Night - Elie Wiesel - Episode #1 - Meet the Nobel Prize winning author - a podcast by Christy and Garry Shriver

Night - Elie Wiesel - Episode #1 - Meet the Nobel Prize winning author

 

Hi, I’m Christy Shriver.

 

And I’m Garry Shriver, and this is the how to love lit podcast.  Thank you for listening, we hope you enjoy our discussions of the Western World’s most amazing pieces of literature.   Today, we begin by discussing one of the most inspiring humans of the twentieth century-  among his many other accomplishments, which we’ll talk about today, he produced 57 works, including what is arguably the most moving expressions of holocaust literature ever recorded- the memoir Night and the man Elie Wiesel.

 

And as I think about how to begin to describe this man and his legacy- there is really only one word that comes to my mind.  That word is reverence.  Elie Wiesel was an author, he was a teacher, he chaired many political action committees, but more than that- he was a moral authority.  In 1986 upon winning the Nobel Peace Prize the chairman of that committee, Egal Aarvik in his presentation speech said, Elie Wiesel has emerged as one of the most spiritual leaders and guides in an age when violence, repression and racism continue to characterize the world. . . . Wiesel is a messenger to Mankind. His message is one of peace, atonement, and human dignity. His belief that the forces fighting evil in the world can be victorious is a hard-won belief.

 

And the question is- how can that true?  His story is terrible.  The upheaval of his life is representative of one of the worst atrocities recorded in human history.  Just his little town of Sighet, Hungary, tells the story.  When he lived there as a child, it was a vibrant community of both Christians and Jews- it was a large center of Jewish learning. Out of the town’s total population of 25,000, 10,000 people belonged to the Jewish community. Following the Holocaust, only about fifty Jewish families remained there- and that remains true to this day.  The people who were slaughtered, many who were slaughtered before Wiesel’s very eyes, were his community- people like his mother, sister who he describes walking away to the ovens before he even understood what those were- his father, friends, cousins- all walked away and into ovens made for humans or died of even worse things like starvation and exposure to cold. Elie Wiesel’s world disintegrated beyond just what could be described as death.

 

But he isn’t unique in this- as we know- what happened to Elie wasn’t an isolated case of a evil human doing one bad thing- as the world watched- before and during the World War 2 holocaust,

 

 it is estimated that 6 millions Jews and 5 million non-Jews were systematically erased.  Of those that were taken to camps to be slaughtered, only 250,000 lived to tell their stories. But even that number is one of many- Eli Wiesel emerged as a man who did not speak of revenge, reparations or retaliation, as you might expect.  He did not live a life full of bitterness and excuses for failure, depression or defeat.  His story is a message of redemption and forgiveness that leads to peace.  But how did he get there?   How does a person like that become a spiritual leader?

 

It is a question that has never been more relevant to ask and is exactly how the Nobel committee understood the meaning of his life?  I believe his life and his message are even more important the farther we walk away from the atrocities of the twentieth century and forget the scars they left- of which the Nazi holocaust, is one, but it is not the ONLY one- the atrocities committed by Stalin, Czuauchesdu, Pol Pot- genocides in the Congo, China, North Korea, Japan and Turkey among others dwarf any violence the world had ever known- and in an age of technology, culture and science.  Elie Wiesel found an answer- and his soft voice- in his concise style he speaks truth- unarguable truth- as a man who has stared at evil in a way that almost no human has- he walked away as a man of love, healing and redemption.  His story is powerful- his life is powerful and his words are powerful.  I feel a true sense of humility in discussing his work, and a grave responsibility to communicate it properly.  So, this is how I would like to approach his story- this week, we’re going to go throuugh his biography- and tell his whole story, not just the months he was at Auschwitz.  We’ll  conclude by reading his remarks to President Ronald Reagan in 1985 in regard to President Reagan’s visit to the German cemetery in Bitburg.  Next week and for the two weeks after that we will study the text of Night through the lens of history and literature- we’ll explain the historical context of the story itself, the art involved and highlight the important themes Wiesel deliberately laces throughout the text.  The last week, we will finish our discussion by reading and studying the now famous address Elie Wiesel gave upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.  So, with the plan laid out, let’s take a look at the man from Sighet.  Garry, where is Sighet? 

 

Well, Sighet is this little town situated in the Carpathian mountains- the Carpathian mountains by the way are the third longest European mountain range, and they are in Eastern Europe- last week we talked about the Czech republic, that’s this same area we’re talking about today- today these mountains border  Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Serbia, but mostly Romania.  Sighet, Elie’s town is on the border between Romania and the Ukraine- but that’s if you look at a modern map today. As we all know, that part of the world has been divided up many times, and when Wiesel was born, it was actually part of Hungary. Today, if you visit it you’ll find that around 80% of the people there are in fact, Romanian, but that was not the case in 1940.  At the start of World War 2, almost 1/3rd of Sighet were Jewish- and all kinds of Jews which is something Wiesel references in the very first line of Night when he says and I quote, “They called him Moshe the Beadle, as though he had never had a surname in his life.  He was a man of all work at a Hasidic synagogue.”  And I know we’ll talk more about what that means next week, but in 1941, Sighet was a very diverse community, but it was also caught in horrible political maneuverings between the Nazis and the Italian Fascists who were diviving up Europe between themselves- even for those who never left Sighet many would have been born in a country called Hungary and died in one called Romania- this is again, exactly like what happened in Franz Kafka’s hometown of Prague, in the Czech republic. 

 

Which of course was all unbeknownst to a little Elie Wiesel who was born there in 1928- this is 40 years after Kafka is born, and 13 years after the Metamorphosis is published- just for context if you’re listening to these in the order we recorded them.  One thing I find amazing is that Wiesel never lost his love for this region although he never went back there to live.  I read where he said, he never got over the beauty of mountains to the point that he much preferred them to trips to the beach or other really beautiful settings.  He also admited that when he wrote the manuscripts for his books (which he did by hand, btw)- he did so with a picture of Sighet almost always placed beside where he was writing.  He said  it reminded him during his creative process of the many joyful experiences of life from those growing up years with his family and all the love that represented.   And, as we’ll see again next week, his father was a local grocer and pretty well-respected member of their community, his mother was a homemaker andwell-educated daughter of a very respected Hasidic farmer.  He had three sisters- Hilda, Batya (or Beatrice), and the youngest Tsipora.  They were a very literary family- Elie’s mother, Sara was a big reader and really pushed that amongst all her children.  They were a musical family, Elie learned to play the violin, but as we see in Night, and most importantly they were also a very observant family to the Jewish faith.

 

And of course, this all came crashing down, as we will see detailed in Night in the summer of 1944 when the Nazis arrived in Sighet, rounded up the entire Jewish population and loaded them into trains taking them to Auschwitz.  For the next 11 months, 16 year old Elie would experience what cannot be described- the most humiliating, gruesome torture conceivable by man and what the adult Elie Wiesel chooses to represent with words- ten years later- in the memoir Night. Two of Elie’s sisters, Hilda and Batya, also managed to survive the massacre, unbeknownst to Elie- but his parents, grandparents, other relatives, and baby sister Tsipora all died in the camps.  At the end of the war, after being moved around and surviving one of Hitler’s infamous Death Marches Elie watches his father die of dysentery.  All of this is in the memoir, but the memoir ends with him alone in Buchenwald, Germany.  He is there for the now famous Jewish uprising against the SS in the camp.  He survived and watched the arrival of the United States Third army that liberated the camp on April 11, 1945.

 

And, of course, even after liberation, Elie almost doesn’t survive- and actually lots of holocaust survivors died immediately after liberation.  Three days After being liberated, as he describes at the end of Night, he almost dies of food poisoning as his body had completely lost the ability to digest food.  Wiesel ends Night with this famous moment where he looks in the mirror to see himself- this unrecognizable person.  However, what is not in Night is his reaction to that person.  He actually shattered that mirror with his fist- and soon as he was able to get pencil and paper he wrote down his memories before they left him of what had happened at Birkenau and Auschwitz- with no intent of actually sharing them.  It would be years before he could express these to the world. He swore to always be silent- and as we now understand he needed that time, he needed those ten years to understand, to forgive, to process, even to be able to articulate, But in 1945 after Buchelwald- Where could a Jewish homeless teenager go?  What could he do?  Imagine the lostness?  There is no home to go back to? No world? No family? Nothing.  He spoke four languages: Yiddish, Hebrew, Hungarian and German, and yet- even those could not serve him. 

 

True you must remember, the world, is still not a welcoming place for Jews in 1945, not even after this.  Elie wanted to go to Palestine, but there were severe immigration limitations so that was out.  He originally had planned to go to Belgium because they were accepting Jewish immigrants, but General Charles de Gaulle, to his great credit wished to receive the homeless immigrants, and so his train was rerouted.  He’s taken to an orphanage in Normandy- but can’t understand a word around him- the obvious first order of business was to learn French- what would become his new mother tongue, in a sense. And this is where, we really discover how brilliant of a man Elie Wiesel truly is.  Not only is he able to master the language, but he competes and ultimately gains admission into the Sorbonne in Paris, as you know, one of the world’s premiere universities.  He studied philosophy, literature, language.  He worked as a translator and even tried to join the Israeli army and go to Israel (he was rejected for medical reasons).  Ultimately, he landed a job as a journalist and finally made it to Israel to work in the Tel Aviv office.  Once in Tel Aviv, he gets a second journalism job, even back then journaliam did not pay well, and he was very poor- so he worked at both places- but this second newspaper, an Israeli paper, offered him a gig that sent him to India.  It was in India that he learned English.

In his capacity as a journalist he gets an opportunity that will change his life forever.  In 1954, Wiesel interviewed French Nobel Prize-winning novelist François Mauriac.  Mauriac took a strong interest in this bright, young holocaust survivor.  He became Wiesel's friend and adult mentor. Mauriac persuaded Wiesel to break his self-imposed ten-year vow of silence about his time in the camps and write his memoir- which Wiesel did do.  The name of that book was And the World Remained Silent. It took Wiesel two years to complete the manuscript and interestingly enough, it wasn’t written in English or French but in Yiddish- because that is Wiesel’s heart language- this original memoir is eight-hundred pages long.  Sadly, but probably not surprisingly no one wanted to print this book, not even with the support of a Nobel Prize winner promoting it.  Finally, they found one publisher willing to do it in Buenos Aires- but the success of this book- was limited for obvious reasons, it was in Yiddish and it was long. That next year Wiesel’s job invited him to move to NYC and be a foreign correspondent covering the UN.   NYC is ultimately where he settles for the rest of his life.  Christy, what can you tell us about the NY years.

Well, it started a little rough. In 1956  Wiesel was struck by a taxi while crossing the street.  He had to have a ten hour surgery, was hospitalized for month and was in a wheelchair for over a year.  But his problems weren’t just medical.  He is actually still a stateless person at this time.  Because he’s disabled he can’t travel to France to renew his identity card, but the problem is that without an identity card, he can’t renew his visa to stay in the United States.  He’s like Tom Hanks character in that movie – The Terminal.   

 

So true, except UNLIKE Viktor Navorski, the character in that movie, Wiesel found out that being stateless made him eligible to become a legal resident which is what he did. Although Wiesel will actually not be a citizen of any place on earth until 1963 when he is granted American citizenship and gets an American passport, the first passport he had ever had.  He does, though, years later, become a French citizen through his relationship to his then close friend Francois Mitterand who became  President of France. 

 

Getting back to Wiesel and writing, Wiesel’s mother who’s own father was a very devout Hasidic Jew had always wanted her son to be a Rabbi and a phd.  His dad, who he watched die slowly in Buchenwald, was a man who actually had been jailed (I didn’t mention this before and maybe I should have) for helping Jews escape the Nazis from other part of Hungarian in the early years of the war- ironically- but Wiesel- had instilled in him this foundation of faith and justice from his early years, and what we will see for the rest of Wiesel’s life is this compulsion, if that’s the right word, this calling to communicate faith and truth through words.  – one nice anecote- if you can call anything pertaining to th holocaust nice, but once when Elie was in his thirties, he finally actually goes back to Sighet.  While he’s there he visits the remains of the only synagogue left in the town,a dn there in the remains he miraculously finds a pile of discarded books and among these is a commentary he had actually written when he was twelve.  But for Elie, he made a decision after this first book, to write all of his books, and he will do this almost without exception for the rest of his life, in French- not Yiddish or Hebrew, the personal languages of his early years, not Hungarian and German- those obviously were oppressive, not even English, but French. 

 

Of course, that makes sense, he was educated in France in those years after the holocaust, he studied there- and it seems French thought had a tremendous influence on his thinking.  As I studied his life, I was amazed to see how much existential thought impacted his thinking- guys like kafka, Camus, Sartre- the guys we just talked about.

 

True, but he was a man of faith, so what we see in Elie is a Jewish understanding with their understanding of story-telling and the human experience, which is a unique, a perspective taken from the holocaust, plus the secular humanist ideas of the French intellectuals.  And all of that is really what we see expressed in every single piece of writing that was going to come from this brilliant man from this moment onward.  It’s going to start in 1958 with the release of Night or really La Nuit.  It wasn’t in English.  Mauriac wrote the forward for the book, helped him condense the longer version into 127 pages.  Mauriac pressured France’s most pretigous publishing house, Les Editions de Minuit, to produce it- and it was an instant success.  Two years later, a woman by the name of Stella Rodway masterfully translated it into English- it was originally rejected by twenty publishers in English as well, but when it was published, readers all over the English speaking world embraced it- and Wiesel was now established as a writer. 

 

And interestingly enough he takes on an unusual genre.  He doesn’t try to just write non-fiction or things around the holocaust from a historical sense or even a philosophical or religious sense, which you might think he would.  He wrote primarily fiction- but fiction sort of because he would blend autobiography with fiction.  Not too long after night  he composed L’Aube [Dawn] in 1960 and Le Jour [The Accident] one year later. In Dawn, Wiesel portrays a Holocaust survivor who travels to the newly born State of Israel to participate in that country’s birth and struggle. The events were real, but the characters are blends of real and fiction. As for Le Jour or the Accident, it’s basically the story of his accident.  So you can see the pattern.

 

 

And of course, he will go on to write basically one book a year for the rest of his life.  I don’t want to imply that it was all fiction, he did write lots of non-fiction, but a lot of fiction too.  His fourth novel was about his return to Sighet in 1962 called Beyond the Wall- and this is what I mean by merging fiction into his expressions of the holocaust, in that book, he creates a character who survives and chooses to return to his hometown ater the holocaust- and he sees the before and after, relives all of the memories but everyone who lives in the town upon his return is a complete stranger- all of the past is gone.He actually won a literary award for that book.

 

 

I know we are going to talk about Wiesel’s humanitarian efforts as a recognized celebrity, but one thing I think is worth mentioning before we leave our discussion of his literary career is well-stated by Dr. Ted L. Estess from the University of Houston points out in his book Elie Wiesel.  He says this and I quote- "It is true that Wiesel comes to reject despair and death in favor of hope and life, but it is also true that the Holocaust remains ever with him. . . . It is an agony that abides: this is the foundation of Elie Wiesel's life and work.”

 

 

You know, Wiesel understood that about himself pretty early on. I was reading the description of the many thoughts that he describes going through his head in NY after he literally almost dies from being hit by a cab after surviving the holocaust and says that lying in that bed he began to really understand, actually for the first time why if a person must choose between death and life, a person must select life- and you know- it isn’t clear he believed that when he lived through the holocaust.  He saw his survival as random and pointless- and maybe he was playing around with the meaning of life being that same thing.  But eventually he understood that that is just not that case.  That as unimagnable as the holocaust was it would be counterproductive for him to persist in reliving the past, that he had no choice but to face the future with a more constructive attitude- to make a positive change in his own life but without forgetting the past, and so the man who emeges from that hospital bed is a man who wanted to dedicate his life to inspire others to create a world better understands what we are capable of both for good and for evil.  He says this and I quote: “We [the survivors] could have told the world: ‘We don’t trust you anymore. If all your civilization and culture could lead to this dehumanization, this total failure of man, we want no part of it.’ . . . [But we] chose to become neither antisocial nor asocial. [We] refused to deal in hate. [We] became scientists and artists, teachers and musicians; some even became writers.

 

 

And so Elie Wiesel really became a citizen, not of just any one country, but really he became a citizen of the world. In the 80s, his celebrity grew, and he began to address the world through the lecture circuit.   He became an advocate- for places well beyond Poland, Hungary or even Europe.  The first place we see this is in his defense of Soviet Jews under the communist regime.  Elie Wiesel ought to be credited as the first major writer to call attention to the plight of Soviet Jewry- something a lot of people still don’t think about. In the preface to The Jews of Silence he wrote that “The pages that follow are the report of a witness. Nothing more and nothing else. Their purpose is to draw attention to a problem about which no one should remain unaware.”  He fought for and succeeded in securing the unconditional release of the Soviet Jews from their bondage.  Actually, ever Since glasnost Jewish emigration has steadily expanded into a mass exodus of Soviet Jews living in hostile environments going to places such as Israel and other parts of the world where they were welcomed and permitted to openly practice their faith.

He defended the Jewish state of Israel, he used his platform to bring attention to oppression wherever he saw it: Cambodia, Biafra, Paraguay, Bangladesh, South Sudan- to name a few of the places that drew his attention.  He allowed himself to be interviewed by the world’s most influential journalists and ultimately won the Nobel Prize in 1986.

 

Of course, it’s this massive influence that leads us to the piece of literature, I want us to read today before we start with Night next week.  It’s an address he gives in Washington DC, really it’s a public scolding addressed to Ronald Reagan.  It’s an unusual turn of events, and a very unique time in history- that we’re actually old enough to vividly remember- Garry, set this up historically for us, then let’s read the speech he gives.

 

Sure, now remember, it’s 1985, WW2 has been over for 40 years, and Germany has been split up- the Russians control East Germany and there is a state named West Germany which is a free democratic country.  Ronald Reagan has planned a state visit to acknowledge that West Germany is a member of the free world.  He’s trying to help recover a country plagued by the guilt of the Nazis- to allow historical forgiveness, allow the German people to progress.  The trip was organized by Chancellor Helmut Kohl who had made many concessions to the Americans in standing up to the Communist regime- on this trip, Chancellor Kohl had included a visit to a cemetery where several SS officers were buried.  Elie Wiesel, who by this point, had a strong voice, verbally objected to this and raised his voice.  Reagan, for political reasons, ultimately chose to NOT concede to Wiesel’s objections BUT allowed him to come to the White House, where Reagan would present him with a medal of achievement PLUS the opportunity to voice publicly his objections, concerns and thoughts in front of the world.  These are the words we’re going to read today.  Christy, read for us, this moving piece of writing-

 

 Absolutely, and before I do, I want you to pay attention to  how many times he uses the words Mr. President- this is to a demonstration of the personal nature of the address, but it also connotes respect as he admonishes one of the most powerful men in the world.  Beyond that, this speech speaks for itself.

Christy, it feels inappropriate to pick that speech apart the way we normally analyze literature.  There is a solemnity of tone, an emotion that still speaks as he talks about redemption as someone who lost everything and then rebuilt. 

 

You are absolutely right- and I’m not going to dissect it- although, I will next week, dissect the book.  But today as we end our discussion, I think it is most fitting to end with a beautiful account from the personal life of Elie Wiesel.  Wiesel took a long time to get married.  Finally at age 40 he met and married a beautiful Austrian woman, another holocaust survivor with her own story,Marion Erster. They had one son together, although she has a daughter from a previous marriage, but for Elie, this was his only child.  These are Elie Wiesel’s words on the birth of his son- Garry will you read them:

 

 “My son’s first name is Shlomo. It was my father’s name. His middle name, Elisha, , means “God is salvation.” We [Jews] believe in names so  much. I was the only son. I cannot break the chain. It is impossible that 3500 years should end with me, so I took those 3500 years and put them on the shoulders of this little child”   Later he said this,  And so I will tell my son that survival in itself is a virtue. It has become the virtue of mankind, and that virtue we [Jews] have taught mankind. It is important. I will tell my son that all the fires, all the pain, will be meaning­less, if he in turn will not transmit our story together, to his friends, and one day to his children.  As the son of a survivor, Shlomo Elisha Wiesel thus carries on his back an awesome baggage of history.”

 

 

Well, it’s hard to imagine how it must have for both father and son at the age of fourteen, Elisha stood at his father’s side on the dais in Oslo, Norway when the Norwegian Monarch presented Elie Wiesel with the Nobel Peace Prize. After graduation from Yale, Elisha had a very successful career as an engineer for  Goldman Sachs; he has continued the tradition of raising large amounts of money for various charities and is increasingly involved in various freedom promoting causes around the world.  That would be a hard legacy to live up to.  God bless him.

 

That ends our first episode in this fantastic series on Elie Wiesel and the book night.  Next week we will tackle that book, starting on page one sentence one (which we’ve already actually read), and then talk through chapters 1,2 and 3- and the Wiesel’s family life before the holocaust, the train ride to Auschwitz and their arrival at Birkenau.  We hope you will support How to Love Lit Podcast by telling your friends, sharing your favorite episode via email or text, by following us on Instagram, FB, and if you’re a teacher, checking out or teaching materials on our website howtolovelitpodcast.com

 

Peace out

 

 

 

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