There, after embracing me, he assumed a grave, almost solemn mien. Listen to the old man that I am: one must speak out—one must also speak out. Encouraged by Mauriac, Wiesel revised and radically abbreviated his Yiddish work.
He brought the French version to Mauriac, who helped him find a publisher and contributed the foreword, writing:. And I, who believe that God is love, what answer could I give my young questioner, whose dark eyes still held the reflection of that angelic sadness which had appeared one day upon the face of the hanged child?
What did I say to him? Did I speak of that other Israeli, his brother, who may have resembled him— the Crucified, whose cross has conquered the world? Did I affirm that the stumbling block to his faith was the cornerstone of mine, and that the conformity between the Cross and the suffering of men was in my eyes key to that impenetrable mystery whereon the faith of his childhood had perished?
Zion, however, has risen up again from the crematories and the charnel houses. The Jewish nation has been resurrected from among its thousands of dead. It is through them that it lives again. We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear. All is grace. If the Eternal is the Eternal, the last word for each one of us belongs to Him.
This is what I should have told this Jewish child. But I could only embrace him, weeping. Nevertheless, the conversation between Mauriac and Wiesel reveals profoundly different sensibilities about the cross of Jesus.
And in those differing sensibilities lies the great theological divide between Jews and Christians: the cross as the cornerstone of faith for Christians and as a theological accusation against Jews as those responsible for the death of Jesus.
Fifty years of new understandings of biblical texts and of revised church teachings now enable us to teach and preach about the crucifixion of Jesus in ways reflective of its historical and theological complexity. Elie Wiesel believed that indifference lies at the heart of all evil. Mary C. He intervened vigorously in the s, condemning totalitarianism in all its forms and denouncing Fascism in Italy and Spain. After the war he increasingly engaged in political discussion.
He wrote De Gaulle , having officially supported him from Foreign journalists frequently come to see me. I am wary of them,torn as I am between my desire to speak to them freely and the fear of putting weapons into the hands of interviewers whose attitude toward France I do not know.
During these encounters, I tend to be on my guard. That particular morning, the young Jew who came to interview me on behalf of a Tel Aviv daily won me over from the first moment. Our conversation very quickly became more personal. Soon I was sharing with him memories from the time of the Occupation. It is not always the events that have touched us personally that affect us the most.
I confided to my young visitor that nothing I had witnessed during that dark period had marked me as deeply as the image of cattle cars filled with Jewish children at the Austerlitz train station…Yet I did not even see them with my own eyes. It was my wife who described them to me, still under the shock of the horror she had felt.
And who could have imagined such things! But these lambs torn from their mothers, that was an outrage far beyond anything we would have thought possible. I believe that on that day, I first became aware of the mystery of the iniquity whose exposure marked the end of an era and the beginning of another. The dream conceived by Western man in the eighteenth century, whose dawn he thought he had glimpsed in , and which until August 2, , had become stronger with the advent of the Enlightenment and scientific discoveries—that dream finally vanished for me before those trainloads of small children.
And yet I was still thousands of miles away from imagining that these children were destined to feed the gas chambers and crematoria. This, then, was what I probably told this journalist. He was one of them! He had seen his mother, a beloved little sister, and most of his family, except his father and two other sisters, disappear in a furnace fueled by living creatures. As for his father, the boy had to witness his martyrdom day after day and, finally, his agony and death. And what a death!
He refers to the French Revolution as an unfulfilled promise of progress, a dream that was initially fractured by the outbreak of World War I Germany declared war on August 2, and then smashed by the horrors of the Holocaust. Wiesel then revealed to Mauriac that he was one of the children in those cattle cars, and Mauriac begins discussing the strengths of Night. As an individual chronicle of life under the Nazis, Mauriac argues, the work merits attention as an incomparable story.
As a deeply believing Christian, he writes, he wanted to explain to Wiesel that he views suffering as the cornerstone of faith, not as an impediment to trust in God. He was a devout Roman Catholic whose writings often focus on the struggle between good and evil within human nature and the importance of faith.
He later became a staunch supporter of Charles de Gaulle, the French hero who helped liberate his nation from Nazi occupation in According to most accounts, it was Mauriac who persuaded Wiesel to write and publish Night.
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