Wiesel’s Existential Act Speaks Louder Than Words

 Wiesel Joins in Auschwitz Evacuation

On January 17, 1945, two days after his foot surgery, Wiesel tells us in La Nuit that he is hearing a rumor to the effect that the camp is about to be evacuated. As he discusses the rumor with others in the hospital who have just benefited from German medical care, he is told that the very same people who just saved his life will now kill him, and he expects the reader to believe such nonsense. He then has two of his characters mention possible ways in which all the detainees could be killed. One detainee speculates that “all the sick will be finished off at point-blank range,”265 while another states that “the camp is surely mined, and as soon as the evacuation is completed, it will all be blown up.”266 Wiesel goes to his father and asks what he would like to do:267He was lost in his meditations. The choice was in our hands. For once, we could decide for ourselves what our own fate would be. Both of us could stay at the hospital, where I could have him admitted either as a patient or a nurse, thanks to my doctor. Or we could go with the others.

But when his father remains silent and does not express a preference, it is Wiesel himself who takes the initiative and suggests one to him: “Let’s allow ourselves to be evacuated with the others,”268 he tells his father. Faced with this suggestion from his son, the father, who is supposedly very sick and quite weak, and who has not been able to work at Auschwitz for even one day, looks at the boy’s foot (and not his knee) and asks: “Do you think you can walk?”269 Wiesel responds: “Yes, I think so.”270 It is clear in this exchange that the father, first through his silence, and then by expressing his doubt about his son’s ability to engage in the forced march that would be part of the evacuation plan, does not want to go. He wants to stay, but his son wants to leave.

Without giving any explanation for his decision, and in contradiction to everything that has come before, Wiesel chooses to do just the opposite of what, logically, he should do: escape from the Germans at all cost! How can his act be defended? This decision is simply inexplicable within the context of the “autobiography” – or novel – up to this point, since it simply defies reason and turns our basic notions about cause and effect on their head. Thus, we must once again analyze the factors, mentioned above, that made the decision to remain behind seem like the obvious one. First, with regard to his father’s health, we must conclude that, by leaving with the Germans, Wiesel in fact hastened his father’s death instead of saving his life. Thus, in retrospect, Wiesel’s act was clearly irrational. Secondly, by leaving, he also needlessly risked his own life in the forced march. This was another irrational act that makes no sense in the context of the novel’s narrative to that point.

We now come to the third element that must of necessity be figured into his decision: German atrocities and overall brutality as part of an alleged extermination policy. The problem here is that Wiesel’s freely made decision to go with the Germans explicitly contradicts the anti-German rhetoric that characterizes La Nuit from its opening pages. This decision rocks the whole foundation on which the novel is based. The accusatory Jewish narrative voice, so stridently anti-German throughout, is completely contradicted by this act. In other words, this decision to voluntarily remain in German custody raises suspicions in the reader’s mind that the anti-German diatribes found in the preceding pages might not be true. If they were, Wiesel would have never agreed to go along with the Germans. Alternatively, his decision could be interpreted by a skeptical reader to mean that Wiesel knew that the anti-German rhetoric he had used in the preceding parts of the novel had no basis in fact.

Wiesel’s Existential Act Speaks Louder Than Words

This decision by Wiesel raises several serious questions about him as both a moral agent and a novelist. First, from a moral point of view, it is he, and not his father, who suggests this course of action. Even worse, he also insists on leaving with the Germans, even though such a choice represents the moral equivalent of signing his father’s death certificate. Given the detailed description of the father’s medical condition that is provided throughout the text of the novel, the son clearly understands that the decision to leave with the Germans involves serious risks for the father’s survival. What kind of a son is this?

Second, Wiesel, as the narrator and protagonist of this novel, seems to have already forgotten that his doctor had ordered two weeks of complete bed rest, that is, until January 29. By taking part of his own free will in a forced march and arduous travel by train when he supposedly could not even stand, Wiesel tests his reader’s ability to believe him. This is especially true when we recall that he was risking his father’s life as well as his own. It was also widely believed that anyone who fell out of the march for any reason was liable to be shot. This episode makes no sense, unless of course Wiesel was much healthier than he claims (if he was there in the first place). On the other hand, if he really was unable to walk, he simply invented, or plagiarized, the whole story.This basic inconsistency in Wiesel’s narrative offers a further explanation for why his camp medical records have been suppressed (if they exist at all). Sadly, the evidence in the text suggests that Wiesel, as narrator, never even considered such issues, hinting yet again that this episode is pure invention. In fact, Wiesel’s whole novel, up to the point of this pivotal discussion with the father, argues in favor of staying behind to be liberated. In doing so, he and his father would not only be escaping from the satanic Germans, Wiesel himself could have also gotten those two weeks of needed rest, and his father’s life would have been spared.

If Wiesel’s book is an autobiography, it must reflect life’s basic realities, including the relationship between cause and effect, as ordinary people understand that link. If not, his story cannot be taken seriously as a lived experience. Alternatively, if Wiesel’s book is a novel, which I believe to be the case, it should nonetheless contain the all-important quality of verisimilitude, that is, the quality of being in conformity, as a work of art, with that same understanding of cause and effect shared by ordinary folk.

In high-school and college literature classes, students hear the expression “willing suspension of disbelief,” which refers to the implicit bargain that any reader of a realistic work (excluded here are science fiction, fantasy literature and the like) strikes with an author. The reader will suspend disbelief, or skepticism, about the veracity and believability of the tale in exchange for entertainment or instruction. But should that reader conclude that the characters’ actions are arbitrary and do not make sense, then the pact is broken. The reader allows his skepticism to get the better of him and might even stop reading. In other words, suspension of disbelief implies a quid pro quo arrangement between author and reader. But skeptical school students who are forced to read this book cannot break the pact out of fear of reprisal from their teachers. After all, they are reading it “for credit,” and sometimes “for extra credit.”

Those who justify Wiesel’s decision to remain in German custody, including of course the teachers who administer Holocaust brainwashing at the grassroots level in the nation’s schools, are forced to justify Wiesel’s decision by citing the rumors mentioned in his discussion with the two other patients at the SS hospital. As shown above, one rumor had it that, if inmates remained behind, the Germans would shoot everyone at point-blank range, while the other predicted that the whole camp would be destroyed. Yet there are at least two reasons why it is difficult, if not impossible, to take these rumors seriously.

First, they were being circulated by people whose lives were being saved by fellow Jews working in a thoroughly normal and professional manner for the German government in a German military hospital. It would have made no sense for the Germans to save these patients, if they had intended to kill them the next day. Jewish proponents of the Holocaust faith have never been able to answer this massive contradiction at the heart of the master narrative of the Holocaust story, so they simply ignore it. Unfortunately, the collaborationist historians and literary scholars of academe give them a pass on the issue.

The second reason why these rumors cannot be taken seriously involves the sheer magnitude of the task they describe, killing thousands of people in a few hours!

Wiesel’s Decision Is Consistent with the Reality of Life in the Camps, Not the Holocaust

While there were no doubt individual instances of German brutality toward Jewish detainees in the camps, there was no German-government-ordered extermination plan at Birkenau. Thus, Wiesel’s decision to remain with the Germans makes sense only if he believed that the German program involved the ethnic relocation of Jews to work camps in Germany and farther to the east in order to force them to work on behalf of the German war effort, and not to kill them. His decision to remain in German custody makes no sense, however, within the context of the Holocaust.

In summary, Wiesel’s decision to evacuate the Auschwitz Camp with the retreating German “war criminals,” instead of remaining behind to be liberated by the Soviets, offers yet another insight into what was actually happening at Auschwitz. Many Jews were in fact deported from Germany and other European countries, spent time in camps, and were then transported farther to the east. In Wiesel’s case, he and his family were imported into the Reich to work in support of the German war effort, and if they were not always treated as humanely as in this episode, they were certainly not subjected to an industrial-scale extermination policy, as the Holocaust myth claims.

Thus, Wiesel’s decision to leave Auschwitz with the Germans is quite consistent with the reality of wartime Jewish suffering, but not with that of Holocaust fantasy. The latter is an exaggeration of the historical facts in order to justify, among other things, 1) German payment of restitution to Jews, 2) Jewish conquest and confiscation of Palestine, and 3) placement of guilt for war crimes solely on Germany. Thus, Wiesel’s decision, made within the horrible context of total war, signals his conviction at the time that the Germans had treated him relatively well. Not only had they provided him with medical care, they also offered the same level of care to his ailing father, even though the latter was never able to work.

Primo Levi and Lili Jacob Were Also Treated in the SS Hospital

One detainee who stayed behind was Lili Jacob. She later discovered the collection of photos that would come to be called The Auschwitz Album. By her own admission, she appears to have been treated well by the Germans before they left. According to the New York Times:273

On the day Auschwitz was liberated by Allied troops in December 1944 [sic], Lili Jacob was ill with typhus, lying in a camp hospital.

Primo Levi, who had worked as a lab assistant at the Buna synthetic rubber factory in the Monowitz complex, was also in the hospital with scarlet fever when the Germans left. Although sick and unable to work, he had not been sent to a gas chamber or killed by other means by the Germans either!274 Here again, the story peddled by Holocaust fundamentalists to the effect that sick people were routinely put to death in a gas chamber has proved to be false, for both Lili Jacob and Primo Levi, like Wiesel and his father, were well cared for.

[←265]Nuit, 129: “Tous les malades seront achevés à bout portant.” 

[←266]Ibid.: “Le camp est sûrement miné. Aussitôt après l’évacuation, tout sautera.” 

[←267]Ibid., 129f.: “Il était perdu dans ses méditations. Le choix était entre nos mains. Pour une fois, nous pouvions décider nous-mêmes de notre sort. Rester tous deux à l’hôpital où je pouvais le faire entrer comme malade ou comme infirmier, grâce à mon docteur. Ou bien suivre les autres.” 

[←268]Ibid., 130: “Laissons-nous évacuer avec les autres.” 

[←269]Ibid.: “Tu crois que tu pourras marcher?” 

[←270]Ibid., 30: “Oui, je crois.” 

[←271]https://furtherglory.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/auschwitzliberation.jpg.

[←272]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Child_survivors_of_Auschwitz.jpeg

[←273] Jo Thomas, “‘Holy Document’ of Auschwitz Found: Closing the Past, Knew Her Tattoo Number,” New York Times, August 14, 1980, A16.

[←274] Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (New York: Orion, 1959); see also Illustration 17, gratefully received from Carlo Mattogno.

Warren B. Routledge:

Elie Wiesel, Saint of the Holocaust: A Critical Biography

Uckfield, East Sussex: Castle Hill Publishers

PO Box 243, Uckfield, TN22 9AW, UK