When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  In 1956, Wiesel moved to New York, where he started to speak both about, and sometimes for, those who had survived the Holocaust. He wrote plays, novels, essays and short stories. He also became a prominent public advocate for the oppressed peoples of the world, in the Soviet Union, South Africa, Vietnam, Biafra and Bangladesh. In 1978 President Carter appointed him the chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. In 1985 he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal and in 1986 the Nobel Prize for Peace. In 1992 Wiesel was presented with the Presidential Medal of Honor, the highest civilian award in America. Wiesel’s words are engraved on the Holocaust Memorial in Washington DC: ‘For the dead and the living, we must bear witness’. It is the terrible cause to which he had to dedicate his life. He died at home in Manhattan in 2016 at the age of eighty-seven.

  The speech that follows was given in the East Room of the White House in April 1999 as part of the Millennium Lecture series hosted by President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton. Between the issuing of the invitation to Wiesel and the day of the speech, the United States was part of the intervention in Kosovo in response to the attempted ethnic cleansing of Kosovan Albanians. On the same day that Wiesel was speaking there was an extraordinary meeting of the North Atlantic Council at NATO to agree war aims.

  Not long before the invitation to the White House, Elie Wiesel had returned home to Sighet for the first time since the day he was put on the train out. In 1944, just before he was forced to leave, Wiesel had gone into his back yard and buried the watch he had received as a present for his bar mitzvah. In 1997, half a century later, he went home to look for it. He had imagined going home in his novel La Ville de la Chance (translated as The Town beyond the Wall), but until then he had never done so. Recreating his childlike paces in the yard, he searched for the exact spot he had buried the watch. He dug into the ground with his fingernails and, marvellously, the watch was still there. It was the only thing that was. Family, the friends, the village life, it had all gone. A great deal of time had passed, but whether the times had changed was a different question.

  Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe’s beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald. He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again. Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers their rage at what they saw. And even if he lives to be a very old man, he will always be grateful to them for that rage, and also for their compassion. Though he did not understand their language, their eyes told him what he needed to know – that they, too, would remember, and bear witness …

  There is so much said in this one opening sentence. The reference to Goethe tells us that culture is no defence when an infection gets into the political bloodstream. Weimar is the republic and the political constitution that fell to the Nazis, as well as the culture that decayed and led to a place of eternal infamy. The fifty-fourth anniversary is not significant particularly and yet there is something deeply touching in this speech taking place on the same day as the liberation. An anniversary is a moment to remember, and there is great poignancy in Wiesel’s voice as he says, after a pause, the words ‘to the day’. The effect, hard to explain but clear at once on hearing, is to take us back to that day.

  The contrast between the delivery and the content is very marked here. Wiesel speaks softly, and his style of argument is forgiving and gentle, but he is reporting rage. The tight compression of this paragraph is possible because the events that Wiesel is relating are well known to the invited dignitaries in the audience. All of them knew his story and everyone understands exactly what was being said. Everyone knows why rage was the appropriate emotion and why the young boy was grateful for the rage of the United States Third Army. Later in the speech Wiesel registers his gratitude to the American nation for its help. Finally, in this condensed opening paragraph Wiesel describes the purpose he gave to his life, which was to bear witness to the terrible events he had been forced to endure. In 1986, in the speech Wiesel gave to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, he recalled asking his father how the world could have remained silent. He then imagined his younger self asking the grown man on the stage: ‘Tell me: What have you done with my future? What have you done with your life?’ The older Elie replies to the younger: ‘I have tried to keep memory alive … I have tried to fight those who would forget.’

  We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations – Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin – bloodbaths in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence, so much indifference. What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means ‘no difference’. A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil. What are its courses and inescapable consequences? Is it a philosophy? Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one’s sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals? Of course, indifference can be tempting – more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbour are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction.

  The title idea of this speech is indifference, a word that appears nineteen times and on which the whole argument pivots. Successive passages deepen the single idea. With one exception, to which we shall come, Wiesel’s instances of indifference are cases in which bystanders could have acted but chose not to do so. The indifference of the crowd is the ally of the tyrant who is then permitted to define hated groups – the mentally ill, the infirm, gypsies, homosexuals, Jews – as beneath human dignity. The failure to respect individual dignity is central to the crime committed. The word ‘indignation’ stresses its origins in the agency of the individual. This is what Wiesel is saying happened in the camps. It is notable that, throughout the speech, he uses the word human as an antonym for indifference. To be indifferent to the fate of another is therefore to strip them of their humanity. The appalling treatment in the camps is the first humiliation. The indifference of the world is the second.

  Though Wiesel is careful to say that Auschwitz and Treblinka are on a different level, his catalogue of contemporary conflicts shows that he thinks indifference is a common human deficiency. The argument has an obvious implication because the actual antonym of indifference is not human. It is intervention. Someone should have intervened, as the Americans belatedly did by liberating Buchenwald. In other speeches and in his published writing Wiesel’s hatred of war meant that he was not always a committed advocate for military intervention, but this speech is, in fact, a bold case for action, to stop abuse wherever it occurs. There is one pointed example in his list of conflicts. Rwanda was an instance of ethnic slaughter in which the United States might have chosen to intervene but did not do so. In the question-and-answer session that followed his lecture, Wiesel asked President Clinton directly: ‘I know one thing. We could have prevented that massacre. Why didn’t we?’ There is an important lesson here for the world’s conflicts today. Indifference that leads to inaction itself
has consequences. Indifference always makes a difference to its victims.

  Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most tragic of all prisoners were the ‘Muselmänner,’ as they were called. Wrapped in their torn blankets, they would sit or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, unaware of who or where they were, strangers to their surroundings. They no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing. They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know it. Rooted in our tradition, some of us felt that to be abandoned by humanity then was not the ultimate. We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be ignored by God was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of His anger. Man can live far from God – not outside God. God is wherever we are. Even in suffering? Even in suffering. In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor – never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees – not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own. Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment. And this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century’s wide-ranging experiments in good and evil.

  This is the one story of indifference in the speech that differs from the rest. The ‘Muselmänner’, the weakest people in the camp at Buchenwald, were not indifferent to the fate of others. They had been so sapped by their treatment that they grew indifferent to their own fate. They became, in effect, nothing, which is Wiesel’s point in this section. Indifference does not bring the rage with which he began his speech. It brings emptiness and resignation. This is the weight of the title that Primo Levi gave to his memoir of his time in Auschwitz: If This Is a Man. Wiesel himself never submitted to indifference, although his time in the camp did lead him to become feral, which is perhaps the preceding state. In Night he described the way his very existence was contingent on his next meal: ‘I was nothing but a body. Perhaps even less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time.’ So obsessed did he become with getting his plate of soup and his crust of bread that he watched helpless, unable to move, as guards beat his father with an iron bar.

  The consolation of religion leads Wiesel into a tangle with his idea of indifference which, at times, stretches a little too far. Wiesel had gone into the concentration camps a deeply religious young man. His experience, understandably, jolted his faith severely. He describes the deepest pain of being abandoned by God as ‘worse than to be punished by him’. At least a vengeful God cares and treats the sinner as a moral agent. But then Wiesel goes on to describe indifference as a punishment as well as a sin. This has some disturbing implications, the most obvious of which is to ask what it is meant to be a punishment for. What sins of the Wiesel family were being expiated? None, and he cannot really think the punishment merited. The passage thus shows the difficulty of bringing divine justice into a treatise on the inhumanity of men and of the power they wield at the head of brutal states. The real villains here are people charged with religious certainty who worshipped their own power.

  In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkest of times, inside the ghettoes and death camps … we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did. And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler’s armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies. If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once. And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State Department knew. And the illustrious occupant of the White House then, who was a great leader – and I say it with some anguish and pain, because, today is exactly 54 years marking his death – Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April the 12th, 1945, so he is very much present to me and to us. No doubt, he was a great leader. He mobilised the American people and the world, going into battle, bringing hundreds and thousands of valiant and brave soldiers in America to fight fascism, to fight dictatorship, to fight Hitler. And so many of the young people fell in battle. And, nevertheless, his image in Jewish history – I must say it – his image in Jewish history is flawed. The depressing tale of the St. Louis is a case in point. Sixty years ago, its human cargo – maybe 1,000 Jews – was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that happened after the Kristallnacht, after the first state-sponsored pogrom, with hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put in concentration camps. And that ship, which was already on the shores of the United States, was sent back. I don’t understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understood those who needed help. Why didn’t he allow these refugees to disembark? A thousand people – in America, a great country, the greatest democracy, the most generous of all new nations in modern history. What happened? I don’t understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the victims?

  Here Wiesel borrows categories taken from Raul Hilberg, who defined the scholarship of the Holocaust by classifying actors in the events as perpetrators, victims or bystanders. This is the moment at which the idea of indifference comes into the room in which Wiesel is speaking. Until now it has been a report of events so appalling that they seem distant and impossible. But no, Wiesel is saying, you and people like you were indifferent too. There is something plaintive and therefore harrowing about that final ‘I don’t understand’. It is stripped of anger and therefore redoubled in pain. The effect is clinched by the pause that Wiesel inserts just before he says it. The incomprehension comes from somewhere very deep, and the silence in the White House has an extraordinary quality to it at this point.

  This is a brave passage. It is no small thing, to come to the president’s residence, to speak to a select gathering of dignitaries, members of Congress and foreign ambassadors, and to be so candid about a former occupant of the office, especially one so distinguished as Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Wiesel speaks graciously and politely – that ‘I must say it’ is a gentle touch – but he does not spare anyone. Indifference went all the way to the top. Wiesel adds to the effect in the questions after the speech when he says: ‘Can you imagine coming from where I come from and being here in the White House with the President of the United States, when some fifty-odd years ago I couldn’t get a visa anywhere, and sixty years ago I belonged to those who were not even considered human beings. But here I am.’ President Clinton added that the first Millennium Lecture, the series in which Wiesel was speaking, was given by the historian Bernard Bailyn, who argued that America is still shaped by the ideals of the Founding Fathers. ‘They understood’, said Clinton, ‘that to be indifferent is to be numb.’

  Wiesel clarified later, in answer to a question, that he does not believe in collective guilt. He says that he had been moved, on a trip to Germany, by the desire of young Germans to make amends for the crimes of their forefathers, but he is clear he wants to absolve them of blame. He cannot, though, offer the same d
ispensation to those who stood by at the time. The verdict of indifference is unsparing. This is a highly charged denunciation of the nation that took him in; softly delivered, apologetic and yet devastating.

  But then, there were human beings who were sensitive to our tragedy. Those non-Jews, those Christians, that we called the ‘Righteous Gentiles,’ whose selfless acts of heroism saved the honour of their faith. Why were they so few? Why was there a greater effort to save SS murderers after the war than to save their victims during the war? Why did some of America’s largest corporations continue to do business with Hitler’s Germany until 1942? It has been suggested, and it was documented, that the Wehrmacht could not have conducted its invasion of France without oil obtained from American sources. How is one to explain their indifference? And yet, my friends, good things have also happened in this traumatic century: the defeat of Nazism, the collapse of communism, the rebirth of Israel on its ancestral soil, the demise of apartheid, Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt, the peace accord in Ireland. And let us remember the meeting, filled with drama and emotion, between Rabin and Arafat that you, Mr. President, convened in this very place. I was here and I will never forget it. And then, of course, the joint decision of the United States and NATO to intervene in Kosovo and save those victims, those refugees, those who were uprooted by a man who I believe that because of his crimes, should be charged with crimes against humanity. But this time, the world was not silent. This time, we do respond. This time, we intervene.