Night - Elie Wiesel - Episode #1 - Meet the Nobel Prize winning author
b'
Night - Elie Wiesel - Episode #1 - Meet the Nobel Prize winning author
\\xa0
Hi, I\\u2019m Christy Shriver.
\\xa0
And I\\u2019m Garry Shriver, and this is the how to love lit podcast.\\xa0 Thank you for listening, we hope you enjoy our discussions of the Western World\\u2019s most amazing pieces of literature.\\xa0 \\xa0Today, we begin by discussing one of the most inspiring humans of the twentieth century- \\xa0among his many other accomplishments, which we\\u2019ll 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.
\\xa0
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.\\xa0 That word is reverence.\\xa0 Elie Wiesel was an author, he was a teacher, he chaired many political action committees, but more than that- he was a moral authority.\\xa0 In 1986 upon winning the Nobel Peace Prize the chairman of that committee, Egal Aarvik in his presentation speech said, Elie\\xa0Wiesel\\xa0has emerged as one of the most spiritual leaders and guides in an age when violence, repression and racism continue to characterize the world. . . .\\xa0Wiesel\\xa0is 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.
\\xa0
And the question is- how can that true?\\xa0 His story is terrible.\\xa0 The upheaval of his life is representative of one of the worst atrocities recorded in human history.\\xa0 Just his little town of Sighet, Hungary, tells the story. \\xa0When 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\\u2019s 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.\\xa0 The people who were slaughtered, many who were slaughtered before Wiesel\\u2019s 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\\u2019s world disintegrated beyond just what could be described as death.
\\xa0
But he isn\\u2019t unique in this- as we know- what happened to Elie wasn\\u2019t an isolated case of a evil human doing one bad thing- as the world watched- before and during the World War 2 holocaust,
\\xa0
\\xa0it is estimated that 6 millions Jews and 5 million non-Jews were systematically erased.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 He did not live a life full of bitterness and excuses for failure, depression or defeat.\\xa0 His story is a message of redemption and forgiveness that leads to peace.\\xa0 But how did he get there?\\xa0 \\xa0How does a person like that become a spiritual leader?
\\xa0
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?\\xa0 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.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 His story is powerful- his life is powerful and his words are powerful.\\xa0 I feel a true sense of humility in discussing his work, and a grave responsibility to communicate it properly.\\xa0 So, this is how I would like to approach his story- this week, we\\u2019re going to go throuugh his biography- and tell his whole story, not just the months he was at Auschwitz.\\xa0 We\\u2019ll\\xa0 conclude by reading his remarks to President Ronald Reagan in 1985 in regard to President Reagan\\u2019s visit to the German cemetery in Bitburg.\\xa0 Next week and for the two weeks after that we will study the text of Night through the lens of history and literature- we\\u2019ll explain the historical context of the story itself, the art involved and highlight the important themes Wiesel deliberately laces throughout the text.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 So, with the plan laid out, let\\u2019s take a look at the man from Sighet.\\xa0 Garry, where is Sighet?\\xa0
\\xa0
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\\u2019s this same area we\\u2019re talking about today- today these mountains border \\xa0Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Serbia, but mostly Romania.\\xa0 Sighet, Elie\\u2019s town is on the border between Romania and the Ukraine- but that\\u2019s 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\\u2019ll find that around 80% of the people there are in fact, Romanian, but that was not the case in 1940.\\xa0 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, \\u201cThey called him Moshe the Beadle, as though he had never had a surname in his life.\\xa0 He was a man of all work at a Hasidic synagogue.\\u201d\\xa0 And I know we\\u2019ll 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\\u2019s hometown of Prague, in the Czech republic.\\xa0
\\xa0
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\\u2019re listening to these in the order we recorded them.\\xa0 One thing I find amazing is that Wiesel never lost his love for this region although he never went back there to live.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 He said \\xa0it 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. \\xa0\\xa0And, as we\\u2019ll 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.\\xa0 He had three sisters- Hilda, Batya (or Beatrice), and the youngest Tsipora.\\xa0 They were a very literary family- Elie\\u2019s mother, Sara was a big reader and really pushed that amongst all her children.\\xa0 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.
\\xa0
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.\\xa0 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\\u2019s 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.\\xa0 At the end of the war, after being moved around and surviving one of Hitler\\u2019s infamous Death Marches Elie watches his father die of dysentery.\\xa0 All of this is in the memoir, but the memoir ends with him alone in Buchenwald, Germany.\\xa0 He is there for the now famous Jewish uprising against the SS in the camp.\\xa0 He survived and watched the arrival of the United States Third army that liberated the camp on April 11, 1945.
\\xa0
And, of course, even after liberation, Elie almost doesn\\u2019t survive- and actually lots of holocaust survivors died immediately after liberation.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 Wiesel ends Night with this famous moment where he looks in the mirror to see himself- this unrecognizable person.\\xa0 However, what is not in Night is his reaction to that person.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 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?\\xa0 What could he do?\\xa0 Imagine the lostness?\\xa0 There is no home to go back to? No world? No family? Nothing.\\xa0 He spoke four languages: Yiddish, Hebrew, Hungarian and German, and yet- even those could not serve him.\\xa0
\\xa0
True you must remember, the world, is still not a welcoming place for Jews in 1945, not even after this.\\xa0 Elie wanted to go to Palestine, but there were severe immigration limitations so that was out.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 He\\u2019s taken to an orphanage in Normandy- but can\\u2019t 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.\\xa0 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\\u2019s premiere universities.\\xa0 He studied philosophy, literature, language.\\xa0 He worked as a translator and even tried to join the Israeli army and go to Israel (he was rejected for medical reasons).\\xa0 Ultimately, he landed a job as a journalist and finally made it to Israel to work in the Tel Aviv office.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 It was in India that he learned English.
In his capacity as a journalist he gets an opportunity that will change his life forever.\\xa0 In 1954, Wiesel interviewed French Nobel Prize-winning novelist Franc\\u0327ois Mauriac.\\xa0 Mauriac took a strong interest in this bright, young holocaust survivor.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 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\\u2019t written in English or French but in Yiddish- because that is Wiesel\\u2019s heart language- this original memoir is eight-hundred pages long.\\xa0 Sadly, but probably not surprisingly no one wanted to print this book, not even with the support of a Nobel Prize winner promoting it.\\xa0 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\\u2019s job invited him to move to NYC and be a foreign correspondent covering the UN.\\xa0 \\xa0NYC is ultimately where he settles for the rest of his life.\\xa0 Christy, what can you tell us about the NY years.
Well, it started a little rough. In 1956 \\xa0Wiesel was struck by a taxi while crossing the street.\\xa0 He had to have a ten hour surgery, was hospitalized for month and was in a wheelchair for over a year.\\xa0 But his problems weren\\u2019t just medical.\\xa0 He is actually still a stateless person at this time.\\xa0 Because he\\u2019s disabled he can\\u2019t travel to France to renew his identity card, but the problem is that without an identity card, he can\\u2019t renew his visa to stay in the United States.\\xa0 He\\u2019s like Tom Hanks character in that movie \\u2013 The Terminal.\\xa0 \\xa0
\\xa0
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.\\xa0 He does, though, years later, become a French citizen through his relationship to his then close friend Francois Mitterand who became \\xa0President of France.\\xa0
\\xa0
Getting back to Wiesel and writing, Wiesel\\u2019s mother who\\u2019s own father was a very devout Hasidic Jew had always wanted her son to be a Rabbi and a phd.\\xa0 His dad, who he watched die slowly in Buchenwald, was a man who actually had been jailed (I didn\\u2019t 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\\u2019s life is this compulsion, if that\\u2019s the right word, this calling to communicate faith and truth through words.\\xa0 \\u2013 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.\\xa0 While he\\u2019s 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.\\xa0 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.\\xa0
\\xa0
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.\\xa0 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.
\\xa0
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.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 It\\u2019s going to start in 1958 with the release of Night or really La Nuit.\\xa0 It wasn\\u2019t in English.\\xa0 Mauriac wrote the forward for the book, helped him condense the longer version into 127 pages.\\xa0 Mauriac pressured France\\u2019s most pretigous publishing house, Les Editions de Minuit, to produce it- and it was an instant success.\\xa0 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.\\xa0
\\xa0
And interestingly enough he takes on an unusual genre.\\xa0 He doesn\\u2019t 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.\\xa0 He wrote primarily fiction- but fiction sort of because he would blend autobiography with fiction.\\xa0 Not too long after night \\xa0he composed L\\u2019Aube [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\\u2019s birth and struggle. The events were real, but the characters are blends of real and fiction. As for Le Jour or the Accident, it\\u2019s basically the story of his accident.\\xa0 So you can see the pattern.
\\xa0
\\xa0
And of course, he will go on to write basically one book a year for the rest of his life.\\xa0 I don\\u2019t want to imply that it was all fiction, he did write lots of non-fiction, but a lot of fiction too.\\xa0 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.
\\xa0
\\xa0
I know we are going to talk about Wiesel\\u2019s 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\\xa0Elie\\xa0Wiesel.\\xa0 He says this and I quote- "It is true that\\xa0Wiesel\\xa0comes 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\\xa0Elie\\xa0Wiesel\'s life and\\xa0work.\\u201d
\\xa0
\\xa0
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\\u2019t clear he believed that when he lived through the holocaust.\\xa0 He saw his survival as random and pointless- and maybe he was playing around with the meaning of life being that same thing.\\xa0 But eventually he understood that that is just not that case.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 He says this and I quote: \\u201cWe [the survivors] could have told the world: \\u2018We don\\u2019t 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.\\u2019 . . . [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.
\\xa0
\\xa0
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.\\xa0\\xa0 He became an advocate- for places well beyond Poland, Hungary or even Europe.\\xa0 The first place we see this is in his defense of Soviet Jews under the communist regime.\\xa0 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\\u2019t think about. In the preface to The Jews of Silence he wrote that \\u201cThe 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.\\u201d\\xa0 He fought for and succeeded in securing the unconditional release of the Soviet Jews from their bondage.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 He allowed himself to be interviewed by the world\\u2019s most influential journalists and ultimately won the Nobel Prize in 1986.
\\xa0
Of course, it\\u2019s this massive influence that leads us to the piece of literature, I want us to read today before we start with Night next week.\\xa0 It\\u2019s an address he gives in Washington DC, really it\\u2019s a public scolding addressed to Ronald Reagan.\\xa0 It\\u2019s an unusual turn of events, and a very unique time in history- that we\\u2019re actually old enough to vividly remember- Garry, set this up historically for us, then let\\u2019s read the speech he gives.
\\xa0
Sure, now remember, it\\u2019s 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.\\xa0 Ronald Reagan has planned a state visit to acknowledge that West Germany is a member of the free world.\\xa0 He\\u2019s trying to help recover a country plagued by the guilt of the Nazis- to allow historical forgiveness, allow the German people to progress.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 Elie Wiesel, who by this point, had a strong voice, verbally objected to this and raised his voice.\\xa0 Reagan, for political reasons, ultimately chose to NOT concede to Wiesel\\u2019s 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. \\xa0These are the words we\\u2019re going to read today.\\xa0 Christy, read for us, this moving piece of writing-
\\xa0
\\xa0Absolutely, and before I do, I want you to pay attention to\\xa0 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.\\xa0 Beyond that, this speech speaks for itself.
Christy, it feels inappropriate to pick that speech apart the way we normally analyze literature.\\xa0 There is a solemnity of tone, an emotion that still speaks as he talks about redemption as someone who lost everything and then rebuilt.\\xa0
\\xa0
You are absolutely right- and I\\u2019m not going to dissect it- although, I will next week, dissect the book.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 Wiesel took a long time to get married.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 These are Elie Wiesel\\u2019s words on the birth of his son- Garry will you read them:
\\xa0
\\xa0\\u201cMy son\\u2019s first name is Shlomo. It was my father\\u2019s name. His middle name, Elisha, , means \\u201cGod is salvation.\\u201d We [Jews] believe in names so\\xa0 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\\u201d\\xa0\\xa0 Later he said this, \\xa0And 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 meaning\\xadless, if he in turn will not transmit our story together, to his friends, and one day to his children.\\xa0 As the son of a survivor, Shlomo Elisha Wiesel thus carries on his back an awesome baggage of history.\\u201d
\\xa0
\\xa0
Well, it\\u2019s hard to imagine how it must have for both father and son at the age of fourteen, Elisha stood at his father\\u2019s 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\\xa0 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.\\xa0 That would be a hard legacy to live up to.\\xa0 God bless him.
\\xa0
That ends our first episode in this fantastic series on Elie Wiesel and the book night.\\xa0 Next week we will tackle that book, starting on page one sentence one (which we\\u2019ve already actually read), and then talk through chapters 1,2 and 3- and the Wiesel\\u2019s family life before the holocaust, the train ride to Auschwitz and their arrival at Birkenau.\\xa0 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\\u2019re a teacher, checking out or teaching materials on our website howtolovelitpodcast.com
\\xa0
Peace out
\\xa0
\\xa0
\\xa0
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
'