A Bit of Revisionism

From an interview with Eli Weisel:

INTERVIEWER

Why after the war did you not go on to Palestine from France?

WIESEL

I had no certificate. In 1946 when the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel, I decided I would like to join the underground. Very naively I went to the Jewish Agency in Paris. I got no further than the janitor who asked: “What do you want?” I said, “I would like to join the underground.” He threw me out. About 1948 I was a journalist and helped one of the Yiddish underground papers with articles, but I was never a member of the underground.

INTERVIEWER

I am surprised to hear you say you wanted to join since the notion of killing is so foreign to you.

WIESEL

Still, at that point, I felt I had to do something. I could only hope that if I had become a member I would not have had to kill. In 1946 I wanted to do something. The Jewish people were awakening, and my place was with the Jewish people. Whatever the Jews were doing, I had to be with them. Everything about the underground was alien to me. I was against killing, against violence.

Wiesel aided the Irgun and also Lechi underground, the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel.  His book, Dawn, is powerful.

See this picture:

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Wounded But Alive

Anthony Sher:-

As I was led across the room to meet Wiesel, I felt an odd mixture of excitement and guilt: a sense of trespassing...

Wiesel turned out to be a lean, neat figure in his mid-seventies with heavy features that made him look melancholic. But his spirit was light and conversation easy. I was most eager to talk about Levi himself, whom Wiesel had known well. He told me how he had spoken to Levi on the telephone just a few days before his shocking suicide in 1987: “I knew about Primo’s depressions, of course, but there was something different about this one, more serious. I offered to pay for him to fly to New York so that we could talk properly, but he said there was no point.”

A crucial difference between the two authors is that Wiesel retained his religious beliefs after Auschwitz, while Levi wrote: “There was Auschwitz, therefore God does not exist.” I said to Wiesel that I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall during their discussions about God in Auschwitz. He replied: “I felt God betrayed me in Auschwitz; I blamed Him. Primo didn’t do this because he had no God: he was from a family of agnostics. There was no God to blame.”

Then, unexpectedly, he made me laugh – mentioning that he had written a play about suing God over Auschwitz.

“Yet despite it all,” I said, “you kept your faith.”

He answered with precision: “Not quite. I have a wounded faith.”

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