by Elie Wiesel
There is so much to be done, there is so much that can be done. One person—a Raoul Wallenberg, an Albert Schweitzer, a Martin Luther King, Jr.—one person of integrity can make a difference, a difference of life and death.
As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.
This is what I say to the young Jewish boy wondering what I have done with his years. It is in his name that I speak to you and that I express to you my deepest gratitude. No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the Kingdom of Night. We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.
Thank you, Chairman Aarvik. Thank you, members of the Nobel Committee. Thank you, people of Norway, for declaring on this singular occasion that our survival has meaning for mankind.
*Delivered on December 10, 1986, in Oslo, Norway, upon acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Peace.
The Nobel Lecture*
ANI MAAMIN, I believe … I believe in the coming of the Messiah … I believe in the hope for a future, just as I believe in the irresistible power of memory.
A Hasidic legend tells us that the great Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, Master of the Good Name, also known as the Besht, undertook an urgent and perilous mission. He wanted to hasten the coming of the Messiah. The Jewish people, all humanity, were suffering too much, beset by too many evils. They had to be saved, and swiftly. For having tried to meddle with history, the Besht was punished. He was banished along with his faithful servant to a distant island. In despair the servant implored his master to exercise his mysterious powers in order to bring them both home. “Impossible,” the Besht replied. “My powers, my mystical powers, have been taken from me.”
“Then, please, say a prayer, recite a litany, work a miracle.”
“Impossible,” the Master replied. “I have forgotten everything.” And so they fell to weeping.
Suddenly the Master turned to his servant and asked, “My friend, remind me of a prayer, any prayer.”
“If only I could,” said the servant. “I too have forgotten everything.”
“Everything, absolutely everything?”
“Everything,” said the servant, “except …”
“Except what?”
“Except the alphabet!”
At that the Besht cried out joyfully, “Then what are you waiting for? Begin reciting the alphabet, and I shall repeat after you.” And together the two exiled men began to recite, at first in whispers, then more loudly, the Hebrew equivalent to the ABCs: “Aleph bet gimmel,” and over again, “Aleph bet gimmel,” and each time more vigorously, more fervently, until the Besht ultimately regained his memory and thus his powers.
I love this story, for I love stories; but I especially love this one for it illustrates the messianic exhortation and expectation which remains my own. It also illustrates the importance of friendship to man’s ability to transcend his condition. I love it most of all because it emphasizes the mystical power of memory. Without memory, our existence would be barren and opaque, like a prison cell into which no light penetrates, like a tomb which rejects the living. Memory served and saved the Besht, and if anything can, it is memory that will save humanity. For me, hope without memory is like memory without hope.
Just as man cannot live without dreams, man cannot live without expectations. If dreams reflect the past, hope summons the future. Does this mean that our future can be built on a rejection of the past? Surely such a choice is not necessary. The two are not incompatible. The opposite of the past is not the future but the absence of future; the opposite of the future is not the past but the absence of past. The loss of one is equivalent to the sacrifice of the other.
A recollection. The time: after the war. The place: Paris. A young man, a young Jew, struggles to readjust to life. His mother, his father, his small sister are gone. He is alone—on the verge of despair. And yet he does not give up. On the contrary, this young Jew strives to find a place among the living. He acquires a new language. He makes a few friends who, like himself, believe that the memory of evil will serve as a shield against evil, that the memory of death will serve as a shield against death. This he must believe. It is a kind of existential belief—like Kierkegaard, he must believe in it in order to go on. For he has just returned from a universe where God, betrayed by His creatures, covered His face in order not to see. Mankind, jewel of His creation, had succeeded in building an inverted Tower of Babel, reaching not toward heaven but toward an anti-heaven, and there to create a parallel society, a new “creation” with its own princes and gods, laws and principles, jailers and prisoners. A world where the past no longer counted—no longer meant anything.
Stripped of possessions, all human ties severed, the prisoners found themselves in a social and cultural void. “Forget,” they were told. “Forget where you came from; forget who you were. Only the present matters.” But the present was only a blink of God’s eye. The slaughterer himself was godlike, almighty; it was he who decided who would live and who would die, who would be tortured and who would be rewarded. Night after night, seemingly endless processions vanished into the flames, lighting up the sky. Fear dominated the universe. Indeed, this was another universe; the very laws of nature had been transformed. Children looked like old men, old men whimpered like children. Men and women from every corner of Europe were suddenly reduced to nameless and faceless creatures, desperate for the same ration of bread or soup, dreading the same end. Even their silence was the same, for it resounded with the memory of those who were gone. Life in this accursed universe was so distorted, so unnatural that a new species evolved. Waking among the dead, one wondered if one were still alive.
And yet some of us remember that real despair did not seize us until later, until after the war. Psychiatrists refer to this as “latency.” We need a certain period between the event and the response to the event, because the immediate response would be overwhelming, tragic; and inevitably the person going through the experience would be crushed by it. We needed time to rethink and reevaluate our acquired certainties.
As we emerged from the nightmare and began to search for meaning, all those lovers of art and poetry, of Bach and Goethe, who coldly and deliberately ordered the massacres and participated in them, what did their metamorphosis signify? Could anything explain their loss of ethical, cultural, and religious memory? How could we ever understand the passivity of the onlookers and, yes, the silence of the Allies?
To this day, I don’t understand how the enemy drove ten thousand Jews to Babi Yar day after day between Rosh Hashanah (the New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). Babi Yar is not outside Kiev, Babi Yar is in Kiev—and they were all machine-gunned. They went through the streets, people saw them marching, heard the machine guns. What happened to the people? Did they become deaf, blind, mute? I cannot understand their indifference. Nor can I understand, and I say so with pain in my heart, the silence of people who were good people. Roosevelt was a good man and Churchill was a great man. They had the courage then to fight the mighty Hitler and his powerful armies. But when it came to saving Jews, somehow the principles of humanity no longer applied. What happened? What made Roosevelt a different person? I do not understand it. And to me, a Jew who comes from a deeply religious background, there was the question of questions: Where was God in all this? It seemed as impossible to conceive of Auschwitz with God as to conceive of Auschwitz without God. The tragedy of the believer is much greater than the tragedy of the nonbeliever. But after the war, whether one was a believer or not, everything had to be reassessed because everything had chan
ged. With one stroke, mankind’s achievements seemed to have been erased.
Was Auschwitz a consequence of “civilization” or was it an aberration? All we know is that Auschwitz called that civilization into question as it called into question everything that had preceded Auschwitz. Scientific abstraction, social and economic contention, nationalism, xenophobia, religious fanaticism, racism, mass hysteria, and, of course, anti-Semitism, both religious and social—all found their ultimate expression in Auschwitz.
The next question my generation had to face was: Why go on? If memory continually brought us back to the altar of death, why build a home? Why go to school? Why reach out to others? Why make friends? Why trust? Why have faith in anyone or in yourself? How can I be sure that tomorrow the sun will shine when night seems eternal? And why bring children into a world in which God and man betrayed their trust in each other?
And yet, it is surely human to forget, even to want to forget. The ancients saw it as a divine gift. Indeed, if memory helps us to survive, forgetting helps us to go on living. How can we go on with our daily lives if we remain constantly aware of the dangers and ghosts surrounding us? The Talmud even tells us that without the ability to forget, man would soon cease to learn. Without the ability to forget, man would live in a permanent, paralyzing fear of death. Only God and God alone can and must remember everything all the time.
How are we to reconcile our supreme duty toward memory with the need to forget that is essential to life? No generation has had to confront this paradox with such urgency. The survivors wanted to communicate everything to the living: the victims’ solitude and sorrow, their tears, their despair, their madness, the prayers of the doomed beneath a fiery sky. They needed to tell of the beggar who, in a sealed cattle car, began to sing as an offering to his companions, and of the little girl who, hugging her grandmother, whispered, “Grandmother, don’t be afraid, don’t be sorry to die—I’m not. It’s not worth going on living.”
Each one of us felt compelled to recall every story, every encounter. Each one of us felt compelled to bear witness. Such were the wishes of the dying, the testament of the dead. Since the so-called civilized world had no use for their lives, then let it be inhabited by their deaths.
The great Jewish historian Shimon Dubov served as our guide and inspiration. Until the moment of his death he said over and over again in Yiddish to his companions in the Riga ghetto, “Yidden, shreibt un fershreibt!” (“Jews, write it all down!”) His words were heeded. Overnight, countless victims became chroniclers and historians in the ghettos, even in the death camps. Even members of the Sonderkommando, those inmates forced to burn their fellow inmates’ corpses before being burned in turn, left behind extraordinary documents. To testify became an obsession. They left us poems and letters, prayers, diaries, fragments of testimony, some known throughout the world, others that should be published but remain unpublished.
After the war we reassured ourselves that it would be enough to relate a single night in Auschwitz, to tell of the cruelty, the senselessness of murder, and the outrage born of apathy; it would be enough to find the right word and the propitious moment to say it, to shake humanity out of its indifference and keep the torturer from torturing ever again. We thought it would be enough to read the world a poem written by a child in the Theresienstadt ghetto to ensure that no child anywhere would ever again have to endure hunger or fear of solitude. It would be enough to describe a death camp “selection” to prevent the human right to dignity from being violated ever again.
We thought it would be enough to tell of the tidal wave of hatred which broke over the Jewish people for men everywhere to decide once and for all to put an end to hatred of anyone who is “different”—whether black or white, Jew or Arab, Christian or Moslem—anyone whose orientation differs politically, philosophically, sexually. A naive undertaking? Of course. But not without a certain logic.
We tried. It was not easy. At first, because of the language: language failed us. We would have to invent a new vocabulary, for our own words were inadequate, anemic.
And then, too, the people around us refused to listen; and even those who listened refused to believe; and even those who believed could not comprehend. Of course they could not. Nobody could. The experience of the camps defies comprehension. Can you understand, can anyone understand how a nation of such culture, of such power, could all of a sudden invent death camps, death factories, and mobilize its entire industry, its science, its philosophy, its passion, to kill Jewish people? For what? I cannot understand; even from their viewpoint it was madness. In 1944, when they were losing the war, they gave priority to trains leading Jews to their deaths over military trains bringing soldiers and weapons to the front. That doesn’t make sense. But it was going on to the very last day. Wouldn’t the story of their irrational criminal behavior prevent irrational crimes against humanity elsewhere?
So we tried. Perhaps if we were to tell the tale things would change. Have we failed? I often think we have. If someone had told us in 1945 that in our lifetime religious wars would rage on virtually every continent, that thousands of children would once again be dying of starvation, we would not have believed it. Or that racism and fanaticism would flourish once again. Nor would we have believed there would be governments that would deprive men and women of their basic rights merely because they dare to dissent. Governments of the Right and of the Left still subject those who dissent—writers, scientists, intellectuals—to torture and persecution. How is one to explain all this unless we consider the defeat of memory?
How is one to explain any of it? The outrage of apartheid which continues unabated? Racism in itself is dreadful, but when it pretends to be legal, and therefore just, it becomes even more repugnant. Without comparing apartheid to Nazism and to its Final Solution—for that defies all comparison—one cannot help but assign the two systems, in their supposed legality, to the same camp. What about the outrage of terrorism? Of the hostages in Iran, the cold-blooded massacre in the synagogues in Istanbul, Paris, and Vienna, the senseless deaths in the streets of Beirut?
Terrorism must be outlawed by all civilized nations—not explained or rationalized, but fought and eradicated. Nothing can, nothing will, justify the murder of innocent people and helpless children … and the outrage of preventing men and women, marvelous men and women like Andrei Sakharov, Vladimir and Masha Slepak, Ida Nudel, Josef Begun, Victor Brailowski, Zakhar Zonshein, Juli Edelstein, and all the others, known and unknown, from leaving their country.
Yesterday afternoon, when I left this hall with its overwhelming emotional aspect, my wife and I went to our hotel and began calling refuseniks in the Soviet Union. That is what we did all afternoon. We wanted them to know that, especially on this day, we were thinking not only of our joy but also of their plight. We went on calling them, one after the other. At one point they began calling back. The whole afternoon was a dialogue of human solidarity. If ever your prize had concrete, immediate meaning, distinguished Members of the Committee, it was yesterday afternoon: to those Jews in Russia it meant that here in this place we care, we think of them, and we shall never forget.
As a Jew, I must also speak about Israel. After two thousand years of exile and thirty-eight years of sovereignty, Israel still does not enjoy peace. I would like to see the people of Israel, my people, establish the foundation for a constructive relationship with all its Arab neighbors, as it has done with Egypt. We must see to it that the Jewish people in Israel and all people in the Middle East enjoy some measure of peace and hope … at last. We must exert pressure on all those in power to come to terms.
And here we come back to memory. We must remember the suffering of my people, as we must remember that of the Ethiopians, the Cambodians, the boat people, the Palestinians, the Miskito Indians, the Argentinian desaparecidos—the list seems endless.
Let us remember Job, who, having lost everything—his children, his friends, his possessions, and even his argument with God—still found the strength
to begin again, to rebuild his life. Job was determined not to repudiate the creation, however imperfect, that God had entrusted to him.
Job, our ancestor. Job, our contemporary. Everything in our tradition tells us that Job was not a Jew, but his suffering concerns us. It concerns us so much that we have taken his language into our liturgy. His ordeal concerns all humanity. Did he ever lose his faith? If so, he rediscovered it within his rebellion. He demonstrated that faith is essentially a rebellion, and that hope is possible beyond despair, but not without ignoring despair. The source of his hope was memory, as it must be ours. Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.
I remember the killers and I despair; I remember the victims, and on their behalf and for their sake and for their children’s sake, I must invent a thousand and one reasons to hope.
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. The Talmud tells us that by saving a single human being—and there are two versions: one version says a single Jewish human being and the other version says any human being—man can save the world. We may be powerless to open all the jails and free all the prisoners, but by declaring our solidarity with one prisoner, we indict all jailers. None of us is in a position to eliminate war, but it is our obligation to denounce it and expose it in all its hideousness. War leaves no victors, only victims.
I began with the story of the Besht. And like the Besht, mankind needs to remember—more than ever. Mankind needs peace more than ever, for our entire planet, threatened by nuclear war, is in danger of total elimination—a destruction, an annihilation only man can provoke, only man can prevent. It is all up to us. The lesson, the only lesson that I have learned from my experiences, is twofold: first, that there are no plausible answers to what we have endured. There are no theological answers, there are no psychological answers, there are no literary answers, there are no philosophical answers, there are no religious answers. The only conceivable answer is a moral answer. This means there must be a moral element in whatever we do. Second, that just as despair can be given to me only by another human being, hope too can be given to me only by another human being. Mankind must remember also, and above all, that like hope and whatever hope signifies, peace is not God’s gift to his creatures. Peace is a very special gift—it is our gift to each other. And so, Ani maamin—I believe—that we must have hope for one another also because of one another. And Ani maamin—I believe—that because of our children and their children we should be worthy of that hope, of that redemption, and of some measure of peace.