudge. Therefore the self-imprisonment of Kornfeld
in the hospital did not necessarily prove that he was a stool pigeon.
It is already
late. The whole hospital is asleep. Kornfeld is finishing his story:
"And
on the whole, do you know, I have become convinced that there is no
punishment that comes to us in this life on earth which is undeserved.
Superficially it can have nothing to do with what we are guilty of in
actual fact, but if you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and
ponder it deeply, you will always be able to hunt down that transgression
of yours for which you have now received this blow."
I cannot
see his face. Through the window come only the scattered reflections
of the lights of the perimeter outside. The door from the corridor gleams
in a yellow electrical glow. But there is such mystical knowledge in
his voice that I shudder.
Those were
the last words of Boris Kornfeld. Noiselessly he went into one of the
nearby wards and there lay down to sleep. Everyone slept. There was
no one with whom he could speak. I went off to sleep myself.
I was wakened
in the morning by running about and tramping in the corridor; the orderlies
were carrying Kornfeld's body to the operating room. He had been dealt
eight blows on the skull with a plasterer's mallet while he slept. He
died on the operating table, without regaining consciousness.
And so
it happened that Kornfeld's prophetic words were his last words on earth,
and those words lay upon me as an inheritance. You cannot brush off
that kind of inheritance by shrugging your shoulders.
But by
that time I myself had matured to similar thoughts. I would have been
inclined to endow his words with the significance of a universal law
of life. However, one can get all tangled up that way. One would have
to admit that, on that basis, those who had received even crueler punishments
than imprisonment,those who were shot or burned at the stake, were some
sort of super-evildoers. And yet it is the the innocent who are punished
most zealously. And what would one then have to say about our torturers?
Why does fate not punish them? Why do they prosper?
The only
solution to this would be that the meaning of earthly existence lies
not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development
of the soul. From that point of view our torturers have been punished
most horribly of all: they are turning into swine; they are departing
downward from humanity. From that point of view punishment is inflicted
on those whose development . . . holds out hope.
But there
was something in Kornfeld's last words that touched a sensitive chord,
and that I completely accept for myself. And many will accept the same
for themselves.
In the
seventh year of my imprisonment I had gone over and re-examined my life
and had come to understand why everything had happened to me: both prison
and my malignant tumor. And I would not have murmured even if all that
punishment had been considered inadequate.
I lay there
a long time in that recovery room from which Kornfeld had gone forth
to his death, and all alone during sleepless nights I pondered with
astonishment my own life and the turns it had taken. Looking back, I
saw that for my whole conscious life I had not understood either myself
or my strivings. What had seemed for so long to be beneficial now turned
out in actuality to be fatal, and I had been striving to go in the opposite
direction to that which was truly necessary for me. But just as the
waves of the sea knock the inexperienced swimmer off his feet and keep
tossing him back onto the shore, so also was I painfully tossed back
on dry land by the blows of misfortune. And it was only because of this
that I was able to travel the path which I had always really wanted
to travel.
It was
granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which
nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human
being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes
I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the
surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor. In my most evil
moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied
with systematic arguments. It was only when I lay there on rotting prison
straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually
it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes
not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties
either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.
This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within
hearts overwhlemed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained;
and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of
evil.
Since then
I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world:
they struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human
being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety,
but it is possible to constrict it within each person.