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The Art of Inventing Hope
Intimate Conversations with Elie Wiesel
Howard Reich
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eBook - ePub
The Art of Inventing Hope
Intimate Conversations with Elie Wiesel
Howard Reich
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About This Book
The Art of Inventing Hope offers an unprecedented, in-depth conversation between the world's most revered Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, and a son of survivors, Howard Reich. During the last four years of Wiesel's life, he met frequently with Reich in New York, Chicago and Floridaâand spoke with him often on the phoneâto discuss the subject that linked them: Reich's father, Robert Reich, and Wiesel were both liberated from the Buchenwald death camp on April 11, 1945.
What had started as an interview assignment from the Chicago Tribune quickly evolved into a friendship and a partnership. Reich and Wiesel believed their colloquy represented a unique exchange between two generations deeply affected by a cataclysmic event. Wiesel said to Reich, "I've never done anything like this before, " and after reading the final book, asked him not to change a word.
Here Wieselâat the end of his lifeâlooks back on his ideas and writings on the Holocaust, synthesizing them in his conversations with Reich. The insights on life, ethics, and memory that Wiesel offers and Reich illuminates will not only help the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors understand their painful inheritance, but will benefit everyone, young or old.
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1
The Holocaust Returns
Itâs the middle of the night, and I should be asleep, but Iâve gotten out of bed for a drink of water. Iâm ten years old and living in our squat but, to us, luxurious ranch house in Skokie, Illinois. As I take a few steps out of my bedroom, which is just a few steps from every other room, I see exactly what I expect: my mother sitting on the floor in the darkened living room, her petite silhouette outlined by soft yellow light trickling in from the streetlamp outside. As always, she has lifted the window shade a couple inches above the sill, so she can peer out and watch the occasional car drive silently by.
Sheâs always there when I get out of bed at night, when I feel ill and call out for help, whenever sheâs needed, really. She doesnât seem to sleepâcertainly not in bed, as far as I can tell. Instead she keeps a nightly vigil in our living room and has done so for as long as I can remember. In fact, I figure all moms must spend each night in front of the living room window, guarding everyone else.
But this is not the only nocturnal ritual in our house. Often my father gets out of bed and proceeds directly to the breakfront in our dining room, opens the bottom cabinet door, lifts up a bottle of whiskey, twists out the cork, and draws a few swallows. Then he methodically recorks the fifth, puts it away, closes the cabinet door, and heads back to bed, saying not a word to my mother as he passes her. Or at least none that I can hear. Sometimes he does this two or three times a night. Heâll have to get out of bed for good soon anyway, because long before sunrise, heâll need to drive to the bakery where he works in Chicago, and the alcohol helps him sleep. Or helps him try.
On weekends, though, he gets to sleep later in the morning, and often when he wakes up, he tells us about his dreams.
âI was killing Nazis good,â he says, with an air of triumph. âI was shooting them down.â
I know that my dad and mom have survived what they briefly told me was the Holocaust, that most of their relatives were executed for being Jews, that my parents had to start over here, in America, and that they feel lucky for that, as if theyâd hit the jackpot. But thatâs about all I know. And, frankly, itâs all I want to know. If machine-gunning Nazis in his dreams makes my dad happy, thatâs fine with me. Sounds like an Audie Murphy movie.
As I look back on it, though, those early years in Skokieâand a few in Chicago before thatâwere haunted by the Holocaust in ways I did not recognize or understand at the time. We were never supposed to take showers, for instance, though my parents didnât tell me why. Our Skokie house had a perfectly fineâif compactâworking bathroom, but showers were categorically banned. My friends took showers, people on TV and in movies took showers, apparently everyone in America took showers, except us. Only baths. It wasnât until I was much older that I came to learn what showers signified for my mother and father.
When my father would talk to his survivor relatives on the telephone, the conversations often would devolve into screaming matches, someone inevitably smashing down the handset on the other party. Yet when we would go out on weekends, we would socialize exclusively with these same relatives who a few days earlier had been berating each other on the other end of the soon-to-be-slammed-down phone. If these relatives couldnât stand each other that much, I often wondered in my naĂŻvetĂ©, why were they getting together all the time? These survivors, who had experienced the worst that humanity had to offer, clearly trusted no one, not even each other. And yet they apparently found some kind of solace in each otherâs company, even amid their raging battles.
When I misbehaved, my parents and aunts and uncles sent Holocaust references my way without shedding much light on the subject. âYou wouldnât last ten minutes in the Holocaust,â an aunt would say. âYou should kiss the ground every day that you have a mother and a fatherâdo you know what I would give to have my parents?â my dad would snarl. âHe doesnât know how good he has it,â my mother would echo. âWhen I was your age, I was sleeping in the snow. But he has a big mouth to his parents.â
I didnât realize it then, but these people understandably were bursting with anger about what had happened to them and their families, their fury directed at anyone and everyone who happened to wander into their line of fire. Their passions poured forth at whomever was closest, and that, of course, was each other, and me. They had lost faith in virtually everyone, even blood relatives who had suffered through the same trials as them. I guess all of them had learnedâunder dire circumstancesâwhat people are capable of, and they could not forget it.
Still, coming to Skokie in 1964 was the greatest event in my familyâs life to that point, and not necessarily because so many survivors had moved there. No one really knew that fact at that time, anyway. Not until the late 1970s would the survivors in Skokie rise up as a group to be heard when famously confronted by neo-Nazis who threatened to march there, causing a worldwide media sensation.
No, Skokie was magical to us because of how far we had come to reach this place of impeccably trimmed lawns and bright, spotless streets.
In 1947, two years after the war, my mother arrived in Chicago as a sixteen-year-old educated only to age eight and now left practically to fend for herself without knowing a syllable of English. My father came to Chicago in 1949 at age twenty-seven, having spent the first year after the war in Germany recuperating from typhus and the effects of years of deprivations and abuse. The two met on a blind date in Chicago and in 1953 got married, a pair of Holocaust survivors whose shared histories surely bonded them as nothing else could.
In the mid-1950s, they opened a bakery with my fatherâs brother in Chicagoâs Germantown, Holocaust survivors choosing to run a business in the heart of the culture that had destroyed most of their families and decimated their people. That may seem odd, but, looking back on it, I suppose it made a strange kind of sense, from their point of view. My father and his brother, after all, had grown up in a family of bakers in Poland, and my father had trained as a baker in Germany after the war. Both spoke Deutsch fluently and knew how to bake German breads, pastries, and other delicacies just like the natives. How else were they to make a living in a strange country? And where else in Chicago could they better ply their trade than in Germantown?
What seemed a bit weird to me was that everyoneâmy parents, aunts, and unclesâtold me that I was not supposed to reveal to anyone that we were Jewish. They swore me to secrecy. Neither teachers nor classmates nor, above all, customers were to be told the truth. Clearly my parents feared that if anyone in Germantown knew that we were Jewsâlet alone that my parents had survived the Final Solution conceived in Germany and exported widelyâwho knew what would happen? Even in the 1950s, even in America, my parents feared revealing their true identities.
All of which was fine with me. I learned to speak German from my German babysitter, and I never got near a synagogue or a yarmulke or a prayer book or anything else remotely Jewish. Every day after school, my babysitter took me to church, where I learned to pray as a Catholic, making the gesture of the cross with my right arm traveling from shoulder to shoulder and head to torso and lighting the candles at the altar.
Unfortunately our bakery went bust with the recession of the late 1950s, and my dad quickly got a job working at someone elseâs bakery. That meant we moved to East Rogers Park, a gritty neighborhood on the north side of Chicago, and then, like thousands of other survivor families, on to the Promised Land, also known as Skokie.
The small suburb just north of Chicago was trying to grow into a bedroom community and explicitly sought out Jews who long had been unwelcome in suburbs ringing Chicago and beyond. One survivor told another and another, and by the â70s, Skokie would be home to an estimated seven to eight thousand of themâmore than 10 percent of the population of a town already more than half Jewishâall living in a village barely ten miles square.
Once we arrived, my parents finally announced themselves as Jews. I watched my dad proudly nail a mezuzah to the doorway. We joined a nearby temple and lit the menorah every Hanukkah. I went to Hebrew school. I studied for my bar mitzvah. We were not in danger.
Each night, when my father went to sleep, he would say to me, âDo you know how I feel when I put my head on this pillow? Like a millionaire!â Each night, he must have thought of how he had tried to sleep in Buchenwald, never knowing if he would live through the next day.
Despite the oasis my parents and other survivors found in Skokieâwhich they transformed into a modern-day shtetl crowded with synagogues, Hebrew schools, and delisâthey mostly kept their dark histories to themselves. Sure, during summer youâd sometimes see men and women in short sleeves with blue numbers etched on the inside of their forearms, but somehow you knew not to ask about it.
My dad and his surviving brothers and sister had no such numbers, so it was a long time before I learned that this was a particular mark of Auschwitz. When children asked their parents about the tattoos, many survivors told me decades later, the survivors often said theyâd simply written down their phone numbers so they wouldnât forget.
So even though Skokie eventually would become one of the worldâs most famousâor infamousâsanctuaries for survivors, they kept such a low profile that hardly anyone outside their circle knew they were there.
âNobody ever rolled up their sleeve and showed me a tattooed number,â Mort Paradise, a World War II veteran who moved to Skokie in 1949, once told me. âThey probably had no motivation to broadcast the fact that they were survivors.â
None indeed.
That is, until neo-Nazi Frank Collin began threatening to march with his brown-shirted, swastika-wearing colleagues on the streets of Skokie. Of all places. WE ARE COMING read the flyers they started distributing widely in September 1976, the picture showing âa caricature of a swastika reaching out to throttle a stereotyped Eastern European ghetto Jew,â wrote Philippa Strum in her book When the Nazis Came to Skokie. Collin and friends vowed to provide âthe final solution to the Jewish question,â and the survivors did not take this promise lightly. The rapidly rising tensions made Collin a media phenomenon; newspapers and TV stations from around the globe covered the spectacle of it all.
âWe were getting calls, here at my house, in the middle of the night, from people living in countries far and wide, who asked what they could do,â Skokieâs then village attorney Harvey Schwartz once told me. âCould they send us money? Could they send us bullets? Anything to stop this.â
My dad was burning up, his face turning white whenever Collin and friends appeared on TV or in the papers, which was practically nonstop in 1977 and â78. I was confounded that my family would take this clown seriously, but I later came to understand why. Hitler, too, had been considered a buffoon until he was duly elected chancellor of Germany in 1933 and began setting the stage for the annihilation of a people.
Though Skokie officials at first suggested that everyone simply pull down their window shades and ignore the planned march, the survivors refused. Thunderously. Early on they gathered at Village Hall, more than one hundred strong, determined to be heard, while Collin took his First Amendment case for his right to march to the courts.
âMany of them stood in shock, catatonic, unable to move,â village attorney Schwartz told me, weeping at the memory. âWhat I realized at that moment was that what we were facing had nothing to do with the First Amendment. When someone wants to come marching into your town, with the announced intention to kill you, there was hardly anything left to discuss.â
Neither my dad nor many of the survivors were going to let the Nazis return, even if it meant meeting Collin in the streets.
âIâll get a bat and break his head if he marches,â my dad often said.
I believed him.
âWe told the police, âIn case they will come in, theyâre going to be dead,ââ survivor Ben Kryska once said to me. âWe all had guns.â
Each time Collin threatened to march, survivors waited for him on the upper stories of buildings facing Oakton Street, the main boulevard in downtown Skokie, trigger fingers ready, aiming dead ahead.
Luckily no shooting ever happened. Collinâs case, tirelessly championed by the American Civil Liberties Union, made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court.
Elie Wiesel would not be silent about this turn of events.
âIn its preoccupation with the rights of the Nazis,â Wiesel wrote in Newsday in 1978, âthe ACLU neglected those of their intended victims. Are they not worthy of the same concern? Are they not entitled to equal protectionâor at least to compassion? After all, they are threatened, not the Nazis. They are in danger, not the Nazis. They are wounded, not the Nazis. They have nightmares, not the Nazis. Is there no law to defend them as well, and, if not, why hasnât the ACLU sought to do something in the matter?â
With the ACLUâs help, the Nazis indeed prevailed under the law; the Supreme Court affirmed their First Amendment right to march. But Collin never exercised it, taking his message of group hatred to Humboldt Park and downtown Chicago instead. Why? He never said, but my guess is that he knew the survivors would be waiting for him, and that there was a very good chance the Skokie police would look the other way.
Years later, after all the neo-Nazi noise, Collin was sentenced to prison for child molestation and gave himself a new name and identity. But he surely had succeeded in retraumatizing thousands of survivors, like my parents, who had come to Skokie believing they had escaped the horrors of the past once and for all.
Collin reminded them that they never really would.
But the survivors were galvanized, many of them resolving never to let such a travesty occur again. They organized a speakersâ bureau that opened in a storefront museum three blocks from our Skokie house in 1984. They lobbied to make Illinois the first state in the country to require Holocaust education in public elementary and high schools in 1990. And their decidedly unglamorous headquarters, located in a former dental-supplies building next door to a tavern, morphed into the $65 million Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center elsewhere in the suburb.
âHas the world learned the lesson?â Wiesel said at the opening ceremony, on April 19, 2009, the sixty-sixth anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising and, coincidentally, my birthday.
âSadly, the answer is no.â
I hadnât started to learn such le...