What would have become of Elie Wiesel, when the story would have been different than those via Auschwitz? A gentle Kabbalist probably. A man with a long beard, who would have lived his life in the Hungarian town of Sighet, now part of Romania. Sometimes he would be praying while he rhythmically forward the upper body rocking back and forth, burst into tears, because God has not yet sent the Messiah; and he had deep inside wondered how long it will still take until all the divine sparks were collected until the broken world has become whole again. But it would have remained an abstract question.
In order to at least appreciate the tragedy of the Hungarian Jews, including Elie Wiesel was rudimentary, one has the simultaneity of events in mind lead. On April 19, 1944 began with a revolt of the Resistance, the Liberation of Paris. Ten days later, the deportation of Hungarian Jews began. The Nazi Reich was dying, everyone knew that.
But still dying Hitler Germany wanted to tear the last Jews of Europe with the death. The Wehrmachtgeneräle begging in Berlin to trains, they needed to move troops. But the office Eichmann had priority: It was important to kill Jews, more important than anything
And the Jews themselves.? In what might be his most important book, “Night”, Elie Wiesel has described how the Jewish community of Sighet refused to believe that their danger threatened. To one of Wiesel’s friends, who was deported as a foreigner, managed to escape. When he returned, he told that he had been out and shot the Polish Jews in forests, all: men, women and children. He was immediately declared insane. Such a thing could not be. It made no sense.
Wiesel mother was sent by Mengele gassed
In “night” are there is a passage which is something like a godless prayer, an anti-Kaddish, a raven black cri de coeur : “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, the one out of my life seven locked long has made night. I will never forget the smoke. I will never the little faces of the children forget ascended their body before my eyes as spirals to the blue sky. I’ll never forget the flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that made me for all eternity to the lust for life. I will never forget the moments which murdered my God and my soul and my dreams, who accepted the face of the desert. I will never forget that, and if I were condemned to live as long as God. . Never “
Wiesel mother and sisters were sent by Mengele with the baton soon after arrival in Birkenau on the other side: the side of those who came to the gas immediately Elie Wiesel and his father were assigned to forced labor, he has then on the death march.. the agonizing death of his father witnessed up close to Buchenwald.
For those who survived the German camp and have written about it later books, you can substantially the first three groups asked incredulously. How could we Germans do such a thing? Ruth Klüger had roll call in the concentration camp Schiller ballads in the head; Jean Amery could verses of Neidhart von Reuental heart. How could it happen that a nation, with its culture and language it was so intimately familiar, something as apparently did evil?
The second group – were among her Primo Levi and Imre Kertesz – expanded this question into the universal: What is the human condition in a world in which a museum, a Treblinka, Majdanek a been possible? What does it mean for this genocide, to be a man
The third group of survivors was primarily a theological question: How could the God of our fathers, the allow? And who thinks Elie Wiesel have answered this with a simple dieu existe n’est pas , the wrong lot. He has always sought dialogue with Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Rebbe of Lubavitch
Holocaust -. A strictly theological vocabulary
Wiesel may have been clean-shaven and eaten occasionally kosher, but at heart he remained a Kabbalist who is looking at the devastated world by divine spark. The word that Elie Wiesel coined for this genocide, was also a strictly theological vocabulary: Holocaust . This is none other than the Greek-English translation of the Hebrew olah , which meant “whole burnt offerings”. When olah when holokaustos should Abraham Isaac his son in the land of Moriah offer – a sacrifice that God has adopted him known. In “Holocaust” swung the idea with that that human sacrifice was then still take place in Auschwitz on monstrous way.
The Israeli writer Amos Oz has this designation therefore strictly rejected. The perpetrators were German – it was not Abraham, not even God. Wiesel himself has not been happy with his neologism for another reason: Soon every genocide and every atrocity in history has been called “Holocaust”. Elie Wiesel, however, insisted that the German genocide of the Jews was unique, and he was right. Never before a group had tried another group completely wipe out all over the world, and this made her every opportunity to escape this fate, for example by conversion to another faith.
Looking back on his life, one comes across loud surprises – such as the now almost forgotten fact that Elie Wiesel was originally a French writer. After the war he lived in Paris, had contacts with the “Irgun”, a right Zionist battle group and was after the founding of Israel correspondent of the newspaper “Yediot Aharonot”. Was published in 1954 in Buenos Aires a book of almost 900 pages that hardly anyone read -. It was called “Un Canada hot geschwign” and clearly showed the influence of the existentialists
got through an accident Wiesel US citizenship
1955 interviewed Wiesel French and very Catholic writer Francoise Mauriac. The he constantly talked about the suffering of Jesus. Eventually it was Wiesel to bunt and he said: “. Ten years ago, I have seen hundreds of Jewish children, who have suffered more than Jesus on the cross, and no one has talked about” No sooner had Wiesel said this, he was ashamed to lift. But Mauriac ran after him and dragged him back to his apartment. Then he sat him in the chair opposite and cried and cried. At the end Mauriac said: “Maybe you should write exactly about that.”
The result was “Nuit”, a (short) Excerpt from “Un Canada hot geschwign “. The rest is history: “Night” was printed in millions of copies and been translated into thirty languages. In the beginning of course, was not a success, on the contrary, “night”. As in 1960, the English translation appeared, it took three years until the first edition – 3000 copies – was sold. The world took a long time before she had learned to listen people like Elie Wiesel.
Since 1955 the writer lived in America. He had been hit in New York by a taxi and was so long in the hospital that his visa expired – he was offered citizenship, and he accepted the offer. He was always on the go, wrote novels, plays, nonfiction. He was not afraid of scandal back, as if the American president Ronald Reagan criticized because of visited a German military cemetery in Bitburg.
Nobel Peace Prize Elie Wiesel
He sat for Israel, the Soviet and Ethiopian Jews, the victims of apartheid in South Africa, the “disappeared” in Argentina, the Miskito Indians in Nicaragua, the Kurds, the Bosnian Muslims on. He described the denial of the Armenian genocide as a “double killing” -. The victims were killed by the blatant lie equal a second time
In 1986 he got the Nobel prize awarded, but not the literature, but those for peace efforts. Since he was already a public figure: a man with tousled dark hair, gaunt face, into which deep wrinkles had notched and sad mouth. Yes, he was controversial, partly because he stood up for a Jewish Jerusalem, instead of insisting that this city Jews, Christians and Muslims belong to the same extent. But that was not really important
Important was the tattooed blue number that he wore on his forearm. A-7713th Elie Wiesel has died at the age of 87 years in the US. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu paid tribute to him as a “ray of light” in the “darkness of the Holocaust”.
May his memory be a blessing.
No comments:
Post a Comment