Telling tales

Yom HaShoah starts at sundown today and runs to sundown tomorrow. It’s the day set aside by the state of Israel to commemorate the nearly six million Jews systematically murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s. At 1000 local time, everything will come to a halt across Israel, and people will stand silent and still, remembering those deaths. It’s an astonishing thing to watch on my computer screen; I cannot imagine it in real life.

Rather than say anything myself, I’m sharing part of the opening lecture Elie Wiesel gave at an international symposium in 1974 at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York. It’s included in his article, “Art and Culture after the Holocaust”, published in CrossCurrents.

“Let us tell tales. Let us tell tales—all the rest can wait; all the rest must wait.

“Let us tell tales—that is our primary obligation. Commentaries will have to come later, lest they replace or becloud what they mean to reveal.

Tales of children so wise and so old. Tales of old men mute with fear. Tales of victims welcoming death as an old acquaintance. Tales that bring man close to the abyss and beyond—and others that lift him up to heaven and beyond. Tales of despair, tales of longing. Tales of immense flames reaching out to the sky, tales of night consuming life and hope and eternity.

“Let us tell tales so as to remember how vulnerable man is when faced with overwhelming evil. Let us tell tales so as not to allow the executioner to have the last word. The last word belongs to the victim. It is up to the witness to capture it, shape it, transmit it and keep it as a secret, and then communicate that secret to others.”

  

The thing is, when we stop telling those tales, the Nazis win—generation after generation.