I have a vivid memory of my first glimmer of understanding about the Holocaust.
I was at religious school in the early 60s at Holy Blossom Temple, and I’m fairly certain I was no more than 10 years old. The school principal, Heinz Warschauer, was a visionary Jewish educator. As a survivor of Buchenwald, he might have been too passionate about standing behind the slogan “Lest we forget.”
He wanted Jewish children to learn the terrible truth about Hitler’s regime early, and so herded us into the auditorium where, aided by devastating visuals – slides showing mounds of eyeglasses, emaciated prisoners, dead bodies stacked up – he told stories of Jews being used for medical experiments, forced into work camps and, of course, gassed by the Nazis.
I remember coming home in shock.
Looking back, I still think I got that education a little too early. But I’ve since realized that although the Holocaust had happened more than 15 years before that assembly, precious few people were talking about it.
I can almost understand Warschauer’s passion for speaking out. Survivors were discouraged from telling their stories. “That’s over now,” they were told. “You have a new life. Leave it behind you.” Guilt-stricken because they were alive, many of them did.
But Elie Wiesel, living in France, did not. In 1956, he wrote an 800-page manuscript that was eventually distilled into the slim novel-cum-memoir Night, a recollection of life in three Nazi camps, published in English in 1960. Except for Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man, written in Italian, no one had ever read anything like it.
The book did not make him famous right away, but after Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Israel, which opened up discussion about the massacre, the novel took off, and Wiesel became an outspoken human rights advocate.
He was a guest at Holy Blossom in the late 60s during the High Holy Days and spoke from the pulpit. Charismatic, his face deeply lined though he was barely 40, he spoke mesmerizingly in his raspy voice of his memories of life in an eastern European shtetl.
I remember thinking, “What are you doing here? How can you still believe in anything?”
He in fact had written about his dilemma, his doubt. But as he faced the altar containing the Torah, swaying to the music, it struck me that faith was buried in his DNA, that he could never let it go.
He eventually wrote 57 books, was instrumental in establishing the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and in 1986 won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Recalling his magical appearance at my synagogue, I’m actually not surprised that he continued to practise Judaism at a shul in Brooklyn.
His passion for human rights failed to embrace Palestinians – he was an uncritical Zionist – but he was an eloquent philosopher who transformed his experience of trauma into art, a believer to the end.
susanc@nowtoronto.com | @susangcole
