Wiesel: Are Justice and Vengeance Compatible?

Two acts of vengeance — one by an individual, one by a government, both with massive consequences for Jews in Nazi Germany — were dissected by Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel on Monday night in an effort to answer the question, can an act of revenge be just?

“Are justice and vengeance related only as cause and consequence?” asked Wiesel (Hon.’74), BU’s Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and author of the seminal Holocaust memoir Night. “Are they at all compatible?”

Wiesel, who has given a series of free public lectures at Boston University for more than 30 years, spoke on October 27 as part of a conference in honor of his 80th birthday sponsored by BU’s Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies. The three-day conference, which drew participants from colleges and universities around the world, touched on Wiesel’s contributions to teaching, literature, and activism, and included an evening of musical performance in his honor on October 26. The conference ended October 28 with a roundtable on The Lasting Contribution of Elie Wiesel. Monday’s lecture, titled Kristallnacht, was Wiesel’s only talk at BU this year.

John Silber (Hon.’95), BU president emeritus, introduced Wiesel by recounting the Biblical tale of Job, who lost his family and possessions in a test of his piety. “The meaning of Job’s words is unmistakable and must never be forgotten: if you have no place of your own, you are dead. This, in essence, is the justification of the state of Israel.”

Silber also said that Wiesel’s “witness ensures that none of [the Holocaust] can be forgotten,” and he compared Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich with the policies and statements of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, regarding the state of Israel.

“Only the willfully blind can ignore the smoke rising from his smoldering words,” Silber said.

Wiesel examined the events leading up to Kristallnacht, the night in November 1938 when hundreds of synagogues were destroyed, thousands of Jewish homes and businesses ransacked, almost 100 Jews killed, and thousands arrested and deported to concentration camps in a coordinated attack by the Nazi party.

The previous month, more than 12,000 Polish-born Jews had been expelled from Nazi Germany; many were refused entry to Poland and held at the Polish border — among them, the parents and sister of Herschel Grynszpan, a young man living in Paris. When Grynszpan received a letter from his sister detailing their plight, he bought a gun and went to the German embassy in Paris, claiming that he had an important document. When admitted to the embassy, Wiesel related, Grynszpan said, “In the name of 12,000 persecuted Jews, here is the document,” and fired at diplomat Ernst vom Rath, fatally wounding him.

“The regime decided to use the episode to punish all the Jews of Germany,” Wiesel said. Kristallnacht took place two days later.

In examining Grynszpan’s actions, Wiesel said that he was struck not only by the inefficacy of vengeance — “hatred leads a person to more hatred” — but also by the potential to choose anger, which can be harnessed and used as a call to action. He recounted the message that was later found scrawled on the walls of concentration camps: “Take vengeance.” Wiesel, who survived the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, said that after World War II, he used to question why revenge was never enacted.

“I ask myself, how, in 1945, we were spared that temptation,” he said. “I ask myself, what happened to our anger? Where was Jewish anger?”

That enormous anger, he said, did not find release in vengeance — “an individual act that could endanger and harm others, even [an] entire people.” Instead, he said, it was channeled into action and social change, ultimately leading to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Throughout his life, anger has also proven to be a personal source of inspiration for Wiesel. He recalled coming to the United States in 1955 and seeing “racism at work” in the South. “For the first time in my life, I felt shame,” he said. “I never felt shame for being Jewish, but I felt shame for being white.”

“When I witness an injustice, I am angry at myself, too.”

Jessica Ullian can be reached at jullian@bu.edu.