And the Sea Is Never Full (31 page)
Read And the Sea Is Never Full Online
Authors: Elie Wiesel
The Council must also deal with problems not directly connected with the creation of a museum. We meet to condemn the resurgence of anti-Semitism or to denounce the attacks on Jews in Europe. In fact, it is our “committee of conscience” that, according to our charter, should be in charge, but it is not working well. The committee may not be to blame; the Senate distrusts it because it fears we might make declarations and take initiatives that might be embarrassing to the executive branch.
Meanwhile, surprisingly, on a personal level, I develop a friendly relationship with the new president.
Our second annual Day of Remembrance, the first during President Reagan’s initial term, takes place not in the Rotunda but at the White House, for Ronald Reagan has just left the hospital. It is his first public appearance since the assassination attempt against him. The East Room is packed. The entire Washington who’s who is there. Six survivors light the six traditional candles. Cantor Isaac Goodfriend of Atlanta intones the customary prayers in memory of the victims. When my turn comes, I begin by giving thanks to God for sparing the president’s life. Then I read, in Yiddish (it is, I believe, the first time Yiddish has been heard in the White House), a poem that evokes the massacred Jewish children. I also speak of Israel, that people with a long history, which is also a modern people that should not
be judged on isolated incidents. I conclude by addressing the president directly: “In our tradition, when a human being dies, we designate him our messenger on high to intercede in our favor. Is it possible, Mr. President, that the six million Jewish victims have become our messengers?”
The president is visibly moved. It seems that tears prevent his reading the speech that has been prepared for him. I watch him as, behind the lectern, he rearranges pages and goes on to improvise a magnificent speech against racism, anti-Semitism, and all forms of discrimination.
That same evening television commentators report: “Political circles in Washington were astonished today to hear President Reagan deliver a speech on human rights. But if one is to believe his closest advisers, he did not mean it. It was but an emotional reaction that …”
Marion and I look at each other, stunned. How dare these advisers disparage the president in this way? In politics, say my friends in the capital, anything goes.
Two weeks later, the telephone rings in my office. A well-modulated voice says: “Please wait a moment; the president of the United States would like to speak with you.” I am convinced it is a prank, until I hear the familiar warm voice. He says hello, and I am so taken aback that I can’t think of anything more intelligent to say than: “Mr. President, how did you find my phone number?” He bursts out laughing and keeps me on the line a good quarter of an hour. He begins by saying some nice things about my work. At the end he chuckles: “By the way, just so you know, I meant every single word in my speech.” Rumors about this conversation make the rounds of Washington dinner parties. After all, who but me would think of asking the president of the United States how he obtained a simple telephone number. This funny incident is followed by another, which has to do with France of the eighties.
A month later I attend the investiture of François Mitterrand as president of France. During the luncheon at the Élysée Palace, he voices a concern to me: He doesn’t know the Americans well, and they don’t know him either; they are bound to mistrust him and his political philosophy. On the flight home I ponder this. I wonder how, in some small way, I could be of assistance to the new president. A wild idea goes through my mind: Why not write a note to President Reagan? Through the Council office I send him a brief personal message
in which I tell him that I consider it my duty as an American citizen to offer him a psychological sketch of his French counterpart. And I add this suggestion: “If you could ring him directly, simply to say hello and congratulate him, as you did with me, I am sure that will facilitate your future relations.” Did he receive my letter? The fact is I received no answer. Oh well, I thought, surely it vanished into one of the proverbial White House wastebaskets. From the Élysée too, silence. Never mind. So what if I made myself look ridiculous. Luckily no one knows.
Years later, a high official tells me that a secretary had indeed transmitted my letter to the president. And he had liked my suggestion. Call President Mitterrand? Why not. Only I had failed to mention that Mitterrand did not speak English. And Reagan has only a little French. An interpreter should have been called in. No matter: The two presidents succeeded in understanding each other. And during the meeting of the seven major economic powers that followed, their easy relationship surprised quite a few people.
When it comes to the affairs of my own Council, I am less lucky. My requests to meet with the president run into insurmountable obstacles, despite the fact that after every one of our conversations he expresses his wish to see me again: Strangely, Reagan’s aides have much power. But why would the prospect of my speaking with their boss bother them? Why would it worry them? I have no idea, but the door to the Oval Office remains firmly closed to me. It opens only four long years later, during the Bitburg affair.
End of October 1981: The international Liberators’ Conference—the need for which had become evident to me two years earlier in Moscow—takes place in the State Department with the participation of the secretary of state, General Alexander Haig, and the assistant secretary for human rights, Elliott Abrams. The opening session is both solemn and original: When American soldiers bring out German flags taken from the enemy and throw them at our feet, on the stage, even the toughest among the participants shiver. Present are representatives of some twenty countries, from both sides of the Iron Curtain, and this is the statement I make to them:
… Some thirty-six years ago, we lived together a moment marked by destiny, a moment without parallel, never to be
measured or repeated; a moment that stood on the other side of time, on the other side of existence.
When we first met, on the threshold of a universe struck by a curse, we spoke different languages, we were strangers to one another, we might as well have descended from different planets. And yet a link was created between us, a bond was established. We became not only comrades, not only brothers; we became each other’s witnesses.
I remember, I shall always remember, the day I was liberated: April 11, 1945. Buchenwald. The terrifying silence broken by abrupt yelling. The first American soldiers. Their ashen faces. Their eyes—I shall never forget their eyes, your eyes. You looked and looked, you could not move your gaze away from us; it was as though you sought to alter reality with your eyes. They reflected astonishment, bewilderment, endless pain, and anger—yes, anger above all. Rarely have I seen such anger, such rage—contained, mute, yet ready to burst with frustration, humiliation, and utter helplessness. Then you broke down. You wept. You wept and wept uncontrollably, unashamedly; you were our children then, for we, the twelve-year-old, the sixteen-year-old boys in Buchenwald and Theresienstadt and Mauthausen, knew so much more than you about life and death. You wept; we could not. We had no more tears left; we had nothing left. In a way we were dead, and we knew it. What did we feel? Only sadness.
And also gratitude. And ultimately it was gratitude that brought us back to normalcy and to society. Do you remember, my friends? In Lublin and Dachau, Struthof and Nordhausen, Ravensbrück and Majdanek, Belsen and Auschwitz, you were surrounded by sick and wounded and hungry wretches, barely alive, pathetic in their futile attempts to touch you, to smile at you, to reassure you, to console you, and most of all, to carry you in triumph on their frail shoulders; you were our heroes, our idols. Tell me, friends: In your whole lives have you ever felt such love, such admiration?
One thing we did not do: We did not try to explain; explanations were neither needed nor possible. Liberators
and survivors looked at one another—and what each of us experienced then, we shall try to recapture together, now, at this reunion, which, for me, represents a miracle in itself.
After describing the goals and the functioning of the Council, I go on:
… What we all have in common is an obsession: not to betray the dead we left behind or who left us behind. They were killed once; they must not be killed again…. You were the first free men to discover the abyss, just as we were its last inhabitants. What we symbolized to one another then was so special that it remained part of our very being….
… It would have been so easy for us to slide into melancholy and resignation. We made a different choice. We chose to become spokesmen for man’s quest for generosity and his need and capacity to turn his or her suffering into something productive, something creative.
We had hoped then that out of so much torment and grief and mourning, a new message would be handed down to future generations—a warning against the dangers inherent in discrimination in all its forms, fanaticism, poverty, deprivation, ignorance, oppression, humiliation, injustice, and war—the ultimate injustice, the ultimate humiliation. Yes, friends; we were naive. And perhaps we still are….
… If we do not raise our voice against war—who will? We speak with the authority of men and women who have seen war; we know what it is. We have seen the burnt villages, the devastated cities, the deserted homes; we still see the demented mothers whose children are being massacred before their eyes, we still follow the endless nocturnal processions to the flames rising up to the seventh heaven—if not higher….
We are gathered here to testify—together. Our tale is a tale of solitude and fear and anonymous death—but also of compassion, generosity, bravery, and solidarity. Together, you the liberators and we the survivors, represent a commitment to memory whose intensity will remain. In
its name we shall continue to voice our concerns and our hopes, not for our own sake, but for the sake of humankind. Its very survival may depend on its ability and willingness to listen.
And to remember.
I have reproduced certain excerpts from this speech because I feel strongly about the circumstances that motivated it. I shall never forget the tears of the American soldier who, in what was called “the little camp,” discovered the result of absolute evil. My gratitude to him and all the other liberators of the camps remains deep and eternal. When I draw up the balance sheet of my life, the memory that binds me to them is paramount.
Yet even they pose a problem. There is one question, always the same, I ask American or Soviet officers: Did they ever modify a plan, or decide to launch an attack a day or an hour earlier, in order to liberate a concentration camp? The answer is always the same: no. Military operations were decided by headquarters; no one else could change orders.
How can one forget the liberators’ kindness, their warmth, the bewilderment, the horror reflected in their eyes, their sadness? Since our Washington conference, their acts of kindness have been commemorated in many communities—they have been congratulated; they have been urged to testify, to speak, to write; they have been the subjects of newspaper accounts, films. They have been honored and involved in the survivors’ effort to safeguard memory. I am proud to have been the one to initiate the process.
There is another international conference I like to recall: “The Courage to Care.” The idea had been Dr. Carol Rittner’s. This nun, who belongs to the order of the Sisters of Mercy, is one of the most dynamic women I have met. After Monroe Freedman’s departure, for political reasons—he was not from the “right” party—I proposed that she take over the direction of the Memorial Council. She agreed, but the White House refused. Because she was not a Republican? Nonetheless, we collaborated for many years, and she became the first director of the foundation I created with Marion after I received the Nobel Prize.
Her obsession is the Holocaust. It is the major topic of the courses she teaches in the university run by her order. Harsh in her
judgment of the Catholic Church’s attitude during the war, she has great admiration and affection for those Yad Vashem calls “the righteous among the nations,” the non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews. “Why not have the Council organize an important colloquium in their honor?” she asked one day. I liked the proposal, for not enough has been said about these men and women whose spirit of sacrifice saved mankind’s honor.
Seventy-five guests, Jews and Christians, from diverse backgrounds arrive to take part in this gathering. Like the Liberators’ Conference, it takes place at the State Department. This time it is Secretary George Shultz who participates in the opening ceremony. We witness the reunions of several “saviors” and those they saved. People are embracing, and there is much weeping in the corridors.
Gaby Cohen—we called her Niny long ago, in the Ambloy children’s home—has come to speak to us of the Jewish children hidden in France, and those who were helped to cross clandestinely into Switzerland. Madame Trocmé retells the glorious saga of her French village, Le Chambon, whose inhabitants risked their lives to save Jews. The widow of Pastor Martin Niemöller recalls the courageous deeds of her husband. His words about the dangers of indifference are famous:
When they came to look for the Catholics, I said nothing, since I am not a Catholic. Then they came to look for the trade-unionists; I said nothing since I am not a trade-unionist; then they came for the Jews, and not being a Jew, I said nothing. In the end, when they came to take me away, there was no one left to raise his voice.
Poles, Dutchmen, Belgians, Danes, Frenchmen, men and women of great courage, how could one not be moved in their presence?
And how could I forget the person who, on the eve of the first transport, had tapped on the window of our house, no doubt to warn us? I never succeeded in learning his identity: I would have so wished to invite him or her to this conference.
In my town, and throughout occupied Europe, such brave people were a tiny minority. Why were they so few, these just men and women who took the side of the victim?