READING Elie Wiesel's memoirs is reminiscent of sitting through a long movie with a cast of thousands, not necessarily interconnected. The bare essentials of his story are well known. Wiesel was born in Sighet, in Hungary, where Jews believed that since Admiral Horthy's regime was not as murderously anti semitic as elsewhere, they would be all right. Wiesel suggests that Horthy "had influential Jewish friends ... Though allied to Germany, Hungary treated its own Jews as it saw fit..."
Not surprising, therefore, that Sighet's Jews felt secure. Even less surprising that they did not believe Moshe the Beadle, who managed to escape from the transport of "foreign" Jews expelled to Polish Galicia. "Dazed, madness in his eyes, he told a hair raising story. Those expelled ... had been slaughtered and buried naked in ditches near Kolomyya, Stanislav and Kamenets Podolski. He talked on and on about the brutality of the killers, the agony of dying children and the death of old people, but no one believed him."
The Jews of Sighet did not" believe that they would not have heard about events in nearby Galicia. "I, too, could not bring myself to believe him. I listened, staring into his feverish face as he described his torment, but my mind resisted." So life continued until Eichmann arrived in Hungary with his Final Solution in 1944.
Some Jews in Sighet could have escaped "they had only to flee to the mountains until the ordeal was over". Wiesel records how Maria, the Catholic housekeeper who had worked for the family since Elie was born, wanted to save them. She tried to persuade them to go and live in her cabin in a remote hamlet in the mountains. When they refused, not believing what was in store, she returned to see them in the ghetto, "gallant, courageous, and loyal Maria, a believer who never complained of her fate". She slipped through the barricades to bring them cheese, eggs and fruit, trying even then to persuade them to go with her. I know a safe place. I wanted to come and tell you ... To beg you ... The cabin in the mountains . . . It's ready.
Come . . . there's nothing to fear there .... You'll be ....... There are no Germans there and no bastards helping them. Come ... Dear Maria. If other Christians had acted like her, the trains rolling towards the unknown would have been less crowded. If priests and pastors had raised their voices, if the Vatican had broken its silence But they didn't go. They had not believed Moshe the Beadle. They did not want to be separated from their community. They were wrong.
Wiesel also castigates Jews abroad.
While many of the Jews of Budapest were helped by the magnificent Raoul Wallenberg, the Jews of the Hungarian countryside did not know what was in store. "Why did the Jews of the free world act as they did? ... When one community suffered, the other supported it, through the Diaspora. Why was it different this time?"
These themes have run throughout Wiesel's life as a distinguished journalist and public man. As a Zionist, he has been a hardliner who refuses to comment properly on the peace process, should it go ahead after the latest Israeli election results, This volume irritates in that Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize winner, great man, writer, thinker and polymath, has countless chances to voice a view on, and even to influence, some of the great questions of our time. Instead, he ducks them.
We know the personal his feelings as he gets married to the woman he loves, or thinking of his dead family. But we do not know if he supported Rabin and the peace process, how he felt about Israel when she could have been judged to have acted wrongly, how he could believe the fate of the Jews lay only with Israel. This is a book that leaves us with an impression of a man who knows everybody, remembers everybody, is haunted by those he remembers who are now dead. But we do not see into the fine mind of this remembrances, and so one leaves unsatisfied, wanting to know why he is what he is, and what messages he might have for us in dealing with this world now, as it is.