Verse:
Pratt, Anne Porter, 554, C. W.
CARGAS: Does your writing in some way help you to purge WIESEL: I knew I would write after ten years. That [Ausch- your pain? witz]...
...I want you to get the meaning of the pain, not the a volume of criticism about Holocaust literature...
...How can I leave that pain...
...I didn't do at least of mine, anything...
...and fumble up to air, So who is that ten thousandth...
...24 October 1986: 557...
...they give themselves to anyone...
...The Americans were coming closer, so the Germans decided to evacuate the camp...
...And if I had been the ten thousandth, maybe he ladderless to find would be sitting here in my place...
...I don't want it to leave me...
...witz] was in 1945...
...I am not a sportsman...
...Suffering is something personal and discreet...
...I have no right to speak for all...
...If, as a result of my CARGAS: Irving Halperin, who teaches at San Francisco State writing, you share my pain, then I would fail...
...All I can try to do is to wanted to wait for ten years...
...To leave meant death...
...designed Most of those who left were killed, either on the way, or on the the apple tree trains: starved or shot...
...In the to think that God beginning, they started with the Jews, and then everybody...
...This is really what I feel: knobby and bare since I can't bring him back, I must try to speak for him...
...But for that unique young man, whom earth-apples...
...It would be a misused by words...
...But not share the pain...
...One, I don't know, never knew, who simply left because he hapunder my hand, pened to be there...
...That Also child of God...
...And I was always afraid of beatings...
...I still am...
...I felt ten years is a mystical number, so I betrayal...
...Logically, I should forth wandering from the garden...
...There's a pain...
...over the void to grip Sometimes I was maybe thirty to forty people away from the the perfect apple at a branch's tip...
...Those of C. W. Pratt you who read Night may remember that the last week in On the Beauty of the Buchenwald was a difficult, despairing, senseless, absurd Universal Order week...
...the Auschwitz experience...
...But really by chance...
...That [Auschyour pain...
...When the ten years were up, by coincidence, I met Francois Mauriac who was so helpful to me...
...chapter devoted to your work, as you know...
...I don't want you University, wrote a book entitled, Messengers from the Dead, to have pain...
...There were 80,000 in the camp Odd and they were going to evacuate 10,000 every day...
...I'm not saying by miracle now at the end of almost fifty years should find because if I were to say miracle that would mean that God myself here high performed a miracle for me and chose not to perform miracles on springy rungs...
...gate...
...My pain is why I decided not to write [earlier] is simply because I was something that doesn't need to be purged...
...towards dangling planets...
...The gate was open, people were Brown going...
...Also, I know it And I didn't want to be used, or to use, or to misuse, or to be will never leave me...
...No one has my Kennebecs: the right to speak for all...
...If somebody had pushed me forward, I stirred, shook off a clod, would have run forward and I would have been the ten became bloat toad...
...I want to prevent suspicious of words...
...I'll give you a practical example...
...In this sense, I accept the term messenger...
...I grasp a branch and lean By chance, I always happened to be in the eleven thousandth...
...Do you want to say something about the responsibility that you have taken on CARGAS: You chose not to write for a long period of time after as a messenger...
...And odd that I, have been the first to die because I was always sick when I was without design, a child...
...But WIESEL: You know I don't speak about my pain...
...so perfectly to catch on crooked branch, in acute crotch, F OR some reason that had nothing to do with me because I the narrow pointed ladder Adam would invent am not a courageous person, I am not a person of initiative, to ease his labor when as punishment I lived...
...WIESEL: Not only I, but everyone who was there, sooner or later, to a certain degree, feels that he or she was a messenger sent back...
...Waiting for the_ gate...
...I am not the for apple-snatching, he was sent type...
...the ladder like an arrow pointing me for so many others, so I refuse the word miracle in this context...
...make something out of that pain, to find a meaning to it and share that meaning...
...What caused you finally to decide that you would write...
...I as baby skulls, huge as pre-Edenic continents, cannot speak for all...
...I have never done anything to stay alive...
...But they had to let out only 10,000, then they'd stop...
...means that I choose to be his messenger because he, I hope, now is my messenger...
...I am not strong...
...I don't speak about my suffering...
...Words are like prostitutes...
...Byalic, a Hebrew poet, said, people from suffering...
...below my feet, turned earth tells where And I'm very often haunted by the person who was the ten this morning I clawed down thousandth...
...thousandth...
Vol. 113 • October 1986 • No. 18
