Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, is observed this Thursday, April 24. This week’s columns are about the Holocaust.
Elie Wiesel: There are No Words
The great humanitarian, survivor of the Holocaust, prolific writer, speaker, storyteller, and student of Torah did not speak about the Holocaust until ten years after his liberation from Buchenwald. Elie Wiesel had taken a ten-year vow of silence.
Why?
He knew that he had to bear witness. He also knew that he did not have the words to express what he had endured and witnessed. In his preface of the 2006 edition of his book, Night, he wrote, “Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly as language became an obstacle. It became clear that it would be necessary to invent a new language…”
Night was Wiesel’s first book and it brought the personal aspect of the Holocaust to a wide readership. It was originally a nearly 900-page memoir written in Yiddish titled, Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (And the World Remained Silent). Published in 1956, it was ultimately edited to be just over 100 pages.
The Holocaust was so large, so consequential, that Elie Wiesel feared that words could not convey the enormity of the evil and suffering.
He is right.
—Rabbi David Woznica
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