Three truths about the Holocaust
Posted September 08, 2023.
Est. Reading Time: 6 minutes.
“Every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer.” Questions are acts to seek truth. And humans will forever seek truth. Every living moment adds terrain to these searches. Elie Wiesel learned this as a boy. In Night, he recounts his Holocaust experiences. The nights that led to some of the most truth-seeking questions ever asked: Why does evil exist? What is freedom? And what to do with suffering?
What did Elie Wiesel make of his time in Nazi concentrations camps. Years later, he believed his experiences needed to be accessible to the human mind. “I needed to give some meaning to my survival…In retrospect, I must confess that I do not know, or no longer know, what I wanted to achieve with my words.” Night begins by recalling an early memory: a time when Wiesel hoped “question and answer would become ONE.” A definite instant. A moment he could retain power from answers.
Many years have passed since the Holocaust. What humanity has inherited is a collection of memories and stories, an old set of questions and answers, all of which must be preserved. Yet what continues to plague us is a persistent forgetfulness of this inheritance: letting the terrors of today roam free as the lessons of yesterday remain lost. As Friedrich Hayek said, “it is the old truths that must continue to be inherited in the language of new generations.” Here are three truths Elie Wiesel shared with the world.
Why does evil exist?
In 1944, Nazi Germany entered Wiesel’s town Sighet (now located in Northern Romania). Before any violence, there were lies. Death’s presence was held in every secret, and deceit moved as if it was air. The fate of the Jews was still unclear then. Wiesel remarks, “our first impressions of the Germans were rather reassuring… Their attitude toward their hosts was distant but polite… the Jews of Sighet were still smiling.” Then doubts formed: Jews were put on restrictions under penalty of death; a ghetto was created in Sighet. This was the worst, it seemed. “Most people thought that we would remain in the ghetto until the end of the war,” shared Wiesel.
But the Jews of Sighet were transported. “The ghetto was to be liquidated entirely.” Only the president of the Jewish Council knew their destination. Only he could organize the Jews. Now he too, like the enemies, bore the secret. Then they arrived at a smaller, unguarded ghetto. “One could enter and leave as one pleased.” Wiesel and his family decided to stay, to a fate still unknown. Soon after they arrived at their destination.
At Auschwitz the atmosphere changed. Hannah Ardent said, there were no secrets here, only bearers of orders. Deceit had fulfilled its purpose. One could feel the heaviness of violence, one could taste death. On selection, Wiesel awaited his order, left or right. Only orders would separate him from the crematorium from now on. “There, I was face-to-face with the Angel of Death…No. Two steps from the pit, we were ordered to turn left and headed into barracks.”
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Ardent describes what had to transpire under the Nazi system for the killing of over 6 million people: the “Final Solution of the Jews” required bearers of secrets and bearers of orders. No one willfully walked to meet with death, and no one willfully complied to part with life. The people doing the killing in the camps could justify their actions—out of duty, out of a need to follow orders. But the bearers of secrets, those far from the killings, had allowed evil to spread.
If banality protects evil, then truth requires a voice. Ardent shared, “Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it – the quality of temptation.” Evil thickens in silence. Evil travels because it is omitted. That is when truth becomes forbidden. Secrets make truth tempting but never real.
What is freedom?
The purpose of reaching Auschwitz was clear: to take away the Jew’s freedom. “Work makes you free,” read the sign at the entrance. But “work kept you alive” was the reality. Wiesel could not escape. He could not disobey. “The bell…. The bell regulated everything. It gave me orders and I executed them blindly,” he shared. Prisoner of Auschwitz, but slave to the bell. And when liberation came, some qualities of freedom became immediately present: “Our first act as free men was to throw ourselves onto the provisions.”
What then was left of freedom in Auschwitz? Viktor Frankl called it the “last of human freedoms,” a person’s “inner freedom.” He believed the ability “to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way” could never be taken.
And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom.
But inner freedom might have been one of the most significant consequences of the Holocaust—not a quality of freedom never taken away. Ardent shared that the concept of “inner freedom,” depends on freedom being experienced before—”a condition of being free as a worldly tangible reality.” “We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves,” she shared. This makes inner freedom something entirely different than being the last of its kind (the last of human freedoms): inner freedom is how one can escape oppression and enslavement in the world; it’s the last resort used by the mind to remember the qualities of freedom—the quality of having a choice in the world.
What to do with suffering?
Before Wiesel was forced out of Sighet, his teacher had already been taken by the Nazis. The teacher, Moishe the Beadle, then returned to tell everyone what he escaped in Poland. But even Wiesel did not believe him: “Annihilate an entire people? Wipe out a population dispersed throughout so many nations? So many millions of people! By what means? In the middle of the twentieth century!” Yet even then, the young boy did not fail to hear his teacher. That is because Moishe himself had embodied the essence of collective responsibility: it was the teacher who showed how the world fell silent; it was the teacher who had decided for himself what should be done about his suffering.
What Wiesel made of his own suffering becomes clear in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech: “keep the memory alive.” “And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endured suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”
In the act of telling his story, Wiesel had decided what to do about his suffering: to define it in its entirety; to command his suffering’s destiny; and to prevent suffering from controlling his fate in this world.
We are always searching for answers—as children to parents, as adults to leaders, and as believers to God. We are truth seekers. But we are also truth bearers. While there must always be a person to inherit wisdom, there too must be a person who already bears the truth. Wiesel believed it begins with one person, “one person of integrity can make a difference.” This is an undeniable source of hope for humanity. The hope Wiesel sought others remembered. The hope Ardent believed was always there,
One man will always be left alive to tell the story. Hence, nothing can ever be “practically useless,” at least, not in the long run…For the lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody’s grasp…that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that “it could happen” in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.
