by Elie Wiesel
As for me, I believe that when human beings suffer I have no right to be elsewhere. How could I have refused to go to the place where the refugees from the Cambodian massacres were dying of hunger and disease? I had seen them on television: skeletons with terror-stricken eyes. They had left behind parents, brothers, or children. All were imprisoned, tortured to death.
The atrocities committed by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge had reached new lows even in the bloody annals of Communism. In the name of a perverse “progressive” ideology, an entire country had turned itself into a slaughterhouse and sealed the gates.
The dazed survivors stare into the cameras. I see nothing but hunger, despair, and resignation. Just weeks before, they had faced their torturers, beaten and humiliated.
“What are you doing here?” asks Henry Kamm, a former refugee from Hitler’s Austria and a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times correspondent. There is no need to respond to his rhetorical question; he knows the answer: We are both here to see what we can do for these victims of American bombs, Vietnamese rifles, and most cruelly, torture at the hands of their own people, for whom the teachings of Pol Pot had replaced those of Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, and Buddha. It was the Jew in us who, since the discovery of the mass graves in Cambodia, felt the need to tell these survivors that we understood.
I have encountered obstacles both real and imagined when I have had to recite Kaddish, and I often wondered how it was possible to sanctify God’s name inside the kingdom of the dead. I recall my father, his features distorted by pain and anguish. I recall other fathers, other children. I watch them fly toward the gaping heavens and wonder: Who is saying Kaddish for them?
Finally I succeed in gathering the nine men I need: Henry Kamm, Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, the writer Guy Suarès, Bernard-Henri Lévy, several Israeli doctors…. Surrounded by chaos, a few steps from the Cambodian border, we say the Minha prayer. My voice trembles as I say the prayer for the dead.
Suddenly I hear behind me a young doctor who repeats the prayer after me. His eyes are filled with tears. Afterward I ask him: “For whom are you saying Kaddish?” He looks at me and doesn’t answer. “Is it for your father?” “No.” “For your mother?” “No.”
He points to the border: “It is for them.”
I am reminded of something from the Talmud: “Be proud, Abraham, be proud of your descendants. Look: they do not forget anyone.”
—Kaddish is a beautiful prayer, is it not?
—Very beautiful. It is the Jewish song of memory.
—Are you reciting it because you love to sing or because you love to remember?
—Both.
—To recite Kaddish is to remember that one comes from somewhere, that one did not emerge from nothingness.
—I know where I come from, and to whom I owe my life.
—You recite Kaddish in order to remember your father?
—Not only my father.
—Is it out of a need to submit that you recite Kaddish?
—I do not consider Kaddish an act of submission. And I have not submitted.
—Is Kaddish not linked to death? And does death itself not imply submission?
—I repeat: Kaddish has nothing to do with death.
—Only with God?
—With God and with His orphans
—Who are they?
—We all were; you still are.
—And God? An orphan, He too?
—He more than anyone.
A rescue mission at the Nicaraguan border. I am to meet Miskito Indians expelled from their homes by Daniel Ortega’s repressive regime, the latest “forgotten” in our society, which often practices apathy and selective solidarity.
To reach them is complicated and exhausting. There are no direct flights. The New York–Tegucigalpa connection is via Miami. At the suggestion of John Silber, president of Boston University, I am accompanied by Professor Joachim Maître, who knows the region well. We meet foreign diplomats, we have secret encounters with the opposition. Then we cross the jungle, the last stretch by kayak. I can hardly believe I am doing this, I who have been known to lose my way in my own neighborhood and don’t know how to swim.
Why has this leftist regime uprooted these peaceful Indians? Because they live too close to the border? Is that a reason to extract them from their native environment? And why do so many civil rights activists look the other way? Because Daniel Ortega is of the left and violently anti-American, anti-imperialist, and therefore untouchable? Still, the Miskito Indians have succeeded in arousing the sympathy of a few journalists and intellectuals in Europe and America. I discuss the situation with François Mitterrand, who listens well. I do believe that he interceded. In the end, the Miskito were allowed to return to their homes.
My extraliterary activities take more and more of my time and energy. But I feel I have no right to turn away from them. Clearly I have less time to work on my novels, but there are more important things. I explain this when, in 1982, I refuse to take part in a colloquium whose subject is close to my heart. Organized by two Israeli professors of psychiatry, this symposium on genocide, which I am to chair, is scheduled for early June in Tel Aviv. Everything is set. Scholars and historians from several continents have accepted our invitation, among them Armenians. After all, they have ideas on this subject which has touched them closely. How could one forget the massacre of their parents and grandparents at the hands of the Turkish army?
At the last moment, we encounter a major hurdle. Under pressure from Turkey, the Israelis urge me to revoke our invitation to the Armenians. I refuse. It would be too humiliating. And to humiliate is to blaspheme. The pressure increases. I am given to understand that even if a single Armenian participates in the conference, Israeli-Turkish relations will suffer. And that there would be consequences for Jews in certain Arab countries. Jewish emissaries from Istanbul confirm this to me with documents. No matter. I will not offend our Armenian guests. I resign as chairman. To Richard Eder, the New York Times correspondent in Paris, I explain why: “A human life weighs more than all the books written about human life.”
The war in Lebanon breaks out a week before the conference opens. I suggest moving the conference to Paris or Amsterdam. “But what about the Armenians?” ask the organizers. I say: invite them, of course. Now that the venue has changed, Israel cannot interfere. Unfortunately, my suggestion is not accepted. The conference, chaired by Professor Israel Czarny and Professor Shamai Davidson, takes place with the Armenians—but without me and some other participants.
I know that Israel had to heed Turkish threats and that the ethical demands on Jews in the Diaspora are not necessarily those imposed on Israelis. Still, I am left with a sense of failure.
The war in Lebanon brings increased hostility toward Israel throughout the world. Passing through Paris in mid-June, I am invited to appear on the one o’clock news. I am meant to help restore some balance to the news commentaries on the Middle East. At the end of the program I ask: Why doesn’t anyone ever speak of the sadness in Israel? As I leave the set, I am accosted by an angry reporter who says: “Today, you shouldn’t have …” “Shouldn’t have what?” “You shouldn’t have defended Israel. Today it was your duty to denounce Israel and to support the cause of its Arab victims!” Back in 1967, this same journalist—Julien Besançon—was considered an admirer of Israel. He had written a powerful book on the Six-Day War.
In America too, the campaign against Israel has become mean. Arthur Hertzberg, a Conservative rabbi, chooses the day before Yom Kippur to publish a violent attack in the New York Times headlined: “BEGIN MUST GO.” He condemns the prime minister and Israel as if it had been the Israeli army, and not the Christian militia, that perpetrated the terrible massacre of the Palestinians.
It is a time of celebration for our enemies. They exploit the Lebanon war to their own ends. A synagogue in Copenhagen is bombed. The monstrous Protocols of the Elders of Zion is distributed in Stockholm. Anti-Semitic statements appear in the German press.
In the past, anti-Semitism flourished in the ranks of the extreme right; today, it is found as well in the extreme left.
After World War II, some of us really believed that anti-Semitism too had died in Auschwitz. We were wrong. Hitler is dead, but anti-Semitism is alive and well. It just goes by other names—most frequently, that of anti-Zionism.
South Africa, 1975. My first journey to this land, my first encounter with apartheid—the racial and racist hatred, the arbitrary arrests, the daily killings; the evil determination to jail entire peoples because of their color; the misery of Soweto. The original crime of apartheid is to have legitimized hatred in the name of racial superiority. To hate under the apartheid regime does not constitute a violation of the law; it is the law. But once unleashed, hatred knows no boundaries. Hate begets hate.
Back then, South Africa was a region without hope. Day after day: riots, repression, funerals. With ancestral dignity families carried their dead to their final resting places. Those armed policemen who surrounded them, had they no respect, no decency, as they faced a community in mourning?
Another subject that does not let go of me: the excluded, the rejected, the marginalized.
In 1985 in Arizona, I participate in the first conference to explore statutes of political asylum or “sanctuary” for the illegal “economic refugees” from El Salvador and Guatemala. Another conference on refugees, in Washington, deals with the larger problem. I remained stateless too long not to be concerned with the fate of those without a land. Long after refugees have been accepted, they remain uprooted.
For the refugee, distances are meaningless. Though one may live a single kilometer from the border, it might just as well be the other end of the world. On one side there is life and happiness; on the other, misery or even death.
The notion of sanctuary has changed over time. In the Bible, the term is ir miklat, or the city of refuge. In those days, only someone guilty of involuntary homicide could take refuge there.
The tradition I claim for myself places the sanctuary not in space but inside man. Every human being is a sanctuary, for God resides there. And nobody has the right to violate it.
In certain countries, refugees are called “illegals.” That word is offensive. A human being is never illegal. His deeds can be, but not his essence.
Another preoccupation: terrorism. We must put an end to it to save democracy. During the French Revolution, the regime of terror lasted less than a year, and those who were responsible for it ultimately became its victims. Are we to infer that only terror can do away with terror?
Terrorism has but one goal: to reduce the adversary to a state of slavery. Terrorism targets the anonymous citizen as much as the political rival. Terrorism does not attempt to convince but to dominate, subjugate, crush.
In a terrorist regime, man is no longer the unique creation with infinite possibilities, but a cipher or puppet. But then how is one to explain the attraction that terrorism exerts on certain minds? Is there a romantic element in the terrorist adventure? What comes to mind are the revolutionary Russians of the early twentieth century, the anarchists, the nihilists.
In Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, the terrorists refrain from attacking the governor when they see that his children are with him. Today, Hamas does not hesitate to attack defenseless children. The hijackings, the massacre of schoolchildren in Maalot, the assaults on buses in Jerusalem…. And elsewhere—in India, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Northern Ireland—the goal is always the same.
In the Middle East, the terrorists’ aim is to sabotage peace. One day an international tribunal will condemn them not only for having assassinated innocent people, but for having committed “crimes against peace,” to use the words of the Nuremberg tribunal.
One cannot speak of suffering or terror, of evil and disaster, without evoking the destructive demons unleashed in Hiroshima. Auschwitz and Hiroshima: One evokes the end of mankind, the other the apocalypse of our planet. Both symbolize the curse that, more than fifty years later, continues to weigh upon us. From now on, we will live with the frightful knowledge that the impossible has become possible. Evil has been unleashed, and nothing seems able to contain it. Shimon Peres spoke without hesitation of “the two holocausts” of the twentieth century: Auschwitz and Hiroshima. He shouldn’t have. Hiroshima was a cruel, inhuman decision, but it was part of a response to Japanese aggression and a global military strategy. It was intrinsically linked to the war in the Pacific. Auschwitz was conceived as an operation that carried its own justification: genocide. True, the death camps had been built during the war, but they functioned independently of the war. One can even say with certainty that, from a strictly military point of view, Auschwitz impeded the Nazi war effort. Thousands of soldiers employed in the concentration camps could have been more useful on the battlefields. The trains that transported Jews from all corners of occupied Europe were needed by the Wehrmacht for their troops. But the Final Solution was, for Hitler, an absolute priority rooted in his deadly and perverse philosophy rather than in his military strategy.
Auschwitz implies the past, whereas Hiroshima announces the future. And it was Auschwitz that made Hiroshima possible. Hitler’s Germany had decided to exterminate an entire people, and the world did not object. Both end and beginning, Auschwitz marks a turning point in history. As does Hiroshima. The bomb that annihilated Hiroshima has become a kind of divinity; it is written with a capital letter: the Bomb. Its shadow falls over the entire planet, leaving no place to hide.
In 1987 Marion and I go to Hiroshima. At a meeting with high Japanese officials I feel compelled to say: “I shall never forget Hiroshima, but you in turn must never forget Pearl Harbor.” Our hosts are clearly unsettled by this remark.
We meet hibakusha, survivors of history’s first nuclear bombardment: men and women with ravaged memories, wounded souls. I ask an old man: “Where were you when …” “Not far away,” he says. Just far enough. “And you, Madam, where were you when …” She was home with her children, who were torn from her by a storm of ashes. I empathize with the survivors’ sadness. And their determination. All are committed to the struggle against atomic weapons. Like them, I feel the weight of the threat. There are too many rockets, missiles, and bombs stockpiled in too many arsenals. How is one to protect oneself against a military Chernobyl? How is one to prevent small nations from collecting weapons that the major powers should be destroying?
We leave this haunted city with the image of a shadow on a stone step. At the moment of the explosion, a woman was entering a bank. Only her shadow remains, imprinted on the stone. If by some accident we miscalculate, the same fate may be in store for us. And we may not even leave a shadow.
In December 1995, in cooperation with the prominent Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun, the foundation that bears my name organized an international colloquium in Hiroshima. Some fifty men and women, politicians and thinkers, gathered for three days of intense debate on the theme “The Future of Hope.”
The question remains open.
On March 5, 1985, I am invited to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is debating the ratification of the Genocide Treaty. Filled with apprehension, I think of the past and its shadows. Had there been such committees to inquire into the tragedy of European Jewry?
When I find out that Jesse Helms is chairing the session, my instinct is to turn around and head back to New York, for this southern senator and I clearly have few ideas in common. As I wait for my turn, I notice that he hardly listens during the early testimonies. And when he introduces me to the committee I realize that he has no idea who I am. He reads a text evidently prepared by his aides: Everything in it sounds false, even my name. To my surprise, when I begin to speak, he actually seems to listen.
I plead for ratification, which means placing genocide outside the law. We owe it to our children. It is up to us to protect them from the dread that inhabits our nightmares. Yes, I know this treaty will not bring back our dead, I say; for them it is too late.
But at least by signing we would be remembering. Not to remember would mean to betray them. And if we forget them, we too shall be forgotten.
Senator Helms remains silent for a long moment. He then thanks me in such flattering terms that the entire committee takes notice. Is it the first time he has heard a Jew expressing himself as a Jew? Or is it just a display of southern courtesy? After my testimony, Helms and other members of the committee including Christopher Dodd and Rudy Boschwitz put me through a friendly but intense interrogation. Helms: “Aren’t you afraid that, one day, the State of Israel will be accused of genocide of the Palestinians?” “I accept the challenge,” I tell him, “I have faith in Israel.” Amazingly, at the conclusion of my testimony, Helms interrupts the session to escort me to the door.
Buenos Aires, December 1996. A small gathering in a central square of the capital, opposite the courts. Dozens of men and women meet here every week, holding candles and photographs. They come together to demand justice, or simply to weep. These are the relatives of the Jewish victims of recent terrorist attacks. Expressing their sadness and anger, they come here week after week. They ask: “How is it possible that the assassins remain at large?” The prosecutor in charge of the cases claims to know their identity but to lack proof. President Carlos Menem speaks of logistical problems. He tries to explain, but is not convincing.
Does the writer need to go to the end of the world to testify when he does so in his writings? This is a question that preoccupies me as I struggle to find more time for my literary work. What am I to do, become a recluse? Sleep less? Limit the traveling? Learn to say no? Marion’s reaction to my good intentions? She laughs.
On Learning and Teaching
TO QUOTE A TALMUDIC sage (Rabbi Hanina, according to the Tractate of Taanit, or Rabbi Yehuda Ha-Nasi, according to the Tractate of Malkot): “I have learned a great deal from my masters, but I have learned much more from my colleagues, and above all I have learned from my pupils.”