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One Saturday night in fall
1944, a crowd of boys packed into the auditorium of their boarding
school for the weekly movie, preceded as usual by a newsreel. But this
week’s footage was not just another montage of Allied victories;
tonight, it contained some of the first publicly-released photos of the
Holocaust, taken by Soviet soldiers liberating the Majdanek
concentration camp. Tonight, the boys saw heaps of skulls, rows of
genocidal crematoria, and processions of emaciated survivors. How did
they react? John L. Loeb, Jr., one of the few Jewish students present,
remembers with painful clarity: “‘[i]t’s hard to believe, but when they
first showed those terrible pictures, the entire school cheered.’” (Kolowrat,
265)
As these teenagers cheered, another teenager thousands of miles away
lived in constant terror on the brink of starvation. In fall 1944,
sixteen-year-old Elie Wiesel struggled to maintain his humanity in the
Auschwitz III-Monowitz labor camp as he subsisted on meager rations,
endured arbitrary beatings, and watched his father’s health deteriorate.
(Wiesel, 66-78) After the Red Army took Warsaw in January 1945 and its
resumed race to Berlin, the S.S. force marched Wiesel, his father, and
66,000 other prisoners to Gliwice (Gleiwitz), Poland, where they were
herded into cattle cars and taken to the Buchenwald camp. (Wiesel 82)
Shortly thereafter, Wiesel’s father—whom Elie believed was his last
living relative—died. When liberation finally came a few months later,
Wiesel found himself utterly alone, his family, his possessions, and his
faith incinerated by Nazi hatred. He had one thing left: a choice. How
would he respond to his horrific experience? Would he despair and bury
his ordeal as society tried to forget its nightmarish past? Or would he
hope, remember, and speak out?
Wiesel chose the latter. As he recalls in the preface to the new
translation of Night, in postwar Europe, “[t]he subject [of the
Holocaust] was considered morbid and interested no one”; even in the
Jewish community, “…there were always people ready to complain that it
was senseless to ‘burden our children with the tragedies of the Jewish
past.’” (Wiesel xiv.) Nonetheless, he chose to bear witness, concluding
that “…having lived through this experience, one could not keep silent
no matter how difficult, if not impossible, it was to speak.” (Wiesel
x.) And he spoke of his ordeal without succumbing to despair; as he
noted 41 years later in his Nobel lecture, “Because I remember, I
despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.” (Wiesel
(2)) The consequences of his choice have been far-reaching; by calling
attention to the Holocaust Wiesel has likely done more than any other
individual to promise the children of tomorrow that “his past [will not]
become their future.” (Wiesel xv.)
Five years before Wiesel’s liberation, Varian Fry arrived in France, 14
years after leaving the aforementioned school. He had been sent to
Marseille by the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), a private American
organization established in 1940 to secretly evacuate 200 intellectuals
sought by the Nazis. Immediately upon arrival, Fry realized that there
were many more than 200 people in imminent danger. Like Wiesel, Fry had
a choice to make.
As Elie Wiesel rejected despair, Varian Fry rejected indifference. His
original mission called for three weeks in Marseille, but he chose to
stay as long as possible saving as many as possible. With only $3000
from the ERC and no clandestine operations training, Fry set up a
latter-day underground railroad, helping Jews and dissidents
intellectuals escape into Spain, on to Portugal, and by boat to the U.S.
By the time the Gestapo expelled Fry in September, 1941, his choice had
saved nearly 4000 lives.
Wiesel’s and Fry’s stories show that we must remember the Holocaust
above all for its lessons about human nature. While we may know that the
Nazis killed 6 million Jews, accounts like Wiesel’s Night personalize
and sharpen this statistic. And though putting individual faces on the
victims helps us emphasize with victims of current crimes against
humanity, it is perhaps even more important to humanize the
perpetrators. It is easy to think of the Holocaust as a uniquely
terrible deed committed by “them”—ruthless incarnations of evil, with
sinister black uniforms and totenköpfe on their caps—but if we are to
avert the Holocausts of the future, we must remember that the men
responsible for the slaughter were once as human as their victims. If
men born into one of the world’s most “civilized” societies could become
genocidal automatons, so could we.
However, the Holocaust also reminds us of humanity’s tremendous capacity
for good. Varian Fry was a normal newspaper editor before the war, but
confronted with evil, he became a hero, rising above the anti-Semitic
conditioning of his high school years and risking his life to act
“beyond himself.” (Isenberg, ix.) And Elie Wiesel’s commitment to
raising awareness of humanitarian issues—a commitment forged as a direct
result of the Holocaust—is equally heroic, although it is impossible to
calculate how many lives he has saved. While the Holocaust is generally
seen as a grim reflection on humanity, we must remember it also as a
reminder that ordinary individuals can choose to rise above any evil.
Examining Wiesel’s and Fry’s experiences and choices, we see that we too
have a profound choice to make. We can choose the path of least
resistance, or we can follow Elie Wiesel in rejecting despair and Varian
Fry in rejecting indifference, and in doing so empower ourselves to
combat prejudice, discrimination, and violence today’s world. In order
to make a difference, however, not everyone needs to be a Wiesel or Fry.
In the long term, the subtle choices we make to fight indifference and
despair within our immediate communities are crucial in ensuring that
“never again” is not an empty promise. We must, of course, stand up
against modern day atrocities like the genocide in Darfur, but for
deeper change, we must work in our everyday lives, doing what is right
before crisis strikes.
A final example demonstrates the power of this focus. John Loeb, after
witnessing the callous anti-Semitism that night in 1944 at his and
Varian Fry’s alma mater, ultimately became the United States Ambassador
to Denmark and a delegate to the United Nations. Despite his
high-profile work for peace, Loeb never forgot the seeds of hatred and
indifference sowed that Saturday in the auditorium. So in 1993, he
subtly helped uproot them by establishing the John L. Loeb Jr. prize,
awarded annually at his former school for the best essay on tolerance
and mutual respect. We will never know how much bigotry Loeb’s action
prevented, but quiet aggregation of such contributions brings about
immense change to places like the Nazi-applauding prep school— change
evident to me as a current student at this institution. I recently
participated in a school sponsored trip to Poland, touring the camp
where Wiesel thought his life would end and seeing ruins of the
crematoria that had turned his mother and sisters to ash. A few weeks
later, I saw Wiesel in person as he addressed the student body that 60
years earlier would have cheered his death, but which now empathized
deeply with his suffering.
Works
Cited
Fry, Varian. Surrender on Demand. New York: Random House, 1945
Isenberg, Sheila. A Hero of Our Own. New York: Random House, 2001.
Kolowrat, Ernest. Hotchkiss: A Chronicle of an American School. New
York: New Amsterdam, 1992
Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life. New York: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1999.
The History Place. “Holocaust Timeline.” <http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/timeline.html>.
Accessed 4-27-08.
Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.
Wiesel, Elie. Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1986. “Hope, Despair and
Memory.” <http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1986/wiesel-lecture.html>.
accessed 4-27-08
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