Elie Wiesel🌙 Nobel Lecture/edit

ELIE  WIESEL NOBEL LECTURE 

 December 11, 1986

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1986/wiesel/lecture/

For having tried
to meddle with 

history, the Besht

(Baal Shem Tov)

 was punished; 

banished along 

with his faithful

 servant to a

 distant island.

Re; the importance of friendship 
to man’s ability to transcend his condition. 

THE MYSTICAL POWERS OF MEMORY

Memory saved the Besht, and if 

anything can it's 

  memory that

 will save humanity. 

 Man can't live w/out dreams / he can't
 live without hope. 

If dreams 

reflect the

 past, hope 

summons

 the future.🌻🌻🌻🌻

 Opposite of the past isn't the future/ It's absence of the future.
  🌻🌻🌻🌻

Opposite of the

future isn't the 

past, it's the

absence of 

the past. 

The loss of one

 is equivalent to

 the sacrifice of

 the other.
🌻🌻🌻🌻

On the verge of despair 
yet he does not give up. 

He makes a few friends who, like himself, believe that the memory of evil will serve
 as a shield against evil/the memory of 
death will serve as a shield against death.

This he 

must believe

 in order

 to go on. 

he has just 

returned from

 a universe  

where God, 

betrayed by 

 His creatures,

 covered His

 face in order

 not to see a 

world where the PAST no
longer counted

– no longer meant anything.🌻A new “creation” with its own princes and gods,
 laws and principles, jailers and prisoners. 

     Stripped of.         possessions, 

     all human 

    ties severed, 

     the prisoners

found themselves

  in a social and        cultural void.

    “FORGET ”, 

they were told,

 “Forget where 

you came from;

 forget who you

 were. Only the 

present matters".

Night after night, seemingly endless processions vanished into the flames, lighting up the sky. 

  Fear dominated the universe/ the   

laws of nature had been transformed.

Even their silence was

the same. It 

resounded w/ the memory

of those who were gone. 

Waking.             among the dead one 

wondered

 if one was still alive.

 All those doctors 

of law or medicine

 or theology, all 

those lovers of

 art and poetry of Bach and Goethe

who deliberately

coldly ordered

 the massacres 

/participated 

in them. 

What did their metamorphosis signify?

Could anything explain their loss of ethical, cultural and religious memory? 

AND QUESTION OF QUESTIONS: 
WHERE WAS GOD IN ALL THIS? 

It seemed  impossible to conceive of 

Auschwitz w/ God as 

Auschwitz w/out God.

Everything had to be reassessed because

 EVERYTHING

 HAD 

CHANGED.

Was Auschwitz a 

consequence or 

an aberration of 

“civilization” ?

-Scientific abstraction, 

-social                                   

-economic contention

-nationalism 

-xenophobia

-religious fanaticism

-racism

-mass hysteria. 

All found ultimate expression in Auschwitz.

If memory continually brings
 us back to this the next question is, why go on? Could 
we try to forget the past? Why not? Isn't it natural for 
a human being to repress 
what causes him pain, 

MEMORY PROTECTS ITS  WOUNDS  

WE COULD NOT BURY OUR DEAD

 WE BEAR THEIR GRAVES W/IN  OURSELVES

The call of memory, 

the call to memory, 

reaches us from the

 very dawn of history.

remember      the good we received, and the evil

   we have 

   suffered. 

 If God wishes to remember our suffering, 
all will be well; if He refuses, all will be lost.

The rejection of memory becomes a divine curse, one that would doom us to repeat past disasters, past wars.

   FORGETTING 

  ALLOWS US 

       TO GO ON

         LIVING. 

W/out the             ability to

 forget man 

  would live 

permanently

in paralyzing

 fear of death. 

ONLY GOD AND GOD ALONE CAN AND 
MUST REMEMBER EVERYTHING.

🌻

How are we to reconcile our supreme 
duty towards memory w/ the need to
 forget that is essential to life? 

They needed to tell the child who, 
in hiding with his mother, asked softly, 
very softly: “Can I cry now?” 

They needed to tell of the sick beggar

sealed in the cattle-

car who sang as an

offering to his friends

/when the little girl hugging her grandma

whispered;"Don't be 

afraid to die don't be sorry...I'm not."

Each one of us felt compelled to record every story, every encounter.

Since the so-called civilized world had no use for their lives, then let it be inhabited by their deaths.

(Jews, write it all down).

-Shimon Dubnov 

Overnight, countless victims become chroniclers and historians in the ghettos, even in the death camps.

Even members of the Sonderkommandos, those inmates forced to burn their fellow inmates’ corpses before being burned in turn, left behind extraordinary documents. 

To testify became an obsession.

to tell of the cruelty, the senselessness of murder, and the outrage born of indifference: it would be enough to find the right word and the propitious moment to say it, to shake humanity out of its indifference and keep the torturer from torturing ever again. 

It would be enough to describe a death-camp “Selection”, to prevent the human right to dignity from ever being violated again.

to decide once and for all to put an end to hatred of anyone who is “different” – whether black or white, Jew or Arab, Christian or Moslem – anyone whose orientation differs politically, philosophically, sexually.

 A naive undertaking? 

Of course. But not 

w/out a certain logic

/language failed us.

 We'd have to invent

 a new vocabulary for our words were

anemic/inadequate.

the people around us refused to listen;

and even those who listened refused to believe;

and even those who believed could not comprehend.

The experience of the camps defies comprehension.

If someone had told us in 1945 that in our lifetime religious wars would rage on virtually every continent, that thousands of children would once again be dying of starvation, we would not have believed it/

racism and fanaticism would flourish once again, we would not have believed it. 

Governments of the Right and of the Left go much further, subjecting those who dissent, writers, scientists, intellectuals, to torture and persecution.

How to explain this defeat of memory?

Racism itself is dreadful, but when it pretends to be legal, and therefore just...

one cannot help but assign the two systems, in their supposed legality, to the same camp. 🌿

Nothing can, nothing will justify the murder of innocent people and helpless children. 

We must exert pressure on all those in power to come to terms.

Let us remember Job who, having lost everything – his children, his friends, his possessions, and even his argument with God – still found the strength to begin again, to rebuild his life. 

Job, our ancestor. Job, our contemporary. 

His ordeal concerns all humanity. Did he ever lose his faith?

he rediscovered it within his rebellion.

faith is essential to rebellion,

/

hope is possible beyond despair. 

The source of his hope was memory/

as it must be ours.

Because I remember, I despair.

Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.

 I remember the killers, I remember the victims, even as I struggle to invent a thousand and one reasons to hope.🌻

there must never be a time when we fail to protest. 

by saving a single human being, man can save the world.

-Talmud

by declaring our solidarity with one prisoner, we indict all jailers. 

but it is our obligation to denounce war and expose it in all its hideousness. 

threatened by nuclear war/

destruction only man can provoke, only man can prevent. 

remember that peace is not God’s gift to his creatures, it is our gift to each other.