TAUBER’S DIARY: PREFACE | The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth

My name is Salomon Tauber, I am a Jew and about to die. I have decided to end my own life because it has no more value, nor is there anything left for me to do. Those things that I have tried to do with my life have come to nothing, and my efforts have been unavailing. For the evil that I have seen has survived and flourished, and only the good has departed in dust and mockery. The friends that I have known, the sufferers and victims, are all dead, and only the persecutors and all dead, and only the persecutors are all around me. I see their faces on the streets in the daytime, and in the night I see the face of my wife, Ester, who died long ago. I have stayed alive this long ago. I have stayed alive this long only because there was one more thing I wished to do. One thing I wanted to see, and now I know I never shall. I bear no hatred or bitterness toward the German people, for they are a good people. Peoples are not evil; only individuals are evil. The English philosopher Burke was right when he said, “ I do not know the means for drawing up the indictment of an entire nation.” There is no collective guilt, for the Bible relates how the Lord wished to destroy Sodom Gomorrah for the evil of the men who lived in them, with their women and children, but how there was living among them one righteous man, and because he was righteous he was spared. Therefore guilt is individual, like salvation. When I came out of the concentration camps of Riga and Stutthof, when I survived the Death March to Magdeburg, when the British soldiers liberated my body there in April 1945, leaving only my soul in chains, I hated the world. I hated the people, and the trees and the rocks, for they had conspired against me and made me suffer. And above all I hated the Germans. I asked then, as I had asked many times over the previous four years, why the Lord did not strike them down, every last man, woman, and child, destroying their cities and their houses forever from the face of the earth. And when He did not, I hated Him too, crying that He had led to believe they were His chosen people, and even saying that He did not exist. But with the passing of the years I have learned again to love; to love the rocks and the trees, the sky above and the river flowing past the city, the stray dogs and the cats, the weeds growing between the cobblestones, and the children who run away from me in the street because I am so ugly. They are not to blame. There is a French adage, “To understand everything is to forgive everything.” When one can understand the people, their gullibility and their fear, their greed and their lust for power, their ignorance and their docility to the man who shouts the loudest, one can forgive. Yes, one can forgive even what they did. But one can never forget. There are some men whose crimes surpass comprehension and therefore forgiveness, and here is the real failure. For they are still among us , walking through the cities, working in the offices, lunching in the canteens, smiling and shaking hands and calling decent men Kamerad. That they should live on, not as outcasts but as cherished citizens, to smear a whole nation in perpetuity with their individual evil, this is the true failure. And in this we have failed, you and I, we have all failed, and failed miserably. Lastly, as time passed, I came again to love the Lord, and to ask His forgiveness for the things I have done against His laws, and they are many. “Shema Yisroael …” (Hear, O Israel…) “Adonai Elohenu…” (The Lord is our God…) “Adonai Eha-a-a-ad.” (The Lord is One.)