The survivor of the darkest night -- the
Holocaust and Auschwitz -- Elie Wiesel is dead. He was our worldly
conscience and the prince of light illuminating the Nazi darkness for
all the world's eyes to see. As the Jew often says, may his memory be a
blessing. He voyages ironically now into the darkness of the earth and
he will become intermingled with it as dust. This time he goes naturally
and as nature intended at age 87. It is the eighth wonder of the world
and is its miracle that he actually lived through the horrors his eyes
saw. I quote from his world famous book "Night" as he so eloquently and
with deep emotion conveys to us the living who never experienced what
it meant to live through the Holocaust in Auschwitz even for one night.
He said:
In Daniel Goldhagen's book "Hitler's Willing Executioners -- Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust" he describes the ordinary German, the everyday folk who were needed to make the functioning of the Holocaust work. They simply were doing the job assigned removing its goal of genocide from the forefront of their minds. What can we learn when man is reduced to untermenschen (subhuman) which make the bestial slaughter of innocent men, women and children palatable for other men to perpetrate. Hannah Ardent in her book "The Banality of Evil" (A description of Adolf Eichmann the designer of what to do about the "Jewish Question") says profundities. Eichmann was not a monster. He was an ordinary being and describes the perverse actions of normal human beings that become easy for them to do as they incorporate its nationalist rationalizations into every day life. He was doing it for his country. He was only following orders.
The profound question, of course, is what can we learn from this bastardization of human behavior? Never Again rings in my ears always as I look out on a world that seemingly has learned little from the monstrosity of its historically collective malevolent experience. Again and again we see actions of our own government and actions of those in the eternal civil wars of Middle East religious and tribal hatred which allow them do unspeakable things no one should have the right to do. Throwing bodies from buildings, placing human cargo in iron carts sunk into the depth of the sea to drown in a horrific death; heads lopped off simply because they are from another group or tribe as if they were trees cut to build a house. What can we do to stem the tide both at home and abroad to save ourselves from ourselves?
The first
and, perhaps, the only step is for the individual we to choose life over
death, light over the darkness of our most ugly inclinations and say
NO; simply NO. I will not do this; I will not hate; and I will not
perpetrate violence on other innocent beings. Every one of the living
has the right to its life. What else can we do since obviously never
again becomes always again. The Prince of Light, Elie Wiesel's life
counted for something but it is up to us, the living, now to understand
and enforce his message.
“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp, which has
turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times
sealed....Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and
my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things,
even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”
“Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out,
swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing...
And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes.
And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still
red, his eyes not yet extinguished.
Behind me, I heard the same man asking:
"For God's sake, where is God?"
And from within me, I heard a voice answer:
"Where He is? This is where--hanging here from this gallows..."
That night, the soup tasted of corpses.”
We, the living, are the lucky ones
by an accident of timely birth and our gift of geographical removal
never saw the unspeakable that his words convey to our minds eye. Man's
capability of madness is, truly, incomprehensible.“Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out,
swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing...
And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes.
And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still
red, his eyes not yet extinguished.
Behind me, I heard the same man asking:
"For God's sake, where is God?"
And from within me, I heard a voice answer:
"Where He is? This is where--hanging here from this gallows..."
That night, the soup tasted of corpses.”
In Daniel Goldhagen's book "Hitler's Willing Executioners -- Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust" he describes the ordinary German, the everyday folk who were needed to make the functioning of the Holocaust work. They simply were doing the job assigned removing its goal of genocide from the forefront of their minds. What can we learn when man is reduced to untermenschen (subhuman) which make the bestial slaughter of innocent men, women and children palatable for other men to perpetrate. Hannah Ardent in her book "The Banality of Evil" (A description of Adolf Eichmann the designer of what to do about the "Jewish Question") says profundities. Eichmann was not a monster. He was an ordinary being and describes the perverse actions of normal human beings that become easy for them to do as they incorporate its nationalist rationalizations into every day life. He was doing it for his country. He was only following orders.
The profound question, of course, is what can we learn from this bastardization of human behavior? Never Again rings in my ears always as I look out on a world that seemingly has learned little from the monstrosity of its historically collective malevolent experience. Again and again we see actions of our own government and actions of those in the eternal civil wars of Middle East religious and tribal hatred which allow them do unspeakable things no one should have the right to do. Throwing bodies from buildings, placing human cargo in iron carts sunk into the depth of the sea to drown in a horrific death; heads lopped off simply because they are from another group or tribe as if they were trees cut to build a house. What can we do to stem the tide both at home and abroad to save ourselves from ourselves?
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