Editor MNH: (9/6/06, Not Accepted)
The MNH (8/28/2006) is putting in a plug for Elie Wiesel: “Nobel Prize winner plans talk at Viterbo, Holocaust survivor to speak Sept.27.” If I would be comfortable driving at night I would attend his talk because I have questions for him. I quote from “Night“ “Free from all social constraints, young people gave way openly to instinct, taking advantage of the darkness to copulate in our midst…” In his subsequent book: “Tous les fleuves vont a la mer.” he relegates this episode to the domain of fantasy. My question to Elie would be: Why is his admittance that he was fantasying about copulating youngsters left out in the English translation “All Rivers Run to the Sea.”
Elie was fantasying about many things. At the end of the war the Nazis gave Elie and his father the choice” Stay and await the Russians or be evacuated with the rest of the inmates. Father and son chose to go with the Nazis. One shelter on the way to Buchenwald was so crowded that Elie was crushed underneath bodies and had to battle for a mouthful of air. His friend, Juliek, however was playing a Beethoven concerto on his fiddle. Elie asks: “How had he (Juliek) managed to free himself?” I would like to know that too. I could go on, but I am restrained by 300 words.
Elie Wiesel claims to be full of love for humanity. However he does not refrain from an appeal to hatred: “Every Jew, somewhere in his being should set apart a zone of hate – healthy virile hate – for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German.” (Legends of our Times pp. 177-8). The committee by giving the peace prize to men like Elie Wiesel, Henry Kissinger and Menachem Begin discredited the prize.