Max was in his early fifties. A handsome Belgian Jew, he had long since immigrated to the United States where he found success as a model. Max was married to a friend, and I didn’t really know much about him, other than that his life was settled and the troubles from the old country had not visited him. I was reluctant to suggest that he and his wife join me for a luncheon with Elie Wiesel. I knew that like me, Max had lost family in the Holocaust, but I wasn’t sure he’d want to confront the memories by lunching with a very famous survivor.
The organization I was with had invited Mr. Wiesel, a book author and Noble laureate, to speak at our semi-annual conference in Las Vegas. He gave the stirring address we expected. It was his belief that man is capable of great works as well as great deprivation. He talked about life in the camps, and gave the kind of personal and minute details that bring a story to life. They were hard to listen to, and, one imagined, a lot harder to live through. He told us how his father died of starvation and dysentery in the camps. How the young and able were worked to death, and how the old and infirm were gassed or, like his father, just left to die. But it was clear that his message was really one that combined these ghastly memories with hope. If you’ve read any of his 57 books, you know this. The most famous of them, Night, is a living memory of his time at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
Perhaps the most startling thing about him was his positive outlook. How, I wonder still, does a human being experience dehumanization on an industrial scale and not dwell in bitterness. For purposes of a taped interview, I got to spend the afternoon with him. My own grandmother had lost her parents and siblings at Berkenau, but she had been spared the experience because, seeing trouble on the horizon, they had sent their daughter to cousins in the US. To Ma, it was more or less an academic experience because it is nearly impossible to conjure the cruelty in one’s mind’s eye. Of course she mourned her lost family, but Elie Wiesel’s experience was first hand, and in relating it, he spared no detail; pulled no punches.
Elie was gracious if perfunctory: he’d been through this a million times; give a luncheon speech, do a meet-and-greet, and get along to the next thing. But after lunch, in a quiet moment when Max mentioned that his grandfather had survived Auschwitz-Buchenwald and a few years later boarded an Israel-bound ship, it stopped Elie in his tracks. His eyebrows went up in surprise, and he suddenly leaned in. This was to be no normal meet and greet. He asked Max about his grandfather, and in a moment or two, he was finishing Max’s sentences about the trip. He had been on that very ship, and had befriended Max’s grandfather.
The tables were turned. Instead of lecturing, he was listening. He wanted to know all about the life Max’s grandfather had made in Israel, and how the family wound up in Belgium.
It’s a story I reflect on in private occasionally, but it’s been nudging me, and since last Thursday was Holocaust Remembrance Day, it feels right to bring it up now. Probably because one of Mr. Wiesel’s lasting themes was never forget. It is easy to put the awful out of mind, and if Elie feared anything, it was the adage out of sight, out of mind.
I’ve tried not to think too much about the Holocaust through the years. Even though I have family in DC and go there often, I haven’t mustered the courage to visit the Holocaust Museum. The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam was just about more than I could take. But the first-hand witnesses to this unspeakable history are nearly all gone, and with so much Holocaust denial on the Internet, it feels important to spend a moment publicly contemplating man’s inhumanity to man.
Our lives now are likely to be interrupted by senseless gun violence. A trip to the store or school can end tragically, and we’re becoming inured to it. The worst thing that can happen is to lose our sense of shock, to allow events as broad as the Holocaust, or as narrow as one shot-up grocery store, to just be normal.
My fears are the denial of history and the normalization of our present. Honoring the memories of those we lost in the camps, and probably more important now, sharing these intimate stories in the hope that we will never forget, is the least I can do.