All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [188]
In France and the United States the Jews were not yet being accused of “collecting the dividends of Auschwitz,” but in interviews I was often asked: “Are you ever going to stop writing about the Jewish tragedy? Don’t you think other, more recent tragedies are equally worthy of attention?” (In the 1980s one Goncourt juror commented, “We’ll give him the prize when he brings us a novel on some other theme.”)
I responded only rarely, with a phrase borrowed from the writer Manès Sperber, who in turn had paraphrased a Talmudic saying. Even if I wrote on nothing else, it would never be enough; even if all the survivors did nothing but write about their experiences, it would still not be enough. After a while I ceased to react, especially since nasty rumors had begun to circulate. It seemed my colleagues and I were making a fortune off the Holocaust. Sperber, whose advice I sought when it all started in the mid-sixties, was enraged. But he didn’t know how to stop the slanderous rumors, and neither did I. All this criticism leveled at writers on the Holocaust was outrageous and unworthy of reply. Just as it is humiliating to have to combat the Holocaust deniers by reiterating that the tragedy did indeed occur, that our parents and grandparents were in fact murdered. At some point in their lives, every writer who has written about the Holocaust has had to defend himself against this sort of accusation, which leaves one feeling smeared and powerless. Yet it is crucial to denounce such malevolence, whose most dangerous and perverse effect would be to make people shrink from speaking of the Holocaust.
In my essay “A Plea for the Survivors” I wrote: “You who have not experienced their anguish, who do not speak their language and do not mourn their dead, think before you offend them, before you betray them.… Wait until the last survivor, the last witness, has joined the long procession of silent shadows whose judgment one day will resound and shake the earth and its Creator.”
Yes, who will tell the censors, so determined to attribute their own baseness to us, to have the decency to be quiet? Who will tell them that we have nothing to learn from them?
But I am ashamed to admit that the charge of being mercenary did hurt me at first, as it did many of my fellow writers. Probably in response to it, I decided to share the prize money from my two French awards with the French Jewish writers Piotr Rawicz and Arnold Mandel. In 1970, in an epilogue to One Generation After, I announced my intention to bring this chapter to a close: “And now, teller of tales, turn the page. Speak to us of other things. Let your mad prophets, your old men drunk with nostalgia, your possessed, return to their nocturnal den. They have survived their deaths for more than a quarter century now. That should suffice. And if they refuse to be gone, at least make them keep quiet. At all costs. By any means necessary. Tell them that silence, more than speech, remains the sign and substance of what was once their world and that it, like speech, demands to be recognized and transmitted.” This passage earned me an “open letter” from the Jewish historian Joseph Wulf (who committed suicide several years later in Berlin). He urged me not to give up. He spoke of the duty of testifying. In truth, how can anyone fail to see that a witness rendered mute betrays the living as much as the dead?
One French Jewish critic, a judge by profession, was particularly virulent in his personal attacks on me. Having heaped praise on my first writings, he now began to express an antipathy that grieved my friends in Paris. Living in New York, I was unaware of this, but with obvious pleasure he informed me of it in person.
He came to see me at my hotel in Paris in 1966. I had just returned from Moscow, where I had barely escaped arrest for having written The Jews of Silence. When the judge telephoned, I assumed he wanted to question