(In my new novel, We Are Like Fire, the lead character, Ren Prothero, and his wife Vera are leading busy lives in Denver when Vera’s brother John introduces them to Elie Wiesel in New York City on February 13, 1958.):
The next morning before lunch, with a look as sensible as her day dress, Vera is peppering her brother with questions. “Remind me why you’re having us put ourselves through this?”
John grins at both of us. “Learning more about Hitler’s atrocities will be bracing for your souls.”
“And more disturbing and depressing than I can handle?”
“Nothing gets you depressed, Vera. And an Auschwitz survivor might inspire you.”
“So he’s a foreign correspondent,” I say.
John nods. “An international journalist. Same age as me, 28, several years younger than you, but he’s already covering world leaders from a desk at the United Nations and even at the White House. Now remember, he was slammed into by a taxicab last year. The left side of his body was shattered.”
Up walks John’s friend Elie Wiesel, leaning on a cane with each step. I’m immediately struck by Elie’s eyes – tormented and conveying a wisdom far beyond his years.
After we eat, John jumps right in.
“Ren and Vera put on plays at their theater in Denver, Elie. And Ren is an Abraham Maslow guy – a Third Force psychologist.”
Elie nods. “Tell me more, Ren, tell me more about Maslow.”
“Well, Elie, Maslow is an explorer, a pioneer. He’s done innovative work, far-reaching work. He’s studied the very best that human beings can be. Not averages. Not our shortcomings. Our strengths. Our achievements, our success, our potential. He’s made breakthroughs. And he’s come up with a comprehensive new theory of human motivation.”
Elie’s eyes widen a little. “Sounds good to me.”
I nod and smile back. “Maslow’s focus is on our innate tendency toward growth. He’s interested in well-lived lives. He has an imagination for people at our best. He’s about us constantly using our talents and capabilities and challenging ourselves as we reach our potential.”
Elie touches his face, leans forward. “Keep going.”
“Just one other thing. Maslow’s vision is a vision of the human being in a state of wholeness, fulfillment, integrity, and optimal psychological health.”
All four of us nod together and beam out a smile.
A few moments later I find myself redirecting the conversation.
“What should we call the Nazi atrocities against the Jewish people?”
“The extermination of six million Jews? Some people call it the Shoah. Shoah is Hebrew for ‘catastrophe’. But the word ‘Holocaust’ is emerging. It means ‘burnt offering’, which doesn’t seem appropriate. It also doesn’t quite capture the tragic depths of it. But it seems to be catching on as the word of choice.”
“The Holocaust,” I say. “All right, Elie.”
Vera smiles at him. “I read the French version of your memoir, At Night, from the concentration camps.” Elie has turned his attention to her. “And as I read it, I verbally translated it into English for Ren.” Wiesel glances at me as we both nod. “But my French is not nearly as good as my German, so I’m not sure I conveyed your story as well as I’d hoped.”
“We’re talking about doing an English translation,” Wiesel tells us. “We’ll probably entitle it Night.”
“Perfect,” says John.
“What moved you to write about your experience, Elie?” I ask.
He raises his eyebrows and tilts his head to one side. “Who’s to say for sure, Ren? Did I write it so as not to go mad or to understand the nature of madness?”
“Show them the number?” John suggests.
Elie rolls up the sleeve of his left forearm. A tattoo. A-7713.
“I was 15 when they needled this on me in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Where my mother and sister were sent to the gas chamber.”
Vera bites her lip. I nod solemnly as he covers his arm again.
“A single order and we were separated. I stared intently, trying desperately to not lose sight of my mother, my little sister with her hair of gold and sun, my grandmother, my older sisters. They were taken away before I could tell my mother goodbye, before I could squeeze my little sister to my heart.”
I can’t think of any meaningful response. I ask another question. “Did you write it to honor the dead?”
“To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time. I owe something to the dead.”
“And now you speak for the dead,” Vera ventures.
He shakes his head. “No one may speak for the dead. No one may interpret their mutilated dreams.”
Vera and I fall silent, and John again smooths the way. “Tell them a little more, Elie, about the conditions you endured.”
“I was in a group that was transported to the labor camp at Buna,” he recalls. “On most days, the workers in my group counted things like bolts and small electrical parts. Fairly easy work. From time to time, the work was harder, like loading diesel motors onto freight cars. Each day, we were given one bowl of soup and one crust of stale bread.”
Vera frowns and shakes her head. “I read how you hummed or sang to help you endure.”
“Yes. While working, we sometimes hummed melodies about the sanctified majesty of Jerusalem. On our cots at night, we sometimes sang Hasidic melodies.”
I look him right in the eye. “What can we learn from your experience?”
“That the opposite of love is not hate. It’s indifference. Indifference is a sign of sickness of the soul. Our obligation is to overcome the indifferent life.”
“You read the story of the teenage boy caught stealing food or something?” John asks us.
“Yes,” Vera says, “but tell it to us now, please, Elie.”
“All right,” he says. “One day this youth from Warsaw was brought in front of us, manacled. The hangman put the rope around his neck and was about to signal his aides to pull the chair out from under the boy’s feet. But the youth startled them when he shouted, ‘My curse on Germany! Long live liberty!’
“Within moments, the chair was pulled away, his eyelids were drooping, his mouth was gaping, and his tongue was hanging out.”
I squeeze the table. “We can’t let this happen again.”
He nods at me. “Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.”
John’s expression turns even more sensitive. “I know that what most troubles you still is your experience when your father got sick. Are you comfortable talking about it?”
Elie trembles. “’My son’, my father says to me, ‘water! I’m burning up!’ An S.S. guard barks at him. ‘Silence over there!’
“Father is too delirious to be aware of the guard. ’Eliezer, water.’
“The guard moves closer, shouts at him to be silent. Father is still unaware of him. ‘Eliezer. Eliezer.’ The guard wields his club and deals Father a violent blow to his head. But I don’t move. I’m afraid – afraid the next blow will be to my head.
“Father groans. ‘Eliezer.’ He’s breathing in gasps. I don’t move. My father is calling out to me and I do not answer.
“After a while, the guard leaves. I get down from my bunk. Father’s lips move but I can’t hear what he’s murmuring. I linger over him for an hour, looking at his face – his bloody, broken, ravaged face. The last moment I’m with him he opens his eyes wide and, in a moment of lucidity and dread, there ekes out of his mouth a little cry. Then I climb up to my bunk and fall asleep.
“When I wake up at dawn, another man is in Father’s bunk.”
Vera shudders and bites her lip again. A tear runs down her cheek.
“Your father had been taken to the gas chamber,” John says.
He nods his head slowly. I open and close my mouth. He looks at me. “Why do I write about it, Ren? I don’t want my past to become anyone else’s future.”
I tighten one fist.
“And silence encourages the tormenter. There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice. But there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”
I tighten both fists.
“Elie,” says Vera, “I’m not sure I translated the story of the boy violin player accurately. Would you share it with us now?”
He nods. “We’d been subjected to a long march in the winter, to Gleiwitz. It’s the end of the march, which left many dead along the way, and we survivors all collapse in a barrack, and we pile on top of each other. More and more men around me begin to die, and many of us are still alive.
“Next to me is a boy from Warsaw named Juliek. He had played the violin for the orchestra at the concentration camp.
“’Juliek, is that you?’
“’Eliezer. My violin. I’m afraid they’ll break my violin.’
“My attention drifts elsewhere. A few minutes later I hear the sound of the violin.
“In this dark barrack, with the dead and dying piled up around us, Juliek is playing a concerto by Beethoven. Enveloped in the darkness, all I hear is his violin-playing, and it’s the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.
“I can barely see his pale and melancholy face. But out of the darkness my young Polish friend plays his concerto, bidding farewell to this audience of dying men.
“It is as if Juliek’s soul has become his violin. As if he is playing with his life. As if his whole being is gliding across the strings. I am listening to the boy’s charred past, his unfulfilled hopes, his extinguished future.
“He plays on. He is still playing when I fall asleep. Who knows how much longer he played?
“At daybreak I wake up. There is Juliek, facing me, hunched over, a corpse. And next to him lays his trampled violin.”
Vera tears up, John quivers and slumps, I clench and unclench my fists again. The poignancy of the story hovers with us awhile.
Vera speaks first. “I’m so glad you emerged from it alive, Elie.”
“On April 11, 1945, the S.S. fled our camp at Buchenwald,” he remembers. “Hours later, there at the front gate, an American tank.”
I should be happy about this but I shake my head. “We Americans think our responsibility ended there. Or ended when our occupation of West Germany ended three years ago.”
He shakes his head vigorously. “Feel deeper. Think higher.”
I grip the table. “No one can stay neutral.”
“Neutrality helps the oppressor,” he tells me.
“Is there something I can do?”
“I think so, Ren. It’s all about memory. Without memory, there is no culture, no society, no civilization, no future.”
I nod. “It’s overwhelming.”
He looks me in the eye and speaks in his firmest voice. “One person of integrity can make a difference.”
I sag into my chair. “Not sure how.”
Elie sets down his coffee mug and stands up to leave. “There are victories of the soul and spirit,” he intones. “Sometimes, Ren, even if you lose, you win.”