The "urgent obligation" to bear witness to the horrors of the Holocaust "remains a constant ... and powerful element in my life," Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel told a Yale audience during a recent campus talk.
Wiesel was keynote speaker at an international conference on Oct. 6 marking the 20th anniversary of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale. The three-day event, "The Contribution of Oral Testimony to Holocaust and Genocide Studies," included scholarly panels and presentations by many of the world's leading experts in the field.
Born in Romania in 1928, Wiesel was deported to Auschwitz as a teenager in 1944, along with his family and the entire Jewish population of his town. He later wrote of his horrific experiences in "Night" and subsequent books. Altogether, he has authored over 35 works dealing with Judaism, the Holocaust, and the moral responsibility of all people to fight hatred, racism and genocide. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1986.
To this day, Wiesel said in his Yale talk, he remains tormented by the impossibility of conveying the nightmare he and others experienced firsthand. "Have I raised the right questions? Have I identified all the scars? Have I told all the tales?" he asked.
Ultimately, he said, the full truth "cannot be told, not because the teller is unable to tell it, but because the listener is unable to hear it." Despite that frustration, noted Wiesel, the stories that "confront the darkness that enveloped God's creation" must come out because "if we forget, we betray a trust" to those who died.
Every survivor has a story that needs to be remembered, he said, adding that, simplified to the barest elements, "All the stories are the same story: One Jew killed by one German, six million times." But in fact, he noted, every individual was precious and unique, and Wiesel said he is haunted by the thought that what happened to many victims has been lost forever, because they were murdered without leaving a record of what they endured. "What have we missed? What about the places where nobody was left?" he mused.
Wiesel read from a letter that was spotted by chance in the rubble by a Russian soldier after the war. The writer was a woman who didn't survive. In the letter, dated July 31, 1941, she described to her husband a massacre that killed 800 Jews in their town, leaving only a remnant of the village alive. "Every day we wait for our death and mourn for the dead ones," she wrote. In a postscript, their 12-year-old daughter bid an affectionate goodbye to her father, anticipating -- correctly -- that she wouldn't live to see him again. She said that she was terrified of being thrown into a pit alive, along with the dead and dying, as she had seen happen to other children. She wrote, "I am so afraid of dying."
"What human mind could imagine all this?" Wiesel asked. "Can anyone who was not there understand?"
Steeped as he is in Holocaust history, Wiesel continues to learn new truths that shock and pain him, he said. At Baba Yar, Wiesel recalled, 32,000 Jews were led to the outskirts of Kiev, lined up along a ravine and shot down in the course of 10 days. When he visited Ukraine a few years ago, he was startled to see that the ravine was not in the forest, miles outside Kiev, as he had always thought, but part of the city where the victims lived. They were herded along familiar residential streets en route to their death.
Noting that, for him, reconstructing the truth and bringing it to light are moral imperatives, Wiesel said when he rereads his own books, he is frustrated that knowledge of past atrocities has not prevented future ones.
"I wish I could start all over again from the very beginning," he said. "The message should have been so powerful" that it "created a better world." But instead, "hatred and fanaticism are gaining ground in every religion, including my own, to my shame," he added.
Wiesel expressed gratitude to the scholars and educators in the audience, admitting that the two years he spent trying to teach a course about the Holocaust were among "the most difficult years of my life. I couldn't do it," he said. "Under the weight of one's memories, one could lose one's mind, one's faith in humanity, if not in something higher."
He lamented the trivialization of the Holocaust in popular culture and its inappropriate use for political purposes, including by the Palestinians who compared themselves to Hitler's victims.
"None of us asked to survive," he reflected, noting that a few did, against all odds. Since then, for him, "every moment is a moment of grace," he said.
Summing up, Wiesel said, "Having read, having written, having listened better and better and more and more, this is what I believe:
"I belong to a generation that felt abandoned by God and betrayed by humankind. And yet I proclaim that one must not estrange oneself from either God or His creation. We have seen that human beings are capable of ultimate inhumanity, and we can give up on humanity. The choice always remains in our hands ... I believe that on the edge of the abyss, it is possible to dream dreams of redemption. ...
"I still believe in human beings, in spite of them," he continued. "I still believe in their future, in spite of what humanity has done to itself. I still believe in language, though it has often been usurped, corrupted and poisoned by the enemy. I still believe in words. It depends on us whether they become carriers of hate or vehicles of compassion, whether they curse or heal ... whether they move us to despair or hope."
He concluded: "I belong to a generation that has learned that, whatever the question, despair is surely not the answer."
-- By Gila Reinstein
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