by Elie Wiesel
… We must seek and situate the success of this conference in the conference itself. The fact that it has taken place is in itself significant and important.
And what is the goal we have set for ourselves? To identify the problems and prioritize them. To name the diseases, the epidemics, the famines, the fanaticism. Torture. Pollution. AIDS. The nuclear threat. The distress of children beaten and killed far from the eyes of men, and perhaps from the eyes of God Himself. Just by enumerating these problems, it would be easy to become discouraged. Every one of the participants is proof of what an individual is capable of undertaking and achieving for the benefit of mankind.
Our conclusions follow, and I admit that none is particularly original. Human rights, priority for education, scientific cooperation, encouragement for research in molecular biology, disarmament, aid to developing countries—they could appear as a collection of clichés. One editorial writer ironically compares them to behavior guidelines for schoolchildren. True, in that sense we have done no better than all other conferences of intellectuals. Their resolutions are frequently futile, if not banal, and have never had the slightest influence on the great of this world, as everyone knows. Sadly, ours fare no better.
There were sixteen “conclusions.”
Let us take as an example: the sixteenth—and final—“conclusion” of our labors. “The conference of Nobel laureates will meet again in two years to study these problems. Until then, wherever it is felt that there is urgent need, several Nobels will personally travel to wherever human rights are threatened.”
Many times two years have gone by since then and … nothing. I brought it up with President Mitterrand on several occasions. I reminded him of “our” promises, our public commitments. Each time he was content to answer, “Oh really?” For that matter, this is not the first public promise he has chosen not to keep. In his speech during the Sorbonne conference in 1982, he entrusted me with the organization of an international conference on hatred. Thereafter, several working sessions with scientists and philosophers ensued. Then came the cohabitation. And that was the end of a stimulating project meant to fight the rise of racism and xenophobia in Europe. With hindsight I think I should have protested immediately.
THIS NIGHT AGAIN, I see my father in a dream. Very close, over there, under a gray sky that is not that of Jerusalem. Behind him I sense my little sister. I sense her because my father is smiling the way he does only for Tsipouka.
He looks at me but doesn’t see me. I call him. He doesn’t answer. I try to speak to him, but he doesn’t hear me. Suddenly he seems to tremble. I turn around and see an unknown woman. I know she’s a widow, for she’s dressed in black. I ask her: Since when have you been in mourning? As she remains silent, I pronounce the ritual formula: May God comfort you together with the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem. I see her lips moving, but there is no sound. I say: I can’t hear you. She acquiesces with a nod: It’s true, you don’t hear me. Why this pain that seizes me abruptly? I look behind me for my father to come to my rescue, but he’s no longer there.
First he hides the horizon from me. Then he illuminates it. And that is how it should be.
The effect of the Nobel Prize? As Nadine Gordimer described it to me, it is sort of a full-time job. And it makes you travel. Invitations pour in from every corner. The world is yours; it is up to you to enrich it—according to your benefactors—or to amuse it, if you’ve remained lucid and kept your sense of humor. There is prestige in having a movie star to dinner, or a Nobel Prize winner on one’s roster of speakers. It is both chic and serious. You are asked to name your terms. You travel first-class or on the Concorde. You stay in luxury hotels. Rewarded for your activities or your work, you no longer have the time to pursue them.
I accept an offer to deliver a lecture at the Centre Rachi in Paris. While I am in Paris, Mayor Jacques Chirac presents me with the coveted Médaille de Vermeil. Thanks to Hélène Ahrweiler, rector of the universities, the Sorbonne awards me a doctorate honoris causa. I confess that the ceremony, in the presence of several ministers and academicians dressed in green, touches me; it brings back memories of my student years. Every morning I had to choose whether to walk from the Porte de Saint-Cloud to the Latin Quarter and buy myself a cheese sandwich, or take the bus and stay hungry. And now here I am, the same person, being told that I am honoring this great and venerable institution. The violinist Ivry Gitlis plays a new composition for us. Hélène Ahrweiler’s address is exquisitely intelligent and erudite. She stresses the connection between writer and witness. I, in turn, place the emphasis on the vulnerability of education: How can one forget that many of the Einsatzkommando’s commanders had advanced degrees? A university diploma does not constitute a guarantee of morality or humanity. In other words, a little humility would do our intellectuals no harm.
On the personal and professional level I receive a serious lesson in modesty administered by my various publishers. Between celebrity and success there is a bridge I have not yet crossed and probably never shall. The proof is that my books, though quickly reprinted, have only modest sales; some do quite well but rarely become best-sellers. The Prix Médicis, one of France’s most prestigious prizes, helped A Beggar in Jerusalem. Contrary to popular belief, the Nobel Prize does not influence sales much—at least not the year I won.
As for celebrity, sometimes I am accosted by a smiling person who asks: “You look like a famous person. Who are you?” Or else, “My elderly father adores you.” Or again: “My children admire you.” It’s always someone else who reads me.
Rather than royalties, the Nobel Prize brings you an audience. Egil Aarvik had murmured this in my ear the night of the official dinner in Oslo: “From now on you will have a forum, a tribune; your words will not vanish into a void. I don’t promise you will be heard, but people will listen to you.”
Invitations continue to pour in. Which should I accept? Seminars, colloquia, conferences: I am invited to speak on all continents, as though it had been discovered suddenly that I had not lost the power of speech.
I return to Oslo to honor Sjua Eitinger. I no longer like all this moving around. I do it anyhow. I don’t like facing audiences; I face them anyhow.
I make a lightning trip to Brazil. David Pincus, a director of our foundation, accompanies me. Hardly has he landed in São Paulo than he disappears. He’s carrying out his own investigation on disadvantaged children. Children are his “cause,” his obsession. He looks for them everywhere; he organizes help for them everywhere, in Rwanda as well as in Bosnia. By the time he leaves Brazil he will leave behind him an organization—financed by him—to assist the children of the impoverished districts, the favelas.
March 1987: Aside from India, I hardly know Asia at all; but it is not in order to discover it that I’m going to Japan. I am going in order to research a bizarre and disquieting phenomenon there: the rise of anti-Semitism. Popular books are spreading a hatred of all things Jewish. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other anti-Jewish writings are on the best-seller lists. I can’t understand it. There are hardly any Jews in the country, probably not more than five hundred, all foreigners, so what is to account for the rampant anti-Semitism there? In my lectures, in Tokyo and Osaka, I tell my audience how astounded I am: “Anti-Semitism without Jews? In Japan? Don’t you know this is a Western disease? Why are you importing it here?”
The writers and university professors I meet do their best to reassure me: Japanese, they say, do not hate Jews, quite the contrary—they admire them. If they read books about the Jewish people, it’s in order to absorb their wisdom, to get to know more about these Jews who seem to dominate the world by virtue of the money they make(!), the solidarity that links them to one another, and the influence they exercise in the press and in international diplomacy(!!). The Japanese want to know them in order to emulate them; it’s as simple as that; it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. I am far from convinced by these “reassurances.”
In response to a standing i
nvitation from the Jewish community of Australia, we visit that country in August 1988. Two of our friends, Harriette and Noel Levine, go with us. I find this faraway continent, a haven for the outcasts of Europe, particularly exciting. It has become a lush, vibrant place of freedom and culture. In Sydney, I meet a woman who used to live on my street in Sighet. She and her husband pull me into a corner to tell me their problem: Their daughter is about to marry a non-Jew. He’s going to convert, they say, weeping, but … but what? I quickly explain to them the rules of conversion: A male convert becomes a son of Abraham, a female convert a daughter of Sarah, and each assumes the duties and privileges of any other Jew.
David Burger, a survivor of Auschwitz, tells me of his experiences in the camp. He should write a book about them. If only I had the time to help him. That is my obsession: to make the survivors talk, to encourage them to testify, to put their recollections on paper.
Marion rushes back to New York with Elisha. Her sister Anny has just died.
In the airplane that brings us from Paris to Kiev on a cold October morning, in 1990, we have a minyan for the Shaharit service. Wrapped in tallitot and with tefillin ringing our foreheads, we are saying our prayers. A young Bratzlaver Hasid is officiating. He has a melodious, fervent voice, filled with beauty and melancholy. Marion and our traveling companions are watching us in silence. Marion seems taken by these prayers. That is unusual for her.
It all had begun with a surprising question: “Would you like to visit Uman?” Clément Vaturi asked me one day. “I’m going there with a group of Hasidim.” We had met Clément through his sister and brother-in-law, Alice and Daniel Morgaine. I knew Daniel from his days as a journalist at France Soir.
“Did you say Uman? In Ukraine?” “Yes,” Clément answers. “Does that mean something to you?” Does it mean something to me? The word is part of my intimate, imaginary landscape. Uman was the last home of Rebbe Nahman of Bratzlav, the marvelous storyteller of the movement founded by his grandfather the Besht. It is the place where the Rebbe is buried.
Rebbe Nahman is close and precious to me on more than one level. He makes me dream. I love everything that touches him, everything that refers to his life, his work. I love everything that is impregnated by his universe—the stories of princes who lose their way and of exalted beggars, his tales of unknown worlds, his biblical ideas and commentaries, even the comments he used to make at table. “Take my stories and turn them into prayers,” Rebbe Nahman used to say. Well, as far as I’m concerned, I’ll turn his prayers into stories.
An old wreck of a bus is waiting for us at the Kiev airport. The guide is there, the driver is not. The guide is running around looking for the driver. Now the driver is there, but the guide cannot be found. We extract him from a sort of bar. Finally we’re all ready. We get to Uman toward the end of the afternoon, after a horrendous drive across fields and villages where peasants and children stare at us blankly.
We see nothing of Uman, a small hamlet where no Jews live anymore. We’ve come to tell the late Master of our love for his teaching, to meditate and pray on his grave. We plead for his intercession—Rebbe Nahman had promised his followers, “Whosoever will recite psalms on my grave—in the prescribed order—I will help him.”
By now, night has fallen. The wind is determined to blow out the candles we’re holding to shed light on our psalters. The flames resist. Our shadows dance on the wall behind the grave. In the street a few villagers seem scarcely surprised by our presence. They’re accustomed to seeing Bratzlav Hasidim, especially around Rosh Hashana. Such was the Master’s wish: to attract to Uman as many followers as possible for the High Holidays. And they came. Even during the Stalin era they crossed the frontier illegally to be with the Rebbe, who, before dying, had promised his disciples that his flame would continue to shine until the coming of the Messiah. Some of the disciples were arrested, thrown into prison.
Rabbi Koenig of Safed, son of the famous Rebbe Gedalia, recites the psalms. We repeat them after him. There is an air of mystery to our gathering around this grave, for, in general, there is no cult of the dead in Judaism. And yet…. There comes a moment when Rebbe Nahman’s followers stretch out on the tomb of their Master, dead for more than two centuries. And I too stretch out beside them. And deep down I too address my secret requests to Rebbe Nahman.
Then a Hasid starts chanting a Bratzlav melody, and we all join in, repeating the words drawn from a psalm of King David. We repeat them fervently, our eyes closed, our minds aflame. And we start dancing around the tombstone. It’s getting late; all the better—one prays better at night. It’s getting cold; never mind. We dance the way Hasidim dance, hand in hand, flinging our arms from front to back and our heads up and down. At first we dance slowly, then faster and faster, our eyes shut, our hearts open, our souls seared by a burning wound; we dance as though we were being drawn to the heights of those prayers that go up all the way to the seventh heaven; we dance like madmen whose beings stretch out toward the Being, whose fire wills itself to become incandescent. No one will be able to stop us, no power will be able to muzzle us; we sing as we weep, we weep as we sing, and from afar, very far, I believe I’m hearing a strange and yet uncannily familiar voice, and it is telling very beautiful but extremely disquieting stories, in which princes and beggars meet in enchanted woods and inflict harm on one another in order to better fight evil and sadness. Now and then, exhausted and out of breath, one of us tries to stop the dance or at least to slow its rhythm, but then another begins to dance with new vigor. And we go on.
We take our leave of Rebbe Nahman with regret. I knew I loved him, but I only now realize just how deep my attachment is. Though I am a Hasid of Wizhnitz, I had claimed Bratzlav as my own, never acknowledging how profoundly I was tied to him.
In the bus we are silent. The young Rabbi Gabbai passes around almonds and dates brought from Safed. To me they have a special taste. I think of Rebbe Nahman and of his adventurous journey to the Holy Land. Hardly had he set foot there when he felt the need to tear himself away and go back home.
I, too, believe that a part of me has remained in Uman.
Another memorable journey followed, though of a different order. Invited by Moses Rosen, Chief Rabbi of Romania, I have come to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the murderous pogrom at Iasi that occurred in June 1941. It seems the Romanian government considers this visit important. The Romanians are obviously trying to please the foreign visitors. I am housed in one of the official—and luxurious—residences of the president. The permanent ambassador of Romania to the U.N., Aurel Munteanu, escorts us in all our travels. I tell him how outraged I am by the renewal of anti-Semitism, however traditional it may be, in his country. Two widely circulated weeklies are fomenting hatred against the fifteen thousand Jews, most of them elderly, who still live in Romania, and against world Jewry, which they accuse of every imaginable and unimaginable sin. Every cliché is used. Among other things, the anti-Semitic propagandists dare to write, without fear of ridicule, that Israel’s goal is to colonize Romania. Still, it’s not the stupidity of the anti-Semites that embarrasses me; I’m used to it. It’s the passivity of those who allow it to flourish, those who don’t oppose it, who don’t chase the liars from the public arena, who don’t say to them that no honest person will believe their senseless lies, that no reasonable person will believe that the Jews have established concentration camps in Romania in order to practice genocide. Nevertheless this is what local anti-Semites are saying and repeating with impunity.
I am received in private audience by President Iliescu and his prime minister, Petru Roman, who are soliciting my help in Washington, especially in economic affairs. I answer that I cannot assist a regime that tolerates hatred. I cite the minute of silence that their Senate has observed in memory of the Fascist dictator Antonescu, the virulent anti-Semitic campaign of a substantial segment of their press, the xenophobic statements of certain officials…. “But what about the starving children,” Roman interjects, �
�are you forgetting them? Even if the grown-ups are guilty, why punish the children?” My answer: “Don’t make us responsible for their hardships; it is you who bear the responsibility! Silence the hatred in your country, and the whole world will come to their aid and yours.”
Iliescu seems sincere. He initiates proceedings to bring to justice the editors and writers of the anti-Semitic weeklies. He also invites me to accompany him to Sighet, so that I may show him my birthplace, and then to Rezavlia, the village near Sighet where he was born. Much later, I read in the press that the Romanian government has decided to turn my house into a museum. The people who live there are worried about what will happen to them. I promise them that as long as they are not offered other decent lodgings, they can stay on in their home—or rather in mine.
With Elisha and his cousin Steve, I see Iliescu again, around the end of July 1995. The situation is unchanged. The anti-Semitic papers are still spreading their poison, while Antonescu’s memory is more and more widely revered. I try to make Iliescu understand that he must oppose this vigorously, that it is important for the reputation of his country, that his honor is at stake. But he is afraid of upsetting his citizenry: Too many people view Antonescu as the only leader who fought against the Soviets. I rejoin that Hitler, too, was anti-Soviet. Iliescu promises to find an occasion to speak out and to give the people his own low opinion of Antonescu, who was Hitler’s ally during the war. Will he find the necessary self-confidence and strength? I hope so, for I believe he is sincere.
Vienna, 1992: a happening. Some sixty or seventy thousand young Austrians have converged on the Heldenplatz (Heroes’ Square) to demonstrate against the renascent fascism in their country. Singers and rock musicians, among the most famous, take up the major part of the program. I would not have believed that I would ever willingly attend, let alone participate in, this kind of event, whose very noise would normally make me flee.
