Meditations on the nature of divinity, authoritarian government run amok, and the individual will to survive in the face of horror were major themes of Monday night’s tribute to Elie Wiesel at the Keene Public Library.
One of the presenters even spoke about his longtime friendship with Wiesel.
The event was co-sponsored by the public library as well as the Cohen Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the Department of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and the Mason Library at Keene State College, and drew more than 100 people. For an hour, academics, teachers and community members shared remembrances and read aloud the works of Wiesel, who died in July at age 87.
Wiesel was a Romanian-born Holocaust survivor, prolific author and winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize. He was imprisoned in the Nazi-run Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps until the U.S. Army liberated Buchenwald on April 11, 1945. After the war, Wiesel penned a long list of novels, plays, essay collections and even a children’s book, “King Solomon and His Magic Ring” (1999). But Wiesel is likely most widely known for his 1960 memoir, “Night,” about his survival in the concentration camps.
In one passage from Wiesel’s work read aloud Monday, he wrote that although words such as “transport” and “selection” had taken on terrible connotations as Nazis used them as euphemisms for genocide, he turned that usage around when he became a writer. Instead of turning words into expressions of death and horror, he used words to create expressions of faith and liberation.
For Hank Knight, understanding what faith means after the Holocaust is a subject of academic study, intense personal reflection and a point he discussed often with Wiesel.
Knight, director of the Cohen Center at Keene State, addressed the crowd with a short speech about his friendship with Wiesel, which began in 1983, when Knight was a young assistant professor and chaplain in Ohio. Knight invited Wiesel to present at the conclusion of a speaker series, because “I wanted a speaker to say, ‘It’s not over.’ This is a long-haul commitment to issues of peace and justice, and it isn’t ever going to go away.”
Wiesel accepted Knight’s invitation to speak, and, during the visit, Knight shared a song he had written, “Pray for the Angry.” The song questions the nature of faith and indifference in the face of murder.
In a soulful rendition, Knight performed it for the library audience.
“Won’t you pray for the angry
Pray for the frightened
Pray for the child bound in the night
On a journey not chosen
He begs for an answer to a question he asked until it’s almost obscene
When a child of 11
The son of a dancer
Stands on the gallows
What the hell does it mean?”
In an interview with The Sentinel, Knight, who is an ordained Methodist minister, said his understanding of the Holocaust has affected his religious practice.
Now, he said, “How I pray is different than how I used to pray. Because what changes is the understanding of divinity is refocused. Simple understandings of what divinity is about changes. You begin to understand there’s a difference between believing in magic and holding a faith that believes the world is in human hands. It doesn’t mean that God has given up on it; it means human responsibility. … It’s a loss of the simple faith, and the discovery of a much more complicated faith, that I would call ‘Post-Holocaust Faith,’” he said.
Through his scholarship, Knight believes the Holocaust had multiple causes, including “a history of anti-Judaism in the Christian Church … racial anti-Semitism in the 19th and 20th centuries … economic conditions being what they were, (and) … World War II as a backdrop.”
Some historians writing on the Holocaust lean more toward the idea that one of those factors was more responsible for the terror than the others. For example, in his 1996 book, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust,” former Harvard professor Daniel Jonah Goldhagen asserts that a long-standing brand of anti-Semitism specific to Germany led to the Holocaust, a notion that Knight disagrees with.
“I would not subscribe to Goldhagen’s sense — that you can trace this back to what he calls ‘eliminationist anti-Semitism.’ That’s a gross oversimplification, and I think it’s rooted in his own sense of anger at the history he uncovered. But it’s a history that goes back centuries,” Knight said.
For people looking for a primer on Holocaust history, Knight recommends “War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust,” by Doris L. Bergen. The book includes histories of groups in addition to Jews who were persecuted by the Nazis.
In response to a question about what motivates him to continue with his Holocaust scholarship, Knight cited the value of addressing difficult academic and personal questions.
“(It’s) not giving up on the sacred when you have to rethink the sacred (and) not giving up on God when you have to rethink what you mean by the word ‘God’ … and that can be a difficult (mental) place to be.”