A Few Thoughts on Elie Wiesel's "A Jew Today"

I must have picked this book up used somewhere, or maybe ordered online from my favorite used book supplier, Abe Books. It's been in my queue for awhile. I recently finished. 

In no particular order, here are some thoughts. 

1. There is so much I do not know. Not just about Jews and Judaism, but about history, about the world. More on this below. 

2. Elie Wiesel is a man of great sorrow. He admits as much in one of his essays ("An Interview Unlike Any Other"),  in which he describes how he vowed not to speak or write about what he saw for ten years: "Long enough to see clearly. Long enough to learn to listen to the voices crying inside my own. Long enough to regain possession of my memory. Long enough to unite the language of man with the silence of the dead." 

The interview was with French novelist François Charles Mauriac, the man credited as the one who encouraged Wiesel to finally tell his story. "I think that you are wrong," Mauriac said. "You are wrong not to speak . . . Listen to the old man that I am: one must speak out--one must also speak out." 

Wiesel did, and the resulting manuscript would eventually become Night. But that sounds too tidy, and it's not that simple, how it came about, nor was finally writing about it enough to alleviate his pain. Each essay in this collection is etched with anguish. Reading it, you feel like placing a hand over your mouth, the way you might feel sitting beside Job, or beside one in mourning. You don't belong here. There's nothing to say. Nothing can be said.  

3. There is so much I do not know. Section II is called "Excerpts from a Diary." Each chapter is commentary on a current event, or controversy, or personality, of the era. My ignorance is deep and wide. After each chapter, I slunk my way to Google for a little primer on moments in history like the Biafran (Nigerian) Civil War between 1967-1970, where mass starvation was used as a legitimate weapon of war;  the genocide of the Aché  people of Paraguay during the second half of the century; United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 on November 10, 1975, which determined that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination. The Resolution was later revoked in 1991 at the initiation of President George H.W. Bush. Wiesel writes of diaries left behind in the camps, somehow written and concealed by the Sonder Kommando; of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: was he an anti-Semite? He writes of apartheid in South Africa, of Holocaust denial. He writes, and the intellect is strong, the words eloquent, but the emotion is raw. Time has not healed, nor likely ever will. He is deeply scarred.

4. Not, "where was God?" but, "where was man?" This was something I picked up on, not anything he wrote in those exact words, so I hope I'm not inferring in error. It was the chapter called "A Plea for the Survivors," which originally appeared in New York Times Magazine in August, 1978. He explains how the victims in the concentration camps believed the civilized world knew nothing about what was happening in the camps, otherwise they would come to their rescue. They consoled themselves with this one thought: "If the killers could kill freely, it was only because the Allies were not informed." But after the liberation, it became clear: in fact, the Allies did know. Everyone knew. While Jews were being decimated, thousands and thousands per day, newspapers around the world dutifully reported everything that was happening. Full coverage. Yet, no outrage. No demonstrations. Not even among American Jews. In the margins, I kept writing, "Why?" At one point, I wrote, "J'accuse!" The evil was there to see, but people in other parts of the world carried on, as if it were already too late for the European Jews. Today, it's easy to blame God. "Where was God in the Holocaust?" atheist Jews ask, and one has no answer, one can only nod in sorrow and shame, still believing in God. But reading this essay, I'm not so quick to blame God. If he's real, if he was aware of the atrocities that occurred then, if he's aware now, do we expect him to intervene supernaturally? Or does his intervention take place when people of courage and conscience stand up, speak out, act, intervene, take up arms. The courage of those who hid Jews in their homes, who lied to protect their Jewish neighbors, who smuggled infants and children out of the country. Stories of the Righteous Among the Nations, men and women, inspire. The courage it took to defy such evil, I can't even imagine.

But reading this, I am angered not at God but at man, at myself. Every day I read of Christians being annihilated, and organizations trying to rescue and intervene send me emails (I'm on half a dozen lists), asking for money. I glance at the messages and feel sad and guilty before deleting. Meanwhile, men and women who share my faith are being tortured, crucified, beheaded, burned alive. Not where is God, but where are we? Where am I? What can I do? Will sending $25 make a difference? I don't know. All I know is nothing I do can change things. Until and unless "they come for me," as the poem goes, we'll continue living life, making dinner, reading the news, shaking our heads...

J'accuse! 

I am guilty, not God. 

This is a book full of "must read" essays.  "A Plea for the Survivors" is one of them. 

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— 
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— 
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

(Martin Niemöller, 1892-1984)

Recommended Reading: "Night," by Elie Wiesel

You cannot read this book and not ask the question: Why? Not just, Why did this happen? (in part, we know: evil men do evil deeds) but, Why did people let this happen? And not just people. The Jews themselves. Why didn't they rise up, fight, resist, before these great horrors could be realized? 

On page 11, Mr. Wiesel writes about how the Jews of Sighet, Transylvania, were ordered to wear the yellow star, and his father, a well-respected member of the community, tried to calm the fears of the community by saying that it was not all bleak. "The yellow star? So what? It's not lethal." 

Shortly thereafter, the members of the community were sealed off from the rest of Sighet in two ghettos from which they were not permitted to leave. This is not right. This is not normal. Why didn't they fight, resist? Instead, they tried to live their lives as normally as possible. "The barbed wire that encircled us like a wall did not fill us with real fear. In fact, we felt this was not a bad thing; we were entirely among ourselves." 

Even worse: "People thought this was a good thing. We would no longer have to look at those hostile faces, endure those hate-filled stares. No more fear. No more anguish. We would live among Jews, among brothers."

In the margin on page 11, I wrote: Why didn't they revolt? Why passively comply?

On page 12, Wiesel answers: "Most people thought that we would remain in the ghetto until the end of the war, until the arrival of the Red Army. Afterward everything would be as before. The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion." 

Yes, delusion. 

Later, he described his family's preparation for transport (by cattle car) to the concentration camps: "It was already four o'clock in the morning. My father was running right and left, exhausted, consoling friends, checking with the Jewish Council just in case the order had been rescinded. To the last moment, people clung to hope." 

Yes, that's it. Hope. Earlier in the book, referring to the spring of 1944, before the Germans arrived in Hungary, he explains:

The trees were in bloom. It was a year like so many others, with its spring, its engagements, its weddings, and its births. The people were saying, "The Red Army is advancing with giant strides . . . Hitler will not be able to harm us, even if he wants to . . ."

Yes, we even doubted his resolve to exterminate us. Annihilate an entire people? Wipe out a population dispersed throughout so many nations? So many millions of people! By what means? In the middle of the twentieth century?

The idea was absurd, so absurd that even as they were surrounded and isolated and tagged and rounded up and herded like animals and stuffed inhumanely into cattle cars, carrying their belongings, they clung to hope. Just a temporary inconvenience, it will be over soon and things will go back to the way they were.

My signed copy (a gift from my brother)

It wasn't until they stepped off the cattle cars (that first "journey" itself was torture) at Auschwitz and saw the fires and smelled the burning flesh that they understood: "The beloved objects that we had carried with us from place to place were now left behind in the wagon and, with them, finally, our illusions."

Meanwhile, the world "remained silent." That was the name of the book in its Yiddish iteration: And the World Remained Silent. 

You read the rest of the book wondering how he, how anyone, survived. Any one of these experiences would be enough to kill: starvation, illness, bitter cold, infections, sores, bacteria, beatings, physical labor, the arbitrary "selection" process sending some to the crematoria. Even at the end, as the war neared its end and the liberators were closing in and the camps were being evacuated and the prisoners were rounded up and made to run to the next camp. Running, running, running for miles and miles in the bitter cold, the driving snow, running in pitch darkness, goaded along by SS guards who called them "filthy dogs" and shot anyone who stumbled; this was pure senseless torture, forced to run for miles, some of them barefoot, all of them starved but given no food, no water. Elie Wiesel himself had an infected foot, recently operated on. How did he survive? His father, up until that point, was still alive, though barely. Wiesel describes how, after arriving at last in Buchenwald, many many more would die simply by lying in the snow and falling asleep. He himself welcomed the idea of sleep, of death, of feeling nothing. He resisted, thinking of his father.

His father died there in Buchenwald on January 28, 1945, and the camp was liberated three months later on April 11. Even after liberation, Elie nearly died of what he said was a form of poisoning. But somehow he survived, along with thousands and thousands of others who suffered similar horrors: men, women, children. 

Their bodies survived, but did their faith? I'm not sure. Before the camps, Wiesel had been a pious Jew, but very early in the book, he tells of losing his faith. It was before death and dying had become commonplace, and someone began reciting Kaddish for those who had died in the crematoria. "For the first time, I felt an anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank him for?" 

I don't know if Elie Wiesel ever returned to his faith, if he ever resolved the contradiction between Almighty God acquiescing to Undiluted Evil, but here he is, speaking with Oprah Winfrey, about the afterlife. He obviously believes in an afterlife and genuinely expects to see his parents and his younger sister, who perished in the concentration camps, again someday.

Recommended Reading: Man's Search for Meaning

In the Afterword of Viktor Frankl's 1959 book, Man's Search for Meaning, William J. Winslade writes that Frankl's book sold more than 12 million copies, has been published in twenty-four languages, and is listed as among the ten most influential books in America. Even though, as Winslade says, the book is "routinely assigned to college, graduate, and high school students," up until a couple of months ago, I'd never heard of it, let alone read it. Once again I'm late to the party.

I suppose if someone were to ask me what the meaning of my life was, at the moment I'd have to say, "catching up." I feel as if I've just woken up out of a decades-long slumber--my teens dulled by marijuana and adolescent rebellion, my twenties by religious conversion muddled by cultic legalism, and my thirties by the attempts to disentangle lies and distortions from truth, or truth as I understood it. The best years of my life are a fog.

Now here I am in my mid-fifties, attempting to learn or re-learn everything I've either never learned or have forgotten, about history, literature, philosophy, mathematics, science, religion, geography. A verse from the Bible has been haunting me lately: "Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom." It's from Psalm 90, and in context the writer (Moses) is keenly aware of how fleeting life is. "Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty . . . they quickly pass, and we fly away." I'm 56. Suddenly 70 or 80 doesn't seem that far away. I'm running out of time.

Back to Frankl's book. It's very short, divided into two main sections. Part I ("Experiences in a Concentration Camp") and Part II ("Logotherapy in a Nutshell"). This edition also includes a Postscript, written in 1984 and based on a lecture the author gave at the Third World Congress of Logotherapy in West Germany in 1983 titled "The Case for a Tragic Optimism," and the previously-mentioned Afterword by William Winslade, which neatly encapsulates the entire book. 

Part I was tough reading. How long have I averted my eyes from the Holocaust? But it's time I looked it square in the face. Frankl actually survived four camps: Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Kaufering, and Turkheim. At the time of his arrest, he was a practicing psychiatrist, had already been writing and lecturing on his theories of the importance of meaning as a key element to mental health--i.e., logotherapy. He apparently had a chance to escape Austria but chose to let his visa expire in order to remain with his aging parents. Eventually his entire family would die in the concentration camps--his parents, his brother, his pregnant wife. Throughout those years he clung to the hope of reuniting with his wife and was nourished by memories of his love for her. He himself, by fate, luck, chance, or God's purpose, survived, but barely. He nearly died of typhus.

One of the more poignant stories Frankl tells comes early in the book, when he was first arrested and the new prisoners were told to strip naked and deposit all their belongings. Frankl had carried with him upon his arrest the manuscript he was working on--essentially this book--naively thinking he would be able to continue writing in prison. Of course the manuscript was destroyed.

Frankl writes about "the great army of unknown and unrecorded victims," about things that happened not in the "large and famous camps, but in the small ones where most of the real extermination took place." He describes the sadistic treatment of prisoners by both SS guards and prisoners themselves who were "promoted" (Capos, they're called). He writes about the "hard fight for existence...the unrelenting struggle for daily bread."

But what's most interesting about this section is that, because he's a psychiatrist, he writes not only as one who experienced these horrors--a survivor--but also as a detached observer. Perhaps it was his ability to distance himself and remain objective that contributed to his survival--his attempts to help others not give up hope inoculating him from the hopelessness which he believes may have contributed to many prisoners' deaths, either by suicide or, quite literally, by simply giving up.

Frankl's observations about self-determination are fascinating. Here are some excerpts (all italics are Frankl's). At the end of Part II he writes:

"A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes--within the limits of endowment and environment--he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.

"Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips." 

Referring to Sigmund Freud's theory that if people from all walks of life were exposed uniformly to hunger, "individual differences [would] blur, and in their stead [would] appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge" (implying, I suppose, that hunger will reduce all people--wealthy or poor, beautiful or homely, godly or agnostic--to animalistic urge for survival), Frankl writes:

"Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the 'individual differences' did not blur but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints."

At the core of these observations are the theories that ultimately form the basis of logotherapy. And while I don't pretend to understand it, at the very least I think I get the fundamentals. Meaning, Frankl says, can be discovered in three different ways:

1. by creating a work or doing a deed
2. by experiencing something or encountering someone (in other words, by loving)
3. by how we deal with unavoidable suffering

That last point is perhaps his most profound. Frankl does not argue, let alone believe, that one needs to experience suffering to find meaning in life but rather that in the face of unavoidable suffering, one's response determines one's meaning. The excerpt quoted above, describing the dignity of those who entered the gas chambers with prayer on their lips, is, perhaps, the most eloquent example of what he's referring to here.