ELIE WIESEL 1928-2016 R.I.P.
He changed the conscience of the entire world, yet he never held a public office. Even Nelson Mandela, perhaps the only other 20th century figure to move the world as deeply as Elie Wiesel did, finally achieved political power and served as the president of his nation, newly born out of intense racial strife. Wiesel accomplished this task without the accoutrements of power by focusing the illuminating light of his spirit on the darkness of human depravity, while being a victim of the evil he opposed. That is what made him unique, a citizen of the world and one who snatched humanity from the pits of depravity. In the long run, he was by my standards the most influential life produced in the 20th century. His death earlier this month was mourned by people of every religious persuasion and by every ethnic strain in the human family. He was a Jew, admired by Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. He was a white European mourned by Africans, Asians and Latinos.
Elie Wiesel was born in a small town in what is now Romania, to parents who were Hassidic Jews. They lived and raised their family in what was a Jewish ghetto. Europe was at that time a deeply unstable place in which to begin life’s journey. World War I had left the country devastated. A worldwide depression had been initiated with the crash of the stock market about a year after Elie’s birth. Wars and economic depressions always have political consequences. Russia had been plummeted into a civil war that finally ended with a Bolshevik victory and the institutionalization of a Soviet style communism. A disgruntled former corporal in the German army during World War I, who was spending his time in jail for his part in an attempted coup in Munich, wrote a book entitled Mein Kampf. In this book, he identified the pain Europe was enduring with the presence of the Jews who, he claimed, had impeded the restoration of the German Empire. By 1933 this man, so very improbably, had become the Chancellor of Germany. He never achieved a political majority, but with a new imperialistic vision of a future Germany, with the Jews identified as a clear enemy and with the fear of Communism sweeping Europe, he took over the political leadership of his nation. He then dissolved the Reichstag and the German people would never vote again until after his regime was toppled. Purging Europe of its Jewish population became the official policy of the most powerful country on the continent.
The roots of anti-Semitism ran deep in ostensibly Christian Europe. The Christian churches in Europe observed annually the story of the crucifixion of Jesus. In those liturgies the Jews were always portrayed as the ones responsible for his death. Biblical support for this anti-Semitism actually appeared in the New Testament. Matthew’s gospel had pictured Pilate, the Roman procurator, after condemning Jesus to death, washing his hands publicly and declaring himself “innocent of the blood of this just man.” Then, as if absolved of any guilt, he turned his prisoner over to the Roman soldiers for crucifixion. The Jewish crowd, defined by the hostile word “mob,” was made to say in response: “His blood be upon us and upon our children.” In this manner the Jews were said to have admitted and owned their guilt. In that exchange the die of history was cast.
This budding anti-Semitism was then fed by the writing of the Church “Fathers,” who filled the European blood stream with negativity about Jews, describing them as “vile people, unfit for life.” They were publicly identified as the killers of Jesus. This anti-Semitism found expression in every movement in European history. The Crusades were anti-Semitic, the Inquisition was anti-Semitic, and even the Protestant Reformation was anti-Semitic. In almost every nation of Europe, the Jewish population was at one time or another either expelled or ghettoized.
So Hitler’s message to his defeated nation fell on soil that had been prepared for centuries to be receptive to a killing frenzy against the children of Abraham. Politicians regularly identify and attack the “enemy” who is responsible for the people’s political and economic pain, and in the process they make this enemy’s persecution and annihilation their pathway to political power. Adolph Hitler cast the Jews in that role and, with this clearly defined purpose, he thrust all of Europe into a war that began in 1939.
It was not until early 1944 that Hitler’s army rolled into the Romanian town where the 15-year-old Elie Wiesel lived with his mother, father and three sisters. That invasion would mark the end of the life that Elie Wiesel had lived up to that moment. The Jewish citizens of his town were quickly rounded up, removed from their homes and ultimately taken to waiting trains, being allowed to carry with them, as the sole reminders of their previous lives, only that which could be contained in knapsacks to which each clung tenaciously. They would never see their homes again. The trains were bound for a place of which they had never before heard —Auschwitz. There the Jewish captives were separated into two lines, one for males, the other for females. Elie Wiesel and his father thus went in one direction, his mother and his youngest sister went in the other. That was the last time he would ever see either again. His two older sisters somehow escaped this journey. This entire captive Jewish population was marked for extermination by gas, by crematoriums and by firing squads. Those who were capable of manual labor, however, like Elie and his father, were spared until they were too weak to be useful. Then they too would be exterminated.
So began that descent into hell that would last for about eighteen months before release was achieved. Elie’s father did not make it. He died of dysentery and starvation about four months before the war came to an end. Elie did make it. Weak from hunger and gaunt in appearance, he had watched as these horrors cascaded on his life day after day. Death was everywhere. He endured its smell, he saw and was victimized by beatings. During his time of imprisonment he lived in a world where no shred of dignity was allowed these Jewish captives. Prisoners whose time had come to be executed would be stripped naked, marched into crematoriums, gassed until dead, then before their bodies were burned, their last vestiges of value, the gold and silver fillings in their teeth, were removed to enrich the citizens of the Third Reich.
When the Russian army neared Auschwitz, the Jewish prisoners, including Elie Wiesel and his father, were marched through the snow to Buchenwald. Finally, with less than ten percent of its previous population still surviving, these concentration camps were freed by the Third Army of the United States in 1945. The nightmare was over, but the scars of the Holocaust would last forever.
The world does not linger over horrors long. It prefers to shove them into the depths of the unconscious and there to be repressed or forgotten. There were, however, too many people who had endured the hell of these Nazi prison camps to think that this memory could be stamped out forever. One of those surviving, Elie Wiesel, would process this experience slowly over a decade before his traumatized psyche could finally begin to be able to talk about it. When he did, the result was an 800-page memoir that few people read. This book was later condensed into a treatise of less than 150 pages entitled Night. Still few people read it. It sold 1860 copies in its first year in print. It was the capture and subsequent trial of Adolf Eichmann that served to bring the Holocaust back into public awareness and then Elie Wiesel’s book gave it content and context, subsequently selling ten million copies. I was one of those who devoured it. It was among the most painful books I have ever read.
Elie Wiesel soon emerged to become “the voice” of the Holocaust. His life and witness made it impossible for anyone to forget. The Holocaust was a reality with which human beings had to come to grips. People had to embrace the fact that human life was capable of something that grotesque. People had to see that a killing prejudice, justified by religion, based on race, tribe, ethnicity and even sexual orientation was a fact of history. People needed to recognize that human beings are capable of dehumanizing each other so deeply that one human being could not even feel the other’s pain or blink an eye when that other was destroyed. We human beings had to confront the fact that we are capable of genocide, sometimes carried out in the name of God. Since the Holocaust the world has witnessed genocide in other places like Bosnia, Burundi and Darfur. The cry of protest has been soft, sometimes barely audible. We have also now been forced to recognize such other horrors as the rape of Nanking, the kidnapping of little girls by Boco Haram in Nigeria, the calculated murder of innocent people by suicide bombers and hate-filled terrorists, the murder of black men by white policemen and the retaliatory murders of white policemen by deranged killers. All of these activities represent aspects of the same Holocaust mentality. Elie Wiesel, more than any other person I know of, shined the insight of his moral conscience on the dark places in the human soul. We dare not look away or forget the evil of which human life is capable. For that Elie Wiesel has earned our unending gratitude.
Several years ago Christine, my wife, and I were invited to a Passover observance in New York at the home of Ruth and Fred Westheimer. She is better known as “Dr. Ruth,” the popular sexologist on radio and television. When Ruth was eight years old, her Jewish parents put her on a train alone and sent her to Geneva. They had no idea what or who would await her in Switzerland. They only knew that for her life to continue they had to get her out of Germany. Kissing her parents goodbye would be the last time Ruth would ever see them. At this Passover observance in her home everyone present, except for Christine and me, was either a Holocaust survivor or the child of a Holocaust survivor. It was a wrenching, moving, unforgettable evening. At that observance the two of us were embraced as Christians by those who had experienced the depravity of the anti-Semitism that Christianity had historically fostered. “Never again” became my motto that night. Elie Wiesel’s life and witness had taken over my consciousness. Rest in peace, my brother Elie, your work lives on.
John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online
here.
