An evening with Elie Wiesel

By Tamar Kairy

Elie Wiesel felt anger at G-d after the Holocaust but, contrary to a common misperception of his memoir Night, he did not lose his faith. “The next day I went on praying. I didn’t stop,” he said in response to a question after his speech at Adelphi University last week. He said he imagines G-d looking down and asking, “What are you doing with my creation?”

Wiesel, an author and activist of Holocaust remembrance and human rights, spoke last Wednesday, April 14, in remarks timed to the anniversary of his personal liberation from Buchenwald.

“I am not sure I found the words, but I tried,” he said, reflecting on the contemporary social and political panorama in light of his experiences 65 years ago. In eloquent, accented English, Wiesel engaged an audience of all ages and backgrounds, including half-a-dozen busloads of children. His Talmudic background and sense of humor were as evident as the gravity of his message.

Quoting a statistic that the year 2009 has seen the most anti-Semitic incidents since World War Two; Wiesel asserted that the optimism of “never again” has not yet been realized. The world appears not to have learned the lessons of the Holocaust, evidenced by the horrors of Darfur, Cambodia, and Rwanda. “When things happen anywhere, we must respond everywhere,” he said. Like an infectious disease, the targeting of one group affects all of society and, “Silence never helps the victim, it only helps the victimizer."

As a Jew, the ongoing state of affairs in the Middle East affects Wiesel deeply, and he questioned why an individual such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is invited to the UN. “I plead for his arrest,” Wiesel declared, calling him the “number one Holocaust denier in the world.”

“Fanaticism,” Wiesel continued, “does not want dialogues.” Today’s “suicide killers,” as he referred to face of modern terrorism, include “young girls who don’t want to hear any other voice except their own.”

Highly educated individuals whose education was superior in every way, except that it was “lacking the moral dimension,” perpetrated the Holocaust, Wiesel suggested. Without this sensitivity, unspeakable crimes could be promoted throughout the most cultured society. Conversely, Wiesel commended the US soldiers buried in military cemeteries in Europe — “17-18 year old kids [who] came to liberate villages and small cities whose names they had never heard of.”

Wiesel has asked six presidents why the Allies did not bomb the railways to Auschwitz, he said. Had they done so, he believes, his family and community in Hungary could have been spared. Hungary was not invaded until 1944, near the end of the war. 600,000 Jews were deported to the camps within two months; almost none survived.

Wiesel’s concluding message to the sold-out audience: “Whatever you do in life...always think higher and feel deeper. Elevate every action that you undertake...and hope will become a possibility.”