#Elie Wiesel - Remembering Elie Wiesel: A Tribute From a Friend and Disciple

 

Elie Wiesel died Saturday at the age of 87. In the end, what remains with us, within us, most are the memories.

 

Much has been said and written, much remains to be said and written, about Elie Wiesel who, after emerging from the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, dedicated himself to perpetuating the memory of the millions of European Jews who were murdered in the Shoah. In doing so, he became the acknowledged voice of its survivors. He often said that he could not, would not speak on behalf of the dead. He did, however, speak forcefully, eloquently for the collectivity of the survivors, and they revered and loved him for it. “Accept the idea that you will never see what they have seen—and go on seeing now,” he wrote in his classic essay, “A Plea for the Survivors,” perhaps subconsciously opening a window into his own heart, “that you will never know the faces that haunt their nights, that you will never know the cries that rent their sleep. Accept the idea that you will never penetrate the cursed and spellbound universe they carry within themselves with unfailing loyalty.”

 

Not all survivors of the Shoah were able to transcend all they had experienced and witnessed in what Elie Wiesel famously referred to as the “Kingdom of Night.” Suffering, he once observed, “gives man no privileges; it all depends on what he does with it. If he uses his suffering against man, he betrays it; if he uses it to fight evil and humanize destiny, then he elevates it and elevates himself.” He described his own reflective existential crossroads in his lecture upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize: “A recollection. The time: After the war. The place: Paris. A young man struggles to readjust to life. His mother, his father, his small sister are gone. He is alone. On the verge of despair. And yet he does not give up. On the contrary, he strives to find a place among the living. He acquires a new language. He makes a few friends who, like himself, believe that the memory of evil will serve as a shield against evil; that the memory of death will serve as a shield against death.”

 

There were so many dimensions to this unique, truly extraordinary individual. Elie Wiesel first came to public prominence, at the outset in France, then in the United States, in Israel and across the globe, as an author whose use of words was invariably elegant, direct, and piercing. The overriding common theme of his more than 60 books of both fiction and non-fiction is survival, not just the factual circumstance of survival but its transformative nature and, yes, power. The inmate of a Nazi death camp, the Soviet Jew struggling to retain a national and spiritual identity in the face of political oppression, the open-heart surgery patient, all are more than literary characters—they are alter egos with whom their author was in perpetual dialogue and through whom he taught and will continue to teach the reader the essential elements of overcoming whatever is most daunting, most harrowing, in one’s life. His memoir, Night, brought the horrors of the Holocaust into the consciousness of millions across the globe. His The Jews of Silence became one of the earliest rallying cries on behalf of Soviet Jewry.

 

Equally important was Elie Wiesel the teacher who made a lasting, often life-changing impact on thousands of students who sat in his classes first at New York’s City College, then at Boston University and Eckerd College, and most recently also at Chapman University. His lectures at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan made the mysteries of Hasidism and Jewish biblical thought accessible to 20th– and 21st-century New Yorkers, Jews and non-Jews alike. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of literature and philosophy coupled with a seemingly inexhaustible intellectual curiosity. Nietzsche in particular fascinated him. At the same time, he was adamant in excoriating those who sought to exploit or trivialize the Holocaust. “Auschwitz,” he wrote, “signifies not only the failure of two thousand years of Christian civilization, but also the defeat of the intellect that wants to find a Meaning—with a capital M—in history. What Auschwitz embodied had none.”

 

Much has also been said and written, and much will surely continue to be said and written, about Elie Wiesel the man of conscience and human rights activist who urged one U.S. president publicly not to honor the memory of members of Hitler’s notorious Waffen-SS, and who implored another to put an end to the crimes against humanity being perpetrated in Bosnia. “That place,” Elie told President Reagan on April 19, 1985, referring to the Bitburg military cemetery in what was then West Germany, “is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.” And he turned to President Clinton at the opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., on April 22, 1993, two years before the genocidal massacre at Srebrenica, and said: “And, Mr. President, I cannot not tell you something. I have been in the former Yugoslavia last fall. I cannot sleep since for what I have seen. As a Jew I am saying that we must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country! People fight each other and children die. Why? Something, anything must be done.”

 

But scholarly assessments of the life and career of the Hasidic boy from the Transylvanian town of Sighet who became a citizen of the world in the truest sense of that term will have to wait for another day. Mourning a friend is always personal, deeply personal, and today, I grapple with my memories of a friendship that spanned more than half a century.

 

I knew Elie from the time I was a teenager. He was a close friend of my parents, a frequent guest in our home. He and my father would sit for hours discussing the politics of the day and, far more than dwelling on their respective memories of Auschwitz-Birkenau and other Nazi camps, they would focus on the present-day challenges of remembrance and on improving the lot, both physical and spiritual, of their fellow survivors. One of my fondest memories of Elie is of him and my father singing Hasidic melodies, nigunim, their voices harmonizing as they took themselves back for a few minutes to the homes and families that had been torn from them. My favorite, perhaps also theirs: “She-yiboneh beis hamikdosh bi-m’heirah be’yameinu … May the Temple be rebuilt quickly, in our days …”

 

One evening at the beginning of my senior year of high school, he asked me, as he invariably did, what I was studying and how my classes were going. These were not perfunctory questions. He wanted detailed answers, especially about the books I was reading. I told him that the only class I did not enjoy was an advanced English seminar. I was frustrated by the teacher’s approach and his insistence on intellectually pigeonholing the assigned material. Elie was skeptical. He knew I liked, more than liked, literature. Perhaps, he said, I was subconsciously exaggerating. I showed him the most recent written assignment I had received back annotated with the teacher’s comments. Elie read it over, and said, “I see what you mean. You won’t learn anything that way.” He then offered to get together with me once a week to go over the readings with me, as well as my weekly papers. He was living at the Master Hotel on Riverside Drive and 103rd Street, and for the rest of that year, I went there to receive a weekly tutorial. We discussed in depth classical works of literature, and he patiently taught me how one translates thoughts into written sentences that take on a life of their own. “Write,” he inscribed a photograph of himself to me in French, “so that the words become a burning scar.”

 

June 6, 1972. Elie calls, his voice trembling with joy. He tells us that he and Marion have a son. Eight days later, my mother carries the child into the Wiesels’ living room on Central Park West to receive his name. Shlomo Elisha son of Eliezer son of Shlomo. Elisha’s birth transforms Elie profoundly, indelibly. For the first time in the more than 10 years that I’ve known him, he seems genuinely, thoroughly happy, content. Over the coming years, he is never happier, never more at ease than when he talks about Elisha and, in recent years, his grandchildren.

 

That same year, when he was appointed Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at New York’s City College and I was back in New York after graduating from Johns Hopkins, he asked me to be his teaching assistant. He taught a course on the literature of the Holocaust and a seminar on Hasidic thought. My tasks were to interact with the students on a regular basis, to grade papers, and to lecture about Elie’s own books, something he would not do. What struck me the most was how accessible he made himself to his students, especially the sons or daughters of survivors, who wanted to speak with him not about their studies but about themselves, their relationships with their parents, their efforts to understand what their parents had experienced. He would listen patiently, empathize, give advice. Perhaps more than anyone else, he was able to relate to the children and grandchildren of survivors. He not only understood us, but he empowered us to embrace our identity.

 

Soon after becoming chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council in 1980, he asked me to organize and chair a Second Generation advisory committee. He wanted our input, to hear our perspective. “When I speak to others,” he said to us at the First International Conference of Children of Holocaust Survivors in May of 1984, “surely you know that I mean you, all the time. You are my audience, because it is you who matter. … Do you know what we see in you, in all of you? We see in you our heirs, our allies, our younger brothers and sisters. But in a strange way to all of us all of you are our children”... Read more.