Author Spotlight: Elie Wiesel

By Jeff Burns

Recently, the world mourned the passing of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel.  At age 16, Wiesel was liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp.  His Romanian family perished in the Holocaust.  Wiesel survived and dedicated his life to educating the world about the Holocaust and to being a champion for the oppressed around the world.  He wrote 57 books over the course of his 87 years. Here are a few of my favorites, and I hope to re-read some of these soon.

Many of us are familiar with his first work, Night, published in 1960.  It is commonly read in high schools, and, if everyone had to read one book about the Holocaust, it would have to be this one.  Night is Wiesel’s memoir of his “life” in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Only about 120 pages, it is one of the heaviest books you will ever read. Many people do not know, however, that Night is the first work of a trilogy, and the other two books are just as powerful.  Dawn is the story of a young Holocaust survivor and Jewish guerilla fighting for independence in British Palestine.  Day centers on the death of a Holocaust survivor in New York City.  All three books poignantly explore life, death, guilt,  brutality, inhumanity, and humanity.

Wiesel’s two-volume memoirs, All Rivers Run to the Sea and And the Sea is Never Full, takes the reader from his childhood memories of his Romanian village through his career as spokesman for humanity.

The Gates of the Forest tells the story of a Jewish teenager who is the lone survivor of his family, wandering through caves, forests, and villages, seeking some sort of order or explanation. The Town Behind the Wall follows a Holocaust survivor as he returns to his home village in Hungary, now behind the Iron Curtain. As he finds himself imprisoned as a spy, he grapples with the bystander question:  what did the people of his village do as the Germans deported their Jewish neighbors to death camps? The Trial of God is a play, set in a Ukranian village in 1649 following a pogrom in which almost all of the Jewish residents had been murdered or driven from their homes.  A traveling group of actors arrives at an inn, and the Jewish innkeeper demands that they put God on trial for abandoning humanity.

Has God abandoned humanity?  How can God allow things like the Holocaust to happen?  How can human beings so cruel and brutal?  How can human beings stand by as brutality happens? How does humanity – and individual humans – survive such experiences?  How can such things be prevented?  These are all the questions that Wiesel addressed in his writing, and we would be hard pressed to find a better “spokesman for humanity.”

Trying to Understand Nazi Germany

By Jeff Burns

Nazi era Germany has to be one of the most fascinating eras in all of human history.  It’s not just the horrific scale of the death and destruction of the Holocaust and World War II, or the fact that tens of millions of people were directly involved.  Much of the fascination centers around the question How could this happen?  How can the country that created some of history’s greatest scientists, thinkers and artists also create a society in which ordinary people witnessed and participated in such unspeakable acts. 

Here are four books I recommend. Each in its own way delves into the mystery by examining German society from different angles.

Two of the books paint a picture of 1930s Germany from an American perspective.   Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power by Andrew Nagorski creates a mosaic portrait of Germany by telling the stories of dozens of Americans who experienced it, from reporters to diplomats to athletes.  Some opinions were favorable, some unfavorable, some mixed, but, taken together, they reveal that there was much confusion and disagreement about just what Hitler and the Nazi Party represented.

Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin is the story of America’s first ambassador to Nazi Germany, a mild mannered history professor named William E. Dodd,  and his family, specifically his daughter Martha.  As Ambassador Dodd struggles to protect American citizens and their interests in Germany and urges the U.S. government to exert more pressure on the German government, his flamboyant daughter has one affair after another with top party officials and even Soviet spies.  The family’s year-long experiences offer a truly unique perspective.

The other two books offer different views of German women during the war.  First is a novel:  City of Women by David R.  Gillham.  The year is 1943, and Berlin is virtually a city of women. While their husbands are away at war, or perhaps captured or killed, Berlin’s women struggle to carry on, up against shortages, suspicions, paranoia, guilt, and a myriad other obstacles.  It’s a fascinating look at the homefront, the enemy’s homefront, that we don’t normally see.

Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields by Wendy Lower is a disturbing look at women in the German front lines.  Thousands of German women accompanied troops as they moved eastward, as secretaries, clerks, drivers for example.  Other women accompanied their SS husbands as the vanguard of the German migration into the new lebensraum, “the living space” of the newly conquered Eastern Europe.  Lower discovered that many of them were willing, and sometimes eager, participants in brutal acts committed there.  The stories are difficult to read, but they make for a more complete picture.

Will we ever find out why Nazi Germany happened?  Probably not, but these books add a little to the understanding.