Title: Elie Wiesel - Facts - NobelPrize.org
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Transcript from an interview with Elie Wiesel
Your prize is the only Peace Prize, certainly, that has been explicitly given concerning genocide and the need of remembrance. There have been some Prizes in Literature, Nelly Sachs, Imre Kertész, dealing with holocaust literature where I think in Peace Prize you are the only one and I wonder what your perspective is today, after some more genocides, after the rise of Neo Nazism over the world. Has your perspective changed as you look back over a large piece of history?
I’m a biologist and I wonder whether you would agree with me that civilisation and humanism are a thin veneer over a much deeper layer of primitive emotions?
Doesn’t that mean that the basic theories are not correct?
I think that human beings are capable of the worst things possible …
Oh, yes certainly, I mean all the inhuman totalitarian systems have their own “ethics”, meaning that it is not only good to kill, but it is justified and more to kill, I mean that was the Nazi philosophy.
But don’t you think that there are two things here, one at the individual level that is a limbic system, the lower republics in the loose federation of the brain, ready to take over as soon as we are stressed, and at the collective system there is a conformism.
So isn’t that the interesting thing to study, just that non-conformism, why.
You know Imre Kertész book, Being without a Fate … have you read it?
Have you read it?
In French? Because in that particular book, seeing Auschwitz through the eyes of a 14 year old, the amazing thing to me when I first read it, long before knowing him, was that when he sees and describes the most terrible things, things I can’t mention, he says “Well, this was to be expected, this is only natural, it could not be any other way” and what he’s surprised by is goodness. Goodness is what he didn’t expect. So what is the difference between his and your background?
It was a surprise?
But these were rare, right?
Of deportation …
You were surprised both by the evil and the good, Kertész is only surprised by the good, could it be that that difference, which I think is interesting, is that you are a religious person whereas he’s not?
Were you religious at that time?
But how do you solve that problem psychologically?
But you can live with it and still remain religious?
I didn’t divorce God, but I’m quarrelling and arguing and questioning …
How do you see the other genocides that are going on in the world all the time? Is it part of the same thing or is the Holocaust unique?
Yes absolutely.
I wonder whether you would agree with me, probably not. Two things. That killing the Jews, all the Jews to the very last one, even the converted to Jews, is a logical consequence and I suggest that’s logical of the paranoid type of anti-Semitism, the one that really believes firmly and honestly, I think, and like Hitler probably believed, that the Jews are the cancer of the world, and essentially believed the accusations which I put down in the Falsarium, the Protocols of the Wise of Zion. If you entertain that notion and you want to pull it out to its logical conclusion like Germans so often do and if you are forced in addition to that with large numbers of Jews concentrated that you don’t know what to do with them, that killing them is a logical conclusion.
And that brings me to the derivative question that you speak about: America, the silence of the world and the total indifference of the world. Actually in Hungary, I think we probably both experienced, to me the great surprise was a total indifference of the majority of the Hungarians about what was going to happen to us and that I would not have expected. And we were part of the same culture, we spoke the same language, we loved the language and the literature at least, some of our fathers had been great patriots fighting the wars, therefore one would have expected a little more sympathy, a little more help. There was some help but that to me the greatest surprise is not the Nazis, not the killers, and not the Arrow Cross, but the indifference of the vast majority. If you compare to say to the Danish.
Oh yes, I know that, yes..
Night, yes.
And do you have an answer to that now?
So what did that moment lead to, how did your feelings change radically and forever towards Hungarians?
You know that there is a statue of you, a bust, on the corridor of the first floor of the Hungarian Academy of Science, did you know that? And that’s where all the Hungarian Nobel Laureates are put on display, and they will gather everyone they can for instance about Imre, he was a Hungarian writer, but also Hershko, yes, yes, they announced him as a Hungarian Laureate, even the Swedish people /- – -/ and said Hungarian Laureate. Whereas of course what all the Hungarians wanted to do, was to kill him and his family. So how do you feel about that?
I did everything I could in my life to be immune to hatred, because hatred is a cancer.
Well, let’s turn it around then and I’m sure you know the film Shoa by Lanzmann, yes. You remember that wonderful idyllic scene in front of the church on a beautiful Sunday morning in the spring and there are girls dressed in white in the procession, and there are these wonderful old peasant women who could be anybody’s grandmother and they’re so full of beauty and love, and then Lanzmann let interpreters and asks questions: Is this the church where the Jews have been, and how many and was there any toilet? And he gets the answers and of course it immediately appears that these were actually terrible conditions, and then he says: Is it true that this church was put on fire with all the Jews in it? Yes, yes and then suddenly you see the camera focuses on one face, it’s one of these beautiful old women, and suddenly it’s distorted in an ugly horrible grimace and she starts shouting: It’s right, they killed Christ! and then suddenly they’re all shouting. So would you agree with me that one important source of anti-Semitism that’s surviving to /- – -/ is in the evangelia ?
Officially yes.
That’s interesting.
You feel relatively good about it?
I am glad you say that. I once had a correspondence with one of the Editors in Chief of one of the daily papers here in Stockholm because some Jews here in the city asked me to go along with them, to him, because this was a time when there was very much anti Israeli publicity, 20 years ago. There’s always a lot, but this was more than usual, and some of the publicity was different in gliding from anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism. And we went up to see him and we had a long discussion which was very fruitful, but then the English correspondence and I wrote to him that I believe that every child who learned the ascent of the Evangelia at the age of six or seven may have an anti-Semitic bias without knowing it, and he, a very honest man, wrote back to me saying “I don’t believe that what you are saying is true, but I cannot exclude it and that worries me”, which is very good.
But do you agree that maybe an unholy alliance between the anti-Semitism of the left, the old type Christian anti-Semitism and then the new Muslim or let’s say Jihad type of anti-Semitism.
There is a coalition, yes.
And do you also go to Muslim countries?
Well I think it is extremely important and just like during the Cold War, the Pugwash Conferences,/- – -/ , the Spirit of …
And do you find that you can talk across the barriers of hate?
As to the youth culture today … Sorry I’m sort of lifting into a bit wider questions, but how do you see, are you pessimistic about it and of all this junk that inundates the young? The disappearance of the importance of learning, of education, it seems alright in some places /- – -/.
They are selected, of course …
What do you tell them, may I ask, when they ask that ever returning question “We don’t understand how this could have happened, this is impossible to understand”. Do you say that it is possible to understand?
No you don’t say that?
Could it had been avoided in any other way than by stopping Hitler?
Yes, I wanted to ask you that question. Did you get an answer?
Yes, but the President, the later Presidents, they probably wouldn’t know …
So they couldn’t answer you? Did you ask the British?
Did you never, did he never analyse it?
There is a major new book about Eichmann, I didn’t read, I just saw the review in the New York Review of Books this week and apparently the book is a very good study, but the word that comes back about Eichmann all the time is “contingency” and depending on really unimportant things this book of contingency that influences decisions in this direction or that direction, or the absence of decisions. Could it be just that? I mean chaos theory.
… they could have saved so many people and they didn’t.
The last question, do you know, or know of Rudolf Vrba.
Have you met him?
Yes you wrote about him, that he’s a genuine hero.
So he, his book was first called I Cannot Forgive and then he changed it into I Escaped from Auschwitz. He is, I think, quite of the same opinion as you are, although he’s more bitter I think about the Jewish leadership.
But I think Vrba overestimates one thing and I keep telling him I am your guinea pig because I can tell you that your theory I have tested in life, namely my boss whom I worked for at the Jewish community, long time gone, a Rabbi, he showed me the report of Vrba and Wetzler during the first days of May in 1944.
Yes. That’s why I escaped, that’s why I went underground, he showed it to me in May …
Yes I’ve written about it, but maybe it’s not translated.
Yes I will send you what I have about it, I have now an essay on it and also on Vrba and my contacts with Vrba. Because what happened was that he showed me the report, it was a typewritten report, a carbon copy, and I saw one copy like that at the Wallenberg exhibition recently, it might have been the same copy. They took me, they made a film about Wallenberg, they took me to the same room where I have read this report, it’s still the same small room in the kibbutz house and I felt again exactly the same feeling I had then, namely a mixture of nausea and intellectual satisfaction. I knew it was true. It is written with such scientific precision but I was then allowed to go and tell my closest friends, my relatives and so I went straight to my uncle, living across the street, he was my father substitute, my father died when I was one, and showed it to him.
Now, he was a rheumatologist, an educated man, he was really like a father to me and he liked me very much, he loved me very much, at this time the only time in my life he got so mad that he almost hit me in the face and he said: Have you gone crazy to believe this? And then I went on and on and told other people, whoever it was, middle aged or had possessions, had family, they said this cannot be true. Young people like myself with no dependence, they believed it and they went underground like myself. I think that the idea of a publication of this would have led to something major, I don’t think that’s true.
I’m sure that could have been the case in many places, but perhaps not …
But isn’t it also dependent on the beholder?
Yes but the evolution of language is like the evolution of the poison of the snake, or the claws of the tiger, it can be an instrument of truth, it can be an instrument of lies.
Amos Oz said once that he is qualified to become a Professor of comparative fanaticism because he was living in the midst of all the difference …
And Elie I think your words carry us very far.
And I hope you will continue in the same spirit.
Thank you very much.
Interview, December 2004
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Content: Genocide is something else. Genocide has been actually codified by the United Nations. It’s the intent of killing, the intent of killing people, a community in this culture so forth, but no other people has been really interested. Rwanda, God knows I was involved in trying to save the Rwandan people and Sudan now. It’s a mass murder. Mass murder is a terrifying word. We don’t have to go further than that. Cambodia came close to, but what was it, Cambodians killing Cambodians after all. So therefore I think we should be very careful with vocabulary. I wonder whether you would agree with me, probably not.