Spokesman for the Dead
RICHLER, MORDECAI
Spokesman for the Dead LEGENDS OF OUR TIME By Elie Wiesel Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 197 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by MORDECAI RICHLER Author, "The Acrobat," "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,"...
...In Warsaw, in Bialystok, in Grodno, and even in Treblinka, in Sobivor, and Auschwitz...
...On my first day in Munich, in 1955, I went to meet a friend at the American Army Service Club, formerly Hitler's Haus der Kunst...
...they were ignorant of the very name of the place, they had not heard of the horrors it concealed from them...
...So modern, so clean...
...Over the information desk, there was another announcement, this one setting out Saturday's diversions...
...It's not used anymore, but . . ." "Yeah, it was only during the War...
...But what weapons...
...Reviewed by MORDECAI RICHLER Author, "The Acrobat," "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz," "Cocksure" I am a believer in obligatory voyages, Gehenna being as necessary as the heavenly spheres, and so I've been to Germany as well as Jerusalem...
...But not the Jews of Transylvania...
...They just hung guys there...
...We say: weapons in hand...
...At the time, he writes, "every child in Brooklyn, in Whitechapel, and in Tel Aviv knew that Treblinka and Birkenau were something other than the names of provincial little railway stations...
...Young, distinctly small-town Canadian schoolteachers attached to the air base breathlessly assured me the Germans were a simply fantastic people...
...From their leisurely way of life...
...I asked if they had found Dachau a chilling place...
...Why...
...The pious Jews of Sighet, Wiesel reminds us, were not deported until May 1944, just a few days before the landings in Normandy and while the Russian Army was only 18 miles from Auschwitz...
...We have a lot to learn from them," a science teacher told me...
...Arriving at the Auschwitz station, they still had no idea what lay in wait for them...
...Returning to Germany 17 years later, he wrote in one of the essays now included in Legends Of Our Time, "Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate—healthy, virile hate—for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German...
...it is one of the few contemporary books that should be obligatory reading for all —an essential part of our 20th-century education...
...That is to say, praise for his style, his art, seems diminishing and grossly beside the point...
...His parents, he said, had taken him to Dachau when he was 12...
...It is not merely that his latter-day Chasidic myth-making, the cloying "Testament of a Jew From Sara-gossa" being a case in point, rubs me the wrong way, the stuff seemingly tainted by a superimposed symmetry, an almost O. Henry-like facility, but rather that I believe he has more urgent things to tell us...
...To my astonishment, most of the other children had been there too...
...The Jews were against Hitler so they had to exterminate them...
...Wiesel, who comes from the shtetl of Sighet, in Transylvania, lost his mother, father and sister in the death camp ovens, and is himself a survivor of Buchenwald...
...Had they known, they could have made a dash for it, been saved...
...Mountains surrounded the area, and the Jews might have fled into these mountains and hidden out for a while...
...Urn, there were too many prisoners so they had to kill some off...
...They had hardly any...
...I asked...
...this time to write a piece about the Royal Canadian Air Force base on the outskirts of Baden-Baden...
...So, for that matter, did the Pope, Roosevelt, and Churchill (who couldn't spare planes to bomb the railway heads...
...We are blessed in having Elie Wiesel as our witness, but such is the exigent burden of his experience and our guilt that he is, as writers go, singularly unfortunate...
...reading them, one does not know whether to rejoice with admiration or weep with rage...
...At the time, my thoughts were with Elie Wiesel, whose ineffably harrowing Night I had read only recently...
...Authenticated documents and eye-witness accounts do exist," Wiesel writes, "relating the acts of war of those poor desperadoes...
...To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the dead...
...Yet, as Wiesel notes elsewhere, nobody thought to parachute messengers or advise them by shortwave radio...
...Drifting into the lobby, I was confronted by a life-size cardboard hillbilly which held a poster announcing that Friday would be "Grand Ole Op'ry Night...
...They never used the gas chambers...
...They used to torture guys there...
...I asked them...
...In fact, when Wiesel strays from his direct experience of the shtetl, the death camps and after, when he attempts to spin tales, an indulgence readily permitted to the rest of us, I find myself impatient...
...Like it was extermination...
...If during 1942-44 the civilized world seemed indifferent, offering the Germans a free hand, as it were, today, such is our sophistication and concern after the fact that there is a burgeoning literature charging not the Germans with bestiality but the victims with compliance...
...One wonders: but how did they do it, those starving youngsters, those hunted men, those battered women, how were they able to confront, with weapons in hand, the Nazi Army...
...Elie Wiesel's continuing testimony, his unequaled insights into the Holocaust, are of incomparable importance to us all...
...Venice...
...Unjustifiably, perhaps, but impatient all the same...
...Naw...
...The Germans...
...Not all, maybe, but a great majority...
...visit the castle and the crematorium...
...They used to punish people there...
...Visiting GIs were assured that promptly at 1400 hours a bus would leave for nearby Dachau: "bring your cameras...
...But the truth is—miraculously, abandoned by everyone as they were—many did resist...
...A bullfight in Barcelona...
...Who told you that...
...I asked...
...He is also singularly illuminating...
...What else...
...What have you seen in Europe...
...Dachau...
...They had to pay in pure gold for a single revolver...
...No, no...
...Objective intellectuals sifting the evidence, thoughtful sociologists concerned about behavior patterns, even callow Sabras, all demand to know why the Jews didn't resist, why they went, like cattle, to the slaughter...
...Legends of our Time continues the testament...
...Dachau...
...I was in Germany again in 1963...
...Do you know what Dachau is...
...It was," a boy said, "an unusual place to visit...
...Night, for instance, is neither a bad nor a good novel...
...I asked...
...The next evening I went to the Social Center, mixing with teenagers at a dance...
...As a spokesman for the dead, I believe that Wiesel is unmatched for eloquence and nobility...
...The boy was only 14...
Vol. 51 • December 1968 • No. 25
