Elie Wiesel

Messenger to All Humanity, Revised Edition

Robert McAfee Brown

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 1983
• ISBN:
  9780268160630
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

Upon presenting the 1986 Nobel Prize for Peace to Elie Wiesel, Egil Aarvick, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee, hailed him as "a messenger to mankind--not with a message of hate and revenge but with one of brotherhood and atonement." Elie Wiesel: Messenger to All Humanity, first published in 1983, echoes this theme and still affirms that message, a call to both Christians and Jews to face the tragedy of the Holocaust and begin again.

CHAPTER 1

Becoming a Messenger: An Impossible Necessity
(a journey of the self)

I am obsessed with the messenger aspect of man. The greatest tragedy of all, though, could be when the messenger is deprived of his message. Imagine a messenger waiting for a message he must pass on—but does not receive.

—Wiesel, A Small Measure of Victory, p. 24

The issue is memory. And memory is double-edged. In one of Wiesel’s short stories, “The Scrolls, Too, Are Mortal,” Issachar comments in a burst of insight and despair: “Memory is not only a kingdom, it is also a graveyard” (A Jew Today, p. 81).

Memory is a kingdom. It enables Wiesel to conjure up beautiful images from his childhood in Sighet—of his grandfather and the stories old Dodye Feig told him; of Shabbat, anticipated in wonder, celebrated in tremulous hope (“Will the Messiah come this time?”), remembered in awe, and then once again anticipated in wonder; of a world in which God still dwelt and prayer was as natural, and as necessary, as breathing.

But memory is also a graveyard. The kingdom became a graveyard for Wiesel, which is to say that it became another kind of kingdom—a kingdom of night, a kingdom of darkness where no light was found, where death, rather than being the daily exception, became the daily expectation. And all that memory could deliver for many years were the all-too corporeal phantoms of the graveyard. One may “survive” while living in a graveyard, and discover that survival is a curse rather than a blessing. For Eliezer in The Accident, it was a curse. He knew himself as “a grave for the unburied dead” (p. 53), and was companion of the dead to the exclusion of those living alongside him in Times Square and Carnegie Music Hall. Every venture into the past became another stick of wood on the funeral pyre of his ongoing death in the present. Not until well into Wiesel’s fourth book, The Town Beyond the Wall, does a character begin to transcend the verdict of the graveyard and begin to rebuild the foundations of a kingdom in which memory could release rather than destroy.

No wonder, then, that Wiesel, on a visit to Kiev, site of a massive slaughter of Jews at Babi Yar in 1943, felt constrained to say to the mayor, “Mr. Mayor, the problem for all of us—for you as for us—is: what do we do with our memories? We must deal with them or they will crush us.” Confronting memories not only involves acknowledging their reality and honoring those victimized, but determining to appropriate the memories in the present for the sake of the future: “Those who have died in anonymity,” Wiesel continued, “must not be remembered in anonymity. Our collective remembrance must save future generations from anonymity.”¹

How does one deal with memory? One becomes a messenger, a transmitter, both of the kingdom and of the graveyard. To be a messenger does not guarantee a new kingdom, but to fail to be a messenger guarantees a new graveyard.

We can discern five steps in becoming a messenger of an event, in this case, the Event of the Holocaust:

1. The Event took place: one must speak.

2. The Event defies description: one cannot speak.

3. The Event suggests an alternative: one could choose silence.

4. The Event precludes silence: one must become a messenger.

5. The Event suggests a certain kind of message: one can be a teller of tales.

The Event took place: one must speak

The Event, for so it must be identified, is the Holocaust, a time, etymologically and existentially, of “burnt offerings.”² Burnings there had been before, of witches and infidels, saints and martyrs, heretics and schismatics, young and old. But the new burnings were burnings with a difference. Not only were there victims who were military, political, ideological opponents of the Nazis, there were also victims whose only “crime” was being Jewish. Having the wrong grandparents was sufficient reason for incineration; the murder of children—Jewish children—is the quintessential expression of Holocaust logic. The Nazi intention eludes us unless we recognize that destruction of the Jews was finally more important than winning the war. Example: when the tide was turning and the war was all but lost, German military commandants had difficulty getting trains to transport troops to the battle front, while Eichmann, in charge of “Jewish Affairs for the Third Reich,” always got trains to transport Jews to extermination centers.

At this point in our study, conventional wisdom would dictate the inclusion of a description of the Holocaust, an array of facts to describe what happened, so that Wiesel’s writings could be seen in context. There are books that provide such information, information to which we always need exposure.³ But our approach will be different. For not all have spoken of the Event through analysis of documents, discernment of historical trends, examination of the motives of political and military leaders. A few have spoken of the Event through its impact on single human lives or groups of lives. Sifting through the ashes of memory, they have told stories, drawn portraits, composed laments, morally committed to telling their story so that the future for others will not recapitulate their own past. They communicate less by analytic description than by human recital.

Elie Wiesel is preeminent among such messengers. While he has written essays, cited statistics, done documentary research, he has nevertheless approached the Holocaust chiefly as a teller of tales, his own and others. Tales of that time and that place are interspersed with tales of other times and other places, all of them circling around the Event, uncovering this or that truth, exposing this or that falsehood, celebrating this or that momentary triumph, mourning this or that permanent defeat.

The impact is cumulative, the result all-encompassing. When he is not writing about the Holocaust, he is writing about nothing else—the story of Abraham and Isaac is the prefigured story of Elie Wiesel’s father and Elie Wiesel. When he is writing only about the Holocaust, he is writing about everything else—the story of Elie Wiesel’s father and Elie Wiesel is the reenacted story of Abraham and Isaac. At the end of the storytelling we will know more than we knew at the beginning, which means that we will know less. But when the subject matter is the Holocaust, to know that we will know less at the end than we knew at the beginning is already to have begun to know more.

If that seems a defiance of ordinary logic, it is only an example of Auschwitz logic.

A curse goes with it:

As for me, I too like to attend a good concert or smile back at a pretty girl. I bless bread and sanctify the wine, and no one is happier than I when, under my pen, words fall into place, fit into a design and create the illusion that they are leading somewhere.

In truth, I know where they lead. To where there are no words. To the mysterious forests where fathers and sons, Jews already marked by the executioner, always the same, tell each other a story, always the same. To where women with dark dilated pupils, violated and drunk with pain, escort their children to the altar and beyond.

Then there arises from the very depths of my being an irresistible desire to let everything go. To throw away the pen, burn all bridges and start to run and curse and leave the present far behind. To seek the moment that gave birth to these images, and never again to hear the laughter, and the moaning of the wind whipped by the shadows, always the same shadows. (Generation, p. 51)

An awesome sequence:

The words always lead back to the story.

The story always leads back to the horror—the mysterious forest, the executioner, the violated women.

The horror always leads back to the desire to negate, to deny.

But the storyteller does not have the privilege of such a resolution. He is under orders: orders to tell the story. Again and again. And again.

In telling of tales about the kingdom of night, there is a privilege of place reserved for the survivor, the one who was there. The rest of us cannot get close to the Event itself, but with the survivor’s help we can slightly decrease the distance. And in ways we cannot yet understand, the survivor’s story back then becomes an integral part of our story right now. If that seems unlikely, let us reserve judgment until we have heard the survivor’s testimony.

The different approaches—analytical description and human recital—need each other, and they concur on the essential starting point: the Event took place, one must speak.

The Event defies description: one cannot speak

Those who have spoken record a second perception as well: having tried to speak, they discover that attempts to speak of this Event are doomed. One cannot speak of the Holocaust. Theodore Adorno puts the case most strongly: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” George Steiner feels that language is stretched beyond endurance when Auschwitz is the subject, or when language is used in a world in which Auschwitz occurred.

So, on frequent occasions, does Elie Wiesel.

There is a double bind here. On the one hand, there is a bind for the messenger: the Event is so awesomely different from all other events that the messenger searches in vain for tools of language to do it justice. On the other hand, there is a bind for the listener: both an inability to hear because of the awesome difference, and an unwillingness to hear, since the consequences of the message are too devastating.

All of which places the messenger in a double bind: his own attempts to speak are foredoomed to self-acknowledged failure, and even if what he says is heard, the listener is foredoomed to misunderstand or evade.

We must examine these binds in more detail.

The basic reason that attempts to speak about the Holocaust are foredoomed to failure is simply the uniqueness of the Event itself. Although the adjective “unique” is not ordinarily subject to comparison, yet in a post-Auschwitz world we can paraphrase George Orwell: all events are unique but some are more unique than others. The Holocaust is not one in a series of examples of human depravity. It is sui generis. Wiesel insists on this:

What happened twenty-five years ago was so unique; even within the framework of our own history, it is unique. It never happened before. It can be compared to no other event. The victim was another victim, and the executioner another executioner. It was a mutation on a cosmic scale. (Responses, p. 151)

Descriptions are made by means of comparisons. Analogies are embedded in all attempts to communicate: this event, of which we do not know, is like that one of which we know at least a little. But what if there is nothing with which to make a comparison, no analogy that will hold? Then we begin to understand the bind of the messenger: “By its uniqueness,” Wiesel writes, “the Holocaust defies literature.” He continues:

Therein lies the dilemma of the storyteller who sees himself essentially as a witness, the drama of the messenger unable to deliver his message: how is one to speak of it, how is one not to speak of it? Certainly there can be no other theme for him: all situations, all conflicts, all obsessions will, by comparison, seem pallid and futile. (Generation, p. 10)

So the messenger appears doomed from the start: “What he hopes to transmit can never be transmitted. All he can possibly hope to achieve is to communicate the impossibility of communication” (Dimensions, p. 8).

Consequence: the one who must speak will feel guilty of betrayal. Discussing the matter with other Jewish writers, Wiesel acknowledges, “Yes, we are concerned. We do try to put the experience into words. But can we? Language is poor and inadequate. The moment it is told, the experience turns to betrayal” (“Jewish Values in the Post-Holocaust Future,” p. 284, italics added).

That is bad enough: to transmit is to betray. But Wiesel is forced to concede that the polar opposite is true also: not to transmit is also to betray: “I believed that, having survived by chance, I was duty-bound to give meaning to my survival, to justify each moment of my life. I knew the story had to be told. Not to transmit an experience is to betray it” (“Why I Write,” p.201).

Who can grasp the pathos of this situation: to speak is to betray, not to speak is to betray. There is no way not to betray. Why not? Because none of the interpretive categories work any more. We cannot draw lines that connect l’univers concentrationnaire and our own universe. No common experiences link them. No language drawn from one world can communicate to the other. Words become obstacles, not enablers, to understanding.

The language of night was not human; it was primitive, almost animal—hoarse shouting, screams, muffled moaning, savage howling, the sound of beating . . . This is the concentration camp language. It negated all other language and took its place. Rather than link, it became wall. Could it be surmounted? Could the reader be brought to the other side? I knew the answer to be negative, and yet I also knew that “no” had to become “yes.” (“Why I Write,” p. 201).

In the world of scholars, philosophers, theologians, people of letters, a vocabulary of considerable sophistication is used, built up over centuries of use. And yet Wiesel insists that “Auschwitz, by definition, is beyond their vocabulary.” Terence Des Pres offers an exegesis of the insistence:

Wiesel means that in this special case, our traditional categories of value and interpretation have been demolished by the very event they would seek to explain. The negativity of the Holocaust was so total, the event so massive and complete in itself, that concepts drawn from tradition and civilized experience—in short the key terms of our world—become, if not useless, then extremely problematic . . . Think of any key concept in the vocabulary of civilized discourse and immediately, if its sounding board is the Holocaust, you are in trouble.⁴

Surely non-Auschwitz vocabulary contains at least one “key concept” that can help us describe Auschwitz. That is the concept of hell. If there is one realm with which Auschwitz can be compared, “hell” is surely that realm. George Steiner, the one most reticent about the possibility of speech in relation to the Holocaust, writes:

The camp embodies often down to minutiae, the images and chronicles of Hell in European art and thought from the twelft...