by Elie Wiesel
It all begins on November 9, when Sadat addresses the People’s Assembly in Cairo and states: “I am ready to go to the end of the world if it will prevent one of my sons, be he soldier or officer, from being wounded. I repeat: wounded, not killed. Israel will be surprised to hear me declare before you that I am ready to go to them, to the Knesset, in order to speak to them….”
That very day, Yossi Ciechanover, at that time a high official in the Defense Department and a friend of Dayan’s, is in my home. We discuss Sadat’s speech. I tell Yossi that Dayan must take Sadat at his word. Let Israel invite him to Jerusalem. Yossi rejects the idea, saying it won’t work. In retrospect, I think he may already have been aware of secret negotiations between the Israelis and the Egyptians.
I remember: It is Shabbat. Marion and I are with our friends the Recanatis. Transfixed, we watch television, tears running down our cheeks. In Israel, night has fallen. Lod Airport is brightly lit. Egyptian flags line the tarmac. It all seems surreal. The presidential plane, escorted by Israeli military planes, appears. It lands. We are silent, afraid to breathe, afraid to wake up. The plane’s door swings open. Is it really Sadat, who only four years earlier had ordered the attack on the Jewish state on the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur? He slowly walks down the steps and reviews the honor guard. The military band plays the two national anthems. And here is Sadat saluting Menachem Begin, Arik Sharon, Ezer Weizman—and Golda, who not so long ago on her hospital bed had told me that she did not want to live to see the day when Begin would be in the cabinet. But it is Begin who welcomes the enemy leader in order to make peace. Begin, the man of the right, and not she, the former head of a leftist government.
We stay there for hours watching the live telecasts. Commentators describe what they see without seeming to believe it. At a loss for words, they hide behind their own incredulity. I scan the faces of the crowd shown on the screen—anonymous faces, looking awed. The warmth of their welcome moves me as much as the illustrious visitor’s arrival. After all, among them there must be orphans, widows, bereaved parents of the Yom Kippur War. And yet there appears to be no anger. On the contrary, they welcome Sadat as a friend come from afar, a brother who has overcome dangerous obstacles.
The next day: Sadat in the Old City, Sadat entering the El Aksa Mosque, Sadat addressing the Knesset.
I admire his instincts, his courage, and I refuse to think of the difficulties that await him and his Israeli counterparts on the road to reconciliation. Will we finally learn to celebrate peace just as our ancestors glorified war?
A leap into the future. Nearly a decade later I invite a young woman to speak on the Koran to my students at Boston University, where I now teach. She is Camelia Sadat, the daughter of the Egyptian leader. I eventually become her Ph.D. adviser and she becomes my friend.
Let us take a few steps back. The year 1977 started badly. In January the French government freed the Palestinian terrorist Abu Daoud before Israel could start extradition proceedings. Throughout the world this scandal provoked an unprecedented wave of protest. In the United States there were calls for a boycott of French products. With the financial help of a few friends I arranged for a full-page ad in the New York Times, in the form of an open letter to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, president of the French Republic:
Dear Mr. President:
It is because of my love for France, and my respect for its people, that I feel compelled to express to you my sadness and my indignation—shared by many other Americans—over your handling of the Abu Daoud affair.
Although born in Eastern Europe, I owe France more than I owe my own native land. I owe France my secular education, my language, and my career as a writer.
Liberated from Buchenwald, it was in France that I found compassion and humanity. It was in France that I found generosity and friendship. It was in France that I discovered the other side, the brighter side, of mankind.
I was proud of France.
France, to me, represented humanity’s highest values in a sterile and cynical society. It evoked Rousseau and Bergson, Proust and Zola, Camus and Mauriac. It symbolized an inspiring quest for justice and brotherhood. In France, I thought, the word humanism does not make people laugh.
Yes, I was proud of France.
France, the birthplace of revolutions against tyranny. France, the ally of our American independence. France, the herald of human rights. France, haven for the persecuted. France and its freedom fighters. France and its Resistance. France and its response to Dreyfus.
No nation had so much prestige. No culture was as readily accepted. No example as universally extolled.
And now, Mr. President?
Now, what has become of France?
Its moral leadership is gone, and its luster tarnished in the eyes of men of conscience. In fact, few countries have lost so much prestige so quickly. What has become of France?
It has betrayed its own traditions.
France has become as cynical as the rest of the world.
Why did your government free Abu Daoud?
And why so hastily?
He lied under oath about his false identity.
Why wasn’t he held until Germany or Israel would offer evidence of his crime?
Why was he allowed to leave Paris in the comfort of a first-class airline seat, when 11 Israeli athletes left Munich in coffins?
Your prime minister claims that the courts were not politically motivated. Does anyone believe him in your country? Not in mine.
In my country we believe that France quite simply, and quite shockingly, yielded to killers’ blackmail, oil merchants’ bribery, and the chance to sell some fighter planes. And in doing that, France deliberately humiliated the victims’ widows and orphans, and insulted the memory of their dead.
Are you surprised the world responded with dismay and outrage? Your own people rose to speak out against you.
Because while you have visited Auschwitz, you have forgotten its lesson.
But then, in truth, one should have expected nothing else from France today. In recent years the signs have multiplied. Offensive statements. Sneering remarks. Sudden policy reversals. Strange alliances. Broken promises. Onesided embargoes. The Cherbourg affair. The Mirage sale. French governments have rarely missed an opportunity to demonstrate their hostility to Israel and the Jewish people.
France even abstained on the infamous resolution equating Zionism and racism.
For ideological reasons?
Much worse: purely for money.
Yes, Mr. President, I used to be proud of France and what it stood for. I no longer am.
Written in the heat of the moment, this letter, regrettably, contained one error: I was wrong to reproach France for having abstained from voting during the infamous resolution equating Zionism to racism. I quickly corrected the error subsequently: France had actually voted against this resolution.
In 1993 on a Paris–New York flight, I find myself sitting next to the former president of France. He asks me what I am working on. I tell him: my memoirs. And I add: “I am afraid it contains pages that may displease you.” He asks why. I say, “Abu Daoud.” “You must let me explain,” he replies. “We were ready to extradite him to Germany, since it was there that he committed his crime. But Bonn didn’t want him.”
In late 1995 the American press reports that Abu Daoud has sold his memoirs for a substantial price. In the book he admits to having participated in the massacre of Israeli athletes in Munich. Where is he now? In the West Bank.
I write every morning. I take notes, I make entries in my personal diary. I sleep less. I read a lot—on planes, in cars. I read very few novels, preferring essays on contemporary history, especially World War II; also, the new philosophers, deconstruction in literature, semiotics.
Writing, teaching, lecturing. Every evening, every morning, I tell myself: The danger lies in trying to do too much. Tomorrow I shall be more prudent, more parsimonious with my time. I never am.
Writing becomes
more difficult, more exhausting, more pressing. I need solitude. Silence. I become acutely aware of the ambiguity of words. Always the same questions, the same doubts: How to express that which eludes language? I erase, I rewrite. I fill the waste-basket with superseded drafts. Will I be discerning enough to know when the well runs dry? I redo a single page again and again, until, in the end, I decide on the first draft.
When man is witness to the alienation of his language, when, to quote Rabbi Israel of Rizhin, the parable and its meaning no longer have anything in common, a door has been closed. Literature ceases to be a beacon of salvation or even a means of introspection.
Aesthetics or ethics: Does literature belong to either realm? If one is to believe the Midrash, Adam, when he composed a song for Shabbat, was already making literature. But didn’t Eve anticipate him by telling stories about forbidden fruit and snakes? What is certain is that this couple, the first in history, opened the way to future creators. In the end, they could not escape ethical imperatives. Knowledge compels man to choose between good and evil, life and nothingness. Moses—who was as great a writer as he was a legislator—told his brother Aaron to remain “bein hakhaim vehametim,” between the living and the dead, and death backed off. The writer creates a link between the living and the dead; he protects one from the other.
A writer cannot detach himself from his story: He is responsible for it to the end. Jeremiah feels guilty for the destruction of the Temple: He is not sure of having found the words needed to change man and revoke the decree.
In New York, at the 92nd Street “Y,” I continue my annual lecture series, begun in 1966, on the Bible, the Talmud, Hasidism, and Jewish tradition.
I remember my first lecture at the “Y.” There were two of us on the program, the novelist Jean Shepherd and myself. The auditorium was nearly full, but after she spoke many people left. Never mind, I told myself, while counting the few friends and strangers scattered through Kaufmann Hall; so they won’t invite me again.
In truth I was disappointed, because this center is among the most prestigious in New York. Resigned, I walk onstage. I sit down at a carved wooden table. I read a page from Les Juifs du Silence, the original French edition of The Jews of Silence. Does anyone in this hall speak French? No matter; they probably won’t stay anyway. I read and comment in English on a passage from The Town Beyond the Wall. Please God, make this torture come to an end. In desperation, I evoke Beethoven, of whom it was said that he not only composed his symphonies but also the silence that followed them.
Finally it’s over.
Only it wasn’t. Since then, over more than thirty years, I have given more than 120 lectures at the “Y”.
I am invited to speak at the Sorbonne. My lectures on Rebbe Nahman and the talmudic Master Elisha ben Abuya are given in the very amphitheater where, long ago, I listened so intently to my professors. I still have trouble overcoming my stage fright. My migraines don’t help. Before every speech I remember the words of our sages which Saul Lieberman used to quote: “It takes less than three years for man to learn to speak, and seventy to learn to remain silent.”
On Human Rights
IN MY DREAM I am looking for my father, who is no longer looking for anyone. I see him leaning against the cemetery wall. He sees me and begins to cry, weakly, like the child he is becoming. He comes closer and rests his head on my lap.
Dawn is breaking. In the distance a few ghosts emerge from shelters. “Come,” I urge my father, “let us follow them.” They lead us to a large, brightly lit synagogue. A stranger goes before us and blows out the candles. Now it is dark. I no longer know where I am. “Father,” I whisper, “where are you?” He takes a deep breath and bends down as if to examine the plowed soil. I no longer see his face. Yet, while I still know who he is, I no longer know who I am.
The Jewish writer as activist is the theme of The Testament, whose original French title, literally translated, is “Testament of an Assassinated Jewish Poet.” Biographical novel? Bildungsroman? No: I am not the novel’s Paltiel Kossover, the Jewish Communist poet. I have never been attracted to Communism. Nor have I been a soldier in the Red Army or a prisoner of the NKVD. But I became fascinated with Paltiel’s story in 1965, on my first trip to the Soviet Union. I needed to understand the transformation of a young Talmudist into a fervent disciple of Marx and Lenin. The Holocaust is almost totally absent from this novel, except for half a page where I describe Paltiel going through Majdanek. Is that when he became a Jew again? Had he ever ceased to be one? He lived as a Communist but died a Jew. In this novel I explore the soul and conscience of the repressed Jew, one who has exiled himself to the margins of Judaism.
Kossover’s portrait is loosely based on the Yiddish poet Peretz Markish and the Yiddish novelist Der Nister, both executed in August 1952 on Stalin’s orders.
One day at the University of Geneva, after a lecture on Rabbi Akiba, a young professor shyly approaches me: “So you knew my father,” he says. He is Shimon Markish, the son of Peretz, who had recognized his father in Kossover. “I am so sorry,” I tell him. “I know and admire your father’s work, I wish I had had the good fortune to meet him.” We spend hours talking. He confirms what I had only imagined about the internal conflicts of a Jewish writer yearning for justice in an unjust society.
One of the main tenets of my life has been: “Lo ta’amod al dam reakha….” Do not be indifferent to the bloodshed inflicted on your fellow man (Leviticus 19:16). Not to take a stand is in itself to take a stand, said Camus. Moses rediscovered himself as a Jew and as a man when he defended a Hebrew beaten by an Egyptian and then one beaten by another Hebrew. Had he remained a neutral spectator, he would not have become God’s prophet and the leader of his people.
I take part in countless rallies for Soviet Jewry toward the end of the sixties. I go every time I am asked. I tell the mostly young audiences that the young Jews of Moscow are mad, completely mad. Do they really believe that they can defeat the Soviet dictatorship with their songs and their dances? And the rest of us, do we seriously believe that we have the power to influence Brezhnev’s policies? But, I tell the audiences, the great Moses Maimonides was right when he said that the world survives thanks to its madmen. The liberation of Soviet Jewry has become my most urgent cause.
A huge meeting takes place in Paris to protest UNESCO’s policy of discrimination against Israel. Isaac Stern, Abba Eban, Artur Rubinstein, Manès Sperber, and Mario Vargas Llosa take part. Delegates from some twenty countries express outrage that an international cultural organization would betray the very ideals it was created to serve.
The atmosphere is tense. When my turn comes to speak, I throw out an idea that I consider pragmatic if somewhat outlandish: “Let us adopt a resolution, here and now, declaring that this body will supersede UNESCO.” I explain with some bravado: “Since so many distinguished scientists and great writers and musicians are with us, doesn’t that signify that we are UNESCO?”
Of course, I am joking. But some of the participants take me seriously. Eban speaks up: He opposes my plan for foreign policy reasons. Others want to think it over. The distinguished French philosopher Raymond Aron takes me aside in the corridor: “Do you really want to do this?” I reassure him. He thanks me, laughing.
An hour later, a frantic phone call from an associate of the director general of UNESCO: “Don’t do something that could ruin us…. Let’s negotiate…. Everything will fall into place.” Some time later we organize another meeting, this time to save Jews in Arab countries. Same participants, same arguments. I ask Raymond Aron: “So, we are starting over again?” He answers: “No. We merely continue. It is they who are starting over again.”
In the early eighties, the writer Tahar Ben Jelloun asks me to use my influence to help free Abraham Sarfati, a Jewish political prisoner whom the king of Morocco refuses to release. I discuss the matter with President Carter’s staff, with senators, journalists, friends. All my efforts are in vain. When Sarfati is finally freed in 1991, I
am pleased. Though I do not share his political convictions—he is a Communist—I admire his courage. Soon after, I am saddened by his declaration: “Israel and the Jewish people are a mythical state and people. The Western Left deludes itself; to achieve peace, Zionism must be fought.”
I ask myself: Had I been aware of his anti-Israel position, would I have tried to help him? I hope I am not deluding myself when I answer in the affirmative. Whether I agree with Sarfati’s ideology has nothing to do with my duty to fight for his civil rights.
Still, I am bitterly disappointed.
In 1980, on the 18th day of the Jewish month of Sh’vat, I find myself in the dusty village of Aranyaprathet, on the border between Thailand and Cambodia, looking desperately for nine Jews. This day marks the anniversary of my father’s death. I need a minyan, a quorum of ten men, to recite Kaddish in his memory.
I had arrived a few days earlier to participate in a march for the survival of Cambodia, organized by the International Rescue Committee and other humanitarian organizations. A hundred or so men and women represent the United States and Europe. Among them are intellectuals and civil rights activists. Bayard Rustin is here, as are Liv Ullmann and Joan Baez; and journalists, countless journalists. I wish I could ask my fellow inmate from the camps, Reb Menashe Klein, what one does in a case like this. Does one have the right to postpone the prayer? Surely he would say: “What are you doing so far away on a day when you should be in synagogue?” For Reb Menashe, a Jewish prayer or a page of Mishna takes precedence over all else.