Hope, Despair and Memory

“Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope. If dreams reflect the past, hope summons the future.”

Wiesel considers dreams and hope a necessity for life. This dichotomy illustrates Wiesel’s conception of time, in which the future depends on the past just as the hope of a better world depends on memories of past suffering. The passage thus lays the groundwork for The Alliance of Hope and Memory to Avoid Despair.

“He makes a few friends who, like himself, believe that the memory of evil will serve as a shield against evil; that the memory of death will serve as a shield against death.”

Wiesel remembers himself in the third person, highlighting the trauma of life in the concentration camps; in some ways, it is as though he died there. After the Holocaust, he and other survivors adopted memory as a tool, which connects to the principal theme that memory allows one to hope for a better future.

“Mankind, jewel of his creation, had succeeded in building an inverted Tower of Babel, reaching not toward heaven but toward an anti-heaven, there to create a parallel society, a new ‘creation’ with its own princes and gods, laws and principles, jailers and prisoners. A world where the past no longer counted—no longer meant anything.”

In this description of the Holocaust, Wiesel alludes to the Book of Genesis. He inverts the tale of the Tower of Babel to aim toward an “anti-heaven”—the perverted social order of the concentration camps. This “damned” creation cuts people off from their own past, which for Wiesel is much the same as cutting them off from their humanity itself.

“Stripped of possessions, all human ties severed, the prisoners found themselves in a social and cultural void. ‘Forget,’ they were told, ‘Forget where you came from; forget who you were. Only the present matters.’”

The Nazis hoped to cut the Jewish people off from their past. The circumstances of the concentration camps disconnected them from everything but survival. Wiesel’s words appeal to the audience’s emotions, asking them to empathize with the situation the Jewish people were put in during the Holocaust; because Wiesel treats The Jewish Experience as Reflective of Human Rights, the Holocaust holds lessons for all of humanity.

“When day breaks after a sleepless night, one’s ghosts must withdraw; the dead are ordered back to their graves. But for the first time in history, we could not bury our dead. We bear their graves within ourselves.” 

This complex metaphor refers to the Holocaust as “night” and the aftermath as “day.” Wiesel argues that the Holocaust’s dead could not rest: They were denied funeral rites as well as graves. Wiesel employs the first-person plural to refer to the Jewish survivors, whom he describes as carrying figurative graves within them—an image that captures the burden of memory.

“Nothing provokes so much horror and opposition within the Jewish tradition as war.”

Wiesel contends that Judaism is a pacifist tradition to support The Argument for Pacifism. He evidences this claim with a series of references from Jewish history and the Talmud. This is his most daring claim: Not only does the Talmud not celebrate warriors, but it opposes war itself.

“How are we to reconcile our supreme duty towards memory with the need to forget that is essential to life?”

This rhetorical question forces his audience to face a paradox: remembering while forgetting. Wiesel posits that humanity must remember the horrors of the Holocaust; however, it must not let these terrible memories lead to despair. Hope requires a balance of memory and forgetting.

“We thought it would be enough to tell of the tidal wave of hatred which broke over the Jewish people for men everywhere to decide once and for all to put an end to hatred of anyone who is ‘different’—whether black or white, Jew or Arab, Christian or Moslem—.”

The first-person plural here refers to Holocaust survivors. Wiesel connects their collective experience to their hope for the future. They believed that their testimony would persuade humanity to avoid repeating the horrors of the Holocaust, which hatred had fueled. Wiesel sees in retrospect that this was naive.

“Terrorism must be outlawed by all civilized nations—not explained or rationalized, but fought and eradicated. Nothing can, nothing will justify the murder of innocent people and helpless children.”

Wiesel mentions children several times in this speech to appeal to the audience’s emotions. In this case, he denounces violence of any kind, citing several examples of terrorism, as well as war. The term “innocent” reinforces that none of these victims deserve to die.

“How to explain any of it: the outrage of Apartheid which continues unabated. Racism itself is dreadful, but when it pretends to be legal, and therefore just, when a man like Nelson Mandela is imprisoned, it becomes even more repugnant. Without comparing Apartheid to Nazism and to its ‘final solution’—for that defies all comparison—one cannot help but assign the two systems, in their supposed legality, to the same camp.”

While he avoids a direct comparison, Wiesel does find some similarities between the systemic racism of the Holocaust and that of apartheid. He mentions the South African activist Nelson Mandela, who at the time of this lecture was imprisoned for his political activity. This reflects how Wiesel unites his experience as a Holocaust survivor with his activism for global human rights.

“We must remember the suffering of my people, as we must remember that of the Ethiopians, the Cambodians, the boat people, Palestinians, the Mesquite Indians, the Argentinian ‘desaparecidos’—the list seems endless.”

Wiesel connects the experience of the Jewish people in the Holocaust to oppressed people around the world. The situation of the groups that Wiesel mentions was topical when he delivered this lecture. The nature of their oppression differed from religious to ethnic to political. Wiesel implies that many more—in fact, “endless”—groups face oppression besides those he names.

“Job, our ancestor. Job, our contemporary. His ordeal concerns all humanity. Did he ever lose his faith? If so, he rediscovered it within his rebellion. He demonstrated that faith is essential to rebellion, and that hope is possible beyond despair.”

Wiesel alludes to Job, who questions God after he loses his family, wealth, and health. Paradoxically, however, the very fact that Job’s losses led him to rebel demonstrates his faith—his sense that things could be different and better. Job, therefore, exemplifies the relationship between hope and despair.

“Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair. I remember the killers, I remember the victims, even as I struggle to invent a thousand and one reasons to hope.”

Wiesel describes the paradox of memory and hope. Remembering the Holocaust makes him feel like there is no hope, and yet, he cannot give up faith in the possibility ofWiesel describes the paradox of memory and hope. Remembering the Holocaust makes him feel like there is no hope, and yet, he cannot give up faith in the possibility of a better world.  a better world.