For the Dead and the Living
WIESEL, ELIE
FOR THE DEAD AND THE LIVING BY ELIE WIESEL With the exception of Israel, ours is the one country that has seen fit to make preserving the memory of the Holocaust a national imperative. When...
...The bloodshed in Bosnia has to be stopped...
...The questions, in fact, are endless and will forever remain unanswered...
...Nor is the Museum an answer...
...Prejudice knows no boundaries...
...I wrote one sentence—now permanently inscribed on one of its walls: "For the dead and the living, we must bear witness...
...I was in the former Yugoslavia last fall...
...Every event connected with that period defies human understanding...
...Others will try to redeem themselves through you...
...Inside the Kingdom of Night, we tried to understand and could not...
...only the victims did not know...
...To forget would mean to kill the victims a second time...
...The Pentagon knew, the State Department knew, the White House knew, most governments knew...
...I saw them all, including the children, entering the shadow of flames...
...There are others...
...It will not stop unless we stop it...
...Treblinka, Ponar, Belzec, Chelmno, Birkenau...
...Fifty years ago, somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains, a young Jewish woman read in a Hungarian newspaper a brief account of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising...
...In Poland, SS officers used Jewish infants for target practice...
...We have learned that whatever happens to one community ultimately affects every community...
...Indeed, if there is an answer to the Holocaust, it must—by definition—be the wrong answer...
...Anti-Semitism is the beginning, not the end of a disease...
...Nevertheless, hatred continues to cause so much suffering in the world today...
...Why was there no outcry, no public indignation...
...That is one of the lessons we have learned...
...When President Jimmy Carter set up the Presidential Commission on the Holocaust in 1978 and appointed me chairman, I was asked about my vision of the future Holocaust Museum...
...In Romania, the Iron Guard killed Jews and displayed them in butcher shops with signs: "Kosher Meat...
...Though not all victims were Jewish, all Jews were victims...
...we must not allow them to vanish again...
...She was my mother...
...We have learned that though the Holocaust was principally a Jewish tragedy, its implications are universal...
...Why was Berlin encouraged in its belief that it could decree with impunity the humiliation, persecution, extermination of an entire people...
...It is not because I cannot explain, that you will not understand...
...Let us therefore seize this moment to condemn the scourge of anti-Semitism, bigotry and hatred...
...Why are they fighting...
...it is because you will not understand that I cannot explain...
...Remember the loving yet naive woman, somewhere in the Carpathians, who together with most Jews of her town perished in a tempest of fury and fire...
...We have learned that although every human being has the right to be different, none has the right to be indifferent to suffering...
...This essay is adaptedfrom his ad-dress at the U. S. Holocaust Museum's dedication ceremonies...
...And the most awesome question of all: Why was man's silence matched by God's...
...One year later, together with her entire family, she was in a cattle-car traveling to the Black Hole of History named Auschwitz...
...Words, images, sounds—that is the stuff of memory...
...Why weren't the railways leading to Birkenau bombed by Allied planes...
...it is but a question mark...
...And yet, we are duty-bound to try...
...but it will be the truth of a madman...
...You will possess the truth...
...Another question: Where did the poorly armed fighters in the ghettos and the forests find the courage to take on the mightiest legions in Europe...
...There were only two categories: those who were there to kill and those who were there to be killed...
...After all, by April 1943 nearly 4 million Jews had already perished...
...When people massacre one another in India, it is our fault too...
...Isay: No...
...In her anguish, she held them close and began to dance...
...Memory is not only a victory over time, it is also a triumph over injustice...
...We cannot tolerate the excruciating sights of this old new war...
...People fight each other and children die...
...I cannot sleep remembering what I have seen...
...Not to do so would mean to forget...
...she had never heard of those places...
...We found ourselves in an unfamiliar world, a creation parallel to God's, with its own hierarchy, its own princes and hangmen, its own laws and customs...
...But those places, and others, were known to officials in Washington and London, Moscow and Stockholm, Geneva and the Vatican...
...We could not prevent their first death...
...In Kiev, an SS officer beheaded two Jewish children in front of their mother...
...As you walk through the Holocaust Museum, as you look into the eyes of the killers and their victims, ask yourselves: How could the murderers do what they did and go on living...
...The essence of this tragedy is that it can never be fully communicated...
...When children are killed in Bosnia, it is our humanity that has failed...
...Astonished, dismayed, she wondered aloud: "Why are our Jews in Warsaw behaving like this...
...In one of my tales, an SS officer derides a young yeshiva student, telling him that if he happened to survive, his words would fall on deaf ears: "Some will laugh at you," he says...
...People will refuse to believe you...
...Something, anything must be done to stop the bloodshed there...
...As a Jew I am saying that we have to do something to stop the killing in that country...
...Elie Wiesel, author and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, is a long time NL contributor...
...It is FIRE that is His shadow, the fire that consumed a third of a people whose memory of God is the most ancient in re corded history...
...The only emotion they ever showed was anger when they missed...
...Jews of every description—old and young, beggars and industrialists, sages and madmen, Ashkenazim from France and Sefardim from Greece, intellectuals from Lithuania and Hasidim from Poland—together began their inexorable journey to a fiery altar of unprecedented dimension...
...For not only are we responsible for the memories of the dead, we are also responsible for what we do with those memories...
...Thus the painful question: Why weren't Hungarian Jews, the last remnant of Eastern European Jewry, warned of their impending doom...
...Light is God's shadow, said Giordano Bruno, the Italian philosopher who was burned at the stake in Rome four centuries ago...
...Couldn't they have waited quietly until the end of the War...
...Religious hatred, ethnic hatred, racial hatred...
Vol. 76 • May 1993 • No. 7
