"Not far from us, flames were leaping from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load -- little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it -- saw it with my own eyes ... Those children in the flames. (Is it surprising that I could not sleep after that? Sleep has fled from my eyes.)"
-Elie Wiesel, Night
“In literature, Rebbe, certain things are true though they didn’t happen, while others are not, even if they did.”
-Elie Wiesel speaking of his book Night,
from his Memoir: All Rivers Run to the Sea
Observation by a Jewish sociologist/camp survivor:
“...most of the memoirs and reports [of 'Holocaust survivors'] are full of preposterous verbosity, graphomanic exaggeration, dramatic effects, overestimated self-inflation, dilettante philosophizing, would-be lyricism, unchecked rumors, bias, partisan attacks...”
—Samuel Gringauz,
"Jewish Social Studies" (New York),
January 1950, Vol. 12, p. 65.
«Not far from us, flames were leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load – little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it – saw it with my own eyes… those children in the flames. (Is it surprising that I could not sleep after that? Sleep had fled from my eyes.)
So this was where we were going. A little farther on was another and larger ditch for adults.
I pinched my face. Was I still alive? Was I awake? I could not believe it. How could it be possible for them to burn people, children, and for the world to keep silent? No, none of this could be true. It was a nightmare… Soon I should wake with a start, my heart pounding, and find myself back in the bedroom of my childhood, among my books…
My father’s voice drew me from my thoughts:
‘It’s a shame… a shame that you couldn’t have gone with your mother… I saw several boys of your age going with their mothers…’
His voice was terribly sad. I realized that he did not want to see what they were going to do to me. He did not want to see the burning of his only son.
My forehead was bathed in cold sweat. But I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it…
‘Humanity? Humanity is not concerned with us. Today anything is allowed. Anything is possible, even these crematories…’
His voice was choking.
‘Father,’ I said, ‘if that is so, I don’t want to wait here. I’m going to run to the electric wire. That would be better than slow agony in the flames.’
He did not answer. He was weeping. His body was shaken convulsively. Around us, everyone was weeping. Someone began to recite the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I do not know if it has ever happened before, in the long history of the Jews, that people have ever recited the prayer for the dead for themselves.
‘Yitgadal veyitkadach shmé rabai… May His Name be blessed and magnified…’ Whispered my father.
For the first time, I felt revolt rise up in me. Why should I bless His name? The Eternal, Lord of the Universe, the All-Powerful and Terrible, was silent. What had I to thank Him for?
We continued our march. We were gradually drawing closer to the ditch, from which an infernal heat was rising. Still twenty steps to go. If I wanted to bring about my own death, this was the moment. Our line had now only fifteen paces to cover. I bit my lips so that my father would not hear my teeth chattering. Ten steps still. Eight. Seven. We marched slowly on, as though following a hearse at our own funeral. Four steps more. Three steps. There it was now, right in front of us, the pit and its flames. I gathered all that was left of my strength, so that I could break from the ranks and throw myself upon the barbed wire. In the depths of my heart, I bade farewell to my father, to the whole universe; and, in spite of myself, the words formed themselves and issued in a whisper from my lips: Yitgadal veyitkadach shmé rabai… May His Name be blessed and magnified… My heart was bursting. The moment had come. I was face to face with the Angel of Death…
No. Two steps from the pit we were ordered to turn to the left and made to go into a barracks»
(Night, pp. 43-45).
Wiesel: “It’s clear to me that one can’t be Jewish without Israel*. Religious or non-religious, Zionist or non-Zionist, Ashkenazi or Sephardic – all these will not exist without Israel. The State’s existence is the oxygen of the image and ideas of the new anti-Semitism.” *Dangerous, fanatical talk. It follows that if Israel goes, so also do Jews. With that thinking, anything is allowed to Jews to prevent it … is what Wiesel is getting at. The failure of Israel would be another form of “extermination of the Jews,” another “holocaust.” -cy
"Elie Wiesel passes for one of the most celebrated eyewitnesses to the alleged Holocaust. Yet in his supposedly autobiographical book Night, he makes no mention of gas chambers. He claims instead to have witnessed Jews being burned alive, a story now dismissed by all historians. Wiesel gives credence to the most absurd stories of other "eyewitnesses." He spreads fantastic tales of 10,000 persons sent to their deaths each day in Buchenwald.
When Elie Wiesel and his father, as Auschwitz prisoners, had the choice of either leaving with their retreating German "executioners," or remaining behind in the camp to await the Soviet "liberators," the two decided to leave with their German captors.
It is time, in the name of truth and out of respect for the genuine sufferings of the victims of the Second World War, that historians return to the proven methods of historical criticism, and that the testimony of the Holocaust "eyewitnesses" be subjected to rigorous scrutiny rather than unquestioning acceptance."
February 19, 2001
MINORITY REPORT
Wiesel Words
by CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
IS THERE a more contemptible poseur and windbag than Elie Wiesel? I suppose there may be. But not, surely, a poseur and windbag who receives (and takes as his due) such grotesque deference on moral questions. Look, if you will, at his essay on Jerusalem in the New York Times of January 24.
As a Jew living in the United States, I have long denied myself the right to intervene in Israel's internal debates.... My critics have their conception of social and individual ethics; I have mine. But while I grant them their right to criticize, they sometimes deny mine to abstain.
Such magnificent condescension, to grant his critics the right. And it is not certain from when Wiesel dates his high-minded abstention from Israel's internal affairs; he was a member of Menachem Begin's Irgun in the 1940s, when that force employed extreme violence against Arab civilians and was more than ready to use it against Jews. At all events, his dubious claim above is only a pompous preface to discarding nonintervention in the present because Jerusalem is at stake, and "the fact that I do not live in Jerusalem is secondary; Jerusalem lives within me." (Again the modesty.) There are, sad to say, serpents in Wiesel's internal Eden, and they too must be patronized:
That Muslims might wish to maintain close ties with this city unlike any other is understandable. Although its name does not appear in the Koran, Jerusalem is the third holiest city in Islam. But for Jews, it remains the first. Not just the first; the only.
"Might wish." "Ties." "Understandable." "Third holiest." Even these lordly and dismissive gestures clearly cost Wiesel something. After all, he announces that the city is "mentioned more than 600 times in the Bible," which (assuming for a moment that one ought to think like a religious fundamentalist in the first place) would give a Christian Arab -- these being at least 15 percent of the Palestinian population -- quite a strong claim on the old place. (Incidentally, let me ask any reader how often the city is mentioned in the Torah.) But for Wiesel all Arabs are Muslims, and even if they happen to live in Jerusalem, this is nothing to the way that Jerusalem dwells within Wiesel. Indeed, it would evidently dwell more comfortably within him if they did not live in it at all. Do I exaggerate? I don't think so. In a propaganda tour of recent history, he asserts that in 1948, "incited by their leaders, 600,000 Palestinians left the country convinced that, once Israel was vanquished, they would be able to return home."
This claim is a cheap lie and is known by Wiesel to be a lie. It is furthermore an utterly discredited lie, and one that Israeli officialdom no longer cares to repeat. Israeli and Jewish historians have exposed it time and again: Every Arab broadcasting station in the region, in 1947 as well as 1948, was monitored and recorded and transcribed by the BBC, and every Arab newspaper has been scoured, and not one instance of such "incitement," in direct speech or reported speech, has ever come to light. The late historian and diplomat Erskine Childers issued an open challenge on the point as far back as the 1950s that was never taken up and never will be. And of course the lie is a Big Lie, because Expulsion-Deniallies at the root of the entire problem and helps poison the situation to this day. (When Israel's negotiators gingerly discuss the right of return, at least they don't claim to be arguing about ghosts, or Dead Souls.)
In a brilliant reply to Wiesel published in Vesti, Israel's largest Russian-language paper, Israel Shamir compares him rather leniently not to Jabotinsky but to the Knight of the Doleful Countenance and his mad quest for purity:
Be reasonable, old man. Stay within the frame of the story and within the bounds of common decency. Don Quixote did not drive his jeep into Toboso to rape his old flame. OK, you loved her, and thought about her, but it does not give you the right to kill her children, bulldoze her rose garden and put your boots on her dining-room table.
Shamir speaks of the beautiful city that Palestinians centuries ago "adorned with a magnificent piece of jewelry, the Golden Dome of Haram al-Sharif, built their houses with pointed arches and wide porches, and planted cypresses and palm trees." He's wasting his time on Wiesel, who says that Palestine was a desert before he arrived there as one of Begin's thugs, and who slanders the people he helped dispossess, first by falsely saying that they ran away from their beloved ancestral hometown and second by disputing their right even to feel nostalgia for it.
In 1982, after Gen. Ariel Sharon had treated the inhabitants of the Sabra and Shatila camps as target practice for his paid proxies, Wiesel favored us with another of his exercises in neutrality. Asked by the New York Times to comment on the pogrom, he was one of the few American Jews approached on the matter to express zero remorse. "I don't think we should even comment," he said, proceeding to comment bleatingly that he felt "sadness -- with Israel, and not against Israel." For the victims, not even a perfunctory word.
As I write, it looks as if the same Sharon will become Israel's prime minister. If you recall, he occupied West Beirut in September 1982, after the assassination of the Maronite Prime Minister Bashir Gemayel, on the announced and highly believable pretext that Palestinian civilians would need protection from Phalangist reprisal. He then sent into their undefended camps the most extreme faction of the Phalangist militia and backed up the dirty work of these notorious fascists with flares during the night, and rear-guard cover during the day, for thirty-six hours before having them escorted out in triumph and thanked for their work. In other words, the bulk of US overseas military aid is about to be lavished on a man who stood with hands on hip, in belt and boots and steel helmet and binoculars, and saw a mound of human corpses rise, and who thought it good. For this outcome, the soil has been manured by the beautiful thoughts of Elie Wiesel.
Website footnote: Elie Wiesel even claims to be one of these prisoners atBuchenwald. The US Signals Corps picture was posed by US troops soon after they entered the Buchenwald camp near Weimar. Have readers any information on the picture? [
] Alan Heath (of Poland) responds (9.2.01): "The person in the top right hand corner whose face only is visible is Mel Mermelstein who recalls how it was taken in his book By Bread Alone." Our comment: Mermelstein and Wiesel both claim to have shared bunks at Buchenwald? Some people just want to be the corpse at every funeral and the bride at every wedding.
In 2014, 327 Holocaust survivors and descendants condemned Elie Wiesel's comments supporting the 2014 Israeli invasion of Gaza, in an ad in the New York Times:
"…we are disgusted and outraged by Elie Wiesel’s abuse of our history in these pages to justify the unjustifiable: Israel’s wholesale effort to destroy Gaza and the murder of more than 2,000 Palestinians, including many hundreds of children. Nothing can justify bombing UN shelters, homes, hospitals and universities. Nothing can justify depriving people of electricity and water."
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