Professor David Peimer
Elie Wiesel’s ‘Night’
Professor David Peimer - Elie Wiesel’s Night
- Good morning, David.
Hi Wendy, how are you?
I’m very good thank you, how are you?
Very well, thank you.
That’s good. I’m really looking forward to the presentation today. You know, Elie was a great friend.
Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, remarkable person.
And what a wonderful, Elie and his wife Marion were a wonderful couple.
Right.
And we’re going to have the great privilege of interviewing Elisha, his son.
Elie’s son, at 7:30 yeah, UK time later tonight yeah.
Oh great.
Thank you.
Yes.
Exactly.
No, no, I’m very much looking forward to that too. A most wonderful, wonderful family. So David, okay.
Yeah.
So a minute after the hour, so I’m going to hand over to you.
Okay, thank you so much.
Thank you.
Visual photos and video are included in this presentation.
- Thank you again to Wendy and to Judi for everything, and as you heard, we’ll be interviewing Elisha, Elie Wiesel’s son this evening at 7:30 UK time. So just wanted to say hi to everyone, hope you’re okay and well, and this is an incredibly emotional and powerful session probably for me, because Elie means a huge amount to me in terms of when I read him first, when I read about his life, and got a little bit about his remarkable life and experience, which I’m sure many people know it, and many people know a huge amount about him. And I guess I really thought of this as a presentation, which is really a sense of a personal honouring of the man, and his life, his writing, his thought, his insights and to be frank, I think his guidance or teaching for many generations after him. I really do see him at that level of a human being. So to begin, Elie Wiesel, as everyone knows, born in September, 1928, and sadly passed away fairly a couple of years ago. I’m going to show some pictures. I’m going to show an interview with him that he did with Charlie Rose, which I think is very interesting because it shows the humanity of Elie Wiesel. And then I also want to discuss a little bit about his writing, the kind of writing which will emerge from Night and in his Nobel acceptance speech, in particular, the book that everyone knows so well, Night, a remarkable piece of writing.
So I’m going to begin a little bit about his life to give context and to was happening at the time. Just a few phrases here from him. The memory of the Holocaust remains a burning and luminous scar on our very being, now until the end of time. He has a way of putting things, a way of writing, which I’m going to link to some of his religious studies, which just captures the emotion and the thought together in a very profound and highly resonant way. The goal of writing of teaching is to sensitise the reader, the pupil, the child, to have a heightened sensitivity of the other. I think he, again, he encapsulates just a hell of a lot there for me about the role of his own writing and the role of art. And not only writing in terms of memoir or memory, but art certainly through the ages. Another interesting phrase, which I’ve always liked of his, is we should try to see the other as an object of curiosity, not a threat. In one phrase, these kind of parables, these phrases, which capture so much meaning and feeling and resonate evocatively, they evoke parables of Kafka and many of the others, and of the religious thinkers and writers as well, who he was hugely influenced by.
These are some pictures of him at different stages of his life. This is the picture of him, the bottom one in 1943 when he was 15 years old, 15 years old. 15 years old. We think of grandsons, we think of sons, we think of ourselves, our families, cousins, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews. It’s such, for me, it’s so evocative this picture because it’s taken 1943, and as we know, in 1944 is when the horrific roundups of Hungarian Jews begins and lasts for about three months. So this is in the year before he is deported to Auschwitz. And then the other two pictures, obviously from later in his life. This here that I wanted to show, are some other pictures of his life. The top right hand one is in front of, at an exhibition of the camps, the little one at the top. This is Elie Wiesel with his son, Elisha, who Dennis and I have the privilege and honour of interviewing later this evening, as Wendy’s mentioned. And thank you to Wendy for arranging and setting it up. This is the bottom one here on the right, in the red background, it’s obviously Elie at a much older age. And then at the bottom left, is Elie Wiesel with Barack Obama. A couple of the phrases here, we must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
It’s an extraordinary way for me of writing, which is ancient, it goes back to biblical ways of thinking, biblical ways of writing, where the idea is to be as minimalist and profound and emotional all at the same time, influenced by parable approaches ways of writing as well, combining what I’m going to talk about later, when you look at Night, combining if you like, insight, fact, and ethics in the language. The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. And that’s one of his most famous statements, which I’m sure many people know. And it’s profound and it’s powerful to really let that sink in, especially post second World War, post Holocaust, 20th century. And I know that I’ve often spoken Dante, in the 33 layers of hell that, you know, Dante and Virgil go through in the inferno. At the bottom is betrayal for Dante, the worst crime of all. But I would put Wiesel’s notion here as the, as possibly as powerful a crime as betrayal, could be indifference. And I believe that’s a very 20th century phenomenon, post the Holocaust. And we see it being played out globally so much of the time in our own times, indifference to the other, whoever the other might be.
And then a fascinating and provocative quote that Wiesel has as well, was Auschwitz a consequence or an aberration of civilization in inverted commas? What we think of a civilization and all the hopes, you know, at the coattails of the Enlightenment, rarely at the end of the Enlightenment, you know, comes the 20th century, all the technological advances, women getting the vote, medical advances, eventually the civil rights movement. So many, many things changing, democracy, taking root more and more seemingly after the war, even before the war to a small degree. And then ask this seemingly civilization moving in a certain progressive direction or positive direction, at least, was it a consequence or an aberration of so-called civilization? It throws up all the questions. There’s no simple answer. It’s just a profound question, which I think one can debate and discuss ahead of a lot, an enormous amount of time. And this is, I’m trying to capture here in these two slides, something about Elie Wiesel the man, his experience from being a 15 year old teenager in today’s, you know parlance.
What he went through in Auschwitz, what he went through afterwards, learning the languages of French and English, going to write, writing 57 books in his life, achieving all the things he achieved, the writing, the speaking, the causes he supported. The remarkable, not only the Nobel Prize in 86, but the remarkable impact of one human being in our times and of the last century, and I think of many centuries. Okay, I would like to show, this is an interview. I’m going to show nearly eight minutes of it, seven and a half minutes, because I think it really shows the interview with Charlie Rose on, it shows Elie Wiesel the man, humanity inside him, the thought, the profundity, and the wisdom, and the pain.
Video clip plays.
- Elie Wiesel and his family were deported to Auschwitz when he was 15 years old. His mother and one of his three sisters died there. His father died later at Buchenwald. He is the author of more than 30 books, including his unforgettable international bestseller, Night, and a Beggar in Jerusalem, which won a number of prizes. He has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States Congressional Gold Medal, the French Religion of Honour, and in 1986, the Nobel Peace Prize. He is the Andrew W. Mellon professor of the humanities and university professor at Boston University. He lives with his wife, Marion in New York City. He is much more than his biography, much more than his prizes.
He is much more than what he writes. He is for so many people, the one who gives testament and testimony to those who have died, and who demands memory of those who were victims of the Holocaust, and who is the voice of the survivor. He has now written his memoir, it is called All Rivers Run to the Sea. There will be another volume because this takes him from birth in Transylvania to 1969 when he gets married here in the United States. He’s my friend and I’m very pleased to have him on this broadcast. Welcome. It’s great to have you here. Let me go back to Transylvania, Sighet?
Sighet, yeah.
You, your father, Schlomo a rabbi.
No, he was a learned man.
[Charlie] Yeah.
But he owned a grocery store, but otherwise he learned every day a learned, actually, he could have been a rabbi.
Yeah, but he was a learned man. You were, tell me about you growing up as a young man there. As a very young man.
Well I grew up in a very religious family, and in a way very happy. I had a mother, I had a father, I had sisters, I had friends, I had teachers, and I had books. I always loved books. I loved books more than walking in the street and playing. I never played anything. I never played any sport or any games, nothing, just-
Books were your love.
Just study. And all I remember really is going to school or coming from school or being in school. Occasionally I would help my father, everybody else would in the grocery store before holidays. And I had a grandfather in a small village nearby, and it was, I used to go and see him twice a year for during the holidays, and to go from my little town Sighet to this little village, seven kilometres, four by four miles. It was an expedition, much more than now to take the and go to Paris.
Well I remember going from one village to another in a small town in North Carolina. You were a little bit of a mystic, or you were fascinated by mysticism.
The secret, the forbidden territory is always fascinated. Those who study it, and of course, I was fascinated by it. And the problem is that it’s forbidden to study mysticism, Kabbalah before a certain age, 30 or 40.
[Charlie] Yeah.
Or before you are a very great scholar. I was neither a great scholar nor old man, but I had in my town a Kabbalist called Kaman. And he taught Kabbalah and he accepted me as a student. We were three, actually three students. And it was an adventure because Kabbalah means to acquire power, mystical power to bring the Messiah. And we wanted to bring, the Messiah.
Yes.
And believe it not there is even a kind of manual, you’re saying how to-
Bring the Messiah.
How to bring the Messiah, which means you fast Monday and Thursday, my poor parents didn’t know why I was fasting.
Yeah, to bring the Messiah.
I didn’t say that. No, it was a secret.
Yeah.
But I did eat always like that, I never ate much. And it was something to bring the Messiah. And then-
[Charlie] Yeah.
My father, who was a rationalist, really heard about it, and he said, aren’t you afraid? I said, of course not, really you know, as long as I learned, as I studied, he was all right and he accept it. But then the tragedy occurred, one of the three lost his mind. And the professor of psychiatry came from nearby big town, Satmar, then from Budapest, and then the professor from Budapest invited the professor from Stockholm for certain famous man. He came, he tried to understand. He couldn’t understand, what does he know about Kabbalah? I didn’t tell him. Nobody told him. And he, my friend who went insane, of course didn’t speak, he already was suffering from aphasia. He went back, very unhappy. Then a few months later, the second one lost his mind, again same thing, psychiatrist there from there, and couldn’t find out. He left back very unhappy. And I remained alone. And my father said, aren’t you afraid? I said no, of course not, that was continued. But then the Germans came in.
[Charlie] Yeah.
I’m convinced that the Germans not come here at that time, I too would’ve lost my sanity, because really it is not for children.
[Charlie] Yeah.
The extraordinary beauty of the text, of the imagery that you get, that you receive about the cosmos, .
And what happened to the two that went insane?
They were among the first to be taken and of course they were vanished. They vanished in the fires of Auschwitz.
And your remembrance, was there a sense of impending doom and fear and that the Germans were coming in?
Not until they came. See, we in this little town, we didn’t know what was happening in the world. The world with everybody at one point knew about Auschwitz except Hungarian Jews. That’s why occasionally I’m so angry. And tonight, you know, it’s a very special night, Charlie, this is a commemoration anniversary of the Kristallnacht.
[Charlie] Right.
The night of the broken glass. And for the first time, you know, hundreds of stores, Jewish stores were ransacked, synagogues burned, and Jews killed. There was a watershed really in the Nazi attitude towards Jews. And somehow we were abandoned. The Hungarian Jewish community could have been saved because we were deported as highlighted here, March 19th, the Germans came in, we were deported May 17, two weeks or three weeks before D-Day. If the allies really had bombed the railways to Auschwitz, thousands and thousands of Jews would’ve been saved. At that time, the Germans were burning 10,000 men, women, and children, every day, every night. That hurts.
You went to Auschwitz-
Video clip ends.
- I’m going to hold it there. I think every word is so powerful. Every thought. He starts obviously just you know, talking about his childhood and the importance of studying Kabbalah, he’s studying the Talmud and many other things, and the very powerful religious upbringing and the love in his family, you know, growing up in a small town in what was then a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, part of Hungary. And then going on to talking about when it all began, when the deportations begin in 1944, a few weeks before D-Day, and it could have been saved, it could have been stopped. And in fact, it’s well known that in December, 1942, the British Parliament had a moment, a minute’s silence for what was happening to the Jews of Europe. And this is a year and a half later that nothing’s happened to help, as he honestly mentions here, thousands, if not hundreds of thousands could have been saved. Okay, I want to go on to a bit about his life and then onto, primarily onto his book, Night. This here has a picture of Elie Wiesel in the middle, obviously, and up the top left, and on the right, that’s a picture of his father, Shlomo. Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet as he says, I’m not going to repeat what he’s already said in the interview, just a couple of things here. His father was, he said, owned a grocery store and his mother Sarah, in a sense, she seems to be more responsible for the religious, if you like, inheritance, her grandfather and the lineage of Sarah, his mother, is very, very profoundly and deeply religious. He’s part of a community of 10 to 20,000, mostly Orthodox Jews in Sighet, which had been annexed by Hungary in 1940. Without going into history at the moment of the Arrow Cross and Horthy and others, I’m sure Judi has covered that superbly. His mother encouraged him to study the Torah and the Talmud.
And Wiesel has said that his father represented reason while his mother promoted faith, very religious family, the way, the sincere commitment to religion, and not only that, but the ideas and the ways of writing of the ancients in a religious context, going right up to contemporary times. The sense of the poetic, his love of books, his love of learning prefers reading books than walking in the streets. His love of learning of books, of literature, which he absorbs incredibly fast and a remarkable amount. On the 18th of March, 1944, the Invasion of Hungary by the Nazis, and in particular the deportations led by Eichmann. And as he is mentioned, as the allies prepared for D-Day, the mass deportations began at a rate of four trains a day from Hungary to Auschwitz. Each train carried about 3000 human beings.
In three months, 437,402 Hungarian Jews were sent in 147 trains, and 90% were gassed. Wiesel, his parents, his sisters, his two older sisters, Hilda and Beatrice, and seven year old Tzipora, were among them. His mother Sarah, and his little sister Tzipora, were sent to the gas chamber immediately, Hilda and Beatrice survived. They were separated from the rest of the family, and Elie Wiesel and his father, Shlomo, were sent to work as the slave camps, obviously of Auschwitz. They survived a death march to Buchenwald, and his father died in Buchenwald in January, 1945, three months before the American Army came across Buchenwald camp. After that, Wiesel had wanted to move to Palestine, but because of British immigration restrictions, he was not allowed to go. He was sent to a special place for young children in France.
As I mentioned, his two sisters, Hilda and Beatrice had survived. And he learned that and discovered that while he was in France. From 1947 to 1950, he studied the Talmud philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he was influenced by lectures given by Jean-Paul Sartre, Dostoevsky, Kafka he read, and he talks about having read Kafka and the incredible influence Kafka and his writings had on him and his writing. He read Thomas Mann and so may others of the great writers of his time and of the ancients if you like. At the age of 19, and remember this is, he’s 15 when he goes into the camp, and he’s transported. So he is 16 when he, you know, after the war, 16 years old. At 19, he was sent to Israel as a war correspondent and became the chief foreign correspondent for Atel Aviv newspaper. About Night itself, the one of the 57 books that he wrote, and if anybody has a chance, who hasn’t read the autobiography, the first one, All Rivers Run to the Sea, so which is obviously a phrase from the Bible as we all know, but please read it. It’s an amazing autobiography, the first one in particular for me, Night is originally 862 pages long. He wrote it in Yiddish, and it was published in Argentina. And the original title was, And the World Remained Silent. His courage and forthright directness to say the world could have done something and did nothing.
Of course, the lessons for today and for all time reverberate endlessly. He then went to the French novelist, Francois Mauriac, forgive my pronunciation, who’d won the Nobel Prize for literature because he wanted to ask him to help him find a French publisher, and when he went to meet him, there’s a very interesting story where Mauriac kept mentioning Jesus. And he’d say this and he’d say that, and he’d say, oh, Jesus might, ‘cause Mauriac was a very devout Catholic. And Elie Wiesel speaks in another interview, he said, when he said Jesus again and again, I couldn’t take it. I said, Mr. Mauriac, 10 years or so ago, I have seen children, hundreds of Jewish children who suffered more than Jesus did on the cross. And we do not speak about them. And then he turned and he walked away to go to the exit.
Mauriac followed him, which changed both their lives. He then helped him get a publisher, they became friends, etcetera. It was eventually published in 1958 a hundred and fifty pages long and called Night in French. And then in 1960 Hill and Wang in New York published 116 page translation called Night. Even with Francois Mauriac’s help, and remember, this is a Nobel Prize winner, they had difficulty finding a publisher in both Paris and in New York. And Wiesel has been quoted as saying, he was told it was too morbid, too depressing, too sad to publish. Eventually they found a very small publishing company in Paris, and interestingly, it’s the same company that had the guts to publish Samuel Beckett’s first play, Waiting for Godot, that was published. And he eventually later met Beckett, very interesting stories about their meetings and discussions and conversations. Beckett for me is one of the great, if not one of the greatest writers of the last century playwrights. And they agreed to handle it. Then, and the publishers insisted cut it down, and he cut it more and more to 178 pages, was published as Night. In New York he had the same difficulty.
And eventually in 1960, found the publisher, Hill and Wang, and Wiesel writes, that Mr. Wang believed in literature as others believe in God. For me, that’s such a rarity these days. And Wiesel was paid a hundred dollars as an advance and was published that year as 116 page book. For the first 18 months, it sold 1,046 copies at $3 a piece. It took three years to run of 3000 copies. By 1997, Night was selling 300,000 copies a year in America. By 2011, it’s sold 10 million copies in the states. Was available in 30 languages and the sales increased rapidly after 2006, when it was chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her book club. The sales rocketed after that. It was republished again with a new translation by his wife Marion, who became his translator of his books. He wrote primarily in English and French. I mean, he grows up in one language, he learns English and French, I mean, this is a remarkable mind here that we can see in human beings. And it has become the third best seller book of Oprah Winfrey’s book club.
Whatever one else might think of Oprah Winfrey, this is a remarkable achievement to get word out, to get the story out to the world, to the Jewish world obviously, but then to the other, to the world of non-Jews, anybody. So Wiesel authored 57 books. He was professor as, I don’t want to go through all this again, but Charlie Rose had mentioned, professor at Boston University, won so many awards, involved in Jewish causes, human rights causes globally, helped establish the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, also campaigned for the victims of genocide in Yugoslavia, for Mandela’s release against apartheid, the congressional medal, etcetera, etcetera. Just to mention that he moved to New York in 1955 and obviously has lived there ever since. And I’ve mentioned his son, Elisha and his wife Marion. Together with his wife Marion, they started the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity in 1986. He served as a chairman for the American Holocaust Memorial Council from 1978 to 1986, spearheading the building of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. 1999 he gave a speech at the White House on the perils of indifference.
And not only saying that in the indifference is the opposite of love, not hate, but that indifference is worse than anger or hatred because it is non-human, no empathy, no emotion, compartmentalised living in contemporary language if you like. No emotion. Emotion is edited from human interaction. He received many other prizes, awards. He’s a speaker, everybody knows, political activist involved in many, many causes. The Soviet dissidents, Soviet jury, the Kurds, etcetera. So he defined also the word indifference as when one chooses to be neutral between two opposing sides. Not only is it involve emotion, but it involves a conscious choice to be neutral in the end for whatever reason one may choose. And this is what he said also in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. I know what people say, it’s so easy. Those that were there won’t agree with that statement. The statement is, it was man’s inhumanity to man.
No, the Holocaust was man’s inhumanity to Jews. Jews were not killed because they were human beings. In the eyes of the killers they were not human beings, they were Jews. I’d like to share some of the thoughts of Wiesel on memory and writing and religion, and then go into his book. For this is quoting Wiesel, for us, forgetting was never an option. The call of memory is the call to memory. And yet it is surely so human to forget, to want to forget. How can we live with suffering in our memory all the time, but we must remember, if memory helps us to survive, forgetting helps a person to go on living. It’s this way of writing, is a dialogue with a self. If memory helps us to survive, forgetting allows us to go on living. He’s writing in the dialectic, he’s writing in the contradictory style of ancient biblical writing of paradox of parable. And Kafka has so many brilliant parables, which often a lot of them linked to Jewish history and Jewish culture. He spoke that, he wrote in his autobiography the first time he read Kafka, he didn’t sleep the whole night until the next day. Just carried on reading, reading, reading book after the book of Kafka. I think it’s such a big influence on him and his writing.
We have a supreme duty towards memory. Each one of us felt compelled to bear witness. What we are doing with so many of these lectures , it seems to me, we are trying to help this memory in some way, and everybody here listening and have been listening over the year, the whole point of setting this all up, one of the points really, is to hold a memory, a memory of the joys, the sorrows, the pains, the pleasures of a certain culture we all inherit, a culture we are part of, a religion, a history. He then says, but have we failed? I often think he has. Often think we have. He’s not afraid to question and doubt himself or his own work to try and keep the memory not only alive, but to become a memory in the history of humanity. As profound as any of the other great profound narratives of history. Have we failed? I often think we have, he writes. He speaks about racism and fanaticism will flourish again. Primo Levi, Primo Levi said it happened once, it can happen again. If it happened once, it can happen again.
What is fanaticism? Fanaticism is when people don’t question. It’s a profound thought. It’s different to the usual idea of what is a fanatic, you know, marching off and screaming and shouting and ranting and raving, nuh, uh. It’s a deeper thing going on in the mind, is a fanatic stops questioning anything, his or her own thoughts, his or her own feelings, ideologies, beliefs, stops thinking, stops questions, but why? Because the fanatic has all the answers. There’s no more need to question. The answers are given and just becomes a tool or an instrument of that ideological, single-minded vision. And his doubt goes on, he writes, let us remember Job in the Bible, who having lost everything, his children, his friends, his possessions, even his argument with God still found the strength to begin again, to rebuild his life. In a wonderful speech he gave in the early two thousands, which has got a very interesting opening keynote address by Israeli Nobel Prize winner for biochemistry, and the topic he was asked to speak on was, what is writing?
Why do you write? And he talks about, I entered writing I think through silence. And he speaks about a coffee he had with Beckett, Samuel Beckett in Paris. And in the beginning they, you know, speaking about this and that, and then started to talk about their writing. And Beckett said, you know it, in one of his novels called Maloy, the publishers left out a parable about writing in silence, about in desperation, what else could I do, but write, try to find words for the silence that which cannot be said. And that’s from Beckett, who was part of the French resistance. And, you know, you hear massive stories about Beckett, but that’s a separate thing. And his friendship with Beckett. And that he should quote Beckett and lick it to his own approach to writing. The influence of religion, All Rivers Run to the Sea, mentioned that, he actually says in another interview, in that same speech, by the way, in Tel Aviv’s Technion University, I was crazily religious. And he gives the example of Cain and Abel.
It’s written the story so early in the Bible and he gives a very interesting interpretation that Cain and Abel were brothers, he says, teenagers, enemy brothers to each other. What is the story trying to teach us? And in Wiesel’s mind, whoever kills, kills his brother. Not just literally his brother, but any other man or woman or child. In terms of memory and language he talks about, without memory, our experience would be barren and opaque like a prison cell with which no light penetrates. Like a tomb which rejects the living. Look at the poetic and the ordinary language of historical document. This is a universe where God betrayed by his creatures, covered his face in order not to see in the camp. The Almighty himself was a slaughterer. It was he who decided who would live and who would die, who would be tortured and who would be rewarded. Night after night, seemingly endless processions vanished into the flames, lighting up the sky, fear dominated the universe. And yet real despair only seized us later, afterwards, as we emerged from the nightmare and began to search for meaning.
All those doctors of law, of medicine, or theology, all those lovers of art and poetry of Bach and Goethe, were coldly, deliberately ordered the massacres. And yet do not forget the passivity of the onlookers. And yes, the silence of the allies. With one stroke have mankind’s achievement been erased. Scientific abstraction, social and economic contention, nationalism, xenophobia, religious fanaticism, racism, mass hysteria, all found the ultimate furious expression in Auschwitz. I’m linking some of his writing in Night together with his acceptance speech for the Nobel prize. It goes on. Can this be true? This is the 20th century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent? And so I explained to my friend how naive we were that the world and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent. Whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation, I will not be silent. We must always take sides.
Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. And yet real despair only seizes us later, afterwards, as we emerge from the nightmare and began to search for meaning, all those doctors of law who had been so cold, what could we find. Having shared some of those thoughts from the book and from his acceptance speech, I want to go onto the book Night itself. And it’s so important to think of him here as a young man and his father here, 'cause that is the key relationship in the book. Just over a hundred pages of sparse and fragmented narrative. In Night, everything is inverted, every value is destroyed. Almost at the beginning, one of the kapos says, here there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends. Everyone lives and dies alone. The book was translated into 30 languages. And he said as well, in Night, I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end, man, history, religion, God, there was nothing left, and yet we begin again.
But we begin with night. It’s such a profound, for me way of thinking, a profound way of putting language together with ideas and feeling, a profound way of writing, as I said, influenced by what I’ve mentioned already, religious influence, parables and so on. There’s a sense of historical accuracy, historical account, together with poetic language and this sort of, what I call paradoxical way of writing, which in the end makes art from historical fact. And that’s a huge debate to have, which Anna Denis and I are going to be giving some lectures later on some films and other pieces of literature where that tension, which is an ongoing debate, you know, whether one goes more towards an artistic expression or one sticks more to documentary, historical facts, or both, or if we’ve moved beyond that debate already, that’s for separate class talks, which will come. So the book opens with Night in Sighet, 1941 and the character’s name is Eliezer. And I say the narrator’s name because yes, it is him, but he also said that he used this language in a certain way, which is what I’m trying to to mention here. He talks about spending time discussing the Kabbalah with Moshe, he calls Moshe the Beadle in the English translation, was the caretaker of the Hasidic education, Hasidic learning.
And right at the beginning of the book, early on, Moshe comes back to Sighet and tells the story of how he escaped one of the Eichmann’s groups in one of the death squads shooting Jews into pits. He’d been taken somewhere and in a forest, dig the pit, etcetera, and had been shot in the leg, managed to crawl out, escaped, and goes back to Sighet to warn the people. And this is his teacher of the Kabbalah, this is what happened to him. The story of his own death. Now this is from the book Night. Jews listen to me! It’s all I ask of you. No money, no pity, just listen to me. It’s so dynamic, it’s so immediate in the writing. It just speaks to us. It speaks to me of centuries of history and it speaks immediately to the moment that he’d been driven to a forest in Galatia, forced to dig the graves. Moshe is the first unheeded witness in the book. And there’s a theme all the way through about being the witness, obviously linked to what I mentioned earlier, you know, being a witness, what Charlie Rose calls testament, testimony, you know, how do you write testimony and witness in today, in literature, in documentary, in art.
Moshe was the first he says, and then he quotes his father 'cause his father didn’t believe that something terrible would happen. Didn’t believe that horrible, that termination. Who could really know and extraordinary that Hungarian Jews didn’t really seem to know what was happening or what had happened, how many others really did know. So his father in the book says, yellow star? Oh well, what of it? You don’t die of it. Now that’s Elie writing about his own father. It’s quite something to quote your own father, saying that in the book, and then he puts in as well, straight after that, poor father of what then did you die? He’s never scared to question and doubt his own father, his own family, his tradition, his inheritance of religion, you know, trained almost to be a rabbi or very religious scholar, etcetera, he’s not scared to question anything. And that to me is the mark of a great human being, not a non-fanatic.
And then he goes on in the book, the general opinion was that we were going to remain in the ghetto until the end of the war, until the arrival of the red Army. Then everything would be as before. It was neither German nor Jew who ruled the ghetto. It was illusion. He speaks a lot about illusion and that since the whole book is a stripping away of layer, after layer of illusion to realise if you like, certain essential truths about what human beings are capable of and what not capable of. Another story he speaks about in the book that the Hungarian police wielding trenches and rifle butts were marching his neighbours then the family’s neighbours through the streets and the neighbours, the non-Jewish neighbours were watching. Didn’t do anything, nobody lifted a finger. And it was Hungarian police who were herding people into the cattle trucks. And he writes, it was from that moment that I began to hate the Hungarian people. I hated them, and my hate is still the only link between us today.
Not scared to question the people he grew up with, the people who live next door to him, anyone. And he carries on writing in the book. The the rabbi, his back bent, his face shaved, his mere presence among the deportees added a touch of unreality to the scene. It was like a page torn from some storybook. One by one they passed in front of me, teachers, friends, others, all those I’d been afraid of, all those I once could have laughed at, all those I had lived with over the years. They went by, fallen, dragging their packs, dragging their lives, deserting their homes, the years of their childhood cringing, like beaten dogs. It’s extraordinary writing. It captures the immediacy of the moment. It captures the historical fact of the moment. And it has a poetic language to provoke an incredibly emotive response and thoughtful responsiveness, artistic and historical language. He and his family are among 80 people crammed into one cattle car.
One night, one woman, Madame Schächter in the book is the second unheeded witness. She starts screaming in the cattle truck that she can see flames and she’s screaming, going delirious, and in the book he writes that the others in the cattle waggon killed her, beat her to death. They arrive and we’ve spoken about what happened. And he quotes from the book, again, men to the left, women to the right, and mentioned what happened to his mother and sisters, younger sister, men to the left, women to the right to quote from the book again, eight words, spoken quietly, indifferent without emotion. Eight short simple words. For a part of a second, I glimpsed my mother and my sister is moving to the right. Little Tzipora held my mother’s hand. I saw them disappear into the distance. My mother was stroking my sister fair hair and I did not know that in that place at that moment, I was parting from my mother and Tzipora forever. Then the book of Night carries on describing his efforts not to be parted with his father. In obviously going through minute by minute, the absolute hell and the grotesque inferno, not even to lose sight of his father, but obviously he sees his father’s decline of his health and in everywhere. The boy becomes the older man’s carer, everything is inverted.
The rules of what we might call supposedly normal life. Everything is inverted. Can we imagine every single thing we’ve learned, every moral, every rule, every sense of structure from the most petty banal to the biggest whatever in life, is totally inverted in this context, The boy becomes the man to the father. The terrible resentment and guilt because he realises, and he’s so honest in the book, that his father’s existence threatens his own need to survive. That’s an extraordinary honesty. During the first night, he and his father had to wait in line and while they’re in line, they watch a lorrie delivering a load of children’s bodies, baby’s bodies into a fire. And his father recites the Kaddish, as we all know, Jewish prayer for the dead. And Wiesel writes in the book, in the long history of the Jews, have people ever recited the prayer for the dead for themselves? And then he talks about himself in the book, the student of the Talmud, the child that I was, had been consumed in the flames.
They remained only a shape that had looked like me. Everything is learned, everything is understood, everything that is been taught about life, family, religion, culture, history, anything civilization, gone, illusion. And in the great quote that I have to say, everybody, many people I’m sure know, never shall I forget that first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed, seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke, never shall I forget the little faces of the children whose bodies I saw turned into reeds of smoke beneath the silence, blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things. Even if I’m condemned to live as long as God himself, never. With a loss of his own self and sense of time, he carries on writing. I glance at my father, how he had changed. So much had happened in a few hours that I’d lost all sense of time. When had we left our houses, the ghetto and the train?
Was it only a week, one night, one single night? Extraordinary writing! One of the most powerful passages, I believe of the 20th century, if not, of many of much literature, he’s able to combine because he’s writing it at an older age when he’s in his mid to late twenties of himself at the age of 15, everything he has learned, his own memory, it’s completely been changed and completely been turned into all illusion at that young age, is no going back obviously. And what is learned and what replaces it is in a sense of everything to come in the 20th century and the Holocaust. The language combining all the elements of poetry, of history, of historical account, of being witness, of bearing witness, but also the writer, the artist, extremely religious upbringing, the sense of coming from somewhere and going to another, somewhere in terms of his life and culture. During the hanging of the child, where they’re all forced to watch one hanging of the child, in the camp he hears someone ask, this is from the book again, where is God?
Where is he? But the child was not heavy enough for the weight of his body to break his neck. The boy dies slowly. We walked past him. His tongue was still pink and his eyes clear. Behind me I heard the same man asking, where is God now? And I heard a voice within me answer, here is God. He is hanging on the gallows. Then in January, 1945 of the Soviet army approaching the Germans take, as we all know, 60,000 inmates on the death march. The journey. Elie and his father are marched to and then put in a freight train to Buchenwald. He writes in the book, pitched darkness, every now and then an explosion of the night. They had orders to fire on anyone who could not keep up their fingers on the triggers. They did not deprive themselves of this pleasure. If one of us had stop for a second, a sharp shot, finished off another filthy son of a bitch. Near me, men were collapsing in the dirty shot snow, shots. Once in Buchenwald he writes, I yelled against the wind. I wasn’t arguing with him, but with death itself, with the death he had already chosen. And then comes for me one of the most powerful parts of the book, the camp lights and Elie exhausted follows the crowd to the barracks, his father behind him. And he wakes at dawn on a wooden bank, remembering he has a father, goes to look for him. And then this is quoting from the book again.
But at that same moment, this thought came into my mind, don’t let me find him. If only I could get rid of this dead weight so that I could use all my strength to struggle for my own survival and only worry about myself. Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever. Extraordinary honesty from a young man about his father and extraordinary lack of fear and total courage to question himself in the writing. As we know his father was killed and he hears the final voice of his father calling for his son Eliezer. And the next day, the kapos come and take his father to the crematorium. And then Elie Wiesel writes in the book, I did not weep and it pained me that I could not weep, but I had no more tears and the depths of my being and the recesses of my weakened conscience if I could. If I could, would’ve searched for it, it might have perhaps found something like when I’m free at last. It’s such a total honesty to himself, being real and honest here about his father and what had happened. I want to move on briefly from the book in the last few minutes, just a couple of points about some responses to the book where some, if you like, academics, Holocaust scholars and others have argued that the power of the narrative is given at the cost of literal truth, of factual truth. And one Holocaust academic says, well, where is the purely factual, it’s ignored for the sake of literary sophistication.
Another Holocaust scholar, I’m not going to mention names, has argued that Elie Wiesel evokes, rather than describes. He writes, Wiesel’s account is filled with a freight of fiction, scenic organisation, characterization through dialogue, periodic climaxes, dramatic, especially in ability to arouse the empathy of the reader not bound by fidelity to fact. Nonfiction becomes art. Another one wrote that Night is a semi-fictional construct. There’s a debate as to whether the first French version of the book was published that if the editors and publishers had taken out questions of revenge and anger in order to appeal to a largely Christian readership in the French translation. I don’t know how much is true, how much isn’t of all that, and I don’t want to know really. For me it’s these debates about, by the academics which have fueled debates over the last century into today right now. How do we capture, how do we witness in literature, in art, literature, art, music, poetry, theatre, whatever, film, how do we capture that in a non-documentary form? What is the price? What is the benefit?
Where is the richness in both? And it’s a debate that is raged all ever since the Holocaust and before, but in particular, I just want to leave that as a question for now. As I said, it’s something we’ll get into more later. It’s interesting that Orson Wells apparently wanted to make a feature film of Night, but Elie Wiesel refused. I want to finally hear, show something. And this is right at the, this is Wiesel just before he is deported on the left, obviously when he is young, he’s 15 years old, and this is Elie Wiesel on the right. And right at the end of the book, there’s this little phrase, after the Germans fled, after the Germans fled, the American tanks stood at the gates of Buchenwald. Later I looked at myself in a mirror and a corpse gaze back at me. The look in its eyes have never left me. For me in his eyes there’s everything of so much experience, of so much wisdom, intelligence, pain, suffering, celebration, understanding, profundity, wisdom. So many things I don’t want to go on. But so many things that are inside this one human being and the, you know, to underestimate the achievements what one human being can actually do, I don’t think should ever be underestimated by anybody in life.
So I, there’s a tattoo on his left arm, and this is the quote that he loves to quote, it’s from one of Camus plays. Albert Camus for me, one of the great writers, one of the first writers I ever read as a kid in Durban, Albert Camus, there’s more to celebrate than to denigrate in man. And I would just like to leave us with that thought, given his whole extraordinary life, which is try to celebrate, try to bring back, and at the same time never hesitate from questioning, challenging, fighting, arguing, debating, discussing. For me, all of this goes into what are the real huge achievements of his life. And I think will only grow as his legacy grows over time. His life, his writings, his way of capturing probably for me, the most grotesque event in human history. Thanks very much everybody, and hope everyone is well.
David, thank you very, very much for that excellent presentation. I know that we, that yeah, truly, truly an extraordinary man and a giant in life and in our lifetime. And as I said to you, we had the honour of knowing him. David, we going to have the opportunity of speaking to Elisha in one hour, so I think maybe just 10 minutes for questions then that gives you, that actually just gives you, I don’t even know if there’s time for questions. Maybe we should leave it now because I know that you’re jumping on in half an hour or 40 minutes.
[David] Sure.
And I just want to give you time to have a break. What do you think?
I’m fine with some questions. Maybe 15, 20 minutes of questions and then-
Okay, if you’d like. I’m going to leave it to you.
[David] Fine.
Alright.
[David] Okay.
And then you jump off, you terminate when you’re ready to jump offline?
[David] Right, okay.
Judi, Jude, are you there with us?
Thank you so much.
[Judi] Yes I’m here, Wendy.
Okay, thanks Jude. All right, over to you David, sorry.
Q&A and Comments:
Okay, thank you. So Diane asked, I have to query the use of his third quote through the object of curiosity is to objectify the other. Curiosity suggests a strange non other . It can, I guess interestingly, but I think what he means is to see another with curiosity rather than a threat. At least that’s a first step to, I guess if it’s not seen a person as a threat and therefore an object of hate.
Thank you Barbara.
From Mara, Martin Luther King also said good people are silent, our greatest threat. Thank you.
Anna, from his Nobel Prize speech of blessed memory must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor. Never the tormented. Thank you.
Alice, they didn’t die. They were murdered. Spot on. Thank you.
Q: Fred, why did the allies not bomb the railway to the camps after being asked to do so?
A: It would’ve saved thousands of Jewish lives. Absolutely, I think well, there are different reasons for it and I possibly will leave it to truly the historical expert. But from what I understand, well there were a whole lot of different reasons, they may not get into it now.
Who paid for him to go to Sorbonne? Barbara, I don’t know. Great question. I don’t know.
Paul, I’ve been told that it is darker in its original in Yiddish. Yes, it’s darker and I think there’s a lot more anger and it’s called, And the World Remained Silent, which I think speaks for itself. Gerald, in Night, he states his family listened to the latest news about the war from the Voice of America, the BBC, but they never did hear anything about the death camps and the German slaughter. If only one radio station would’ve said it, and if you don’t, the Germans will come for you, etcetera.
Q: Why isn’t not the fact of the silence of the allies in their broadcasts not raising essential fact of the Holocaust?
A: Yeah, absolutely. That’s what he’s saying. As I mentioned the British House of Parliament in December the 17th, I think 1942 had a minute silence for the Jews of the murdered Jews of Europe. So they knew, and you know, we all know the stories of how word got out. You know, reports got out not going into detail of how it got out, reports got out, word got out. They knew December, 1942, could have bombed easily. All sorts of justifications and reasons that I’ve read why the allies didn’t bomb. But it’s up for debate I think perhaps for another time. But nevertheless, the fact is the end result is, you know, they didn’t.
Q: Okay then Arlene, did Wiesel remain religious?
A: Yes, very much so. He kept studying the Talmud in particular, in New York and his life.
Bernice, my husband lived in little town across the river from Elie Wiesel, they could have been on the same train to Auschwitz. That’s an extraordinary, thank you Bernice.
Amazing man, appreciate the quotes of memory forgetting. Thank you Rochelle.
Monica, the honour of meeting Elie Wiesel, having dinner with him when he was brought to the temple, what struck him as the aura and a humble. Absolutely and thank you.
And a little bit of that came across in the interview with Charlie Rose, thank you Adam.
Then Lily, privileged to meet him at 92nd Street. Why? I did a reading of Night. Never forget that experience.
Monty, the Holocaust has now become a commodity for some to use for material gain. There are now individuals across the board in print, radio, TV, exploiting the show to make money for themselves. There are those studying the Holocaust in order to help us cope with what happened. I have no problem with them. It is the vultures picking the bones of the Holocaust memory at all. Spot on Monty.
Baryl, thank you Wendy. Thank you, really appreciate for your comments. Okay.
Q: Why the rise of anti professors and students scared to make a noise.
A: The fear in universities couldn’t agree with you more. There’s so much PC stuff going on in universities around the world, I think, which is a nightmare itself.
Q: Romi, how much do you think trauma affects memory and writing changes memory?
A: It’s a great question. I think it’s such a fascinating and profound question for our times. The link of trauma and memory and how writing changes memory, but also how to write to reflect memory. Those of you might have seen some of William’s work even, you know, Ubu and The Truth Commission and others about South Africa and many others from in writing all over the world. There’s a new movement in theatre called Verbatim Theatre, which takes testimony literally and doesn’t change a word and just puts the words in the mouths of the performers on stage verbatim. And it’s a whole new approach to theatre to try and capture memory, memoir, documentary. It’s part of the ongoing debate between that and be more poetic as Elie Wiesel does with language. I think it’s such an important point 'cause it relates to the film Schindler. I mean, Schindler’s List is not made exactly, you know, it’s an hour and a half of a film and many other films that we know about the Holocaust. So this tension, if you like, between drama, the needs of drama or clay, or a novel, a book, a literature, a poem. The needs of that compared to historical fact and documentary is an ongoing fascinating debate. In fact, one goes back to the ancient Greeks again, some of their stories in their plays, you know, would’ve done the same thing obviously in a totally different context not about the Holocaust.
Edith, I was friends with his sister. That’s extraordinary.
Beatrice, thank you so much.
She lived in Montreal and worked in the Israeli Consulate, had two wonderful children with whom I understand were Elisha’s friends. Batia was a very kind and humble person like her brother. Her face carried the totality of Jewish pain. Thank you very much. That’s so profound.
Nikki, did Wiesel, sorry yeah. Did Wiesel and George Stein know each other? I don’t know. Fascinating question.
Rachel, I’m glad that Elie Wiesel speaks about halting hating the Hungarians. Long last, someone speaks his mind. Thank you, Rachel. This is so strong because for me, he doesn’t hesitate to speak his mind. He doesn’t hesitate to question anything. If he can question his own father and his own self of feeling free at his father dying, that he has a chance to survive in his book, that’s an extraordinary courage, an extraordinary, painful and raw honesty.
Lynn, did he know Frankl? I’m not sure. Good question.
Monica, when did he get to see his sisters? I don’t know. I’m sure, I imagine often. I wanted to focus much more on Night, the book in today. There’s so much you know about him.
Thank you Josephine. Thank you Yvonne. Thank you very much for your kind comments. Carol, thank you.
Josephine, a Hungarian survivor, late friend, always say when asked where was God, and he, it was not God in Auschwitz, but man. Thank you Josephine.
Carol, it’s meaningful, thank you.
Anna, thank you for your kind comment.
Menachem, does the original Yiddish manuscript still exist? It’s a really interesting question. I’m sure it does somewhere. Maybe I would imagine with the publishers.
Okay Bev, thank you for your kind comments. Thank you, Robin. Thanks again Debbie.
Elie thank you. Elie Strauss, a friend of mine spent the rest of his life working for the JDC.
Sandra, how does Wiesel reconcile his belief in God? Great question. It’s for another lecture, sorry. It’s in his autobiography, but it’ll take too long here.
He was born in, Miriam, was born in Sighet, Romania, and later became part of, yeah, you’re right. It was Sighet in Romania at the time and then became part of Hungary under Horthy.
Diane, just wondering if Elie responded to the claims that his book Night was partly fictional. There’s a lot that has been spoken about it and he has said that if, yeah, I don’t want to get into that, that’s going to get us into a separate debate right now. It’s a long, big debate. Thank you. But an important question. I’m only, I’m really not ducking the question. It’s just that it’ll take a long time 'cause it’s a nuanced discussion.
Giselle, did he maintain his faith, as I’ve heard, stop believing in God? No, he believed in God and he maintained his faith.
Elie Strauss, my parents were in Hungary. They thought the tales of the death camps were horror stories, most people did not believe it. Yeah, hence the need in our times to absolutely find ways to make these stories not become stale and seemingly old or anything, but to find ways all the time to tell them so they don’t just become little stories, you know, which I said over, you know, a cup of coffee or something crazy.
Lily, thank you again.
Thank you, Beverly. They said the British didn’t want the Germans to know they could decode their message. Yep, absolutely, Beverly. That’s one argument the British didn’t want the Germans to know they decoded the Enigma and if they had, they, if they had bombed the camps, they thought the Germans might, but on the other hand, the British used it, having decoded in Enigma to beat the Germans with the submarines and the U-boats stopping the supplies of weapons, food, and everything else coming from America to England. So they used it for that and to turn the Atlantic sea wall against the U-boats around and other things. So I don’t fully buy that.
Abigail, he recovered his faith through speaking with the rabbi in New York. Yes, very friendly with Nielsen and others. Okay, Yolandi continued to be religious. Yeah.
Did he continue to believe in God? I understood that he did not. Great question, Yolandi. Go back and double check in his autobiography.
Julian, I heard Elie Wiesel speak at and he told us not to be silent about apartheid. I don’t think he was scared of anything. Often experienced, like, I don’t think fear of anything really, so powerful. Okay.
You don’t mention his contribution to waking up the world. This is from Evelyn. Don’t mention his contribution to waking up the world to the plight of the Soviet jury with his Jews of silence. I mentioned that just briefly once there, I know. Thank you for that, Evelyn. He did a huge amount, I couldn’t cover everything in a short hour. He did a huge amount to try to bring the world’s attention to the plight of dissidents and Jews in Soviet Russia, in Soviet Union.
Okay, thank you Sharon. Okay. I think that’s mostly it. Thank you very much. Okay, Judi?
[Judi] Yes, sorry David, thank you so much. Wendy, are you still there with us? Well David, thank you and we’ll see everybody in 45 minutes.
45 Minutes, great. Thank you Judi.
[Judi] Thank you so much, take care.
Take care everybody. Take care.