I believe that the first duty of all who have the freedom of speech today is to speak in the name of the millions, the countless millions, who can no longer do so themselves, because this inviolable right of theirs has in fact been violated. Never in history has a similar level of violence been exercised so widely, so methodically and so systematically. My voice will therefore make an effort to be victim to the forty or fifty million whose voices in Central Europe have been stifled, throttled. Forty million, fifty million, perhaps even more. The assault and throttling of rights is carried out to such a grisly extent these days that we accustom ourselves only with great difficulty to the concept that such an enormous, impenetrable zone of silence has been created in the centre of Europe. One could say that the north pole has suddenly moved down and enveloped all of Poland, all of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, in a massive, dismal loneliness. A horrific vision: forty or fifty million human beings suffer in this state of humiliation, forty or fifty million live, or more accurately vegetate, without the slightest possibility to express their thoughts, their wishes, their complaints, their hopes.

You all know how the tragedy began. It happened in Germany with the rise of National Socialism, whose rallying cry from the first day onwards was: suffocation. The smothering of all voices other than one. Stamp out all manifestations of the free word in whatever form, artistic, literary, journalistic – even in the form of simple conversation. Flattening, rooting out, shattering every freedom of expression.

A few days later, the egregious rallying cry was followed. Books were burned, scholars were chased out of their laboratories, priests from their pulpits, actors from the stage. Newspapers and freedom of assembly were suppressed. People who had enriched European culture through their ideas and works were set upon like wild animals. It was the sudden unleashing of a hatred made so much more odious through the fact that it was nowhere spontaneous, but rather everywhere contrived down to the smallest detail and coldly set into motion. The entire world was horribly affected. It was as if someone had fallen down from great height due to a severe shock, and as if they finally lifted themselves back up, looked around and asked themselves: “Where am I? Are we really in the twentieth century of humanity?”

But in this very world, appeasing voices soon made themselves heard: “Let’s be cautious. This is an internal affair that only concerns the Germans. The Germans can do whatever they like in their own country. The Germans will sort it out among themselves. If it doesn’t cross the border, it doesn’t concern us.”

A fatal error! But an error that is unavoidable and will remain the same as long as the human mind conspires to manipulate national borders in its judgement; when it forgets that humanity with its rights and sacred duties is a unity and indivisibility, and that a crime is a crime without respect to which latitude, under which flag, and in the name of which ideology it is committed.

But strangling the freedom of thought, the violence against the intellectuals of Germany, was only the prelude. You all know the bloody calendar of Hitler’s attacks on individuals and nations. The victims change, the methods remain the same. Always an abrupt attack against a weak country, an already half-suffocated cry: “Help! Help!” – and then the silence. The icy silence, the total silence. Not even the faintest moan, not even the smallest sigh. As if this country with its cities and towns, with its millions of human beings, has sunk beneath the surface of the earth. No more letters, no reliable news. Dead are the voices of relatives and friends, dead the voices of poets and writers; no further signs of them, the silence… a silence that lies today like lead over so many nations, over so many peoples, who just yesterday were still free and whose voices were those of our brothers.

This silence, this horrible, impenetrable, endless silence, I hear it at night, I hear it during the day, it fills my ears and my soul with its indescribable horror. It is more unbearable than any noise; there is more dread in it than in thunder, than in the wailing of sirens, than in the crack of an explosion. It is more nerve-wracking, more oppressive than a cry or a sob, for in every moment I know that the bondage of millions and millions of human beings is pressed into this silence. In no way is it similar to the silence of loneliness. When quiet reigns over the mountains, the sea, the woods, it is as if the landscape is holding in its breath to relax, to dream. This quiet is natural. But I know that the one that tortures me and brings me to my knees is an artificial quiet, one enforced by threat, a commanded, imposed, extorted silence, a silence of terror. Under the enormous pall woven from lies that it is, I catch sight of the convulsions from those who refuse to let themselves be buried alive; behind this silence I feel and sense the humiliation and indignation of these millions of voices that have been smothered and gagged. Their silence drills wounds in my ear and assails my soul day and night.

Sometimes I forget. I sit with friends, I chat, I laugh. But suddenly, as if waking with a start in the night, I hear the dreadful voice of this silence over the friendly conversation – and the laughter dies on my lips, I stop and become mute. It feels shameful to speak while these millions, countless millions of beings gasp out from under their gag, and I strain to hear them. I think about those who perhaps in the same hour are thinking of me, I invoke their faraway souls before me… over the impenetrable distance, I begin to see them. I think about Prague, about a laboratory there, about the chemist who explained his research to me. The laboratory is empty; the bottles, the glasses, the tubes have been shattered; my friend has disappeared. I think about a poet in Vienna, I know he’s in a concentration camp. I see the university in Krakow; I remember the bubbling of cheerful voices that I heard in the corridors: the voices have been stifled, the corridors are empty and quiet. I strain to picture the faces, the countenance and the movements of those friends who are entombed in the enormous gaol of the German occupation, but I know that I am deluding myself. I know that they no longer have the faces they had back then, but ashen and exhausted masks; I know that they have lost the free and casual movements of free people and that they keep themselves hidden in their homes under the shadow of terror. They don’t dare to go out, the streets are guarded by soldiers in steel helmets. Their ear is always strained. At the slightest step on the stairs, they ask themselves if the Gestapo has come, if they will be arrested. Sitting together at the family table, they don’t dare to speak a word: perhaps the maid is spying on them. And so: silence, silence, silence.

The same silence in the house next door, in the house across the street, in all the houses of the city, in all the houses of all the cities and towns of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria. And a new agony amidst their agony: they know that out there in the ether float friendly voices from France or England and consoling voices from the neutral powers. These voices are so close to them, so easy to catch: to renew one’s strength, one would need only to turn the radio dial in Poland or in Czechoslovakia to hear what kind of incredible efforts are being made so that they can regain their freedom and so that all of Europe does not fall to the serfdom that was forced upon them. But to make the agony even crueler, the secret police forget nothing. They confiscated the radios… it wasn’t enough to render their victims mute, they had to be rendered deaf as well, deaf for any sound of hope. Only after the night falls do they begin to whisper in broken voices: “When will they give us back our speech, when will this agony of silence end?” – the most cruel dismemberment of the soul to have been invented in this world.

Occasionally one of them manages to escape the iron prison despite the incredible danger and comes over the border. You greet them, hug them. “Tell me,” you say to them. “Describe what’s going on.” But they have not yet relearned how to speak. They look fearfully around them, terror in their eyes, as if still within the grip of their relentless guard. You press them for news about this or that person. They don’t know anything for certain. Disappeared; maybe that one is dead. The other imprisoned. The brother knows nothing about his brother. The mother no longer knows what has happened to her son. The silence, the horrific silence has torn all human contact. Useless to press further: what one person can report is only a drop in this ocean of misery that has flooded a quarter of our Europe. Sometime later, when its full extent is known, when it is known how many millions and millions of happy existences it engulfed, sometime later humankind will be ashamed of those who, through acts of needless cruelty, have tainted this century, whose progress, whose science, whose art, whose magnificent inventions were once our common pride and creed.

Let us therefore never forget, not in our conversations, not in our silence, not by day and not in the night; let us never forget those who would spill their blood drop for drop if they could only turn it into words, into pleas, into prayers. We in France and England also suffer from being thrown for the second time into the guttling jaws of war; our joys are also dimmed, our hours of rest are also tortured. But at least we have kept our speech, and the soul breaths through speech like the body through the lungs. Through words we can free our own hearts, and when the pressure is too great, we can strengthen each other in our confidence, one to the other. But for those people, for these forty million brothers in humanity, there is nothing that remains other than the final weapon of the weak: hope and prayer. This secret prayer rises out to heaven from thousands of homes, from millions of hearts. And life would not mean anything more to me if I were not ardently convinced that the eternal justice will hear their accusatory silence.

Original speech “Das grosse Schweigen” given on Radio Paris by Stefan Zweig (1940), as published in “Erst wenn die Nacht fällt: Politische Essays und Reden 1932 – 1942”, Edition Roesner (2016). Translated from the German.