Refiner’s Fire: Elie Wiesel Poses Hard Questions from the Holocaust

“As surely as the victims are a problem for the Jews, the killers are a problem for the Christians.”

Elie wiesel is a jewish author all Christians ought to read. His Jacob-like struggle with God was born from his experience of the Nazi pogrom and his vision of the terrifying flames gushing from the tall chimneys of Auschwitz. Taken with his mother, three sisters, and father to the German concentration camp in 1944, he recounts the experience in Night (1958), his first book.

François Mauriac, the Christian French novelist, who encouraged Wiesel to tell his story, wrote the foreword to Night. He describes what engaged him “most deeply”: “The child who tells us his story here was one of God’s elect. From the time when his conscience awoke, he had lived only for God and had been reared on the Talmud, aspiring to initiation into the cabbala, dedicated to the Eternal. Have we ever thought about the consequence of a horror that, though less apparent, less striking than the other outrages, is yet the worst of all to those of us who have faith: the death of God in the soul of a child who suddenly discovers absolute evil? [emphasis added].”

Night; the flames of the crematorium; absolute evil.

Here is Wiesel’s description of arrival at Birkenau, the reception center for Auschwitz:

An SS noncommissioned officer came to meet us, a truncheon in his hand. He gave the order:

“Men to the left! Women to the right!”

Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight short, simple words. Yet that was the moment when I parted from my mother. I had not had time to think, but already I felt the pressure of my father’s hand: we were alone. For a part of a second I glimpsed my mother and my sisters moving away to the right. Tzipora held Mother’s hand. I saw them disappear into the distance; my mother was stroking my sister’s fair hair, as though to protect her, while I walked on with my father and the other men. And I did not know that in that place, at that moment, I was parting from my mother and Tzipora forever. I went on walking. My father held onto my hand.

Behind me, an old man fell to the ground. Near him was an SS man, putting his revolver back in its holster.

Christians, I think, tend to forget the absolute evil that was the crucifixion. Our shining silver crosses and crucifixes decorate our fallen humanity; we hardly feel the weight. Yet if we take Jesus’ words seriously—that what we do or fail to do to the least of our brothers and sisters we do to him—then every death in that Holocaust was also in some very real sense the death of Christ: Who is guilty? Who is not guilty?

My nine-year-old son said to me recently that the world would be such a good place if God simply got rid of all the evil: people who pollute our environment; thieves who steal our goods; killers who steal our lives. I agreed. Yet I saw immediately that if all evil were gotten rid of, I, too, would no longer exist. Evil is so inextricably bound up in ourselves. Who is guilty? Who killed Elie Wiesel’s mother, his sister Tzipora, his father? Where was God? Why did God allow the Holocaust? Who is not guilty?

Wiesel’s works raise many questions for Christians and Jews, but there are no easy answers. In A Jew Today (1978), a collection of essays, Wiesel asks:

How is one to explain that neither Hitler nor Himmler was ever excommunicated by the Church? That Pius XII never thought it necessary, not to say indispensable, to condemn Auschwitz and Treblinka? That among the SS a large proportion were believers who remained faithful to their Christian ties to the end? That there were killers who went to confession between the massacres? And that they all came from Christian families and had received a Christian education?… It is a painful statement to make, but we cannot ignore it: as surely as the victims are a problem for the Jews, the killers are a problem for the Christians.

Wiesel’s novels and plays explore the human responses, primarily Jewish, but Christian, too, to a world where faith in a just and merciful God is constantly threatened by the presence of persons only too eager to hurt and maim and kill, and by the silence of that God in the face of such evil.

In his first novel, Dawn (1960), the central character is Elisha, an 18-year-old Jewish youth who has escaped the gas chambers of Buchenwald. How does one live with and understand the evil he has experienced?

The study of philosophy attracted me because I wanted to understand the meaning of the events of which I had been the victim. In the concentration camp I had cried out in sorrow and anger against God and also against man, who seemed to have inherited only the cruelty of his creator. I was anxious to reevaluate my revolt in an atmosphere of detachment, to view it in terms of the present.

Elisha, however, does not study philosophy but is recruited for a Jewish terrorist movement directed against the British forces occupying Palestine in the mid-1940s. As the novel begins, we discover that Elisha’s commander has chosen him to execute a British officer in reprisal for Britain’s execution of a Jewish prisoner:

Tomorrow, I thought for the hundredth time, I shall kill a man.… I did not know the man.… All I knew was that he was an Englishman and my enemy. The two terms were synonymous.

Thus Elisha, the former victim, becomes the killer, and we follow his thoughts through his dark night to the awaiting dawn and its consequences. The execution takes place, but the reversal of roles, we discover, is no solution; the killer only kills himself:

The night lifted, leaving behind it a grayish light the color of stagnant water. Soon there was only a tattered fragment of darkness, hanging in midair, the other side of the window. Fear caught my throat. The tattered fragment of darkness had a face. Looking at it, I understood the reason for my fear. The face was my own.

Other novels and other responses follow: The Accident (1961), where despair drives the Jewish survivor to cooperate with fate in his own destruction; The Town Beyond the Wall (1964), where another response is madness. Here the Jewish survivor, Michael, wants to return to his home town, Szerencsevaros, now behind the Iron Curtain, to confront the spectator who had stood at his apartment window and watched while the Jews of his town were sent to the concentration camps.

The Town Beyond the Wall is about all the walls (physical, psychological, spiritual) that exist to separate one person from another, and about the breaching of those walls, about reaching the city where real human beings meet face to face, recognize their common humanity, love, affirm one another in themselves. Embracing insanity, we find, like murder, like suicide, is evil.

Other novels include The Testament (1981), where the focus shifts from the Holocaust in Germany to the terrible persecutions of the Jews in Russia.

Wiesel’s stories bring us to the heart of darkness, but they do not leave us in despair, for we are led by his art to touch those depths in life where laughter, love, friendship, faith, understanding all point to an underlying mystery, an affirmation at the heart of Judaism in the Torah, one that, for Wiesel, reaches back to the story of Cain and Abel, the first victim. Writing—astonishingly!—of Abel’s guilt, Wiesel says:

In the face of injustice, one may not look the other way. When someone suffers, and it is not you, he comes first. His very suffering gives him priority. When someone cries, and it is not you, he has rights over you even if his pain has been inflicted by your common God.

… Abel did nothing—such was the nature of his fault” (Messengers of God).

Who is guilty? Who is not guilty?

Wiesel’s fiction explores human responses to evil, yet in the final analysis Wiesel is a contemporary Job, demanding a hearing, a contemporary Jacob, wrestling with God to understand, in the face of monstrous evil, the meaning of God’s apparent silence. The outcome of Wiesel’s struggle ought to concern every Christian.

L. EUGENE STARTZMANDr. Startzman is professor of English at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky.

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