GIDEON TELPAZ
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I think by Mike Wallace of "60 Minutes ," why he had fainted, he
replied - and ' I paraphrase - "Not because I saw Eichmann , not
because of all the horrors, but because all of a sudden I realized
that Eichmann can be me and I can be Eichmann,"
WS:
In a nutshell that's what Wiesel seems to be ignorant about, or
doesn't want to face . When I portrayed Rudolf Hoss I did not try
to mitigate the evils of the man or make him look less or more
human than he was. The point is: he was human . He wasn't par–
ticularly nice, but he wasn't particularly un-nice . He certainly
was not a monster. I'm sure the Nazis employed dyed-in-the-wool
sadists, psychopathic monsters, to really do the worst work
around the crematoriums . They have psychopaths like that in
American prisons who are happy to do those sorts of things . But
someone like Rudolf Hoss had to be a bureaucrat, had to be very
human , and if Wiesel doesn't recognize that, he's dealing in
dangerous insights rather than in anything else.
GT:
Is it feasible to expect a survivor to attain the epic distance
necessary to write objectively about this horrible experience?
WS:
It
is important, it seems to me, to deal with the oppressors and
not only with the victims. It's of utmost importance to find out
what made Eichmann tick, and what made Rudolph Hoss tick.
Because these were the ones who were in the eye of the storm . To
ignore them is to ignore a very important part of the whole story.
GT:
Did writing about Auschwitz have any therapeutic relevance to
you as a man and an artist?
WS:
I suppose it had a certain kind of cathartic effect, surely. I
mean, I wanted to cough this up out of my system, and to do it in
some way that would have a meaningful effect on myself. Whether
it was therapeutic, I don't know. I know I felt awfully good when
the book was finished, and I'd realized I'd done as well as I could,
given the material I had.
GT:
While the book was in progress, in addition to the classical
struggle with the material itself-did you have to struggle with the
theme?
WS:
I had certain struggles, yes. You know, it's very hard to recapit–
ulate - you must as a writer realize this - to recapitulate your own
motives at certain times, when you're off away from what you've
done several years. You lose sight of the moments of determina–
tion . It's all lost in a kind of gestalt. But certain things I remem–
ber . For instance, when I started out having Sophie tell about her
"humane" father-what a wonderful man he was, how he hid Jews
