The Art of Inventing Hope by Howard Reich

Author:Howard Reich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2019-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

10

Listening to Silence

I am surprised not that the survivors learned to be silent about their stories following the war but that they stayed silent for so long. Wiesel, for instance, fulfilled his promise to himself not to write about his experience for a full ten years.

He waited because “I was worried,” he said. “I was worried that I will not find the right words. I was worried of using the wrong words, even worse. I still am not sure whether I found the words. I am not sure. But at least I said, ‘I will wait ten years.’

“You know, ten in Jewish ritual is a special number. Ten years. So I waited. I kept my word.”

He was not the only one. Yes, as Wiesel had indicated, some Holocaust memoirs were published immediately after the war, such as Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (1947, later published in the United States as Survival in Auschwitz) and Wladyslaw Szpilman’s Death of a City (1946, later published in the United States as The Pianist, which survivor Roman Polanski made into a feature film in 2002).

But this was a trickle compared to the outpouring that would emerge decades later. In light of the ubiquity of this subject today, with newspapers carrying Holocaust-related stories almost every day on looted art, uncovered graves, and other matters, it’s difficult for us to imagine a time when so little was said.

But I believe the silence wasn’t only about the world being unwilling to listen. It also related to lingering fears induced during the Holocaust, and the way survivors understandably carried those fears with them ever after.

Silence was a method of survival during the war and became a way of life in peace as well, at least when the survivors stepped outside their own circles. In effect, they sought a kind of anonymity in the aftermath of their terrors, generally not revealing their pasts as those who suffered during the Holocaust, except to each other. The survivors in Skokie who didn’t come out until provoked by neo-Nazi Frank Collin were but one example of the long-lasting silence.

“They were afraid of being identified,” Wiesel agreed, but he referred not only to a fear of being recognized as survivors in their newfound countries. He referenced a deeper fear rooted in their experiences.

“Remember one thing,” he said to me. “When we stood in line in camp and the SS would come, the worst thing would be to catch his eye. So we looked, but you couldn’t close your eyes. You only hoped that he wouldn’t stop and look at your eyes: to be seen and to be remarked upon, which means to be marked, to be singled out. Just to be seen is dangerous.

“And therefore, instinctively, better not to be known. At that time, to survive a moment—a moment—was already a victory. Some victory: a moment. The survivors were afraid.”

The survivors had learned that looking away, disappearing into the background, staying anonymous, remaining silent, had helped them live through the war and often became a survival strategy afterward.

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