曾营救数百犹太儿童的老人

曾营救数百犹太儿童的老人

LONDON — An old man went to Prague this week. He had spent much of his life keeping quiet about his deeds. They spoke for themselves. Now he said, “In a way perhaps I shouldn’t have lived so long to give everybody the opportunity to exaggerate everything in the way they are doing today.”

伦敦——本周(指上周——编注)，一位老人去了布拉格。在人生的很长一段时间里，他一直对自己的事迹缄口不言。那些事不言自明。如今，他开口了，“在某种程度上，我或许不该活这么大岁数，致使人人都有机会像现在这样过分夸大所有的一切。”

At the age of 105, Sir Nicholas Winton is still inclined toward self-effacement. He did what any normal human being would, only at a time when most of Europe had gone mad. A London stockbroker, born into a family of German Jewish immigrants who had changed their name from Wertheim and converted to Christianity, he rescued 669 children, most of them Jews, from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939. They came to Britain in eight transports. The ninth was canceled when Hitler invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. The 250 children destined for it journeyed instead into the inferno of the Holocaust.

105岁高龄的尼可拉斯·温顿(Nicholas Winton)爵士依然保持着谦逊的态度。他做了任何正常人都会做的事情，只不过是在大半个欧洲都陷入疯狂之际。当时的温顿是伦敦的一名股票经纪人。他出生于一个德裔犹太移民家庭，其家人把姓氏从韦特海姆(Wertheim)改成了温顿，并皈依了基督教。1939年，他从纳粹占领下的捷克斯洛伐克救出了多为犹太裔的669个孩子，分八批送到了英国。1939年9月1日，希特勒入侵波兰，第九批未能成行。原本要被送走的250个孩子，踏进了大屠杀的炼狱。

Winton, through family connections, knew enough of the Third Reich to see the naïveté of British officialdom still inclined to dismiss Hitler as a buffoon and talk of another war as fanciful. He raised money; he procured visas; he found foster families. His day job was at the Stock Exchange. The rest of his time he devoted to saving the doomed. There were enough bystanders. He wanted to help. Now he has outlived many of those he saved and long enough to know that thousands of their descendants owe their lives to him.

温顿因为家庭的关系而对第三帝国有足够的了解，因此知道英国官场把希特勒当成跳梁小丑来看待、把又一场战争当成幻想来讨论是多么天真。他筹措了资金，弄到了签证，还找到了愿意收养孩子的家庭。白天，他在证券交易所上班;其余的时间，他都用来拯救即将遭受厄运的孩子。袖手旁观的人太多了，但他伸出了援手。如今，大部分获救者都已辞世，而他活得足够长久，有机会得知被救者的数千名后代因为他给予了他们生命而心怀感激。

Back in Prague, 75 years on, Winton received the Order of the White Lion, the highest honor of the Czech Republic. The Czech Air Force sent a plane. He was serenaded at Prague Castle, in the presence of a handful of his octogenarian “children.” The only problem, he said, was that countries refused to accept unaccompanied children; only England would. One hundred years, he said, is “a heck of a long time.” The things he said were understated. At 105, one does not change one’s manner.

75年后重返布拉格，温顿获颁捷克共和国最高荣誉勋章——白狮勋章(Order of the White Lion)。捷克空军派了架飞机负责接送。在布拉格城堡，当着他的几个年逾八旬的“孩子”，有人为他献歌。他说，当时唯一的问题是，很多国家都拒绝接收无人陪伴的孩子，只有英国愿意。他又说，100年是段“相当漫长的时光”。谈起往事他总是轻描淡写。虽然活到了105岁，他的脾气秉性并无改变。

Only in 1988 did Winton’s wartime work begin to be known. His wife found a scrapbook chronicling his deeds. He appeared on a BBC television show whose host, Esther Rantzen, asked those in the audience who owed their lives to him to stand. Many did. Honors accrued. Now there are statues of him in London and Prague. “I didn’t really keep it secret,” he once said. “I just didn’t talk about it.”

直到1988年，温顿在战争时期的所做所为才被公之于众。他妻子发现了一本剪贴簿，上边记载了他的事迹。他出现在了BBC的一档电视节目上，主持人埃丝特·兰森(Esther Rantzen)要求被他救过一命的观众站出来。许多人都站了出来。随后，荣誉接踵而至。如今，在伦敦和布拉格都有他的雕像。“其实我以前并非要保守秘密，”有一回他说，“我只是没有谈论它而已。”

Such discretion is riveting to our exhibitionist age. To live today is to self-promote or perish. Social media tugs the private into the public sphere with an almost irresistible force. Be followed, be friended — or be forgotten. This imperative creates a great deal of tension and unhappiness. Most people, much of the time, have a need to be quiet and still, and feel disinclined to raise their voice. Yet they sense that if they do not, they risk being seen as losers. Device anxiety, that restless tug to the little screen, is a reflection of a spreading inability to live without 140-character public affirmation. When the device is dead, so are you.

在我们这个自我表现至上的时代，这样的谨言慎行实在让人着迷。现如今，活着就要自我推销，要么等于死了。社交媒体以几近不可阻挡之势将私生活拽进公共领域。被关注，被加为好友——要不就被遗忘。这种迫切性制造了大量的紧张与不快。其实，多数人在大部分时间里，需要静如止水，不愿大呼小叫。问题是，如果他们不发声，就可能会被视为失败者。设备焦虑，那种被钉到小小屏幕上的躁动感，反映了人们越来越无力在140个字符的公共认同之外活着。当设备不动了，人也就死了。

What gets forgotten, in the cacophony, is how new this state of affairs is. Winton’s disinclination to talk was not unusual. Silence was the reflex of the postwar generation. What was done was done because it was the right thing to do and therefore unworthy of note. Certainly among Jews silence was the norm. Survivors scarcely spoke of their torment. They did not tell their children. They repressed their memories. Perhaps discretion seemed the safer course; certainly it seemed the more dignified. Perhaps the very trauma brought wordlessness. The Cold War was not conducive to truth-telling. Anguish was better suffered in silence than passed along (although of course it filtered to the next generation anyway.)

在喧嚣之中，我们忘记了这样的状态是多么晚近才出现的。温顿不愿多说并不反常。沉默是二战后那代人的本能反应。之所以做了这件事情是因为它是正确的，因而也不值一提。在犹太人当中，沉默绝对是常态。幸存者鲜有提及自己遭受的苦难。他们不会对后代说，而是压抑自己的记忆。也许，谨言慎行显得是更安全的做法，也必然显得更庄重。亦或是，创伤本身带来了无言。冷战时期并不鼓励说出真相。痛苦最好是在沉默中忍受，而不是传递下去(尽管它还是必然会渗透到下一代)。

But there was something else, something really unsayable. Survival itself was somehow shameful, unbearable. By what right, after all, had one lived when those 250 children had not? Menachem Begin, the former Israeli prime minister whose parents and brother were killed by the Nazis, put this sentiment well: “Against the eyes of every son of the nation appear and reappear the carriages of death. ... The Black Nights when the sound of an infernal screeching of wheels and the sighs of the condemned press in from afar and interrupt one’s slumber; to remind one of what happened to mother, father, brothers, to a son, a daughter, a People. In these inescapable moments every Jew in the country feels unwell because he is well. He asks himself: Is there not something treasonous in his existence.”

然而，这里面还有些别的东西，真真切切不可言说的东西。幸存本身就多少令人羞耻、难以承受。毕竟，到底有什么理由你活着，而那250个孩子却没有?以色列前总理梅纳赫姆·贝京(Menachem Begin)的双亲与哥哥死于纳粹手中。他很好地描述了这种情绪：“就在犹太民族每个子孙的眼前，死神的战车不断出现……黑夜里，炼狱的车轮吱吱作响，不幸的人们发出阵阵叹息，这些声音从远处迫近，打断了安眠，提醒着你，母亲、父亲、兄弟、儿女、民族，究竟遭受了什么。在这些无可逃避的时刻，这个国家里的每个犹太人都会因为自己安然无事而感到不适。他扪心自问：自己活下来难道不是种背叛吗?”