We met more than once and even exchanged some letters in handwritten Hebrew. This was because he was eminently approachable and unimpressed with his fame. But it was our very first encounter that immediately came to mind when the news arrived of the death of Elie Wiesel—the poet laureate of the Jewish people.
He raised his eyebrows in recognition of a restored memory.
Dr. Wiesel was the featured guest on a community forum panel years ago dealing with the issues of Holocaust, survival, and hope.
No one has described the insanity of the genocide with more searing and unforgiving candor than this now-departed, remarkable, gentle writer and teacher.
I was privileged to be a participant on the dais. Towards the end of the program, we panelists were permitted ask Wiesel questions for the audience to hear. All evening, as I sat directly next to him, I noted the deep lines of suffering and experience that were woven into his still-benevolent face.
Looking into Elie Wiesel’s eyes was a mystical experience; there were wells of permanent pain that nonetheless conveyed a certain, tortured belief in humankind. Wiesel was soft-spoken, wiry, and uncompromising in his demand for compassion among all peoples and creeds. His very presence in a room, and the elegiac timbre of his voice, were the quiet evidence that Hitler didn’t kill everything.
I presented the following question to him: “Professor Wiesel, after the war ended and you were finally freed from the death camps, when was the first time that you were able to smile again?”
He paused momentarily but then raised his eyebrows in recognition of a restored memory. “Yes,” he said, his face lifted slightly higher than before. “I recall the moment.”
Wiesel proceeded to recount a long walk he took within a year or so of the close of the war. It was along a rural road in France.
He explained that, as he made his way along the road, he thought he heard the sound of singing voices. He then realized he was approaching a country church.
Wiesel, a Jew who suffered and saw unspeakable things in Nazi camps, felt drawn to the doorway of the abbey. Inside, he gazed at and heard an exuberant of children harmonizing together under the busy direction of their choirmaster.
“They were beautiful children,” Wiesel now told us, his eyes watering. “They sang like angels, in Latin. There was a pure and simple joy about them. I did not understand their musical words but I felt the utter truth of their expression. It was then, at that moment, that I felt myself breaking into a smile for the first time.”
Would that we could all now hear and see beauty in the forgiving words of strangers with music.
Cross posted from Spirit Behind the News
Photo by World Economic Forum from Cologny, Switzerland – World Economic Forum Annual Meeting Davos 2003, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3581251