PART I

PRIVATE GRIEF BECOMES PUBLIC OUTCRY

This essay has been the most difficult to write and took the longest time. The topic is so laden with emotion that a person searching for the truth steps into a minefield that has to be navigated very carefully. To arrive at objective truth, which is the purpose of this website, one needs to look at the motives and actions of both sides to a controversy in a dispassionate manner and one must not be swayed by either. “Without fear or favor,” should be the motto for an exploration of this type. Furthermore, since the subject must not be trivialized it requires more than one installment because otherwise it would become too lengthy. This is also the reason why I had to break with precedent and not stay with the self imposed “first of the month installment routine.”

Inasmuch as the Nazis’ “Final Solution” of the Jewish problem has occurred more than 60 years ago one may wonder why the subject should be raised now. The reason is that there is a strange phenomenon occurring in our society; the more time elapses since the event, the more is published about it, although no new facts have emerged. If one types “Holocaust” into Google one is rewarded within 0.09 seconds with about 63,200.000 entries. This is surely a prodigious number and no one can be expected to absorb this ocean of data. Choices have to be made and in the search for my own understanding of this phenomenon I broke the subject down into three aspects: What prompted the Nazis to attempt their “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem [Endlősung],” how did they proceed in actuality, and how is the outcome reported. Since I have already discussed the subject to some extent in War&Mayhem, as well as in The Moses Legacy, I shall proceed here not from the past to the present but from the present to the past. 

But this does not quite answer why this topic should be discussed in February of 2006 when there are so many others that could be addressed. The reason is that we may be standing on the brink of another war, this time with Iran over its determination to acquire nuclear weapons. Since it has also been reported that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has recently stated that the Holocaust is a lie and the State of Israel, which arose from its ashes, has no right to exist, we have been confronted again with what is now called “Holocaust denial.” These are serious matters which deserve serious answers and the usual excuse of mental illness, or pure evil that seems to afflict everyone whose opinions differ radically from what is generally accepted, will not suffice.

In addition there was the flap in regard to when a book should be called a “novel” and belongs thereby into the “fiction” category or an “autobiography” which would place it into the “nonfiction” bracket. This was precipitated by James Frey’s: “A Million Little Pieces,” which purported to be a true account of Mr. Frey’s life of crime and drug addiction. The book had been selected by America’s talk show queen, Oprah Winfrey who can make and break literary careers, for her book club and sales soared into a multi million dollar figure. Although our press is somewhat less than vigilant we do have the Internet and the site www.thesmokinggun.com published an article in January entitled “A Million Little Lies.” It pointed out that far from being an exact account of his trials and tribulations, Frey had been not been truthful and that Oprah had been duped. Ms Winfrey, who had at first defended Frey, subsequently became furious and called him on the carpet in one of her later shows.

The matter might have rested there had Oprah not immediately thereafter endorsed the new translation of Elie Wiesel’s Night as her next book club selection. This reopened the question posed above: when is an account a memoir and as such regarded as fact or a novel inspired by autobiographic events? Since Night deals with Mr. Wiesel’s experiences, first in Auschwitz and subsequently Buchenwald, this book has assumed an importance which far outweighs any of the other book club selections. When we consider further that Mr. Wiesel was the person who popularized the word “Holocaust” in the context of the “Final Solution” and  has dedicated his life to keeping the memory of this tragedy alive, it is obvious that our quest for the truth will have to start with him.

 Elie, short for Eliezer, Wiesel had a very distinguished career and inasmuch as he was the chief spokesman for Holocaust survivors President Jimmy Carter appointed him in 1978 Chairman of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust. Its final report called for, among other aspects, the creation of a National Holocaust Memorial/Museum in Washington DC, an Educational Foundation that disseminates Holocaust information throughout American High Schools and Universities, a Committee on Conscience, and Holocaust Memorial Days. In 1985 he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom and in 1986 the Nobel Prize for Peace. He has been Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities at Boston University, was inducted into the Academy of Achievement in 1996; and was invited to give a speech in the East Room of the White House on April 12, 1999 as part of the Millennium Lecture Series hosted by President Clinton and his wife Hillary. It is, therefore, obvious that Mr. Wiesel commands unparalleled moral stature in America and is a person not only the public but Presidents listen to.

Although I had read Night decades ago and was appalled by the humiliations, brutalization and outright murders that had occurred at Auschwitz I also felt that some details might have been embellished. The book was not written in the style of Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning but in a tone one is accustomed to from historical novels. This didn’t bother me because survivors of concentration camps had every right to present their experiences in any form they wished. But when the Oprah story hit the news and brought with it not only a resurgence of “Night” but also a reclassification from novel to memoir by Barnes&Noble as well as amazon.com my interest in this piece of literature was rekindled.

The Internet informed me that Night, which was published first in French as La Nuit (1958), was based on an account of nearly 900 pages written in Yiddish and published in Argentina under the title “Un die Velt hot geshvigen.” Although I do not speak Yiddish the language is sufficiently similar to German, having been derived from it, that I thought it would be interesting to compare the four versions: the original one which had been significantly shortened to 256 pages prior to its publication in Argentina with the French one of 178 pages, the first English translation from 1960 and the new one from 2006. Since the French and Yiddish editions are not commercially available here I thought I might get them through my niece in Vienna who works in the book trade. When she asked me if I can read Hebrew I was taken aback and lectured her that there is a difference between Yiddish and Hebrew and my ignorance of Hebrew is irrelevant for this purpose. Well, as it turned out she was right and I was wrong. Since no help was forthcoming from Vienna I did what I should have done in the first place; contacted the Marriott Library of our University and lo and behold both La Nuit and Un die Velt hot geshvigen were available on the stacks. But to my great surprise the universally referred to “Yiddish” book is actually in Hebrew, reads from back to front and only the title as well as the publishing firm (Buenos Ayres, Tsentral-Farband fun Poylishe Yidn in Argentine, 716, 1956, in the series Dos Poylishe Yidentum) are in Yiddish.

Well, I had struck out on that one but there was La Nuit and the Preface by François Mauriac, which I could compare with the two English translations. To get those Martha and I went to the neighborhood Barnes&Noble which was busy selling numerous copies. When I asked the clerk for the original edition, which I no longer had, he told me that I might as well buy the whole trilogy because it’s the same price. Although I didn’t want to I couldn’t resist the bargain and now I had Night, Dawn and The Accident.  In retrospect I am, of course, grateful to that clerk because the three books really belong together but I shall deal with the other two later. There are some differences between the two English editions of Night in addition to the Preface by Elie Wiesel for the current one as well as Wiesel’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. The 2006 translation by Wiesel’s wife is somewhat more concise and in colloquial American. While Stella Rodway tried to stay as close as possible to the more poetic language of the French original, the new translation is at times less so by cutting out parts of sentences which had been used originally for further emphasis.

It is now necessary to point to the importance of Maitre Mauriac, as he was referred to by everyone in France at that time, for the life and subsequent fame of Elie Wiesel. There are two versions of what went on when Wiesel interviewed Mauriac in 1955 for the Tel Aviv newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. One is by Mauriac in the Preface to La Nuit and the other in an interview by Wiesel for the Academy of Achievement. I shall deal with Mauriac’s first. He had received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1952 and was rather tired of interviews but as he wrote, “the young Israeli (Israëlien) inspired from the outset a sympathy in me against which I couldn’t defend myself for any length of time [my translation].” The conversation soon became personal. When Mauriac mentioned an event his wife had witnessed at the Austerlitz train station of wagons filled with Jewish children (wagons remplis d’enfants juifs), which had disturbed him profoundly, Wiesel said: “I am one of them.” The shocked Mauriac continued, “he had seen his mother, a little sister whom he had adored and his entire family [tous les siens], apart from his father, disappear into an oven fed with living creatures.” The new edition has changed Mauriac’s words to “except his father and two other sisters.” Although Wiesel commented on another occasion that his two older sisters had survived he seems not to have mentioned that to Mauriac. The Preface then continues with portions from La Nuit and especially the now famous and often repeated passage,

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky. Never shall I forget those flames that consumed forever my faith. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the will to live. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul, and turned my dreams into ashes. Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God himself. Never [2006 translation].”

These were powerful words and the deeply religious Catholic Mauriac, whose novels dealt mainly with the evil in man especially towards children, was profoundly moved. He went on quoting more passages from La Nuit which described Wiesel’s loss of faith in God and regretted that he could not find words of consolation at the time. He mentioned that he should have said that the Jewish nation has risen from the ashes of the dead, that we don’t know the worth of a single drop of blood, of a single soul and that all is grace. “But I couldn’t do anything except embrace him weeping.”

Such was the beginning of Elie Wiesel’s career because it was Mauriac, who had encouraged him after this interview to put his thoughts to paper which led to the mentioned publication in Argentina one year later, and La Nuit in 1958. To what extent Mauriac was responsible for the final form of the French publication, which reduced the Yiddish-Hebrew version from 256 pages to 178 and rendered it into poetic French we may never know. Wiesel only mentioned that Mauriac had become his lifelong friend thereafter who did everything in his power to get the French manuscript published even to the extent of visiting personally numerous reluctant publishers.

But everyone experiences the same event somewhat differently and here is Wiesel’s account from an interview after his induction into the Academy of Achievement. As mentioned he was a journalist for the Israeli paper and had intended to interview the then Prime Minister of France, Mendès-France, who was also Jewish. He was unsuccessful in this endeavor but he had heard that Mauriac was “his guru” and hoped that he might help him to see the Prime Minister. This is how the interview came about as Wiesel tells it,

“We met and we had a painful discussion. The problem was that he was in love with Jesus. He was the most decent person I ever met in that field - - as a writer, as a Catholic writer. Honest, sense of integrity, and he was in love with Jesus.

Whatever I would ask – Jesus. Finally, I said ‘what about Mendès-France?’ he said that Mendès-France, like Jesus was suffering. That’s not what I wanted to hear. I wanted, at one point to speak about Mendès-France and I would say to Mauriac, can you introduce me?

When he said Jesus again I couldn’t take it, and for the only time in my life I was discourteous, which I regret to this day. I said, ‘Mr. Mauriac,’ we called him Maitre,’ ten years or so ago, I have seen children, hundreds of Jewish children, who suffered more than Jesus did on his cross and we do not speak about it.’ I felt all of a sudden so embarrassed that I closed my notebook and went to the elevator. He ran after me. He pulled me back; he sat down in his chair and I in mine, and he began weeping. I have rarely seen an old man [Mauriac was 70 in 1955] weep like that, and I felt like such an idiot. I felt like a criminal. This man didn’t deserve that. He was really a pure man, a member of the Resistance. I didn’t know what to do. We stayed like that, he weeping and I closed in my remorse. And then, at the end, without saying anything, he simply said, ‘You know, maybe you should talk about it’ [italics in the original].

He took me to the elevator and embraced me. And that year, the tenth year, I began writing my narrative. After it was translated from Yiddish [sic] into French, I sent it to him. We were very, very close friends until his death. That made me not publish, but write.”

            Those are all the facts we can ascertain at this time about the genesis of La Nuit. In the same interview Wiesel explained how he had come to use the word Holocaust to describe the Jewish concentration camp tragedy.

            “Take the word ‘Holocaust.’ I am among the first, if not the first to use it in that context. I was working on an essay, a biblical commentary, and I wrote about the sacrifice, the binding of Isaac, by his father Abraham. In the Bible, there is a Hebrew word ola, which means burned offering. I thought the word ‘holocaust ‘was good: fire and so on. In the Bible, it was the son who almost died, but in our case it was the father who died, not the son. The word had so many implications that I felt it was good. Then it became accepted, and everybody used it and then I stopped using it because it was abused. Everything was a holocaust all of a sudden. I once heard a sportscaster on television speaking of the defeat of a sports team and he said, ‘Was that a holocaust!’ My God! Everything became a holocaust.”

            Yes indeed and the victims, as well as the descriptions of the atrocities, keep growing in the genre of La Nuit. Although the emphasis now is on the extermination of human beings and especially Jews by gassing, rather than burning, Wiesel does not mention having witnessed that atrocity in the book. Instead there is another powerful passage that describes his experience in Auschwitz after the selection by Dr. Mengele, who by the way was supposed to have worn a monocle which is unlikely for an SS officer. While being marched in the direction of a ditch he was told by another inmate that they were to be killed,

            “Not far from us flames, huge flames, were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there. A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children. Babies! Yes, I did see this, with my own eyes . . . those children in the flames. (Is it any wonder that ever since then, sleep tends to elude me?)”

As the procession of men moved forward toward a larger ditch for adults, people prayed,

“’Yisgadal, veyiskadash shmey raba . . . May His Name be celebrated and sanctified . . .’ whispered my father.

            For the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank Him for?

            We continued our march. We were coming closer and closer to the pit, from which an infernal heat was rising. Twenty more steps. If I was going to kill myself, this was the time. Our column had only some fifteen steps to go. I bit my lips so that my father would not hear my teeth chattering. Ten more steps. Eight. Seven. We were walking slowly, as one follows a hearse, our own funeral procession. Only four more steps. Three. There it was now, very close to us, the pit and its flames. . . . [2006 translation]”

Two steps before reaching the ditch they were ordered to turn to the left and made to go into barracks. The narration continued with the previously cited “Never shall I forget” passages.

I have mentioned these details because an account of this type does not show up in other Holocaust literature. After selection, those that had been destined for labor were led directly to disinfection, where they were also robbed of all their remaining belongings, and then sent to their barracks; the others simply disappeared. The dramatic countdown of steps towards the ditch also occurs in the subsequent publication Dawn in another context. The report of babies being thrown into a fiery pit, which Wiesel emphatically claims to have seen with his own eyes, has not been corroborated by credible witnesses. This part of the story immediately brought to my mind the behavior of Egyptian overseers who tore little children from the arms of their mothers handing them to the fathers to use as bricks for building pharaoh’s “store cities.” I have described that legend in The Moses Legacy because it forms part of the Talmud, which Wiesel said he has been studying diligently.

It seems, therefore, very likely that poetic license had been taken which would have been perfectly understandable especially when one considers the circumstances under which this book first appeared in print. But on January 16, 2006 The New York Times reported in an interview with Wiesel, “’But it is not a novel at all,’ he said. ‘I know the difference,’ he added, noting that ‘Night’ is the first of his 47 books, several of which are novels. ‘I make a distinction between what I lived through and what I imagine others to have lived through.’ As it is a memoir, he said, ‘my experiences in the book - A to Z -must be true.’ He continued: ‘All the people I describe were with me there. I object angrily if someone mentions it as a novel.’”  

Well, there may be a difference between “what must be true” subjectively and what can be objectively verified; a topic which I have discussed in “What is Truth?” (September 2001) and “Perceptions of Reality” (August 2004). We need to remember at this point that Wiesel was 15 years old when he was transported to Auschwitz and 16 when he was liberated from Buchenwald. Adolescents, even when they have been brutalized, tend to go on with their lives and while they will not forget their experiences they usually don’t dwell on them to the extent Wiesel did. The possible reasons for doing so will be discussed after we have looked at the other two semi-autobiographic books.

For now it seems that the contents of Night had undergone several changes before they appeared in the form we now know. A document that may have originally been an attempt at soul cleansing was turned into one that is gripping, but which may not be correct in all aspects. This assumption finds some validation in Dawn and The Accident (L’Aube and Le Jour in the original French), which followed shortly after Night.

Dawn, is also written in the first person singular and deals with young Elisha, who had been liberated from Buchenwald and sent to Paris. There he was recruited by a member of the Irgun, the illegal terrorist organization for the struggle to liberate Palestine from the British, so that the Jews could build their own state. The novel, apart from flashbacks, takes place within one house during one night and centers on Elisha’s conflict with his conscience when he is ordered to execute a British captain in retaliation for one of their terrorist brotherhood who was to be executed by the British on the same morning. The word terrorist is, of course, applied to different people today but it was freely used and morally justified in Dawn. Elisha had no scruples participating in raids against the British where people got killed, that was part of war, but murdering your “enemy” face to face, whom you didn’t even hate is quite different. Wiesel used two devices to dramatize the situation further. There is a countdown from ten seconds to one before he fires the fatal shot, which is quite reminiscent of the twenty paces to two in Night and there is also the presence of the ghosts of his parents, friends, and acquaintances who have all perished in the camps, as well as himself as the young boy he had been previously. This assembly appears to be saddened by what he is about to do because it will turn him into a murderer for the rest of his life. This in turn would make murderers out of them because they had made him into what he had become.

Biographies of Wiesel state that he was associated with the Irgun but as a reporter for their newspaper. Since Wiesel does not talk about this aspect of his life we don’t know what he did or did not do at that time but the actions of the “Stern gang” and subsequently the Irgun under Shamir are well documented in Terror out of Zion. The Fight for Israeli Independence by J. Bowyer Bell.

Wiesel’s third book The Accident [Le Jour] grapples with Hamlet’s existential question: “to be or not to be.” The narrator, whom we know mainly as “I,” (he uses the name Eliezer only once in connection with his mother’s name Sarah) was nearly killed by a taxicab, while crossing Times Square with his girl friend. It may, however, not have been a pure accident but an unsuccessful suicide attempt by not moving away from the oncoming cab. He was initially in critical condition but recovered after several months of hospitalization. The long months in the hospital, while flat on his back gave him time to reminisce and come to terms with his inner demons. The accident itself and the hospitalization are true but what thoughts he had formed can only be conjectured.

Although it is acknowledged that Night would never have been written and published without the help of Mauriac, the influence of Albert Camus on Wiesel’s literary work has received less comment. Yet, for anyone who has read some of Camus’ plays, essays, and novels it is apparent that Camus had a powerful influence not only on Wiesel’s writings but mental outlook. Perhaps the most important one was La Peste (The Plague). The theme of La Peste is: the sense of total abandonment, in a city the gates of which had been closed because of a raging epidemic; the coping mechanisms of its citizens which include indifference and apathy towards those who were dying around them; the accusation of God for permitting such disasters and especially the killing of innocent children. But while Camus stressed the universality of human suffering, its reasons and how to overcome it, Wiesel honed in on the specific Jewish aspects as seen through the lens of Hasidic legends, Torah and Talmud.

While traces of La Peste can be found in all of Wiesel’s writings and speeches, Dawn bears a close resemblance to Les Justes (The Just Assassins). It likewise contains one woman and four male terrorists in a single apartment who plot the assassination of a representative of an oppressive regime for the greater good. The difference is that Camus placed his terrorists into imperial Russia. The victim is the Grand Duke and the terrorists, the word appears as such in both books, are revolutionary socialists rather than patriotic Jews. The similarity between the character of Ivan (Yenka) Kaliayev, who kills the Grand Duke with a bomb and Elisha who executes Captain Dawson is quite striking. So is the similarity between Dr. Paul Russell in The Accident with Dr. Bernard Rieux in The Plague. The existential problem whether it is better to live rather than commit suicide was also extensively discussed by Camus; first in the 1942 essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” and subsequently in “The Rebel” (1951).

These observations allow us a glimpse into Elie Wiesel’s personal torment and how he tried to exorcise the ghosts of his past. The key word became “memory,” which had to be kept not only alive but aflame. The flames of the crematories, or the ditches, of Night became the focus of his life, giving rise to the much abused word Holocaust that now divides our world. But as mentioned one might wonder whether Wiesel had in fact personally seen everything he reported or whether he had heard about some aspects from other Auschwitz inmates. This is not a trivial question because it is to be expected that rumors were rife in the concentration camp environment and human beings are known to embellish misfortunes. It is also known that in criminal trials eyewitness testimony is not always entirely reliable and needs to be corroborated by objective evidence. I shall return to this aspect later in the context of what is now called “Holocaust Denial.” Although the Holocaust and the Final Solution are dependent upon each other their totality may be best viewed as two sides of a coin and as such are not identical. Objective truth about the Final Solution might be found in official documents while Holocaust truth seems to be based mainly on the subjective experience of the victims.

Let me now give my personal view on how the Holocaust concept came into being. There can be no doubt that the adolescent Eliezer, was thoroughly traumatized by the events he had to endure from spring 1944 to May 1945. He told us that he had been interested in studying the Cabbala but his father had discouraged the idea because he was too young for that. One studies mysticism as an adult after one has mastered all the practical subjects that get one through life, he was told. Yet, his very name Eliezer, was also that of the founder of Hasidism, Israel b Eliezer better known Baal Shem Tov (master of the divine name) or Besht for short, so how could he be expected not to be drawn to that subject? Very little is known about Wiesel’s inner life and the emphasis has always been placed on atrocities committed by the Nazis, which undoubtedly occurred. About his activities in Palestine, which he refers to in Dawn we know nothing. But even if we exclude Dawn and concentrate only on Night there are likely to exist undercurrents of personal guilt feelings in Wiesel’s mind if what he wrote had indeed happened.

It is well known that relationships between father and son, especially in adolescence, can be quite complex and do not require Freud’s Oedipus complex for explanation. But we have been told little about the feelings between father Wiesel and son prior to deportation. In Night Wiesel only stated that the father was, “a cultured person, rather unsentimental (un homme cultivé, peu sentimentale). No display of affection, not even within the family (Aucune effusion, même en famille).” The terseness of the sentences is telling and is followed by the statement that the father was more interested in the affairs of others than the family. Thus, the relationship is likely to have been distant and one of duty rather than cordiality.

 He gives two examples in Night of untoward behavior of sons towards their fathers during his concentration camp days but he may not to have come to grips with his own feelings. We are told that he had urged his father to take the family to Palestine when there still might have been an opportunity, but the father had refused. Is it so far fetched to assume that there could have been some lingering resentment towards the father, who in a way had become responsible for the son’s subsequent suffering? In addition we are told that the father-son roles were to some extent reversed in the camp and the son became responsible for the father; a burden he may not have always relished. We are also told that they could have stayed at the Auschwitz infirmary to await the liberating Russians but on the boy’s urging they did not. In this way he had indirectly contributed to his father’s death in Buchenwald. It would be surprising if this had not led to profound guilt feelings thereafter.

There is additional potential evidence that Wiesel is still haunted by the father’s death. In the Preface for the new edition of Night he mentions some passages from the Yiddish [sic] version that deal directly with this topic,

“I remember that night, the most horrendous of my life: ‘Eliezer, my son, come here . . .  I want to tell you something . . . Only to you . . . Come don’t leave me alone . . . Eliezer . . .’

I heard his voice, grasped the meaning of his words and the tragic dimension of the moment, yet I did not move.

It had been his last wish to have me next to him in his agony, at the moment when his soul was tearing itself from his lacerated body – yet I did not let him have his wish.

I was afraid.

Afraid of the blows.

That’s why I remained deaf to his cries.”

This has the ring of truth and if it were to be the truth it would explain a great many aspects of his subsequent life. A Catholic boy could have gone to confession poured out his soul to the priest and would have received absolution, because that was what was called for. To the Jewish boy this avenue was denied because only God can forgive sins and his faith in God had been profoundly shattered. Father and God became synonymous; in his mind he may have believed that he had killed both.

This may be the tragedy of Wiesel’s life for which he has tried to atone. His personal guilt and hatred for his perceived cowardice, at a crucial moment, could only be directed towards the perpetrators of the situation he had innocently been placed in. Their crimes must never be forgotten and even their graves must not be visited because the Jewish people who had been brutally murdered did not have graves they could be remembered by; their bodies went up in smoke. Some of us still remember Wiesel’s violent opposition to President Reagan visiting the cemetery at Bitburg, upon invitation of Chancellor Kohl, because among the hundreds of soldiers who had died in previous wars there were also some members of the Waffen SS. As a Catholic I couldn’t understand at that time what I perceived as hate beyond the grave but when one looks at it in this context it does make some sense. This becomes even clearer when one is aware that cremation is unacceptable in the Jewish religion.

This psychological drama may well afflict other Jewish concentration camp survivors. What they had to do in order to stay alive cannot be described but can remain a life long burden on their conscience. By focusing on the atrocities inflicted upon them and devoting one’s life towards their future prevention it was hoped that a degree of mental equilibrium might become achievable for the survivors. In Wiesel’s case this seems not to have worked very well. When one looks at his most recent photograph in TIME, January 30, 2006 one is reminded of what Mauriac has described in the Preface to La Nuit, “the gaze of a Lazarus risen from the dead yet still [pourtant toujours] held captive in the somber regions into which he had strayed, stumbling over desecrated corpses [2006 translation]. 

This is Elie Wiesel’s personal tragedy, which still haunts him and cannot be overcome by honors, fame, or money. From these feelings the word Holocaust, in its current connotation, was born. The fact that an originally religious term has been secularized and is as such not acceptable for this purpose to some observant Jews is disregarded. The Greek word appeared first in the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Torah where it refers to “whole-burned offering” or simply “burnt offering.” This produced a quandary for truly religious Jews because under those circumstances the murders committed by the Nazis would have been a sacrifice to God, which was hardly the intent. Some observant Jews prefer, therefore, the term shoah for the “Final Solution,” which simply denotes “devastation” or “catastrophe.” But that word also has its problems because it is regarded as too general and does not emphasize the uniqueness of the event, vociferous proponents of the Holocaust insist on. It may also remind people of Al-Naqba (the catastrophe), which is the term Palestinians use for the expulsion from their homes during the establishment of the State of Israel. This was clearly an event in Jewish history not too many Jews, both here and in Israel, want to be reminded of but it is now inextricably entwined with the Holocaust. Arabs cherish their memories too.

To sum up: the transition from the “Final Solution” to the “Holocaust” was based on a semi-autobiographic account by a young Elie Wiesel that accused the world of silence in face of a catastrophe that had befallen the Jewish people. To the best of my knowledge Un di Velt hot geshvigen has never been translated into English but since it is the forerunner of La Nuit and Night, which has become required reading for our children and grandchildren, this should be done. Under those circumstances we would get to know the genuine Eliezer Wiesel rather than the one who is presented to the world via Mauriac. This comparison is essential if we want to get at the truth of Wiesel’s thinking because the consequences, which will be discussed in next week’s installment, affect all of us.

When this article was originally published I had been unaware that Yiddish uses Hebrew letters rather than the Latin script. This error stemmed from my Viennese upbringing, where a great many Yiddish words appeared in journals or books in our common type script. I am indebted to Mr. Israel Shamir of having pointed out the error and who assured me that the mentioned Wiesel book is indeed in Yiddish.