With Elie Wiesel at 35

A second scene from my novel

(Near the end of my new novel We Are Like Fire, the lead character, Ren Prothero, has a second conversation with Elie Wiesel. This time Wiesel impacts 24-year-old Dylan Steffan, who will end up the lead character and narrator of the third novel.)

New York City

September 30, 1963

Elie Wiesel opens the front door to his small studio apartment in The Master Hotel on Riverside Drive at 103rd Street.  Dylan and I let out a shared cheer.  “Happy birthday, Elie!”  

He smiles and welcomes us in.  Elie waves us over to his couch – he and Dylan have met twice before – and Dylan takes a seat.

I walk to the window and look out at the Hudson River, Manhattan, and New Jersey.  The sun is setting, so cars snaking by on the West Side Highway are turning on their lights.  Lights are also beginning to come on across the skyline of Manhattan.  The view is breathtaking.

I’m vaguely aware of Elie speaking in his light and slightly accented but clear voice.  “Ren.”  When he says my name a second time he calls me from my entrancement.  I turn around.  “You’re not the first person to look out there and almost forget the purpose of your visit.”

I grin and take a seat next to Dylan as Elie slides into a chair.

“How are you feeling?” he asks me. 

“I’m well but my mother’s been ill,” I inform him.  “Please keep her in your thoughts and prayers.”

“Refuah, shlemah,” he responds.  “A complete healing.”

. . .

His hand drifts up to his cheek.  “When I first met children of Nazi officers, young Germans who carried a burden of horror and guilt, I considered it could be as painful to be the child of those who ran the camps as to be the child of those who died there.”

“How true,” I say.  “And you, Elie?  I hear you went to the trial of Adolf Eichmann a couple years back.”

“I went to see Eichmann and cover the trial.  I saw him once in my town when I was a youth.  He was with 50 Hungarian soldiers, and they deported 15,000 people from my town. 

“I went to the trial to see if he was human.  I watched him, day after day, but I saw nothing but a bureaucrat, an accountant.”

“Where does such hatred come from, Elie?” Dylan asks.

“Hatred is a kind of insanity, Dylan.  It is like a contagious cancer, spreading from one person or community to another.”

“So you don’t hate them back?” Dylan asks.

“Hatred serves no purpose,” Elie responds.  “I am not even a judge.  I am only a witness.”

“Is education the solution, Elie?” Dylan inquires.

“One of the darkest days of my life after the War was when I discovered that many of the killers – high-ranking Nazi officials and front-line murderers alike – had advanced university degrees.  Some were even scholars of Goethe and Immanuel Kant and of ethics.”

“So knowledge alone is not the answer,” Dylan says. 

Elie shakes his head.  “But surely, Elie, we cannot sit by and watch it happen again.”

“Just because we’re too busy with our lives?” Elie asks him, shaking his head again.  “We understand how hatred works.  It starts with words and symbols.  It ends with killing.  We have seen this over and over.  We know it.”

“I think that the arts still have a role,” Dylan says.  “If more and more people encounter each work of literature and culture as a moral and ethical agent – as a reader, a listener, a viewer with a conscience.”

Elie nods a third time.  “Before we decide whether or not to listen or watch or read something, we should know what the music or the play or the novel or the art is intended to convey.  Is it in service to humanity or its opposite?”

“Christians and Jews should be awakened enough by the Holocaust to always get along,” Dylan says.

“When I was a child we stayed home on Easter Sunday,” Elie recalls.  “That was the day of the year when Christian children were the most violent toward Jews.”

Dylan raises his fist.  “Christian hostility toward Jews makes no sense!”

Elie nods.  “Judaism never insists that the world become Jewish.  It insists only that the world become good, each person along his own path.”

“If Jesus lived in our time,” Dylan asks, “what would he say?”

Elie reflects a moment before he answers.  “If Jesus had lived in our time, Dylan, he would have died in a concentration camp.”

“Seems the arts have a role”, Dylan repeats.

Another thoughtful pause by Elie.  “At the train depot at Auschwitz, the Nazis piped music through the loudspeakers as their victims passed by to be selected for work or the gas chamber.  Classical music, to help keep us calm.”

“Good grief!” Dylan exclaims.

“However, in Buchenwald, children wrote poetry.  In Theresienstadt, youth became painters.  In Lodz, there was a theater.  In the ghettos, Jews conducted high school classes and even celebrated weddings.  Jews went on studying and singing.  Their art was resistance.”          

Dylan nods.  “But I’m so young.” 

“The Warsaw ghetto uprising was led by twenty-year-olds,” Elie tells him, “and it took the Nazis longer to occupy that ghetto than it did for them to occupy France.”

“So the arts are not enough,” Dylan says. 

“Sometimes direct engagement is called for.”

Dylan looks stunned.  “Direct engagement?” 

“Being on the front lines of social progress.”

Dylan coughs.  “Well, Elie, I’ll work to change people in the privacy of my therapy office.”

Elie shrugs.  “In Auschwitz, a woman named Roza Robota smuggled grains of dynamite under her fingernails for weeks until she’d collected enough to bomb the crematoria.”  Dylan raises his eyebrows.  “As she was hanged, she shouted out the biblical verse, ‘Be strong and of good courage!’”

“I do want to engage directly against evil,” says Dylan.  “In the privacy of my therapy office.”

“Be watchful for it, Dylan.  When you are facing it, don’t let it grow.  Confront it right away.  Fight it right away.  Had Hitler been fought immediately, there would have been no Holocaust.” 

Dylan’s squirming in his seat.  “Surely one-on-one engagement is valuable.”

Elie nods.  “We should never allow another individual to be humiliated in our presence.”

“A good start,” I say.

“How do we deal with an evil person?” Dylan asks.

“Acknowledge his humanity,” Elie replies.  “And believe what he says he will do.  The perpetrator has chosen to betray his humanity.  So let’s oppose him.  Stop him where we can, protest him where we cannot.”

“Back to taking action,” says Dylan.

“Persons who deliberately cause harm often hope for our silence.  If we avoid action, we play into their hands.  We must take action, Dylan.”

“Take action,” Dylan repeats.

“Anyone who is threatened is our responsibility.”

“And we can go beyond a defensive reaction?” Dylan asks.  “We can push back from our best values, from our souls?”

Elie smiles and nods.  “At Auschwitz, I saw kindness and goodness.  I saw people encourage one another with words they could barely speak.  I saw a father give his son his last piece of bread, and I saw the son give it back.  I saw prisoners protect weaker and sicker prisoners from the wrath of the guards.  Many victims kept their humanity.”

“So, Dylan, you think your therapy work and engaging with evil in social situations will be the extent of your contribution to social progress?”

“Yes, Elie, I do.”

“The collective political madness of the 20th Century has swept up whole nations – hundreds of millions of people – in a kind of hypnosis, and collective insanity, driven by hatred.  Differences became more important than humanity.  An in-group opposes ‘outsiders’.  Tribalism is followed by triumphalism.  To feel strong and confident, we belittle ‘them’.  To feel our group is special, chosen, and destined, we denigrate ‘their’ group.  This oppression is a critical thread in human history.”

“How do we stop it?” Dylan asks.

“I do not know how to end hatred, Dylan, but recognizing our shared humanity is a good beginning.”

“Shared humanity,” Dylan echoes.

“Each of us has an indivisible and ineffable self – an essence – and to encroach on it is a moral offense.”

After we share in a brief silence, Dylan asks his next question.  “Have you found it easy to become an activist, Elie?”

“Oh no.  I am very shy.  It’s not easy for me to speak up.  But I couldn’t be silent.  How would I live with myself?”

“I’m going to be active,” Dylan says, “but I’m not going to be an activist.”

I smile at Elie.  “You seem so full of hope.”

He smiles back. 

“Real hope comes to us only after we face the darkest part of a story.  To renounce despair is an act of will.  The only way to continue through the darkness is to confront and resist.  Even in the Warsaw ghetto, some people continued to sing and dance.  They knew it was absurd to do so but they danced through their pain. In spite of all reason, in spite of tragedy, through our despair, we can choose to hope.”

“Hope,” Dylan and I say in unison.

“In a world that has lost its ethical compass,” Elie tells us, “what is left to us but to sing?”

Dylan and I look surprised.  “How can we sing?” I ask.

Elie replies immediately.  “How can we not sing?”

Dylan smiles, then nods.  Elie looks at him.  “In my faith tradition, Dylan, music is very important.  The Torah is called a song.  Legends say that God created the world by singing.  The psalms call us to sing a new song to God.”

Now all three of us are smiling and nodding.  “We have a song called ‘Es Brent’.  Here’s the chorus.  He sings it in Hebrew, then in English:

     Don’t just stand there, brothers

     Put out the fire

Because our town is burning

“Each time I sing this song, I think of the world we live in and my heart is always broken.  We are doing so little about the fire.”  I frown.  Dylan nods.

“Here’s one more song before you go,” Elie says.  “It is a nigun of Hasidism, a song from my childhood.”

He closes his eyes as he begins singing.  It’s a melody without words.  It shifts from a major to a minor key and back.  Elie sings in a baritone with a strong yet delicate voice.  He sways to the melody’s rhythm.  He moves his hands gently up and down, as if conducting an orchestra and choir.  Then he snaps his fingers and claps his hands.        

We feel drawn into the beauty of a lost world.  The music is poignant.  We feel chills in our bodies, and we have tears in our eyes.

A few moments later Elie opens his eyes.  He stands up.  We stand up.

“Thank you, Elie,” Dylan says.

Elie looks at Dylan.  “Listening to a witness makes you a witness.”

Dylan nods.  “I’m now a witness.”

Elie walks with us to his front door. 

“It’s as if the universe is defined by a war between two kinds of flame.

“One flame is intolerance, inquisition, a vision of a new hegemony.  The other flame is our strong, deep, awakened, passionate, and cultivated yearning for good.

“They have had a fire, Dylan – the fire that is lit between the feet of innocent victims.  We cannot be lukewarm against such things.  We must light a better fire.”