Elie Wiesel: Duty-Bound Survivor

Imagine that you have endured a traumatic experience beyond all conceivable reckoning. Imagine that your family, friends, neighbors, and even strangers were also subjected to this nightmare. Some of you perished; others lived through this hellish reality. If you survived, would you want to talk about it? Would you be capable of talking about it? Would others want to hear it? Whom would you trust with your story? What would their reactions be? Would the telling of this ordeal cause harm or healing? These questions must have been very real for Elie Wiesel and his fellow Holocaust survivors. How did they cope with their trauma? How did they assimilate into the new world of post-Holocaust Judaism and secularism? A world that seemed to have moved on past the lurid drama of World War II, ashamed and fearful of the vulnerability required to acknowledge the pain of the survivors. For Elie Wiesel, silence was not an option: “[H]aving lived through the experience, one could not keep silent no matter how difficult, if not impossible, it was to speak.” (Wiesel 8)  

Elie Wiesel grew up in a close-knit community in Sighet, moored by security, tradition, and a commitment to his Jewish faith and upbringing. In 1944, reality was fractured as the Nazi forces ushered in a new era of prejudice, hatred, and violence. Wiesel recalls in his memoir Night how the people of Sighet refused to listen to Moishe the Beadle, who escaped a massacre and tried to warn the Jews of the coming danger. This would be Wiesel’s first taste of the bitterness and dangers of silence as his neighbors, world leaders, and even fellow Jews turned a blind eye and deaf ear to occupation, discrimination, deportation, and the horrors of the Holocaust.

Millions of Jews perished in the Nazi death camps, including Wiesel’s mother and younger sister who were murdered in the gas chambers upon their arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and his father who died in Buchenwald before Wiesel and the rest of the camp were liberated in April 1945. The survivor bears a heavy burden, as Wiesel lamented “[H]ow great a debt paid in guilt for being where I am and who I am!” (Neusner 295) He reflects further on this in his fictional narrative A Beggar in Jerusalem, taking the reader through the mind and memory of David, a Holocaust survivor and fighter for the State of Israel in the “Six-Day War” of 1967: “Survivors we were, but we were allowed no victory. Fear followed us everywhere, fear preceded us… We were beggars, unwanted everywhere.” (Wiesel 17, 19)

How then could “unwanted beggars” such as these survivors open up and share their traumatic experiences? It was noted by the journalist Joseph Berger (a Jew whose parents escaped the Nazis and later emigrated to the United States) that Elie Wiesel “…long grappled with what he called his ‘dialectical conflict’: the need to recount what he had seen and the futility of explaining an event that defined reason and imagination.” The darkness of the night through which he passed left a shadow on his soul, but Wiesel’s heart yearned to share his story. When presented with the Congressional Gold Medal in 1985, Wiesel explained that “[The Jewish] tradition commands us, quote: ‘to speak truth to power’.” As a survivor, Elie Wiesel was duty-bound to bear witness and give testimony to honor the memory of the dead and the living; to give dignity and meaning to the suffering they endured.

Wiesel was devoted to this responsibility and it became his vocation. Through his testimonies, he became “…a vessel of truth, a carrier of eternity and fire.” (Wiesel 73) His memoir Night memorialized his experience in Sighet, and at the merciless hands of the Nazis through ghettos, deportation, and concentration camps. Channeling this raw insight, his reflections bore witness to the truth of the hatred, suffering, and trauma that he and his fellow Jews endured, and honored those who did not survive the brutality of the Nazis.

Elie Wiesel also bore witness through testimonial narrative in his fictional novels, exploring the painful challenge of being a survivor in a culture, society, and world that had moved on from the events that the European Jews endured. In his novel Day, the protagonist Eliezer is a Holocaust survivor whose acquaintances expect him to be actively present; fully alive. And so he must suffer in silence, haunted by the past, pretending to go through the motions and participate – but within him is a void that the world does not want to acknowledge, which ultimately manifests as a suicide attempt. Through the lens of this fictional narrative, Wiesel shows us the destructive power of silence – how it erodes empathy between people and damages the psyche and soul.

Wiesel took every opportunity to honor the memory of those who perished and those who survived in his ongoing practices of compassion and storytelling. It is particularly striking that he was emboldened to address world leaders and their audiences (such as when he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Nobel Peace Prize), calling attention to the transgressions of the past as a caution for the present and the future. Wiesel used his voice for good, as an agent of change fueled by experience, committed to creating a better world than the one that bore the Holocaust: “I have tried to keep memory alive… I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.”  

If Elie Wiesel felt any apprehension about sharing his experiences in the Holocaust, then the duty he felt to honor the dead and the living must have empowered him to break through the barrier and bear witness. “Fear is a wall and so is silence… Once the wall has been pierced, its shadow becomes less formidable. The highest walls also crumble.” (Wiesel 114) Everything he created was a catalyst for healing through testimony – from his memoir and novels, to journalism articles and letters, and his speeches and interviews – Elie Wiesel made meaning out of suffering and survival through the catharsis of bearing witness.

To endure an experience such as the Holocaust seems unfathomable, with its uncharted depths of anguish, loss, and pain. One who survives this horror gazes with dread and bewilderment at the wasted landscape of ash, smoke, blood, and tears, and with an aching heart asks Why? How does one awaken and animate from this darkest night of existential nightmare? Impossible as it seems, by finding meaning. In his profundity, Elie Wiesel was able to reckon with his experience and transform the guilt of survivorship into a created purpose of bearing witness. He was able to see the Holocaust as a “sensitizer” (Hyman A109) – awakening those who would hear testimony and drawing them into a deep compassion. Wiesel was dedicated to the duty of bearing witness, honoring the memory and legacy of those who perished and those who survived, and holding those accountable who tried to move on without honoring the events, who armored up in fear against the emotions and experiences. “[S]uffering can elevate man… we can humanize it… turn it into dialogue.” (Wiesel 106) – Elie Wiesel plunged into the crucible and alchemized the Holocaust experience through a life of testimony. 

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WORKS CITED

Berger, Joseph. “Elie Wiesel, Holocaust Survivor Who Ensured World would Never Forget, Dies at 87: [Obituary (Obit); Biography].” New York Times, Jul 04, 2016. 

Elie Wiesel – Acceptance Speech. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2020. Mon. 26 Oct 2020, http://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1986/wiesel/acceptance-speech/.

Hyman, Paula E. “New Debate on the Holocaust.” New York Times, September 14, 1980, p. A109.

Neusner, Jacob. “The Implications of the Holocaust.” Journal of Religion, vol. 53, no. 3, 1973, pp. 293-308, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1202134. 

Remarks by President Reagan and Elie Wiesel during the Presentation of the Congressional Medal of Honor to Mr. Wiesel in the Roosevelt Room and Signing the Jewish Heritage Week Proclamation on April 19, 1985. https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/remarks-presenting-congressional-gold-medal-elie-wiesel-and-signing-jewish-heritage

Wiesel, Elie, and Lily Edelman. A Beggar in Jerusalem. New York: Random House, 1970. Print.

Wiesel, Elie, and Marion Wiesel. The Night Trilogy: Night; Dawn; Day. New York: Hill and Wang, 2008. Print.

Wiesel, Elie. “To a Young Jew in Soviet Russia.” A Jew Today. Translated by Marion Wiesel, Random House, 1978, pp. 114-121.Wiesel, Elie. “To a Young Palestinian Arab.” A Jew Today. Translated by Marion Wiesel, Random House, 1978, pp. 101-106.