Forgiving Elie Wiesel, Somewhat, on His Opposition to Gypsies in Holocaust Museum
The Nazis' extermination of Gypsies was nearly as complete, proportionally, as the Nazis' extermination of European Jews. Yet the commemoration of Gypsy victims of the Holocaust has never come even close to the memorialization of Jewish victims.
In her fine book on gypsy life, Bury Me Standing, Isabel Fonseca describes the resistance by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council to the inclusion of Roma, or gypsy, victims of the Nazis in the museum that the council supervises in Washington.
It was only after the 1986 resignation of President Elie Wiesel, the survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who had opposed Gypsy representation, that one Gypsy was invited onto the council...
I tended to judge Wiesel for this opposition, till a few days ago, when I read his book on his father's murder in a concentration camp, Night (1958). In it, he describes his first night in Auschwitz, after saying goodbye to his mother and one of his sisters for the last time. He and his father are moved to a barracks where Gypsy inmates assisted the German guards, or kapos. His father is suffering from colic and approaches a Gypsy to find out where the bathroom is.
The gypsy looked him up and down slowly, from head to foot. As if he wanted to convince himself that this man addressing him was really a creature of flesh and bone, a living being with a body and a belly. Then, as if he had suddenly woken up from a heavy doze, he dealt my father such a clout that he fell to the ground, crawling back to his place on all fours... I did not move... Yesterday, I should have sunk my nails into the criminal's flesh... I thought only: I shall never forgive [him] for that...Night's great theme is the son's guilt at surviving while his father dies. It includes another scene of cruelty by Gypsies. I wish Wiesel could have gotten past his anger at Gypsies when he held a position of authority; and yet I find that I also excuse him.
Wasn't there also opposition to the Armenian genocide being included in the Holocaust museum? Turkey is in a way a friend of Israel so Israel and its US lobby didn't want to embarrass Turkey with the Armenian question.
Generally speaking, I always found the very establishment of a "United States Holocaust Museum" strange (isn't that the official name?), because both the Armenian and the Jewish and Gypsy genocides were crimes of other nations.
Klaus
Frankfurt, Germany
Klaus, I still think your an ant-semitic asshole but hell hath froze over, because I actually agree with you on this one. The holocaust museums should be centered in two places Germany and israel, with satellites in every country that collaberated in it. I never though it belonged in Washington, it should be in Berlin with mandatory visits from every school between Cherbourg on the west, trondheim in the north, Moscow on the east, and soloinika on the south. Last but not least, the Arabs, because they were collaberators and would have been enthusiastic participants if given the oppotunity
who the hell is little phil weiss to "excuse" anyone?, especially elie wiesel.
this is just another example of the glaring malignant narcissism on the part of our ugly apostate blogger host.
book:"pink triangle"
I think we all have examples in life where a minority person has behaved badly, even reinforcing a stereotype, and where we have yielded to a temptation to condemn that entire group. In the case of Wiesel, however, I can't help recalling Norman Finkelstein's unflattering expose of him and his mission (for example in "The Holocaust Industry"). So forgive me if I don't join you in excusing him, who is about as representative of my race as that Roma was of his.
Isaac, Norm Finkelstein is a truly sick person and I would question everything that he says about himself.
Not many people know that Weisel was actually an Israeli citizen for a brief period after the War. In fact he was employed by the Irgun as a writer at the time of the Deir Yassin massacre. However, shortly thereafter he chose to launch a career in the United States as a "homeless victim." So successful was he in adopting this new persona that he apparently forgot all about Deir Yassin--he has never spoken out about it to this day.
Phil should be a little more critical in his reading: when it first came out in the 1950s, Weisel's book "Night" was originally classified (by its publisher) as fiction, and described by reviewers as a novel. It was only last year that, by a stroke of amazing coincidence, major online booksellers all quietly changed its classification to "nonfiction."
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,181986,00.html
Trouvere:
Elie Weisel lasted through a year in a concentration camp. What have you ever done in your sad little life. Other than in engaging in pedophilia
to Pearlman, wise king, and other ignorant trolls - what have YOU ever done in YOUR sad lives except find ways to malign intelligent writers without EVER contributing a single fact as basis for your contrary opinions?
Dear Phil - thank you for your excellent blogposts as always. I must say I second Isaac's opinion - one can understand and even forgive Wiesel's general prejudice against the Roma based on his horrible experience, but not to the extent of a ban on the memory of hundreds of thousands of innocents who had nothing to do with these collaborators.
Bill Pearlman. Concerning your riposte regarding Finkelstein, I believe that was a conditioned reflex on your part, belonging to a time when public dissent among Jews "had" to be silenced. I don't know if you've ever watched Finkelstein debating this and many other issues, Bill, but I have. You may take the opposing view and say he is mistaken (if you can demonstrate you have truth on your side) but I have yet to see anybody succeed in this. Not only is he brilliant but he also sticks to plain facts that can't be refuted. It demeans us as human beings to make gratuitous remarks as you did, Bill: in ten years from now Finkelstein's views will be mainstream.
Wiesel's view on other Holocaust victims and victims of other genocides is this: "They are stealing us the Holocaust". To generalize the holocaust (no capital H) comes next to denying it. (The quote is from Peter Novick's book "The Holocaust in American life".)
Klaus
Wiesel probably said "they are stealing the Holocaust from us" (that sounds better, I was translating back into English from my German edition of Novick's book).
Novick quotes ADL's Abe Foxman as writing: "The Holocaust is not just one example of a genocide since it was the near successful attack on God's chosen children and therefore on God himself". That hits the nail on the Orthodox head.
Klaus
When the South African Prime Minister John Vorster made a state visit to Israel in 1976, it kicked off with a tour of Yad Vashem, Israel's grand Holocaust memorial, where the late Yitzhak Rabin invited the onetime Nazi collaborator, unabashed racist and white supremacist to pay homage to Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Compared, say, to oft-heard outcries from Jewish groups over even mild whiffs of Holocaust revisionism (for example, Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry), no less remarkable was the bland equanimity both Israeli and Diaspora Jews in their great mass displayed toward the Vorster visit. These silent Jews - whether, in fact, privately they were indifferent, or anything but - would have, ironically enough, included Elie Wiesel. Different strokes, or what?
The numbers of those estimated to have been killed at Auschwitz has been reduced from over 4 million to 1.2 million in 1989 and is accepted by nearly everyone.
The total number of Jews that are alleged to have died has remained at the 6 million figure. This is no longer a plausible number regardless of whether one is a revisionist or not.Imprisoning those who say less than 6 million Jews died is therefore a Crime against Humanity.
I don't think it's a non-Romani person's place to forgive Wiesel even "somewhat" -- that is for Roma to do.
Forgiveness is divine.
Yanko
Where has man's compassion to other man gone? WW11 was a world of chaos and madness. If we can't learn from the mistakes of the past, we are doomed to repeat them, right? We all need to learn to embrace humanity and accept each other as who and what they are. In the words of Saint Rodney King: "Can't we all just get along?" Some of my best friends are REAL gypsies, and they accept me, knowing I am not a Gypsy and do not pretend to pass myself off as one. Where would the beauty in the world be if we did not have these people? They are true survivors, artisans, and creative people! Look how resilient they are, even when people have tried to wipe them out. We need to learn from them to be less wasteful and more appreciate of the ways of freedom and right. Quit slinging ugly crap at them and quit bringing up one wrong that MAY or MAY NOT have happened, when so many thousands upon thousands have been perpuated against them.
Bill Pearlman: Norm Finkelstein is a terrific guy who is smart and well-informed and you can't just dismiss him with epithets. Please give us some substantive criticisms of his work.
Joe: Norm Finkelstein is a Neo-nazi with a unique last name, thats all he is.
Hi,
I don't get the point. Because some Gipsys did something horrible/bad, it is okay to exclude all gipsys from remembrance? And the Holocaust is reduced to the murder of Jews? What about the jewish capos? Do they establish an excuse for not remembering all the people murdered?
Sorry, but if Wiesel argues like that, he isn't any better than all the other racists.
The horrible thing of the Holocaust was not only that Jews were killed. It was the killing of all "unwanted" persons and the fixation on Jews only to me seems like a kind of Holocaust-denial.
To me, Wiesels attitude is a slap in the face of all the other victims and someone, who treats those in such a way, lacks of credibility in claiming remembrence of his own victims.
It is also worth noting that Elie Wiesel was forgiving to Jewish kapo as "victims" yet did not see those same extenuating circumstances applying to non-Jewish persons suffering a similar fate.
from: http://www.jewishtribalreview.org/18holo1.htm
"Reviewing the moral crimes of the Jewish leadership under Nazi rule, Hannah Arendt faces squarely the hideous, sordid mess of it all, points the finger to those who look to blame others beyond the Nazis for an answer (Ukrainians, Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, and others who were --to use Elie Wiesel's phrase of pardon for Jewish Nazi collaborators -- also "chosen by their enemies"), and poses the gnawing rhetorical question to the European Jewish community itself: "Why did you cooperate in the destruction of your own people and, eventually, in your own ruin?" [ARENDT]"
also:
from: http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=3&Board=ethnic_judaism&Number=294644982&page=&view=expanded&sb=5&o=21
Wiesel Stresses Forgiveness
By Suzanne Dean for The Deseret Morning News
Nobel Peace Prize Winner Elie Wiesel
EPHRAIM - Asking for forgiveness is the responsibility of every sinner, and accepting it the obligation of each victim, Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel told an overflow crowd at Snow College on Monday night.
"I don't believe in collective guilt," Wiesel said. "I don't believe in collective punishment, I believe in the responsibility of every individual."
Lengthy collection gathered by me of authors commenting on Elie Wiesel here:
"Dr. Finkelstein, Elie Wiesel, Henry Gregory, Lazarro and me"
http://www.jewishjournal.com/forum/main/read.php?f=1&i=7741&t=7625#reply_7741
I don't quite buy it. There were Jews in the Concentration Camps who also collaborated with the Nazis in exchange for longer lives as portrayed in the movie, The Grey Zone.
How are Roma collaborators any worse than Jewis ones?