Word: wiesel
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There can be no longer journey than the one Elie Wiesel, 56, has taken from a cell in Auschwitz to the corridors of Washington. "How can you measure it?" he asks. "In the suffering of a people? In the recesses of history?" The questions are rhetorical. No gauge exists; no one has ever made the trip before. The voyage is charted in three words inscribed on his medal: AUTHOR, TEACHER, WITNESS...
...spoke so much about Christ," says Wiesel. "I was timid, but finally I said, 'You speak of Christ's suffering. What about the children who have suffered not 2,000 years ago, but yesterday? And they never talk about it." Mauriac was to recall the look in the speaker's pained eyes, "as of a Lazarus risen from the dead, yet still a prisoner within the grim confines where he had strayed, stumbling among the shameful corpses . . . I could only embrace him weeping...
Four years later, Night appeared in France with an introduction by Mauriac. The little book set the Wiesel style: austere, tense phrases articulating the unspeakable--the murder and torture of the innocent, the martyrdom of faith itself as a child watches the hanging of another child: " 'Where is God? Where is he?' . . . And I heard a voice within me answer: 'Where is he? Here he is--he is hanging here on this gallows...
Volumes by other writers, films, television programs followed Night, tracing the origins and consequences of genocide. Some of them were legitimate, but many were full of the now familiar Holocaust cant about survivor guilt or the complicity of the victims. Ironically, it was Wiesel who brought the term Holocaust out of scholarly usage into common parlance in a New York Times book review some 25 years ago: "I used it because I had no other word. Now I'm sorry. It's been so trivialized and vulgarized. Today one must ask, 'Do you mean the show or the event...
...despite the docudramas and paperback page turners with barbed wire on the covers, Wiesel has kept to his private tasks of organizing memory and troubling a deaf world with his cries. Although he has been called the voice of the 6 million killed in the "Final Solution," few of his more than 20 books directly confront the events of Auschwitz. Often they discuss the testamental prophets (Five Biblical Portraits, Messengers of God), ancient legend (The Golem) or contemporary Eastern Europe (One Generation After). His study of the Soviet Union (The Jews of Silence) was a new jeremiad, going beyond...