The Messenger

It is 60 years since a boy named Elie Wiesel assumed the burden of memory for 6 million people who did not survive the Holocaust. The horror he witnessed as a child in concentration camps was so indelibly seared into his soul that he became a living memorial to it.

At 71, he is still the world’s most outspoken Holocaust survivor, a complicated and controversial man who refuses to be quiet or stand still. He is revered as a speaker, teacher, author of 40 books, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and hundreds of other honors, and as a fierce witness-bearer to human suffering in all places--Albania, Serbia, Nigeria, South Africa, Cambodia to name a few.

Still, he is not sure anything he has ever written, taught, said or done is enough. Often, he wonders if his humanitarian efforts have made any difference at all, he writes in the second book of his memoirs, “And the Sea Is Never Full” (Alfred A. Knopf). And in Los Angeles recently, he says it again. “I don’t know if I have made a difference. I know something more must be said, and I haven’t said it yet. I am still looking for the words.”

As a child who survived three death camps, where he saw his family and thousands of others killed, he has felt a duty to “bear witness” to the tragedy. For the first 10 years after he was freed, however, he could find no words. Then, at 25, the floodgates of his memory opened, and he began to write and speak prodigiously about what he had seen.

As he became famous and revered, he was asked to be an emissary for many heads of state who wanted him to visit trouble spots and offer his evaluations and advice.

Recalling the Kosovo refugee camps, which he visited this year at President Clinton’s request, he holds his hands to his head and moans, “My God, to look at those little children, to know what they have lived through and seen. I literally went from morning to night, from one person to another, just listening, trying to understand. Then I came back and gave my report. But that is never enough, never enough. . . .”

On his trip to L.A., he faced the future--in the form of 200 Jewish children in a Tustin temple. Most of the 10-year-olds had not yet learned about the Holocaust, and they weren’t going to hear about it from him. They heard tales of his early childhood in a small European town, where his family was large and loving, and he had to light a lantern when he awoke on frosty winter mornings because there was no electricity yet.

When Rabbi Elie Spitz, of Temple B’nai Israel in Tustin, asked Wiesel what he wanted the children to learn and remember, Wiesel replied: “Be sensitive to the needs of all others, of everyone you meet. Remember that Adam and Eve weren’t Jewish--they were human.”

The voice came from somewhere deep within, soft, low, heavily accented with the lilt he’d learned in the little Transylvanian town of Sighet, where his parents and little sisters, aunts and uncles and cousins--in fact, everyone in the neighborhood--spoke only Yiddish.

What the Tustin children didn’t hear was that his safe and cozy childhood ended abruptly. The soldiers came, put all the Jews in boxcars, transported them to concentration camps and exterminated most of them.

Marked Forever

By Sadness

The memories still burn like raging flames in Wiesel’s mind, and the pain is transmitted through his eyes. People who meet him even briefly, or see him from a distance when he speaks, almost always note the sadness in his eyes. But memory also seems to be the fuel for his unflagging energy.

On the day of his L.A. visit, he awoke at home in New York in the early morning, flew to Los Angeles for an interview at 10, drove to Santa Monica for a radio show, then went to Orange County to meet with the children. After that he gave an evening talk to 900 temple congregants. Then, without stopping for rest, he caught the red-eye back to New York. Wiesel is slim and slightly built--and far more vigorous than he looks.

Wiesel says his deepest concern now is fanaticism, which has escalated in the past 10 years. “I talk about it everywhere I go. It is the greatest danger the world faces. We have it in religion, in politics, in culture. Fanaticism is hatred,” he says, “which, if combined with power, can ruin the planet.

“Out here in L.A., you have the deniers of the Holocaust, for example. They are so vicious that I would never grant them the dignity of a debate. I would never argue with them or answer their questions. They are here, and they are everywhere.”

Wiesel says he has “a desk full of death threats” as payment for all his witnessing. This is partly because he is a Jew, he says, and because “there are still fanatics in the world who love to hate the stranger, or what I call ‘The Other’--no matter who The Other is. In this country, it is often Hispanics, blacks or Jews--anyone who is not exactly like themselves.”

Then why did Wiesel’s message to the children seem so . . . well, optimistic? Why did he adopt such an upbeat tone? Why, on the eve of the millennium, if so much is still wrong in the world . . . he stops his questioner in mid-flight.

“It’s because there is so much more right with the world now than there once was. Look, I don’t hold with all this millennium who-ha-ha. But I believe this last century was very special because it was so extreme--it oscillated between the highest hope and lowest abyss.

“On the side of evil, you had two totalitarian world wars and ideologies, plus the Gulag, and, of course, the Holocaust.

“On the good side, you had the end of fascism and the end of communism both in this century--actually, within the span of one life. We have seen communism victorious, with the Soviet empire greater than ever before. Then, poof, it collapsed from within. No intelligence service in this world had seen it coming. Not the CIA, the KGB or the Mossad.

“And in this one century imperialism disappeared. Colonialism disappeared. Apartheid disappeared. And for us Jews, Israel came into being.

“In the beginning of this century there were not even 20 organizations that dealt with human rights. Today we have 2,000-plus committees, commissions and groups that are doing good work.”

In the new century, Wiesel says, by now smiling, “we will see Israelis and Arabs living in peace. I am sure of that.”

His face brightens even more as he talks of the world’s young. “Many young people I meet are so caring, so good. I see them everywhere I go. They want to learn about the past. They are interested in making wrong things right. I have tremendous faith in them.” He has “particularly strong faith” in the young Germans he has met, he says. “They are so good and so motivated. I believe they may do great things.”

In his memoirs, Wiesel writes that he bears no malice toward Germans whose parents and grandparents were Nazis. He does not believe in collective guilt, he says. “The children of killers are children, not killers. We must never blame them for what their elders did.” He holds them responsible only for “what they do with the memories of their elders’ crimes.”

For Wiesel, memory is everything. “It is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it,” he writes.

Documenting an

Unforgettable Journey

He has been accused of “being too Judeo-centric,” of “using the Holocaust” to gain fame or to make money. He has been called “too close to the Holocaust to be a reliable witness to it.” He has even been accused of imagining it.

It would be laughable if it weren’t so demented and sad, he says.

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.

Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.

Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. 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.

Wiesel wrote those words 46 years ago, in his first book, “Night.” It is a slim, simple volume that has become a classic, and is now taught in many public schools. It takes about an hour to read, and more than a lifetime to forget.

He was 25 when he wrote it and had spent the 10 previous years, since his liberation, in almost total silence. He considered himself a dead person, he writes, when he was freed from camp at 15 and taken to France. He knew no one there. He was an orphan. He was stateless. He had no language the French could comprehend--he spoke and wrote only Yiddish. He was penniless, living on his own, and yet he survived again. He learned to read and write French, found his way into schools, scrounged for food and lodging and friendship, and a way to make sense of what had happened. He eventually became a journalist. “Night” was the beginning of his break with silence, of his life as a witness-bearer who would try to shake the world from its lethargy.

Since then, Wiesel has had 40 books published on various subjects, very few of them involving the Holocaust. The word “Holocaust” itself is one he tries not to use any more, he says--although it was he who popularized it in the first place, early in his career. “I was writing an essay on the Bible, on the sacrifice of Isaac. The part where God said to Abraham, ‘Bring me your son, your only son, the one that you love. . . .’ The word ‘holocaust’ in that context means a burnt offering . . . so I used the word in my essay, and it caught on.”

But the word no longer means what it did when he wrote it, he says. “Now people believe they must exaggerate in order to get attention. So everything bad becomes a holocaust. I myself have heard a sports announcer speak about his team’s defeat as a holocaust. Every upheaval, in L.A. and New York, is called a holocaust. Of course, there are many valid reasons to protest and complain,” Wiesel says. “But why compare things to something they do not remotely resemble?”

What word would he use instead?

“In truth, there are no words, there are simply no words,” he says.

A Way for Cultures

to Coexist in Peace

After years spent studying the world’s great philosophers and writers, of poring over the Bible, Talmud, Torah and other ancient texts, of discussions with inspired social and religious leaders, Wiesel still has no answer to the question of what makes people good or evil. “I can give all the usual answers--education, home, parents, peer pressure. But these are just factors. The mystery of why people become good or evil is still just that--a mystery.” But he has thought of one “rational approach” to ensuring more goodness in humanity. It is respect. “If I respect The Other for whatever The Other is, and The Other respects me for whatever I am, then there can be understanding and even great friendship between all people.”

Wiesel still writes his books in French. His wife, Marion, whom he married when he was 40, translates them for publication into English. He has one son, Elisha, 27, who “doesn’t like me to discuss him in interviews.”

After a life lived backward--learning about death before he had experienced life--Wiesel has reached a pinnacle of respect and success few achieve. Has he gotten happier as he’s grown older? Has the sadness receded?

“The sadness will always be mine, always be there. But my role is to find some hope. And I do see it in the world. Jews and Christians have so many possibilities of living together. Never before have there been so many good changes. Even the Pope has had a concert commemorating the Holocaust in the Vatican. He’s established relations with Israel. He speaks a lot about anti-Semitism. The future may be good.”

Bettijane Levine can be reached by e-mail at bettijane.levine@latimes.com.