by Elie Wiesel
Some time earlier I had received a letter from the Austrian minister of culture and education offering to organize an “Elie Wiesel Day,” in the course of which my books would be discussed, after having been studied in all the schools. My response had been: “Thanks for the kind invitation; I accept. I shall come to Vienna the day after Kurt Waldheim leaves.” The infamous past of the former secretary-general of the U.N. is well known. Declared persona non grata in the United States, he has, for all practical purposes, been banned by the leaders of most civilized countries, the notable exceptions being certain Arab leaders, Helmut Kohl, and, sadly, Pope John Paul II, who all visited or received him.
But now Austria has elected a new president, and I feel free to come and meet the youth of Vienna.
The press is largely favorable to the demonstration. Austria clearly wants to close the regrettable parenthesis opened by Waldheim. But to do so it must reject the Fascist-leaning nationalism of Jorg Haider, who a year earlier had declared that there were some positive aspects to the Third Reich’s policies, notably with respect to employment. A demagogic politician, he seems to be a darling of the media. Evidently the Austrians, who have never confronted their Nazi past, easily identified with Haider’s xenophobic program. The polls are troubling; the number of anti-Semites in Austria is climbing. A well-known commentator publishes in the Kronenblatt, a tabloid with a large circulation, an article denying the gas chambers. I’m told that I’m the target of death threats. The demons are not all gone. For all these reasons Austrian democrats wish to strike a major blow “for Austria.” For them this demonstration presents the ideal occasion.
As for the place, it is symbolic: It was here, in this immense square, that half a million Austrians gathered in 1938, the day after the Anschluss, to salute Adolf Hitler as their beloved Führer. Indeed, I’m told proudly, I shall deliver my speech from the very balcony from which he had harangued the ecstatic crowd. It is a tempting prospect, I admit. It seduces me.
Though Marion was just a little girl at the time, she remembers hearing the speech over the radio, as she remembers the change in her neighbors. She lived through the very horror the youth of Vienna are demonstrating against today. Since Hitler, no one had been permitted to speak from that balcony. Strange, but I sense his evil shadow; I feel it enveloping this square, this city, this country. But these young people united in their quest for change merit our setting aside our anger. I have written a text. I decide not to read it. I choose to improvise.
… I am not sure history has a sense of justice, but tonight I am convinced it has a sense of humor! The speaker who preceded me on this balcony, soon after the Anschluss in 1938, decided on death for me, my parents, my family, and my people…. Who could have imagined that a Jewish writer would succeed him in this very place in order to speak out against hatred? But note this: The crowd that came to salute him in 1938 was much larger, and its jubilation far greater….
… Remember, young people of Vienna! In 1938, your ancestors, your parents and grandparents, following Adolf Hitler’s teaching, looked with indifference or complacency upon those Jews—one of whom was my wife’s father, a Viennese—who were arrested, humiliated, and often sent to their deaths. Today, as you close the era of lies and deceit symbolized by Kurt Waldheim, you are free to open a new chapter. Open it without erasing those that preceded it. Do not run toward the future by obliterating the memory of the past. Learn to live without betraying the truth. You must learn to confront, to assume responsibility for, that truth.
An incitement to rebellion? No. An appeal to my listeners to repudiate their parents’ and grandparents’ generation. Intervention in a country’s internal affairs? Never mind. Austria has lived equivocally and hypocritically too long. It must shake itself. I have confidence in its youth. They will do what must be done.
Chronicle of a Deposition
SPRING 1987. Why would I testify at the Klaus Barbie trial? I never even met Barbie. At the time he was terrorizing and torturing his victims in Lyon, I was a long way from France: first in Hungary, then in Auschwitz. And even though I am concerned with this trial, follow it passionately, and consider it of paramount symbolic importance, I prefer keeping up with it through the media—as an observer, not as a witness.
These are the arguments I offer to attorney Alain Jakubowicz, who on behalf of the Jewish community of Lyon has come to ask for my help. Though I had asked some friends for advice, among them Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Marc Kravetz, and several of them urged me to accept, I remain negative.
“You’re all crazy,” I tell them. “It would be enough for the defense lawyer to ask me some geographical or biographical questions, like, Where were you during the Occupation? Were you in Lyon? Were your parents living in France? for my testimony to become irrelevant. Let his victims depose. That should be enough; that will be enough.”
But the lawyers for the plaintiffs, and several historians, insist. To be sure, the deposition of the victims is essential, but … I still resist. So then they talk about context, milieu, testimonies in the public interest, until in the end I have to give in. There remains the problem of scheduling. Jakubowicz suggests that I be deposed on June 12, which, because of prior commitments, does not work for me. My preference is for June 3, that is, the eve of Shavuot. Jakubowicz persuades Chief Justice Cerdini to call me as the first witness to enable me to return to Paris before nightfall, before the beginning of the holiday.
So here I am, for the first time in my life, a witness in the trial of one of the killers of my people.
• • •
For weeks I have followed the debates from New York and Japan, which I am visiting, and I have been commenting long-distance on them daily for France-Inter Radio. I read as many newspapers and reviews as possible, familiarize myself with the entire cast of characters, noting Cerdini’s solemn demeanor, Barbie’s sarcastic smile, his lawyer’s hateful vehemence, the plaintiffs’ lawyers’ earnest determination, and above all the witnesses, the survivors: the mothers who try hard not to weep but do, the men who in a barely audible voice attempt to express the anguish of the underground fighter, and to describe the torture that Barbie and his henchmen inflicted on them. I admire the courage, the selflessness of the resistants: I love, I totally empathize with, the woman who as an adolescent girl saw her father shot before her eyes, as I admire the counselors, men and women, who risked their lives trying to save the Jewish children in their care. I said this before the trial, and I repeat it here: This trial will be remembered above all because of these witnesses; it permitted them, at last, to speak freely, to protect a past that many choose to reject and others deny. This trial is necessary for the world to be able to hear certain words said in a certain tone of voice.
After an initial surge of irritation, I am getting used to Barbie’s absence. He will not be able to silence his victims. Too bad that no one has thought of installing a camera in his cell so that he would have to face up to the images, so that he would see and be seen. Of course it wouldn’t be the same; I too would prefer to see him in a glass booth facing his victims. Never mind. Just as in the past he failed to make his prisoners talk, so he will not manage to render them mute. Though he may refuse to listen, the world will hear them.
“What is expected of me at the trial?” I ask.
Bernard-Henri Lévy has been following the sessions since the very first day, has experienced all their vagaries. He answers that what is expected of me is a text or a message to remember. “Remembrance and justice?” He responds instantly: “Yes, that is it, that’s it without a doubt.”
I set to work. Conscious of the significance of the moment, I propose to say in a concise text what, throughout my life, I have tried to convey in my writings: my apprehensions about language, my doubts with regard to the efficacy of education and culture, the anguish involved in confronting the extraordinarily heavy duties that memory imposes on the survivor.
Meanwhile I’m traveling more than ever. There seem to be more and mor
e conferences. Michel Barthélémy of France-Inter calls me in Los Angeles and Hiroshima. He is asking for a sort of meditation on this uncertain era, in which the past keeps coming back to haunt the present. And where the silence of the dead rejoins the murmur of the survivors.
I leave Tokyo and return to Paris via Oslo. A telephone conversation with Jakubowicz. I am astounded to learn that all my work has been for naught: The law prohibits a witness from reading his deposition. But the lawyer is authorized to read it. I give it to Marc Kravetz, who publishes it in Libération.
Lyon, June 2. I visit Cardinal Decourtray: fraternal as always. I visit Chief Rabbi Klinger, who is warm and helpful. There is a meeting with Jakubowicz, and one with Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, the tireless Nazi hunters. I visit the memorial. There are photos of children and old men, emaciated bodies, eyes open to the horror.
The courtroom is packed, as it is every day. There are well-known faces and unfamiliar ones. An obscure anxiety comes over me, as it does every time I’m forced to speak of those times. What am I going to say? How can I say it? A prayer goes round and round in my head, the prayer of the hazzan, the cantor, who, prior to the Musaf service during the High Holidays, declares his apprehension before the task ahead: “See to it, Lord, that my tongue does not falter.”
The witnesses are called. We withdraw to an adjacent room. Chief Justice Cerdini publicly notes the defendant’s absence. He dispatches court officers to his cell to invite him to attend the hearing. Twenty minutes go by. The officers return with their usual report: the defendant refuses.
As I stand before the court, I am gripped by an emotion that takes me by surprise. I put on my kipa to take the oath. I shall articulate those things that, until now, have remained buried within me. I speak of my grandmother; how I admired her silent, radiating sweetness and good nature. She could go for days and nights without opening her mouth. And what if I spoke of her mute litanies before this court? Or of the merry laughter of my little sister whose image never leaves me? And what if I revealed, just once, what I feel every time I recall my mother, every time I see her again, as she moves toward the nocturnal crossroads lit up by gigantic, somber, so somber flames?
That is the dilemma for the witness: What face should be illuminated, what name should be mentioned, what destiny should be included as one shares one’s memories? Should I speak of the rabbi who let himself be buried alive rather than violate the Shabbat? Or of the ghetto children who at the risk of their lives slipped back and forth through the holes in the walls to bring bread and potatoes to their starving families? Should I recall the youngsters who, against all odds, defended the burning Warsaw Ghetto to save Jewish honor? Or the Greek Jews who chose to die rather than accept assignment to the Birkenau Sonderkommando? Or the countless victims who moved, trancelike, to their mass graves in Babi-Yar and Ponar? They seemed to have little regret leaving a world corrupted by hatred and cowardice.
I shall not repeat here what I said in ten minutes during my deposition. All I remember is trying to stress the incommunicable aspect of our experience, and rejecting the despicable questions of the defense attorney, who did his best to dishonor the United States, France, and Israel by comparing them all to Nazi Germany. I also remember that I refused to look at him—the Talmud forbids looking at the face of an ungodly person—addressing my answers to the chief justice instead. I recall the reactions in the courtroom and how warmly the survivors, Barbie’s victims, looked at me. And then, perhaps most important, there were all these young people who seemed to want to catch every word, every sigh, every murmur in the courtroom. Sunshine flooded the city that afternoon, and I remember the packed, noisy railway station; I recall everything except what I may have said to the court. But I remember my tone, that of the thirteen-year-old who, in his remote little town during his bar mitzvah, trembled with fear as he recited the customary prophetic words, the Haftorah.
You see, that is how it is, and I can do nothing about it; everything carries me back to my childhood, and to the children of yesterday, and to all the Jewish children of Europe whose existence, in the eyes of Barbie and his accomplices, seemed incompatible with theirs.
The Gulf War
AUGUST 1990. Iraq invades Kuwait. The mad Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is capable of anything. President Bush and his European and Soviet allies are anxiously monitoring the situation.
The first American soldiers land in the Saudi desert. The U.N. Security Council adopts resolutions demanding the Iraqi army’s immediate evacuation of Kuwait. Saddam couldn’t care less. For the killer of Baghdad, the chapter is closed.
According to Henry Kissinger, there will be no military intervention; Bush will not make a move. Kissinger knows Washington better than anyone else. Amr Moussa, the Egyptian ambassador to the U.N., disagrees: The war will take place, it must. Saddam must be defeated, not only to help Kuwait, but to protect the entire Arab region. If Saddam succeeds, he will emerge as a latter-day Salah el Din, the uncontested leader of Islam.
As yet Saddam has done nothing against the Jewish state, but everybody knows he is capable of the worst. He counts on the world’s indifference. If he could gas thousands of Kurds with impunity in 1988, what will prevent him from doing the same to the Israelis?
Fully expecting war, Sigmund Strochlitz and I board an El Al flight to Tel Aviv. It is the evening of January 12, 1991. As we enter the terminal at Ben-Gurion Airport we see droves of people preparing to leave the country. Is it the fear of gas? Israelis are used to danger. In 1956, 1967, and 1973, they rushed back from wherever they were—Europe, the United States, Asia—to rejoin their combat units.
I see Prime Minister Shamir and tell him how traumatic the threat of Scuds is for people haunted by the word “gas.” “Have faith,” he responds. “Our army can deal with it.” The next day I meet with his defense minister, Moshe Arens, who tells me the same thing, though he adds with a straight face: “Of course if a Scud happens to fall on your head, it won’t be pleasant.”
Arens arranges for me to visit the military zone. A liaison officer drives us “somewhere.” We are received by an air force colonel who takes us on a tour of his base. I chat with his colleagues and subordinates. If Israel decides to respond, these are the men—officers, pilots, and technicians—who will be doing the job. They exude confidence. In their presence even I feel invincible.
I board a parked F-16. I am afraid to move. What would happen if, by accident, I were to push the wrong button? “Better you don’t know,” says one of the officers. Later, in his Jeep, the colonel details some of his responsibilities. “What if there were an alert right now?” I ask. “How long would it take you to reach your command and give the appropriate orders?” He calmly glances at his watch: “Ninety seconds,” he says.
We lunch with his staff. Suddenly I hear a loud exchange outside the mess hall. Someone wants to enter, and the M.P. on guard refuses to let him in. This hall is reserved for high-ranking officers. “But,” says a voice, “I don’t want to eat. I’ve come to see my uncle.” It’s my beloved sister Bea’s son, Steve, a doctor in the legendary Golani Division. I had called him as soon as I landed, but he explained he couldn’t meet me; he was on duty.
We embrace. This kind of miraculous encounter can happen only in Israel. “I saw the television crew,” says Steve. “They told me it was for ‘some writer.’ I thought it might be you.” I would have been disappointed if I had had to leave Israel without seeing him.
It has been said of every war, but for Israel the Gulf War is in fact different from the others. Imposed by a cruel and cynical enemy, it seems to take place unilaterally. Israel appears not to be participating, at least not actively or directly. Because the Americans and their allies attack Baghdad, Iraq is now bombing Israel. It is an aggression that is insane, criminal, absurd, but, coming from Saddam Hussein, it surprises no one. We witness a new and incomprehensible phenomenon: The missiles are falling and the Israeli armed forces are not responding. Is it a policy of restraint rather than
strength? Let us say, a policy of strength that expresses itself with restraint. For the first time in its history Israel leaves its defense to others. And the people do not protest. The ideological conflicts of yesterday are forgotten; this is not the time to engage in fighting among brothers. With this policy of restraint Israel earns the respect of many nations. Strange: In 1967 Israel was admired because it fought; now people praise it for not fighting. But how long will this current of sympathy last?
I marvel at the friendly and generous behavior of the civilian population during alerts. People are courteous, warm. Nobody is pushing, nobody is losing his temper. There are no tears, no hysteria. One hides one’s fears as best one can. One tells funny stories, evokes memories. Radio programs of patriotic and sentimental songs from the time of the Second Aliyah are interrupted by the coded warning “snake viper,” to announce an alert. Israelis seem grateful to visitors who choose to be with them. A taxi driver refuses to be paid. At the restaurant we are offered free drinks.
At night one is afraid to fall asleep, afraid to be awakened by the sirens, and afraid of having to head for the sealed rooms; afraid to have to use the gas masks. I don’t even know how to use mine; never mind.
My cousin Eli Hollander invites me to his house for dinner. “We’ll wait for the Scuds together,” he says. A funny thought. An image returns: Our last Sukkoth together, in 1943, in the little town of Khust, in the Czech part of the Carpathians.
I accept my cousin’s invitation, but at the last moment I am forced to cancel. That evening I listen to the news. A missile attack has just been launched. Later, I call Marion to reassure her. Then I call Eli to make sure he is all right; no answer. Nor do I reach him the next day. A month later, I hear from him. He thanks God that I canceled our appointment: “Had you come, we would have stayed home. Since you didn’t, we spent the night at our children’s house. Our house was completely demolished by a Scud.”