Shouting whisper -Elie Wiesel in Jerusalem

Elie Wiesel in Jerusalem this week. 'I am not tormented. I deliver my lectures with humor. People are surprised. I like to make them laugh.' (Eyal Toueg)
Shouting whisper
By Shahar Ilan (Haaretz)
"Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever," the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel wrote in the line that is considered the motto of his first and most important book, "Night." "Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul ... Never." The best-known scene in the book is probably the description of the hanging of two adults and a boy, in the Buna camp at Auschwitz, after they were implicated by the Gestapo in the discovery of an arms cache. The two adults died instantly, but the little boy, being so light, hovered between life and death for more than half an hour. "Where is God? Where is He?" someone behind Eliezer, the book's first-person narrator, asks. "Where is God now?" And a "voice within" the narrator answers, "Where is He? Here He is - He is hanging here on this gallows ..."

"Night" is the best-known and best-selling memoir of the Holocaust. In the United States, where Wiesel lives, it had sold six million copies as of the end of 2005. In January, it became the first book to be chosen twice by talk-show queen Oprah Winfrey for her immensely popular book club, and since then it has sold another 1.7 million copies. (The text of the book used in this article is from the original English version, translated from the 1958 French edition by Stella Rodway and published in the United States in 1960. The book has now been translated anew by Marion Wiesel, the author's wife, and, with a preface by Wiesel - in which he states that he has taken the opportunity "to correct and revise a number of important details" - has been republished with the seal of Oprah's Book Club on the cover.) The book tells the story of the deportation of 15-year-old Wiesel and his family in the spring of 1944 from the town of Sighet, in Romania, to Auschwitz; of life and death in the camps; and of the death march at the end of which Wiesel's father falls ill and dies. It is hard not to read "Night" as a book about the loss of faith and the death, or murder, of God at Auschwitz. It was Francois Mauriac, the French Nobel laureate for literature (1952), who discovered Wiesel - who was then the Paris correspondent for the daily Yedioth Ahronoth. Mauriac found a publisher for Wiesel and wrote a foreword for the book. In the foreword (which is also included in the English-language edition), Mauriac, a Catholic whose work deals with sin and redemption, wrote, "For him [Wiesel], Nietzsche's cry expressed an almost physical reality: God is dead, the God of love, of gentleness, of comfort, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, has vanished forevermore, beneath the gaze of this child, in the smoke of a human holocaust ..." In a 1963 newspaper article, Mauriac described Wiesel as a "child mystic who lost, or believed he had lost his faith in the God of love and comfort." Wiesel himself relates that a study was written about the death of God in his work. So it was something of a surprise when, at the very outset of the interview that I conducted with Wiesel this week (in Hebrew) at the Jerusalem hotel where he was staying on the occasion of a visit, he said, "I did not write about the death of God. People did not understand me rightly. I never lost my faith in God. I rose up against God's silence ... I had questions and protests." Wiesel, now 76, explains, "I said that God was in the boy who was just now murdered. I wanted to say that every time they murdered a Jew they were trying to murder God." It is possible, he says, that after the Holocaust, there really was place for him to say, "Lord of the Universe, bye-bye, shalom, we're finished. But what? Instead of that, I started to quarrel with Him and I have been quarreling with Him all along." People interpret you as they wish and you don't intervene? "My memoir 'All Rivers Run to the Sea' [1995] has an entire chapter in which I explain the episode of my faith. I say that I have a wounded faith, but faith nonetheless. I rise up against God's ways. But I simply cannot get divorced. I simply cannot. It is almost not a matter of will. I experienced a crisis of faith, a very serious crisis, of course. For me the questions remained open. If I had said that I believe in the justice and holiness of God, the problems would have been resolved and everything would have been in order. But I say, all is not in order." In "All Rivers Run to the Sea," Wiesel writes, "There is a passage in 'Night' - recounting the hanging of a young Jewish boy - that has given rise to an interpretation bordering on blasphemy. Theorists of the idea that 'God is dead' have used my words unfairly as justification of their rejection of faith. But if Nietzsche could cry out to the old man in the forest that God is dead, the Jew in me cannot. I have never renounced my faith in God. I have risen against His justice, protested His silence, and sometimes His absence, but my anger rises up within faith and not outside it." However, this explanation had little if any impact. In the end, none of Wiesel's later books enjoyed a success that even approaches that of "Night." If God is not dead, the question remains: Where was He during the Holocaust? "Do you think I know? I truly do not know, and therefore I cry out. I cry out in a whisper, because I cannot shout. My voice is very quiet. I speak in a whisper and write in a whisper. The religious zealots say that the Jewish people sinned and God punished them. When I meet with great rabbis, I say, 'You tell me - in what could we have sinned to merit such a punishment?' "I was friends with the Lubavitcher Rebbe. I asked him how it was possible to believe after what happened. He said, 'How is it possible not to believe.' I said, 'If you have just given me an answer, I do not accept it, but if you gave me another question, then I accept it.' There is no explanation. If God Himself appeared in a dream or a vision and gave me an answer, I would say that I do not accept it. To this I have no answer. I have no answer." Do you believe that after death you will actually meet God? "I do not know. I have the feeling that after death I will meet my parents and my grandfather. A strange feeling. But to say that I will actually meet God? I don't know." And if such a meeting takes place? "I think that when the time comes I will ask the same questions." It's all trueA very mystical scene takes place in "Night" toward the end of the war, during the death march that set out from Auschwitz. At night, in a place called Gleiwitz, Juliek, one of the members of the camp orchestra, takes out his violin and plays "a fragment from Beethoven's concerto." He played "in this dark shed, where the dead were heaped on the living ... How could I forget that concert, given to an audience of dying and dead men!" Eliezer is overcome by sleep, and "When I awoke, in the daylight, I could see Juliek, opposite me, slumped over, dead. Near him lay his violin, smashed, trampled, a strange overwhelming little corpse." In later years, he writes, the Beethoven concerto always evokes the death march for him, he writes. Oprah Winfrey's choice of "Night" for her book club not only generated mass sales. It also involved Wiesel in a debate about the credibility of the violin scene and the hanging scene. The reason was that "Night" was selected immediately after the memoir by James Frey, "A Million Little Pieces," which recounts the author's addiction to drugs and alcohol and his rehabilitation. Research by the Internet site Smoking Gun showed that Frey had concocted many of the details in the supposed memoir. Frey was forced to admit that he had fabricated elements of the book, and a debate sprang up in the American media over the boundaries of the permissible for memoir writers. "Night" was the first book to be chosen a second time for Winfrey's club. The first time was about a decade ago. Some observers alleged that she was trying to take advantage of Wiesel's reputation in order to repair the damage Frey caused her. Some said she had again picked a book that was partly fictional. It was not the first time that such allegations had been raised about some of the scenes in "Night." In "All Rivers Run to the Sea," Wiesel talks about the literary critic Alfred Kazin, who "remains one of my great disappointments." Kazin, Wiesel relates, wrote that he would not be surprised to discover that "the episode in 'Night' describing three inmates who were hanged together had been invented." Wiesel asks, furiously, "How dare he? There were thousands of witnesses. Of all the vile things this bitter man ... has written in his life, this is the most intolerable. In the last analysis, a man like Kazin is lending credence to those who deny the Holocaust." The American left-wing journalist Alexander Cockburn recently published an article on "Night" in which he discusses whether Winfrey again chose a non-credible book. Cockburn based his article in part on Prof. Raul Hilberg, one of the world's leading Holocaust experts. Hilberg told Haaretz this week, "I am satisfied that the hanging took place, but I am inclined to doubt that he was a boy." He is drawing, among other evidence, on testimony that appears in the Auschwitz Archive stating the names of the three who were hanged but failing to mention that one of them was a boy. According to Hilberg, the question of whether one of the three was a boy is very significant for Christian readers, because the scene of the hanging of two adults and a boy appears to reenact the crucifixion of Jesus. "Wiesel reported what he recalled, but what he recalled is another matter," Hilberg said. Wiesel, for his part, insists that "everything that is written in 'Night' is factual. Even the silence between the words is factual. Heaven forbid, in this book everything is true. If it is no longer possible to believe the testimony of a survivor, what shall we believe?" There were very few articles that questioned the authenticity of the book, Wiesel notes. "It passed very quickly, on the contrary, there were articles in The New York Times attacking Frey for making people suspicious even of Elie Wiesel." Concerning the hanging scene, he says that over the years he met others who had also witnessed the event. One of them, Fred Diamond, "told me that the boy was his brother." Wiesel maintains that "Hilberg never took an interest in the testimonies of survivors and never mentioned survivors," and that what counts for him are documents of the Nazi SS. Hilberg says he admires Wiesel. There are those who say that the difference between the original Yiddish version of "Night " and the French version is a result of adapting it to the taste of a Christian readership. "That is not true. Not true. That is completely untrue." What is the difference? "There is no difference. I simply cut it. Pruned it. Simply pruned it. My manuscript was rejected by all the major publishers in France. Mauriac himself went from one publisher to another until he found a small publisher, Jerome Lindon, who has now become rich. He cut 40-50 pages." [According to Ruth Franklin, in an article in The New Republic Online on March 23, 2006, the Yiddish manuscript was some 800 pages long, the French version 121 pages.] Doubts were also raised about the violin scene. The question in this case is whether it is possible that someone would have taken the trouble to carry an awkward object such as a violin in the horrific conditions of a death march. Hilberg says that an intellectual he knows who was in the death march says the whole business of the violin is nonsense. However, he says, after devoting much thought to the subject, he finds that it is not impossible that the members of the orchestras took the violin with them. Wiesel: "Do you think that a violinist would not take his violin wherever he went? All the more so, because he thought he was going to a different camp, where there would also be an orchestra." I need prayerTen thousand inmates, Wiesel relates in "Night," took part in the Rosh Hashanah prayers in Buna camp in Auschwitz in 1944, including kapos and heads of blocks. "'Blessed be the Name of the Eternal!' Thousands of voices repeated the benediction," but this was no ordinary prayer for Eliezer/Wiesel: "Why, but why should I bless Him? In every fiber I rebelled. Because He had had thousands of children burned in His pits? Because He kept six crematories working night and day, on Sundays and feast days?" On that day, Wiesel relates in the book, "I had ceased to plead. I was no longer capable of lamentation. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused ... We stayed for a long time at the assembly place. No one dared to drag himself away from this mirage. Then it was time to go to bed and slowly the prisoners made their way over to their blocks. I heard people wishing one another a Happy New Year!" Did Wiesel cease to pray after Auschwitz? In "All Rivers Run to the Sea," he relates that in the mid-1950s, when he was in New York, he stopped attending synagogue services (apart from the High Holy Days), "because I was mired in a religious crisis." He writes that this began during his first visit to Israel, when he "forgot" to put on tefillin (phylacteries) for the first time. "It was in Jerusalem, most sacred and spiritual of cities, that I first felt the need to protest against divine justice and injustice." Even if Wiesel did not become reconciled with God, he appears to have made his peace with the rituals of Judaism and especially with prayer. Even before the interview, one of Wiesel's Jerusalem friends told me that in many ways he behaves like a religiously observant Jew, praying and putting on tefillin. I was also told that he changes words he does not agree with in prayers. Wiesel himself says that he prayed in Auschwitz and that he can certainly pray elsewhere. "I pray because my father prayed, because my grandfather prayed ... Seemingly this has nothing to do with God. But I do not want to talk about my religious life, really. That is a very personal matter. I do not want the religious extremists to say that even Elie Wiesel prays." "God," he says, "does not need these prayers. We need them, each person for himself. For me it is exceedingly important. My father prayed, my grandfather prayed, Rashi was one of my forebears. If it was good enough for Rashi, it is good enough for me, too." Are you still a religious person? Did you go back to being religiously observant? "If you are asking me whether I am a religious person now in the same way I used to be - no. If you are asking me whether I belong to a religious framework - no. If you are asking whether I believe in God's existence in the world - yes. If you are asking whether I uphold the tradition as I used to - no. But I try, at any rate, to follow my father's path. I try very hard." What does that give you? "I do not do it in order get something. It defines me for myself. Who I am." Prayer is a request. How can you make a request of one who did not respond to you in Auschwitz? "The truth is, there are prayers that I now find surprising that I recited there in the camp together with my father and others. We would get up before everyone and stand in line to put on tefillin. Today I say, What did we do? What did we do? What for? Even in terms of halakha [Jewish religious law], we should not have risked our lives. To say 'How goodly is our lot'? In Auschwitz? Really." I did not succeed in getting an answer from Wiesel about when he went back to praying regularly. But in 1986, when he won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Haaretz correspondent in New York, Shlomo Shamir, reported that he prayed regularly at a synagogue near his home in Manhattan. What do you do on Yom Kippur? "On Yom Kippur I fast all day, of course, and pray all day like everyone, partly in solidarity with the Jewish people. Solidarity for me is not only with the present but also with the past, solidarity with all those who prayed on this day. Do I agree with all the prayers? No. But I recite them. I say them with intention." Do you amend them? "I do not amend them, no. Not on Yom Kippur." Still, Yom Kippur is a day of asking for forgiveness from the Creator. "I think that Yom Kippur is a dual process: I will forgive the Creator and He will forgive me."