by Elie Wiesel
People close to him told me how, after the battle was over, he came home to his wife and children and spent several days and nights sobbing. Never explaining.
Many years later, in 1995, a victim of cancer, fearing the inevitable decline, he committed suicide. All Israel wept for him.
In the Bible, one generation represents forty years. But I collected and published the texts that compose One Generation After twenty-five years after the Event. That is what I sometimes call the Holocaust, for the latter name does not seem adequate.
Some scholars contend that I was the first to give the term “Holocaust” a modern usage by introducing it into our contemporary vocabulary. Why did I choose that word over another? At the time I was preparing an essay on the Akeda, the sacrifice of Isaac; the word ola, translated as “burnt offering” or “holocaust,” struck me, perhaps because it suggests total annihilation by fire and the sacred and mystical aspect of sacrifice, and I used it in an essay on the war. But I regret that it has become so popular and is used so indiscriminately. Its vulgarization is an outrage.
In truth, as I have said over and over, there is no word for the ineffable. Shoah? This biblical term, now officially used in Israel, seems equally inadequate. It applies to an accident, a natural catastrophe striking a community. As such it has appeared in official speeches and in the press since the very beginning of anti-Jewish persecutions in Nazified Europe, long before the implementation of the Final Solution. Clearly the same word should not be used to describe both a pogrom and Auschwitz.
After the liberation, Yiddish-speaking survivors referred simply to “the war” or the Churban, a word that signifies destruction and recalls the ransacking of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. Yet with the passage of time I become more and more convinced that no word is strong enough or true enough to speak of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, … And yet.
In The Town Beyond the Wall, I divided society of that time into three categories: the killers, the victims, and the spectators. Later, in my first speech at the White House, I observed that if we allow the victims to be relegated to oblivion, we would in fact be killing them again.
As the years go by, this witness grows increasingly weary of correcting “experts,” of trying to limit the trivialization of memory, of fighting public indifference. Hate crimes, religious wars, ethnic conflicts, collective violence, the rise in xenophobia and anti-Semitism—to think that we had imagined that the demons would no longer come howling in the night.
These may be the reasons for the pervasive feeling that a grave error has been committed, that something has gone awry. We must have been wrong to trust mankind, wrong to hope that we could defeat death by remaining faithful to its victims. Perhaps we should have remained silent, so as not to violate the secret entrusted to us by the dead. Perhaps we were wrong to expose the mystery of Auschwitz to the inevitable profanations we are forced to witness more and more frequently.
MY GRANDFATHER continues to haunt my dreams. Hands clasped behind his back, he wanders through the Beit Midrash as if he were looking for someone. He is alone. But not completely: I am keeping him company. But he is alone nevertheless. From time to time he stops, picks up a book, and, with an air of deep concentration, leafs through it. He puts it down, and I, in turn, open it. A shiver runs through me: All the pages are blank and faded. I utter a frightened sound, but my grandfather signals me to be silent. And to come closer. He stands before the Holy Ark. Inside are human beings instead of the sacred scrolls. I cry: “But they are dead, Grandfather, they are all dead.” My grandfather nods as if to say: True, we are all dead. “But the sacred scrolls, Grandfather, where are they? With the dead?” My grandfather doesn’t answer. Panicked, I turn and prepare to run away. I run toward the exit, but it is blocked. I rush to the window, but it opens on a wall. A stranger has scaled it; he is sitting on top. Eyes wide, I try to identify him. It is my grandfather. In his arms he holds the sacred scrolls. He cradles them as if they were his grandchildren. I lean over to capture his song and I fall, or rather I feel that I am falling, only to find myself at the very spot where my grandfather had been sitting. I don’t know how, but now I am the one who is holding the scrolls. I want to rock them, but I don’t know the song that filled my dream.
In Israel, the so-called war of attrition is devastating. In Munich, where an El Al plane is attacked by Arab terrorists, killing one and wounding eleven, the Jewish Center is set on fire. A Swissair plane explodes: Forty-seven people, passengers and crew, lose their lives. Violence becomes more frequent, more intense. Planes are hijacked. We witness the massacre of Palestinians by the Jordanian army and the birth of the Black September movement.
One evening, having been invited to Golda’s home, Marion and I arrive to find her distraught. The army has just shot down five Soviet MiGs that had violated Israeli airspace. Golda fears reprisals. Chainsmoking as usual, she complains: “These Russians, what do they want from us? Why are they always against us, always on the enemy’s side? Why do they provoke us? Is it war they’re looking for? With a small state like ours?”
Next day, in the restaurant at the Knesset, we chat with Ezer Weizman, the former air force commander, a minister without portfolio in Golda’s government, and the future president of the State of Israel. “Everybody is worried,” I say to him. “Aren’t you?” No, he is not. The enfant terrible of Israeli politics is, as General de Gaulle would say, “sure of himself” and of Tsahal, the army. “The next war will not last six days but six hours,” he tells us. “The plans are ready, success guaranteed.” “Then why is Golda so worried?” I ask. Weizman shrugs as if to say: What can you expect of a woman who has never done military service?
An hour later we have coffee with General Bar-Lev, commander in chief of the army, and famous for his strategic genius. I first met this brilliant military man in New York, where he was doing postgraduate work at Columbia University. He is a fine man—intelligent, reserved, sophisticated, and loyal. His speech is slow and deliberate; his gaze, penetrating. He inspires confidence and is admired by the military, respected by the politicians, trusted by the public.
We discuss the current tensions. He is nearly as optimistic as Weizman. He whips out his pen and scribbles numbers on a paper napkin. Of course, he says in his low, halting voice, there are those who are afraid—not of the Arabs, naturally, but of the Russians. Those Russians are powerful. Their numbers are overwhelming. But they are far away. What would be dangerous for us would be a war with infantry and armored vehicles…. If the Red Army sends more than a hundred thousand soldiers, that might pose a problem…. But they would need transport planes…. And, yes, their pilots are good. But ours are better.
I must admit that I was frightened by his calm. I thought to myself: The entire world is afraid of the Soviet Union, but he is not. France fears the Russians, Washington is wary of them, China distrusts them, and the tiny Israeli nation is fearless. If Bar-Lev’s equanimity had been based on a belief in divine intervention rather than in strategic arguments, I would have better understood his attitude.
Let us stay another moment with One Generation After, whose French title, Entre deux soleils, was suggested by Manès Sperber. What does it mean, “Between two suns”? It means dusk, the mystical hour worshipped by Hasidic dreamers. At that hour on the first Friday of Creation, according to Pirkei Avot, The Ethics of Our Fathers, ten things were introduced into human history: the abyss that swallowed Korah and his accomplices; Miriam’s well, which accompanied the Children of Israel into the desert to heal them; the mouth of the ass that answered Balaam; the rainbow in Noah’s time; the manna; the staff used to effect the biblical miracles in pharaonic Egypt; the shamir, the tiny worm that split the stones used in the construction of Solomon’s Temple; the rectangular shape of the letters engraved in the Tablets of the Law; their capacity to be read at four different angles; and the tablets themselves. Certain sages add the demons, who were also created at this hour between daylight and darkness. And the tomb of
Moses. And the ram Abraham sacrificed instead of his son Isaac on Mount Moriah.
This title reflects, less clearly than the American, the content of this work, which deals, however sketchily, with generational conflicts and also the fate of children of survivors, their dramatic confrontation with their parents’ past. There is the tragic story of one young man, the son of a distant cousin from Queens. He was twenty, a student of literature, filled with literary dreams. One morning he rose, took his typewriter, and walked into the sea.
• • •
Years after the publication of One Generation After, I am invited by Yossel Rosensaft’s son, Menachem, to address the first meeting of “the Second Generation,” that is, the children of survivors. Facing these young men and women, some of them now fathers and mothers themselves, all caught between their parents’ wounded memory and their own hopes covered with ashes, I have difficulty hiding my emotions. For these people belong to my internal landscape: I look at them and see them through the prism of the past. Some of them were my students at City College. They affect me deeply because every time I see them, I cannot help but see other children through them, behind them, marching in the distance toward the blazing abyss.
I look at these young people and tell myself, tell them, that they were the enemy’s target as surely as were their parents. They were the ones he had hoped to annihilate. By killing Jews, he hoped to prevent their children from being born.
I tell them the talmudic legend of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai and his son Eleazar. Fleeing the Romans, they found refuge in a cave and stayed there twelve years. When they emerged they were unable to conceal their astonishment: The world outside had not changed. So angry were they that their eyes burned down all that they looked upon. As a result, a celestial voice ordered them back into the cave for another year, at the end of which the son was still angry, though the father was not. And the Talmud comments: “Whatever the son’s gaze wounded, the father’s gaze healed.”
Rembrandt’s beautiful painting of Abraham and Isaac comes to mind. It shows them, after the test, embracing with a tenderness that must have moved the Creator and his angels.
Is there a tenderness more profound, more intense, more human than the one that links the survivor to his child? What goes on in the mind of a son who watches his father praying or simply staring into space? What are the thoughts of a daughter who senses the pain of her mother, who has lost two infants to the executioner? Surely there comes a moment when such children become their parents’ parents.
My thoughts turned toward them once again when I wrote The Fifth Son and The Forgotten. I speak to them even when I think I am speaking to others.
In One Generation After, I try my hand at a new literary genre. My wish: to convey the essential in the form of dialogue alone. Dialogues between individuals separated by death—or life. Brief questions and clipped answers. I wanted these dialogues to be anonymous. Voices. No, I wanted them to be echoes that reach us from far away. I strain to hear the last conversation between a young boy and his little sister, a grown man and his mother, a Hasid and his grandfather. He is a witness who grasps at scraps of dialogue with the dead man inside him. He wants every word to contain a sentence, every sentence a page, every page a book, a life, a death, and the history they share.
—Hey you! You look like you’re praying!
—Wrong.
—Your lips don’t stop moving!
—Habit, no doubt.
—Did you always pray that much?
—More than that. Much more.
—What did you ask for in your prayers?
—Nothing.
—Forgiveness?
—Perhaps.
—Knowledge?
—Possibly.
—Friendship?
—Yes, friendship.
—The chance to defeat evil? The certainty of living with truth, or
living, period?
—Perhaps.
—And you call that nothing?
—I do. I call that nothing.
*
—Will you remember me?
—I promise you.
—How can you? You don’t even know who I am, I myself don’t know.
—Never mind; I’ll remember my promise.
—For a long time?
—As long as possible. All my life perhaps. But … why do you laugh?
—I want you to remember my laughter too
—You’re lying. You laugh because you’re going mad.
—Perfect. Remember my madness.
• • •
—Tell me … Am I making you laugh?
—Not just you. No, my little one, not just you.
I make my first trip to Norway, a nation that will become important to me in my life as writer and activist. Must I mention the awful, embarrassing fact that in Sighet I knew nothing of this nation and its people? Norway for me was one of those places of which I didn’t even know that I knew nothing.
Invited by the publishing house Aschehoug to promote The Jews of Silence, I go there rather skeptically. No sooner have I landed than a journalist advises me to meet Johan Borgen. Who is he? And why should I make his acquaintance? The journalist explains that when The Town Beyond the Wall had come out a few years earlier, it was warmly received, largely because of a very favorable article by this great writer, the revered dean of Norwegian letters. “He is our own Mauriac,” the journalist tells me. “Evidently he has taken you under his wing.” This explains the presence of the large number of journalists at a press conference organized by Max Tau, my editor at Aschehoug. I speak of Russian Jewry’s plight; of their struggle, nonviolent but determined; of their hopes, nourished by their thirst for identity as much as by their need for freedom. The Norwegian people are always on the side of the victims, and I sense this among the listeners. Norway is one of the rare countries to have opened its doors to “displaced persons,” the sick ones who were rejected by the big Western powers at war’s end. It is easy to become attached to this country, to these rather reserved men and women who are respectful of your moods, your need for privacy and friendship. Like the British, they favor understatement. In Norway, reticence is a national virtue. (Do you know the story of the young Norwegian who was so in love with a woman that he finally told her?)
For me a city, a country, is first of all a face. Oslo has many.
Professor Leo (his friends call him Sjua) Eitinger is the author of an important study on the psychosomatic effects of the Holocaust on its survivors. I speak of him in Night: He was present at my knee operation at Buna concentration camp. He is a distinguished-looking man. His gaze is open, his voice authoritative. “I have read your testimony,” he says. “I believe we come from the same place.” Astonished, I ask: “From Sighet?” “No. From a place that could be called anti-Sighet.” “Auschwitz? Buchenwald?” I whisper. “Both.” Suddenly an image comes back to me: the infirmary. That voice, I recognize that voice. “It’s you who …?” He smiles: “Possibly.” I tell him that I owe him a debt of gratitude. “For taking care of you?” No. For showing me that even over there it was possible to have faith in mankind.
During that same trip, I meet someone who is in fact from Sighet. Better: We attended the same heder. Surprised, I call out to him: “What are you doing here?” He bursts into laughter. “And you?” he asks. Haim-Hersh Kahan left with the first transport, together with the town’s rabbis and my two mad fellow disciples of Kalman the Kabbalist. After the liberation he returned to Sighet via Vienna and Budapest. How did he come to settle in Oslo? Like all survivors’ stories, his had much to do with chance. On his way to the United States, he went through Sweden, where he met a beautiful local Jewish girl, Esther. Haim-Hersh stayed in Scandinavia, went into business, and made a fortune; he now plays an important role in Oslo’s Jewish community. He still sings as he did long ago and tells stories of times that only he and I remember.
And so death did not triumph everywhere. Nor did evil. Old bonds are renewed, and n
ew ones are formed.
Max Tau, my editor, is an original. Small, agile, and ever watchful, he appears to be in constant fear of missing something—a rumor, a thought, an encounter. To him I owe the Norwegian publication of my first books. He introduces me to my translator, Gerd Host Heyerdahl, poet and professor at Oslo University. Max, a writer and Jewish immigrant of German origin, had fallen in love with a Norwegian, Tove (taller and less talkative than he), and with Norwegian society.
Since I don’t know his language and he doesn’t know mine, he speaks to me in German and I respond in my Germanized Yiddish. In company he pretends to understand everything, but in reality he hears nothing for the simple reason that he’s deaf, which does not prevent him from participating in the conversation. He laughs at the right moment or becomes serious when required. What upsets him about me? My refusal to “forgive.” A Germanophile, he has introduced the important German writers to Norway and proclaimed himself an advocate of reconciliation with Germany. When he obtains a German literary prize for me and I tell him that I do not feel right about accepting it, he does not conceal his hurt.
We have a shared admiration for the great Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba, whom he has known and celebrated for years, and about whom he tells me a thousand anecdotes and tales of adventure.
And then there is Johan Borgen, my ally, my friend. I owe him in Norway what I owe François Mauriac in France. Borgen lives two hours outside the capital and goes only rarely to the city. His house is isolated, protected. There are flowers everywhere. Several large, light-filled rooms. A few small cubicles—reminiscent of ancient monastic cells—are reserved for guests.
The friendship is instantaneous. From the first encounter, without preliminaries, we go straight to the essential. We speak of writing and of death, the eternal in the moment, the word and despair.
Long and thin, almost emaciated, Borgen radiates an air of rigor and flawless character: Nothing, neither honors nor adversity, can bend him. His intelligence is sophisticated, demanding.
