In the aftermath of the Shoah, different nations embraced different narratives of the tragedy. Today, though, the world needs to hear all of these complementary messages.
Almost inconceivably, the two most acclaimed Holocaust writers were imprisoned in the same Auschwitz sub-camp, Monowitz, at the same time. Some survivors even remembered them occupying the same block. There, they suffered the same unspeakable deprivations, the deadly cold, disease, hunger, and dehumanization. In that insanely polyglot place, they both learned the lifesaving lingua franca—German—and miraculously passed through selections. And even after liberation, when tens of thousands still died, they somehow endured.
Yet, despite all their shared horrors, Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi emerged with profoundly different versions of the Holocaust’s meaning and lessons. Their memoirs made them national icons, not only because of the compelling voices in which they were told, but even more so because of what their audiences were willing to hear.
Americans would not have listened to the enraged Wiesel who staggered out of Germany’s Buchenwald concentration camp, one of the relative few to have survived the agonizing march from Poland. In the first drafts of what would become his classic, Night, Wiesel expressed fury at the Germans, his family’s Christian neighbors, Jewish collaborators inside the camps, indifferent Jews overseas, and especially God. He described desperate sexual encounters among prisoners likely to die and the rape of German women by newly liberated survivors. Virtually all of this rawness was excised from La Nuit, first published in 1958, under the mentorship of the French Catholic humanist François Charles Mauriac. As noted by the critics Ruth Franklin, Ron Rosenbaum, and others, Mauriac condensed an embittered 865-page Yiddish manuscript into 254 pages of literary French all but drained of acrimony. The need for revenge was replaced by acceptance of the silent martyrdom traditionally preferred by the Church. Originally a cry of despair, the description of a Jewish boy’s hanging by the SS became, in Wiesel’s new homogenized version, a parable of saintly suffering.
Nevertheless, La Nuit could scarcely find a publisher, must less a wide readership. Nor was it an instant success in America, where the 1960 translation sold just 3,000 copies. Over the next 50 years, though, that number would soar exponentially, surpassing 6 million. Along the way, Night was selected by Oprah’s Book Club and spent 18 months at the top of the New York Times Best Seller List. Wiesel was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Nobel Peace Prize. An entire generation of American high-school students learned about the Holocaust almost exclusively from Night.
That triumph owed as much to Wiesel as it did to his adopted country. In terms of Holocaust memory, the United States also evolved. During the 1950s and ’60s, the Final Solution was barely discussed, even among American Jews, and then mostly in whispers. The photographs taken at Buchenwald by my uncle Joe, a U.S. Army officer, were hidden in a cubby under our basement stairs. In five years of Hebrew school, I learned about the miracle of Israel but virtually nothing about the murder of a third of my people 20 years earlier. When, at age 15, I heard a lecture at the Jewish community center by a frail-looking writer named Elie Wiesel, I was shocked that someone would speak so publicly about Auschwitz.
The radical change came in the ’70s, after the Six-Day War gave American Jews the confidence to confront the Holocaust and after the Yom Kippur War dislodged Israel as the centerpiece of American Jewish identity. One result was the Soviet Jewry movement—spurred in part by Wiesel’s seminal book The Jews of Silence—but also by the emergence of Holocaust awareness. Lucy Davidovicz’s The War Against the Jews was published in 1975, followed by the widely popular TV miniseries Holocaust three years later, and President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 Commission on the Holocaust, chaired by Wiesel. Holocaust-studies programs proliferated, as did March of the Living–type pilgrimages to Poland. The process climaxed in 1993 with the opening of the $190 million United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C. “A museum is a place that should bring people together,” Wiesel declared, “not set people apart. People … should feel united in memory [and] bring the living and the dead together in a spirit of reconciliation.”
Reconciliation, rather than retribution, became the message that Wiesel and the museum he championed brought to Americans. “Even in darkness it is possible to create light and encourage compassion,” he wrote. “I still believe in man in spite of man.” Without conceding the uniquely Jewish nature of the Holocaust, and its centrality in his conflicted relationship with God, Wiesel told a different story to his countrymen. This was the hopeful theme of Schindler’s List and the many films and novels about Germans who opposed Nazism and about gentiles who saved Jews. It was evident in the purified diary of Anne Frank, whose “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are good at heart” anticipated Wiesel.
Read: Elie Wiesel and the agony of bearing witness
Could it have been otherwise? Would Oprah have interviewed a survivor who demanded the eye-for-an-eye execution of 6 million Germans? Would hundreds of thousands of American young people of all backgrounds pass through a memorial that taught “Never again” as a pledge to armed resistance rather than a plea for universal love?
Elie Wiesel understood that Americans could be educated about the Holocaust only in their own language: affecting and ultimately redemptive. That language had to include, as the memorial makes clear in the opening of its mission statement, “the Gypsies, the handicapped … Poles … homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war and political dissidents,” who were also victims of the Holocaust. And that language could not be overly critical of America. Some scholars have alleged that the museum soft-pedaled President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s abandonment of the Jews and President Barack Obama’s refusal to intervene in Syria. At the Holocaust Memorial–sponsored rotunda ceremony I attended each year as Israel’s ambassador, congressional leaders and administration officials heard praise for the GIs who liberated Dachau, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen, but scarcely a word about America’s refusal to admit Jewish refugees or bomb Auschwitz.
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