Elie Wiesel:
A
Prominent False Witness
Elie Wiesel
- Raping German girls:
a frivolous dereliction of
the obligation to
fulfill the "historical commandment of revenge."
Elie Wiesel
University Professor and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the
Humanities
Boston University
745 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02215
USA
Dear Mr. Wiesel:
I bring to your attention the following excerpts from Naomi Seidman's
essay, Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage. The
event of central concern is the deal that you struck with French
Catholic writer and Nobel Laureate François Mauriac at your
meeting with him in 1954, which deal encompassed Mauriac launching
your literary career, but at a price, referred to by Naomi Seidman
below as a "transformation" in your writing.
François
Mauriac launches your career.
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What Mauriac gave Wiesel in
return for this transformation was the weight of his moral
authority and the power of his literary status. Mauriac
found Wiesel a publisher, wrote his first and most glowing
reviews, even dedicated his Life of Jesus to him, the
"crucified Jewish child" (!); in short, Mauriac found and
secured Wiesel the larger audience he wanted. And in
conversation with Mauriac, Wiesel developed a language to
talk about the Jewish genocide that could hold the attention
of Jews and Christians, a considerable achievement
indeed. (Naomi Seidman, Elie Wiesel and the Scandal
of Jewish rage, Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture,
and Society, Fall 1996, Volume 3, Number 1, p. 16,
parenthesized exclamation mark was in the original)
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In return for two
concessions.
(1) Stop talking about Jewish revenge:
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The [1954] encounter
[between Mauriac and Wiesel], it seems to me, could
be described as a series of delicate negotiations, in which
the survivor's first concession was to relinquish all talk
(if not thought) of Jewish revenge - and why not? As an
author whose audience crossed ethnic boders, it made sense
for Wiesel to suppress an impossible fantasy whose clearest
effect would be to alienate Christians. (Naomi Seidman,
Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish rage, Jewish
Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society, Fall 1996,
Volume 3, Number 1, p. 15)
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And here is the leading example of you making this concession in your
description of events following the liberation of Buchenwald:
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But the Yiddish [of
Un di velt, your early version of Night]
continues: "Early the next day, Jewish boys ran off to
Weimar to steal clothing and potatoes. And to rape
German girls [un tsu fargvaldikn daytshe
shikses]. The historical commandment of revenge
was not fulfilled." In French this passage reads: "Le
lendemain, quelques jeunes gens coururent ý Weimar
ramasser des pommes de terre et des habits - et coucher avec
des filles. Mais de vengeance, pas trace." Or, in
Stella Rodway's English rendition: "On the following
morning, some of the young men went to Weimar to get some
potatoes and clothes - and to sleep with girls. But of
revenge, not a sign."
To describe the differences between these versions as a
stylistic reworking is to miss the extent of what is
suppressed in the French. Un di velt depicts a
post-Holocaust landscape in which Jewish boys "run off" to
steal provisions and rape German girls; Night
extracts from this scene of lawless retribution a far more
innocent picture of the aftermath of the war, with young men
going off to the nearest city to look for clothes and
sex. In the Yiddish, the survivors are explicitly
described as Jews and their victims (or intended victims) as
German; in the French, they are just young men and
women. The narrator of both versions decries the Jewish
failure to take revenge against the Germans, but this
failure means something different when it is emblematized,
as it is in Yiddish, with the rape of German women. The
implication, in the Yiddish, is that rape is a frivolous
dereliction of the obligation to fulfill the "historical
commandment of revenge"; presumably fulfillment of this
obligation would involve a concerted and public act of
retribution with a clearly defined target. Un di
velt does not spell out what form this retribution might
take, only that it is sanctioned - even commanded - by
Jewish history and tradition. (Naomi Seidman, Elie
Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish rage, Jewish Social
Studies: History, Culture, and Society, Fall 1996, Volume 3,
Number 1, p. 6)
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(2) And don't
implicate the French in the Holocaust:
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Wiesel's second concession
was to narrow the target of his hatred to avoid accusing
Mauriac or his countrymen of the crimes of complicity or
silence. (Naomi Seidman, Elie Wiesel and the Scandal
of Jewish rage, Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture,
and Society, Fall 1996, Volume 3, Number 1, p. 15)
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But I am left with
four questions.
(1) Jewish vengeance?
Naomi Seidman above leaves the decided impression that there exists
within Jewish culture an inexorable call for vengeance. Thus,
she cites your own words alluding to "the historical commandment of
revenge," which she adds is "sanctioned - even commanded - by Jewish
history and tradition." As I can recollect no comparable call
for revenge within Ukrainian or Canadian or American cultures, I find
this Jewish call for revenge surprising, and perhaps out of keeping
with Western traditions, and wonder if you would be able to confirm
its existence, and to elaborate on it?
(2) The target
of Jewish vengeance is collective? It
surprises me further that the Jewish call for vengeance is not
limited to individuals guilty of wrongdoing against the Jewish
people, but that it extends to all Germans, even those who are likely
guiltless of any wrongdoing, such as German girls. Would you be
able to confirm that Jewish vengeance does indeed extend broadly to
all members of a national group in cases where some members of that
group have committed crimes against the Jewish people?
(3) Raping
German girls is too mild to constitute
vengeance? Upon
liberation, the Jews of Buchenwald ran off to rape German girls, and
yet you view this action as insufficient to fulfill the Jewish
historical commandment of revenge. I wonder if you would care to
elaborate exactly what sort of actions would be severe enough to
fulfill the Jewish historical commandment of revenge?
(4) Your
literary career success has been a French protection
payment? Naomi Seidman
proposes the view that protection from Holocaust blame can be
purchased from Jews in the same way that protection from arson can be
purchased from the mafia, and that your career success has been the
French payment for just such protection. Would you be able to
confirm that Jewish leaders assign Holocaust blame not entirely on
the basis of guilt, but also taking political favors into
account? And would you care to comment on the possibility that
Ukrainians have been singled out today to shoulder a disproportionate
share of the blame for the Holocaust - take the persecution of
John
Demjanjuk as a leading
example of severe punishment applied in the absence of any provable
wrongdoing - simply because Ukrainians have as yet failed to offer
Jews anything in compensation for their directing their historical
commandment of revenge toward some other victims?
Yours truly,
Lubomyr
Prytulak
Faurisson
Robert Faurisson:
Elie Wiesel:
A Prominent False Witness
ELIE WIESEL won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He is generally
accepted as a witness to the Jewish "Holocaust," and, more
specifically, as a witness to the legendary Nazi extermination gas
chambers. The Paris daily Le Monde emphasized at the
time that Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Prize because: (note
1)
These last years have seen, in the name of so-called
"historical revisionism," the elaboration of theses, especially in
France, questioning the existence of the Nazi gas chambers and,
perhaps beyond that, of the genocide of the Jews itself.
But in what respect is Elie Wiesel a witness to the alleged gas
chambers? By what right does he ask us to believe in that means of
extermination? In an autobiographical book that supposedly describes
his experiences at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, he nowhere mentions the
gas chambers. (note 2) He does indeed say that the
Germans executed Jews, but ... by fire; by throwing them alive into
flaming ditches, before the very eyes of the deportees! No less than
that!
Here Wiesel the false witness had some bad luck. Forced to choose
from among several Allied war propaganda lies, he chose to defend the
fire lie instead of the boiling water, gassing, or electrocution
lies. In 1956, when he published his testimony in Yiddish, the fire
lie was still alive in certain circles. This lie is the origin of the
term Holocaust. Today there is no longer a single historian who
believes that Jews were burned alive. The myths of the boiling water
and of electrocution have also disappeared. Only the gas remains.
The gassing lie was spread by the Americans. (note
3) The lie that Jews were killed by boiling water or steam
(specifically at Treblinka) was spread by the Poles. (note
4) The electrocution lie was spread by the Soviets.n (note
5)
The fire lie is of undetermined origin. It is in a sense as old as
war propaganda or hate propaganda. In his memoir, Night, which is a
version of his earlier Yiddish testimony, Wiesel reports that at
Auschwitz there was one flaming ditch for the adults and another one
for babies. He writes: (note 6)
Not far from us, flames were leaping from a ditch,
gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at
the pit and delivered its load -- little children. Babies! Yes, I
saw it -- saw it with my own eyes ... Those children in the
flames. (Is it surprising that I could not sleep after that? Sleep
has fled from my eyes.)
A little farther on there was another ditch with gigantic flames
where the victims suffered "slow agony in the flames." Wiesel's
column was led by the Germans to within "three steps" of the ditch,
then to "two steps." "Two steps from the pit we were ordered to turn
to the left and made to go into a barracks."
An exceptional witness himself, Wiesel assures us of his having met
other exceptional witnesses. Regarding Babi Yar, a place in Ukraine
where the Germans executed Soviet citizens, among them Jews, Wiesel
wrote: (note 7)
Later, I learn from a witness that, for month after
month, the ground never stopped trembling; and that, from time to
time, geysers of blood spurted from it.
These words did not slip from their author in a moment of frenzy:
first, he wrote them, then some unspecified number of times (but at
least once) he had to reread them in the proofs; finally, his words
were translated into various languages, as is everything this author
writes.
That Wiesel personally survived, was, of course, the result of a
miracle. He says that: (note 8)
In Buchenwald they sent 10,000 persons to their deaths
each day. I was always in the last hundred near the gate. They
stopped. Why?
In 1954 French scholar Germaine Tillion analyzed the "gratuitous
lie" with regard to the German concentration camps. She wrote:
(note 9)
Those persons [who gratuitously lie] are, to tell
the truth, much more numerous than people generally suppose, and a
subject like that of the concentration camp world -- well
designed, alas, to stimulate sado-masochistic imaginings --
offered them an exceptional field of action. We have known
numerous mentally damaged persons, half swindlers and half fools,
who exploited an imaginary deportation; we have known others of
them -- authentic deportees -- whose sick minds strove to go even
beyond the monstrosities that they had seen or that people said
had happened to them. There have been publishers to print some of
their imaginings, and more or less official compilations to use
them, but publishers and compilers are absolutely inexcusable,
since the most elementary inquiry would have been enough to reveal
the imposture.
Tillion lacked the courage to give examples and names. But that is
usually the case. People agree that there are false gas chambers that
tourists and pilgrims are encouraged to visit, but they do not tell
us where. They agree that there are false "eyewitnesses," but in
general they name only Martin Gray, the well-known swindler, at whose
request Max Gallo, with full knowledge of what he was doing,
fabricated the bestseller For Those I Loved.
Jean-François Steiner is sometimes named as well. His
bestselling novel Treblinka (1966) was presented as a work of which
the accuracy of every detail was guaranteed by oral or written
testimony. In reality it was a fabrication attributable, at least in
part, to the novelist Gilles Perrault. (note 10)
Marek Halter, for his part, published his La Mémoire d'Abraham
in 1983; as he often does on radio, he talked there about his
experiences in the Warsaw ghetto. However, if we are to believe an
article by Nicolas Beau that is quite favorable to Halter, (note
11) little Marek, about three years old, and his mother left
Warsaw not in 1941 but in October of 1939, before the establishment
of the ghetto there by the Germans. Halter's book is supposed to have
been actually written by a ghost writer, Jean-Noël Gurgan.
Filip Müller is the author of Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three
Years in the Gas Chambers, (note 12) which
won the 1980 prize of the International League against Racism and
Anti-Semitism (LICRA). This nauseous best-seller is actually the work
of a German ghost writer, Helmut Freitag, who did not hesitate to
engage in plagiarism. (note 13) The source of the
plagiarism is Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account,
another best-seller made up out of whole cloth and attributed to
Miklos Nyiszli. (note 14)
Thus a whole series of works presented as authentic documents turns
out to be merely compilations attributable to various ghost writers:
Max Gallo, Gilles Perrault, Jean-Noël Gurgan (?), and Helmut
Freitag, among others.
We would like to know what Germaine Tillion thinks about Elie Wiesel
today. With him the lie is certainly not gratuitous. Wiesel claims to
be full of love for humanity. However, he does not refrain from an
appeal to hatred. In his opinion: (note 15)
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. To do otherwise
would be a betrayal of the dead.
At the beginning of 1986, 83 deputies of the German Bundestag took
the initiative of proposing Wiesel for the Nobel Peace Prize. This
would be, they said, "a great encouragement to all who are active in
the process of reconciliation." (note 16) That is
what might be called "going from National Socialism to national
masochism."
Jimmy Carter needed a historian to preside over the President's
Commission on the Holocaust. As Dr. Arthur Butz said so well, he
chose not a historian but a "histrion": Elie Wiesel. Even the
newspaper Le Monde, in the article mentioned above, was obliged to
refer to the histrionic trait that certain persons deplore in
Wiesel:
Naturally, even among those who approve of the struggle
of this American Jewish writer, who was discovered by the Catholic
François Mauriac, some reproach him for having too much of
a tendency to change the Jewish sadness into "morbidity" or to
become the high priest of a "planned management of the Holocaust."
As Jewish writer Leon A. Jick has written: "The devastating barb,
'There is no business like SHOAH-business' is, sad to say, a
recognizable truth." (note 17)
Elie Wiesel issues alarmed and inflammatory appeals against
Revisionist authors. He senses that things are getting out of hand.
It is going to become more and more difficult for him to maintain the
mad belief that the Jews were exterminated or were subjected to a
policy of extermination, especially in so-called gas chambers. Serge
Klarsfeld has admitted that real proofs of the existence of the gas
chambers have still not yet been published. He promises proofs.
(note 18)
On the scholarly plane, the gas chamber myth is finished. To tell the
truth, that myth breathed its last breath several years ago at the
Sorbonne colloquium in Paris (June 29-July 2, 1982), at which Raymond
Aron and François Furet presided. What remains is to make this
news known to the general public. However, for Elie Wiesel it is of
the highest importance to conceal that news. Thus all the fuss in the
media, which is going to increase: the more the journalists talk, the
more the historians keep quiet.
But there are historians who dare to raise their voices against the
lies and the hatred. That is the case with Michel de Boüard,
wartime member of the Resistance, deportee to Mauthausen, member of
the Committee for the History of the Second World War from 1945 to
1981, and a member of the Institut de France. In a poignant interview
in 1986, he courageously acknowledged that in 1954 he had vouched for
the existence of a gas chamber at Mauthausen where, it finally turns
out, there never was one. (note 19)
The respect owed to the sufferings of all the victims of the Second
World War, and, in particular, to the sufferings of the deportees,
demands on the part of historians a return to the proven and
time-honored methods of historical criticism.
Notes
- October 17, 1986. Front page.
- There is one single allusion, extremely vague
and fleeting, on pages 78-79: Wiesel, who very much likes to have
conversations with God, says to Him: "But these men here, whom You
have betrayed, whom You have allowed to be tortured, butchered,
gassed, burned, what do they do? They pray before you!" (Night,
New York, Discus/Avon Books, 1969, p. 79). In his preface to that
same book, François Mauriac mentioned "the gas chamber and
the crematory" (p. 8). The four crucial pages of "testimony" by
Elie Wiesel are reproduced in facsimile in: Pierre Guillaume,
Droit et Histoire (La Vieille Taupe, 1986), pp. 147-150. In the
German-language edition of Night (Die Nacht zu begraben, Elischa
[Ullstein, 1962]), on 14 occasions the word "crematory" or
"crematories" has been falsely given as "Gaskammer" ("gas
chamber[s]"). In January of 1945, in anticipation of a
Russian takeover, the Germans were evacuating Auschwitz. Elie
Wiesel, a young teenager at the time, was hospitalized in Birkenau
(the "extermination camp") after surgery on an infected foot. His
doctor had recommended two weeks of rest and good food but, before
his foot healed, the Russian takeover became imminent. Hospital
patients were considered unfit for the long trip to the camps in
Germany and Elie thus could have remained at Birkenau to await the
Russians. Although his father had permission to stay with him as a
hospital patient or orderly, father and son talked it over and
decided to move out with the Germans. (See Night, p. 93. See also
D. Calder, The Sunday Sun [Toronto, Canada], May 31, 1987,
p. C4.)
- See the US War Refugee Board Report, German
Extermination Camps: Auschwitz and Birkenau (Washington, DC),
November 1944.
- See Nuremberg document PS-3311 (USA-293).
Published in the IMT "blue series," Vol. 32, pp. 153-158.
- See the report in Pravda, Feb. 2, 1945, p. 4,
and the UP report in the Washington (DC) Daily News, Feb. 2, 1945,
p. 2.
- Night (Avon/Discus). See esp. pp. 41, 42, 43,
44, 79, 93.
- Paroles d'étranger (Editions du Seuil,
1982), p. 86.
- "Author, Teacher, Witness," Time magazine, March
18, 1985, p. 79.
- "Le Système concentrationnaire allemand
[1940-1944]," Revue d'histoire de la Deuxième
Guerre mondiale, July 1954, p. 18, n. 2.
- Le Journal du Dimanche, March 30, 1985, p.
5.
- Libération, Jan. 24, 1986, p. 19.
- Published by Stein and Day (New York).
Paperback edition of 1984. (xii + 180 pages.) With a foreword by
Yehuda Bauer of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew
University, Jerusalem.
- Carlo Mattogno, Auschwitz: un caso di plagio,
Parma (Italy): 1986. See also: C. Mattogno, "Auschwitz: A Case of
Plagiarism," The Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1990, pp.
5-24.
- Paperback edition, 1961, and later, published
by Fawcett Crest (New York).
- Legends of Our Time (chapter 12: "Appointment
with Hate"), New York: Schocken Books, 1982, p. 142, or, New York:
Avon, 1968, pp. 177-178.
- The Week in Germany (published in New York by
the German government in Bonn), Jan. 31, 1986, p. 2.
- "The Holocaust: Its Use and Abuse Within the
American Public," Yad Vashem Studies (Jerusalem), 1981, p.
316.
- VSD, May 29, 1986, p. 37.
- Ouest-France, August 2-3, 1986, p. 6.
Summary
Elie Wiesel passes for one of the most celebrated eyewitnesses to
the alleged Holocaust. Yet in his supposedly autobiographical book
Night, he makes no mention of gas chambers. He claims instead to have
witnessed Jews being burned alive, a story now dismissed by all
historians. Wiesel gives credence to the most absurd stories of other
"eyewitnesses." He spreads fantastic tales of 10,000 persons sent to
their deaths each day in Buchenwald.
When Elie Wiesel and his father, as Auschwitz prisoners, had the
choice of either leaving with their retreating German "executioners,"
or remaining behind in the camp to await the Soviet "liberators," the
two decided to leave with their German captors.
It is time, in the name of truth and out of respect for the genuine
sufferings of the victims of the Second World War, that historians
return to the proven methods of historical criticism, and that the
testimony of the Holocaust "eyewitnesses" be subjected to rigorous
scrutiny rather than unquestioning acceptance.
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