The Survivor Dilemma

Elie Wiesel’s Early Work

Image via essay worth reading The Jerusalem Post

A Talmudic question has much intrigued me: Two men are stranded in the desert. Only one has water. If he shares it, they both die; if he keeps it, he lives and his companion dies. What should he do? Rabbi Akiva taught that the man has the right to drink it.

Before I begin this essay I introduce and celebrate our guest this week whose essay will appear soon: J.E. Petersen writes:

The Survivor Dilemma

The complex Talmudic question I posed to open this essay was addressed by Wiesel in a lecture he delivered, “Rabbi Akiva was very hard, very hard on the survivor.”

The “survivor” must be placed in context as a term that applies to all: Jews and Palestinians. Nicholas Kristof explains in The New York Times.

At the same time that Israel is being condemned for inhumanity in Gaza, anti-Semitism is on a dramatic rise. Here is an early quote from Wiesel on the fear Jews have in this moment of time and trial:

“As a Jew, I need Israel. More precisely, I can live as a Jew outside Israel but not without Israel.”

—Elie Wiesel (1928–2016), American author born in Romania, survivor of the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.

At this same moment: We have fascist promises from potential presidential candidate Trump that history will repeat: He calls his political opponents “vermin”. NPR explains

As horrifying, Trump says he will create detention camps. The Washington Post explains.

Let us hear Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller (14  January 1892 – 6 March 1984), German theologian and Lutheran pastor, whose words appear on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial:

"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me."

We must speak out to save democracy and condemn inhumanity.

Elie Wiesel on the Survivor

Wiesel is now perhaps more well-known for his Nobel Peace Prize, among a host of others, and the work he did as a Jewish activist for the greater part of his life than for his first four novels.

I argue here that Night¹ and the three novels that came in quick succession in the 1960’s inform the word “survivor,” whether it be Jew or Palestinian.

Night, first published in 1958, is a brief, salient hundred-page “testimony,” as Wiesel has called it, that was originally nine hundred pages. Here the reader finds a largely autobiographical account of what was arguably the central event in Wiesel’s life: Auschwitz.

From this telling of the horrors of the concentration camp, we learn that a man’s past and future may be tortured by an experience of this magnitude. Night gives us striking insight into the child before Auschwitz and the child-man who survives it.

We meet Eliezer, the central character of Night, in 1941 when he was a twelve-year-old boy, a Hasidic Jew, who lives in Sighet, a town in Transylvania. He was an unusual boy, one touched by a mystical belief in God. Eliezer is the narrator of the novel and he tells us,

“I was twelve. I believed profoundly. During the day I studied Talmud, and at night I ran to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the temple.”

He wanted to study and learn all, to go beyond the Talmud to the Cabbala with his Master Moché, the Beadle, who guides him in his study. Moché told this young boy,

“Man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him. That is the true dialogue. Man questions God and God answers. But we don’t understand his answers. We can’t understand them. Because they come from the depths of the soul, and they stay there until death. You will find the true answers, Eliezer, only within yourself.”

Wiesel is concerned in this novel with the search for God as a search for man’s identity.

When Eliezer was fifteen, he was faced with the horror of the Nazi concentration camps. More than the physical horror of any of the events in the camp was the horror of this mystical boy’s loss of faith and, perhaps as a result, loss of his identity, his place in life, his purpose on earth. Suddenly he was herded into a wagon with other Jews and suddenly “the world was a cattle wagon hermetically sealed.” We see how the absurd encroached on this boy’s life once filled with love of God.

When they arrived:

“In front of us flames. In the air that smell of burning flesh. … We had arrived at Berkinau, reception center for Auschwitz.”

The child began to cry, ‘Where is God?’ with no affirmation of His existence in this environment. Prayer soon had little meaning for him. He tells us that some of the others talked of God and of the hope of deliverance.

“But I had ceased to pray. How I sympathized with Job! I did not deny God’s existence, but I doubted His absolute justice.”

Eliezer cried out against God who was silent while children burned in the pits.

 “I was the accuser. God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone—terribly alone in world without God and without man. Without love or mercy. I had ceased to be anything but ashes, yet I felt myself to be stronger than the Almighty, to whom my life had been tied for so long.”

As Eliezer struggled with God, he struggled with his identity.

Eliezer’s relationship with his father became his only meaningful hold on life. They must stay together. They must live together. When Eliezer would not give up his gold crowned tooth, Frankel, the foreman, eventually obtained it by berating and assaulting the boy’s father. The importance of their staying alive together is seen when Eliezer and his father were forced to run with others from the camp as the Russians were to invade shortly. Eliezer had a wound on his foot. The pains were horrible and death welcome.

“My father’s presence was the only thing that stopped me. … He was running at my side, out of breath, at the end of his strength, at his wit’s end. I had no right to let myself die. What would he do without me? I was his only support.”

This love for his father struggles against the dehumanization that envelops all. Eliezer saw men trampled underfoot, dying as the prisoners were forced to travel. But no one paid attention. He lived among corpses as winter progressed and in every stiffened corpse, he saw himself. He heard of the old rabbi who lost his son in a crowd after three years of sticking together. And he realized that the son had wanted to get rid of his father, to free himself of the burden of an old man.

“And, in spite of myself, a prayer rose in my heart, to that God in whom I no longer believed. My God, Lord of the Universe, give me strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahou’s son has done.”

When he was fifteen, he watched a son and father fight over a morsel of bread amid the indifference of the others until both lay side by side, dead.

Indeed, it was difficult for this young boy to fight dehumanization. One day he watched his father being beaten with an iron bar.

“I had watched the whole scene without moving. I kept quiet. In fact I was thinking of how to get farther away so that I would not be hit myself. … That is what concentration camp life had made of me.”

When his father became ill, momentarily, he wished that he could get rid of this dead weight to survive himself. He became overwhelmed with shame, shame that would last forever. But again, when his father was near death and was dealt a violent blow by an officer, Eliezer tells us,

“I did not move. I was afraid. My body was afraid of also receiving a blow.”

This child survives to see himself in a mirror and to comment that “from the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes as they stared into mine has never left me.” The mystic soul of a twelve-year-old becomes the ravaged soul of a man, a man who says,

 “Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”

The novel focuses on how the inhumanity of the camps demeaned those who survived, how it could and, in many cases, did destroy every shred of self-respect, every belief in the significance of one’s identity.

The story of the effects of this experience is told and retold in the next three novels Wiesel wrote in the 1960s and that I’ll discuss in my next post here on Inner Life and that also deal with the survivor’s dilemma.

The dilemma cannot be transmuted into the affirmative temporal life of, for example, Camus’s doctor in The Plague. Here I compare Wiesel’s despair to that of Camus, as Wiesel admits to having been a deep reader of his work in his 1978 interview with The Paris Review and because Wiesel quotes Camus in The Accident.

I close with this from Camus in The Fall, “[A]fter a certain age every man is responsible for his face.”

Mary Tabor writes:

1. Night, translated by Stella Rodway, 1960.