One Generation After
Page 1
Books by Elie Wiesel
Night
Dawn
The Accident
The Town Beyond the Wall
The Gates of the Forest
The Jews of Silence
Legends of Our Time
A Beggar in Jerusalem
One Generation After
Souls on Fire
The Oath
Ani Maamin (cantata)
Zalmen, or The Madness of God (play)
Messengers of God
A Jew Today
Four Hasidic Masters
The Trial of God (play)
The Testament
Five Biblical Portraits
Somewhere a Master
The Golem
(illustrated by Mark Podwal)
The Fifth Son
Against Silence
(edited by Irving Abrahamson)
Twilight
The Six Days of Destruction
(with Albert Friedlander)
A Journey into Faith
(conversations with
John Cardinal O’Connor)
A Song for Hope (cantata)
From the Kingdom of Memory
Sages and Dreamers
The Forgotten
A Passover Haggadah
(illustrated by Mark Podwal)
All Rivers Run to the Sea
Memory in Two Voices
(with François Mitterand)
King Solomon and
His Magic Ring (illustrated by Mark Podwal)
And the Sea Is Never Full
The Judges
Conversations with Elie Wiesel (with Richard D. Heffner)
Wise Men and Their Tales
The Time of the Uprooted
Rashi
A Mad Desire to Dance
The Sonderberg Case
Copyright © 1965, 1967, 1970, 2011 by Elie Wiesel
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Schocken Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in different form in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1970. Published in paperback in the United States by Schocken Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1982.
Schocken Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Wiesel, Elie, [date]
One generation after.
Translation of: Entre deux soleils.
Reprint. Originally published: New York: Random House, 1970.
PQ2683.I32E513 1982 848’.91407 82-3226 AACR2
eISBN: 978-0-8052-4296-6
www.schocken.com
Cover photograph by Tamara Staples
Cover design by Emily Mahon
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Will the World Ever Learn?: Introduction to the 2011 Edition
One Generation After
Journey’s Beginning
Dialogues I
Readings
Snapshots
Dialogues II
The Watch
Stories
The Violin
First Royalties
Dialogues III
Waiting
The End of a Revolutionary
The Death of My Teacher
Postwar: 1948
Postwar: 1967
Motta Gur
To a Concerned Friend
To a Young German of the New Left
To a Young Jew of Today
Russian Sketches
Excerpts from a Diary
Journey’s End
A Note About the Author
Will the World Ever Learn?:
Introduction to the 2011 Edition*
“One generation after” the cruelest of tragedies to befell the Jewish people, one often wonders: Has everything been said about its so-called legacy? Has its dark truth been properly revealed? Have the right words been used? Have these words truly reached the hearts and minds of enough people around the world so as to shield us from further religious or ethnic fanaticism, racial hatred, and state-organized violence? Have our memories changed our collective destiny?
These questions confronted me a few years ago when I was invited to address the General Assembly of the United Nations; they remain valid today. Here is what I said then:
The man who stands before you this morning feels deeply privileged. A teacher and writer, he speaks and writes as a witness to a crime committed in the heart of European Christendom and civilization by a brutal dictatorial regime—a crime of unprecedented cruelty in which all segments of government participated.
When speaking about that era of darkness, the witness encounters difficulties. His words become obstacles rather than vehicles; he writes not with words but against words. For there are no words to describe what the victims felt when death was the norm and life a miracle. Still, whether you know it or not, his memory is part of yours.
I speak as a son of an ancient people, the only people of antiquity to have survived antiquity, the Jewish people, which throughout much of its history, has endured exile and oppression yet has never given up hope of redemption.
As a young adolescent, he saw what no human being should have to see: the triumph of political fanaticism and ideological hatred of those who were different. He saw multitudes of human beings humiliated, isolated, tormented, tortured, and murdered. They were overwhelmingly Jews, but there were others. And those who committed these crimes were not vulgar underworld thugs, but men with high government, academic, industrial, and medical positions in Germany. In recent years, that nation has become a true democracy. But the question remains open: In those dark years, what motivated so many brilliant and committed public servants to invent such horrors? By its scope and magnitude, by its sheer weight of numbers, by the impact of so much humiliation and pain, in spite of being the most documented tragedy in the annals of history, Auschwitz still defies language and understanding.
Let me evoke those times:
Babies used as target practice by SS men … Adolescents condemned never to grow old … Parents watching their children thrown into burning pits … Immense solitude engulfing an entire people … Infinite despair haunting our days and our dreams sixty years later …
When did what we so poorly call the holocaust begin? In 1938, during Kristallnacht? In 1939, perhaps, when a German ship, the St. Louis, with more than a thousand German Jewish refugees aboard, was turned back from America’s shores? Or was it when the first massacres occurred in Babi Yar?
We still ask, What was Auschwitz: an end or a beginning, an apocalyptic consequence of centuries-old bigotry and hatred, or the final convulsion of demonic forces in human nature?
A creation parallel to God’s—a world with its own antinomian United Nations of people of different nationalities, traditions, cultures, socioeconomic spheres, philosophical disciplines, speaking many languages, clinging to a variety of faiths and memories. They were grown-ups or young, but inside that world there were no children and no grandparents; they had already perished.
As I have said many times: Not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims; for the first time in recorded history to be became a crime. Their birth became their death sentence. Correction: Jewish children were condemned to die even before they were born. What the enemy sought was to put an end to Jewish history; what he wanted was a new world, implacably, irrevocably devoid of Jews. Hence Auschwitz, Ponar, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno, and Sobibor: dark factories of death erected for the Final Solution. Killers came there to kill a
nd victims to die.
That was Auschwitz, an executioner’s ideal of a kingdom of absolute evil and malediction, with its princes and beggars, philosophers and theologians, politicians and artists; a place where to lose a piece of bread meant moving a step closer to death, and a smile from a friend, another day of promise.
At the time, the witness tried to understand; he still does not: How was such calculated evil, such bottomless and pointless cruelty possible? Had Creation gone mad? Had God covered his face? A religious person cannot conceive of Auschwitz either with or without God. But what about man? How could intelligent, educated, or simple law-abiding citizens fire machine guns at hundreds of children and their parents, and in the evening enjoy a cadence by Schiller, a partita by Bach?
Turning point or watershed, that catastrophe which has traumatized History has forever changed man’s perception of his or her responsibility toward fellow human beings. The sad, terrible fact is that it could have been prevented. Had the Western nations intervened when Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia and Austria; had America accepted more Jewish refugees from Europe; had Britain allowed more Jews to return to their ancestral land; had the Allies bombed the railways leading to Birkenau at the time when ten thousand Hungarian Jews—men, women, and infants—were assassinated day after day, our tragedy might have been avoided, its scope surely diminished.
This shameful indifference we must remember, just as we must remember to thank the few heroic individuals who, like Raoul Wallenberg, risked their lives to save Jews. We shall also always remember the armies that liberated Europe and the soldiers that liberated the death camps: the Americans in Buchenwald, the Russians in Auschwitz, and the British in Belsen. But for many victims they all came too late. That we must also remember.
When the American Third Army liberated Buchenwald, there was no joy in our hearts: only pain. We did not sing, we did not celebrate. We had just enough strength to recite the Kaddish.
And now, sixty years later, the entire world listens to the words of the witness. Like Jeremiah and Job, we could have cried and “cursed be the days dominated by injustice and violence.” We could have chosen vengeance. We did not. We could have chosen hate. We did not. Hatred is degrading, and vengeance demeaning. They are diseases. Their history is dominated by death.
The Jewish witness speaks of his people’s suffering as a warning. He sounds the alarm so as to prevent these things from being done to others. Had the world listened to our testimonies, the tragedies of Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur might have been avoided.
Oh yes, the witness knows that for the dead it is too late; for them, abandoned by God and betrayed by humanity, victory came much too late. But it is not too late for today’s children, ours and yours. It is for their sake alone that we bear witness. It is for their sake that we are duty-bound to denounce anti-Semitism, bigotry, racism, and religious or ethnic hatred. Those who today preach and practice the cult of death, using suicide terrorism, the scourge of this new century, must be condemned for crimes against humanity. Suffering confers no privileges; it is what one does with suffering that matters. Yes, the past is in the present, but the future is still in our hands.
Remember: Those who survived Auschwitz advocate hope, not despair; generosity, not rancor or bitterness; gratitude, not violence. We must be engaged; we must reject indifference as an option. Indifference always helps the aggressor, never his victims. And what is memory if not a noble and necessary response to and against indifference?
But … will the world ever learn?
* From remarks made by the author at the Twenty-seventh Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly, on January 24, 2005, in commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps.
ONE GENERATION AFTER
Twenty-five years. A quarter-century.
And we pause, trying to find our bearings, trying to understand: what and how much did these years mean? To some a generation, to others an eternity. A generation perhaps without eternity.
Children condemned never to grow old, old men doomed never to die. A solitude engulfing entire peoples, a guilt tormenting all humanity. A despair that found a face but not a name. A memory cursed, yet refusing to pass on its curse and hate. An attempt to understand, perhaps even to forgive. That is a generation.
Ours.
For the new one it will soon be ancient history. Unrelated to today’s conflicts and arguments. Without impact on the aspirations and actions of adolescents eager to live and conquer the future. The past interests them only to the extent that they can reject it. Auschwitz? Never heard of it.
And yet there is logic in history. The future is but a result of conditions past and present. Everything is connected, everything has its place. Man makes the transition from the era of holocaust silence to the era of communications with remarkable ease. Once walled in by ghettos, man now takes flight to the moon. If today we live too quickly, it is because yesterday we died too quickly. If today we endow machines with increasingly wide powers, it is because the generation before us so foolishly left its fate and decisions in the hands of man.
Spring 1945: emerging from its nightmare, the world discovers the camps, the death factories. The senseless horror, the debasement: the absolute reign of evil. Victory tastes of ashes.
Yes, it is possible to defile life and creation and feel no remorse. To tend one’s garden and water one’s flowers but two steps away from barbed wire. To experiment with monstrous mutations and still believe in the soul and immortality. To go on vacation, be enthralled by the beauty of a landscape, make children laugh—and still fulfill regularly, day in and day out, the duties of killer.
There was, then, a technique, a science of murder, complete with specialized laboratories, business meetings and progress charts. Those engaged in its practice did not belong to a gutter society of misfits, nor could they be dismissed as just a collection of rabble. Many held degrees in philosophy, sociology, biology, general medicine, psychiatry and the fine arts. There were lawyers among them. And—unthinkable but true—theologians. And aristocrats.
Astounded, the victors find it difficult to accept the facts: that in the twentieth century, man’s armor against himself and others should be so thin and vulnerable. Yes, good and evil coexist without the one influencing the other; the devil himself strives for an ideal: he too sees himself as pure and incorruptible. Inherited values count for nothing. Seeds sown by earlier generations? Lost in the sand, blown away by the wind. Nothing is certain, the present erases triumphs and treasures with hallucinating speed. Civilization? Foam that crests the waves and vanishes. Lack of morality and a perverted taste for bloodshed are unrelated to the individual’s social and cultural background. It is possible to be born into the upper or middle class, receive a first-rate education, respect parents and neighbors, visit museums and attend literary gatherings, play a role in public life, and begin one day to massacre men, women and children, without hesitation and without guilt. It is possible to fire your gun at living targets and nonetheless delight in the cadence of a poem, the composition of a painting. One’s spiritual legacy provides no screen, ethical concepts offer no protection. One may torture the son before his father’s eyes and still consider oneself a man of culture and religion. And dream of a peaceful sunset over the sea.
Had the killers been brutal savages or demented sadists, the shock would have been less. And also the disappointment.
Adolf Eichmann was an ordinary man. He slept well, he ate well. He was an exemplary father, a considerate husband. During the trial in Jerusalem, I could not turn my gaze away from him. I stared at him until my eyes burned. Naïvely, I was looking for the mark on his forehead, believing somehow that he who sows death must perforce dig a grave within himself. I was shaken by his normal appearance and behavior.
The way he spoke and pleaded made everything chillingly clear, disgustingly banal. With cool detachment, he expressed himself in a language devoid of irony or vehemence, monotonou
sly reciting dates, figures and reports. At first he frightened me. It occurred to me that if he were sane, I should choose madness. It was he or I. For me, there could be no common ground with him. We could not inhabit the same universe, nor be governed by the same laws.
Yet he was a man like any other.
A metamorphosis was taking place. On many levels and affecting all of humanity: executioners and victims alike. The first too anxious to become executioners, the latter too ready to assume the role of victims. How long did it take? One night, one week. Or more. A year, perhaps three. Time is a lesser factor than man’s ability to discard his inner self. To a victim of the “concentrationary” system, it no longer mattered that he had been intellectual, laborer, angry student or devoted husband. A few beatings, a few screams turned him into a blank, his loss of identity complete. He no longer thought as before, nor did he look men straight in the eyes; his own eyes were no longer the same. Camp law and camp truth transcended all laws and all truth, and the prisoner could not help but submit. When he was hungry, he thought of soup and not of immortality. After a long night’s march, he yearned for rest and not for mercy. Was this all there was to man?
People wanted to understand: the executioner’s fascination with crime, the victim’s with death, and what had paved the way for Auschwitz. Explanations alternated with theories involving everything from politics to mass psychosis; none proved adequate. It was like coming up against a dark wall. Auschwitz eluded man to the end. And beyond. Whence the anguish hovering over the postwar generation. It needed to unravel the mystery; pinpoint the attraction the abyss exerts on man and determine the nature of what pushes him to his downfall. To succeed, one would have had to question many executioners and many of the dead. The first had long since escaped, the latter were still without graves.
So we turned to the victims, the survivors. They were asked to bare themselves, to delve into the innermost recesses of their being, and tell, and tell again, to the point of exhaustion and beyond: to the delirium that follows. How it had been. Had the killers really been so many and so conscientious in their task? And the machinery so efficient? Had it really been a universe with its own gods and priests, its own princes with their laws, its philosophers with their disciples? And you, how did you manage to survive? Had you known the art of survival from before? And how were you able to keep your sanity? And today: how can you sleep, work, go to restaurants and movies, how can you mingle with people and share their meals?