Wednesday, May 10, 2000

Elie Wiesel looks for meaning

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Holocaust survivor finds hope in young

By Ben L. Kaufman
The Cincinnati Enquirer

        Fifty-five years after being liberated from a death camp by GIs, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel still doesn't know whether his survival had any meaning.

        “It was sheer accident that I survived.”

Elie Wiesel visited the Hillel Jewish Student Center. (Craig Ruttle photo) | ZOOM |

        So he has decided to “confer” meaning on it, Mr. Wiesel told students Tuesday at the Hillel Jewish Student Center at the University of Cincinnati.

        His choice is teaching, “to be with young people all of the time.”

        It reflects his hope that new generations won't have to suffer as he did to learn the lessons of intolerance.

        Mr. Wiesel, author and professor at Boston University, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

        Wonderful as students and celebrity are, he said, “my real change in life came when I had a son.”

        Since then, he continued, he has lent his voice and prestige to human rights causes. Unless he works to create a better world, he said, he had no right to bring a child into it.

        And it's not a cheerless world that he's trying to change, despite predations in Rwanda, Bosnia, Congo and other places.

        Each time he traveled to a crisis point, he said, he al ways found young people, physicians, teachers and others who have left jobs to offer succor in the midst of murderous misery.

        Other reasons for hope are increasing numbers of nongovernmental groups working for human rights and the expansion of courses about the Holocaust.

        Mr. Wiesel spoke to a UC Worldfest convocation before meeting with the Jewish students, telling the Shoemaker Center audi ence, “The opposite of love is not hatred but indifference.” Shun indifference and go beyond tolerance, he urged listeners.

        Invited by Hillel's rabbi, Abie Ingber, Mr. Wiesel spoke highly of the late New York Cardinal John O'Connor and in an interview said he is not troubled by flare-ups of Jewish-Catholic differences.

        He'd rather see Jews and Catholics argue about the wartime role of Pope Pius XII than not engage each other.

        On the other hand, he doesn't care whether the Vatican canonizes the wartime pope. “He's not my saint,” Mr. Wiesel said.

        Similarly, Pope John Paul II's Mass for victims at Auschwitz still rankles. Most victims were Jews, Mr. Wiesel recalled. “A Mass for my grandfather?”

        But he affirmed a new, warm appreciation of John Paul's recent visit to Israel and apology for persecutions by Catholics. “What he said was good,” Mr. Wiesel said. “He has changed a lot.”

       

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