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from Gainesville, Florida Hello, I'm Mike Cannon. And this is conversation. Elie Wiesel is acclaimed as one of the most gifted and sensitive writers of our time and an outstanding voice for the universal human conscience. He is probably the world's most widely read Jewish novelist, essayist and commentator.

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Mr. Wiesel, who has been called a modern day wandering Jew, was born in 1928 in Transylvania, Hungary. He was still a child when, during the Second World War, he was taken from his home and sent first to Auschwitz concentration camp and then to book involved. After the Holocaust, he was taken to Paris, where he lived and worked as a journalist and writer.

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He is now married and the father of Slo Mo Alicia, and he and his family live in New York City for most of the year, spending the balance in Paris and Israel. Mr. Wiesel is the recipient of many honors, including National Jewish Book Council awards in 1964 and 1973 the Jewish Heritage Award for literature in 1966 and the 1968 pre medicine for beggar in Jerusalem, the holder of honorary doctorates from many academic institutions.

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Mr. Wiesel served until recently as distinguished professor of Judaic Studies at City College of New York and currently is Andrew Mellon, professor of the humanities at Boston University. A conversation with Ellie was, Oh, when I return in a moment Live Live presents conversation from the University of Florida, a discussion of social, political, scientific and religious issues of the day.

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Your host is Dr Michael Vegan in professor of history and ethics and assistant dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida. Mr. Wiesel, welcome to the University of Florida and welcome to conversation. Thank you for agreeing to chat about your writings and your work.

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Let me ask you straight off. Did you happen to see the television series produced in the United States? The first call Holocaust and the second, the winds of war? If you did not, did you hear about them? And more particularly, I wanted to know. Do you think that series of these kinds trivialize what happened during the actual Holocaust?

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I did not see the second I saw the first, and I reviewed it for The New York Times, and I created some stir because I have then accused the program is producers, its directors of trivializing of commercializing. But I called, unfortunately, the first one to call that the Holocaust.

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I brought that work into that vocabulary, and I regret it. I think the word doesn't do justice to the event. There are no words for that event, but I do use it in the beginning, thinking it does suggest something mystical, religious, meta, historic. Now I regret it because it became so cheap, but I cannot use it anymore.

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Mm, that's fascinating. And is it your view that there are no means artistic means with which we can come to grips with the horror? That was what you used to call the Holocaust. Is it possible, through the medium of motion pictures, for example, to begin to show or to depict the horrors of that situation?

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Maybe with worsts? But I'm not sure. Pictures surely do not render what the experience was. Words perhaps, but I doubt even that I'm not sure part of my fear I would go further more. I would say that my obsession is that there are no words and yet we must try, because if we survive that experience by accident, it must justify it, and he must justify every minute of our life.

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Now, every word that we say every gesture that we make, every idea that espouse or reject must be justified against that background as a witness. So I know I have to do it. I don't know how I've written some 22 books until now. Very few of them deal with that subject because I know that we cannot.

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We cannot communicate. Nobody will ever know what happened with pictures. I think it's worse because to imagine it is a bless for me. The only way is to remember it. That means memory may serve as a vehicle, but not imagination. Imagination failed, and that was, by the way, part of the reason why we didn't know how to cope with it.

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Usually, literature means to imagine something. In this case, reality preceded imagination. Yes, yes, no one had prior to that date imagined a a tragedy of that magnitude, and nobody today can imagine it even retroactively. Therefore, we are so hesitant. That's why earlier, before, before we came on the program, we spoke about my first book, which was 860 pages.

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I reduced it because I wanted everywhere to carry some way. This is the book entitled Night and It described your My only autobiographical work, which is very small, very slim, but very powerful. I I remember reading it and being chilled by the experience through which you passed.

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Have you ever wondered why you were a survivor? I wonder every day. Why me? I was not better than my friends not worthy than my friends. And just by sheer luck that I am here and not somebody else. I could very well have stayed behind. And somebody else should be here now, speaking to you probably about me.

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Mhm. Did the experience of Jews in the Second World War alter radically, perhaps forever. The understanding the Jews have of themselves as a people? Yes and no. Yes, because it brought everything to a climax. I still wonder whether what happened as a result of history or an aberration of history?

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Was it an outcome of 2000 years of exile and persecution of something totally different? And one day I think one thing next day I think something else, But it's not really only the Jewish destiny. It was affected. It was a Jewish event with universal implications. I think the human conditions was altered.

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Ah, we had crossed a threshold in evil. We have seen evil as an absolute force. Suddenly, I realized that good has limits. Evil doesn't have any limits. Like a cancer cell that grows and grows out of control. Yes, and we don't know where it came from, and we don't know where it leads.

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Now, for instance, I'm frightened. I'm terrorized by the by the idea that the world has not been punished for what it has done. And I don't want it to be punished because the punishment will be a a universal punishment on a planetary scale. You have written about how the environment that prevailed in Europe at the time Hitler came to power and afterwards the indifference, the political expediency, the anti Semitism lay at the root of much of what happened.

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I wonder if you see much of that same indifference today at work not only in Europe, but perhaps in this country as well, perhaps even political expediency, human beings treated in a mechanistic way, in a very impersonal way, without regard to them as as ends, but simply as means.

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So if anyone had told me in 1945 that 40 years later or less, I shall say what I'm going to tell you, I wouldn't have believed it. Meaning that the world hasn't changed. I was convinced in 45 that the world will change that. Something will happen as a result of that tragedy, that there will be no more hate, no more wars, normal starvation of Children and normal fanaticism.

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Normal intolerance. I really believe that in the old it it was a paradox. In 1945 on the ruins of Europe and on the ruins of our lives, he suddenly became absolutely optimistic. And now we realized that he didn't change. There are wars going on religious war like in Ireland, racial wars in Asia and economic wars.

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Intolerance is rising. High anti Semitism is making inroads. Well, has the world not learned anything? And what have we done? We tried to bear witness. We tried to warn the world. We tried to teach few words and we try to tell people that words are not innocent.

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Yes, but they're no longer innocent. You can build we can destroy always between the framework of words, nothing else. And it's up to us to situate that the words are either vehicles of destruction, old Earth prayer, so or spears. And today they are spears their weapons, and they spread hate and not understanding, which means they are not links.

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But on the contrary, they destroy links. And what's the use? I'd like to bring us up to date and to the person of Jacobo Timmerman, the world celebrated journalist in Argentina who spent a considerable amount of time in prison whom you befriended. And as a matter of fact, you went to Argentina to intercede on his behalf.

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Subsequently, the state of Israel intervened on his behalf and he was released and he makes his home. Today in Israel, he has written a book, The Longest War. Israel in Lebanon, extremely critical of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the attack on the Palestinians. And I understand that you fault him for his views because they represent a lack of generosity and gratitude.

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Is that correct? Yes, I wouldn't really want to talk about people I dislike, but that the book is wrong. The book is a lie and why I spread lies. I believe in gratitude and the person who doesn't have gratitude. Something is wrong with that person who I talk about.

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When the tragedy of the Palestinian refugee camps occurred in the the Christian phalanges entered the camp and a goodly number of innocent people were slaughtered. You joined others in expressing your outrage at what had happened, and if I recall correctly, you said at the beginning of your reaction to this experience that you thought perhaps the Israelis themselves had had undergone some kind of moral blemish.

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But as time went on and you saw the nature of the reaction that was developing from other quarters, did you not say, Well, just a minute now, what the other people are saying here is that we can now wipe the slate clean on the Holocaust. Yes, it was small, I think, more complex than that.

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I never attacked Israel never blamed Israel. I come from a city background, and I learned from a Hasidic mastered When I have to praise, I pray someone else. If I have to blame, I blame myself. So in my statement to The New York Times, I blame myself, I said, Probably it's my fault because I have not.

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I'm a teacher and I haven't thought well enough. I'm a writer, that I've written the wrong things because if I had been a good writer and a good teacher that my teaching would have had an effect and things that happened wouldn't have happened. So I took the responsibility for it.

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At the same time. I appealed then to my people, to the Jewish people to proclaim a day of fasting, because I felt that I knew from the very beginning that not one Jew was involved in the killing, that not one Jew was present at the massacre.

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But I also felt from the first reports. And then it was confirmed by the Kahane report, which is an extraordinary report and recorded history, that there were a few who knew and that bothered me if you knew and didn't stop it. Uh, well, that's bad. Of course it's bad because I would have preferred to see that massacre stopped by any means right away.

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Now, later on, I realized that the the attacks on Israel was so violent and there was so unfair and I also saw the relish with which the enemies of Israel jumped on on Israel. There was such a jubilation. They loved every minute of it. At last they exactly therefore I changed them.

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I said, Wait a second. Who are you? Really? And who are those two judges? We are an ancient people, and our memory of suffering is the most ancient in the world. And I do believe to this day that this memory is alive. And I do believe to this day that the prophetic voice is reaching us to this moment.

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Otherwise you wouldn't be here. And who are those people? The United Nations. Really? The representatives of Dictatorships of murderers, Assassins and they cast. They pass judgment on Israel. Yeah, you mentioned, um, Hasidism. Is that the correct pronunciation? Citizen? Yes. And that you come from a Hasidic tradition.

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Could you explain that to me, please? What that particular tradition in Judaism is tradition was It was established in the 18th century by by a very beautiful person called the master of the good name, and they believe in song and enjoy and its simplicity and in friendship and all the good things in the world.

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Except it's more complex than that. It's a It's a way of life in the midst of Europe, which was exposed to despair, especially for the Jewish communities dispersed from the car patients to the Napa. The ball Shinto of the mouth of the good name invoked, invoked the power of the world, the power of storytelling and that became a shield and the power of community, which became another shield.

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And actually it's a mystical. Of course, it's rooted in mystical movements and mystical ideas. But it was the most humanistic community in the world and still is, I don't know any other religious community that emphasizes friendship to such a degree. And that remained alive for so long is most of Hasidic Judaism found in Eastern Europe.

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It was built in Eastern Europe, developed in Eastern Europe. And then, when Hitler came, of course, most of the victims for Hasidic Jews. Three million out of the six came from Hasidic background, and the miracle is that it's flourishing again in Brooklyn and the New Jersey and in Morocco and in Israel.

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Of course, it is to me an astonishing event that this has it been that belonged to a certain geography because it had to happen only in Eastern Europe. It couldn't have happened anywhere else. And now it's blossoming in Brooklyn and everywhere. Do members of the Hasidic community follow a different ritual or a different law or disciplined?

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And the other Orthodox Jews? Orthodox Jews would be the difference. The my definition of Hasidism has. It is a Jew like anyone else who does what the Jews should do and doesn't do what the Jews shouldn't do it, except he doesn't fit further. That's great. Uh, we've talked about Eastern Europe.

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Let me move farther on to the Soviet Union and to the condition of Jews in the Soviet Union. Today, there are many occasions in which people in the university community such as this see placards announcing a rally for Soviet jewelry or or hear a call for the support of Jews in the in the Soviet Union.

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What specifically is the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union? Is it that they are routinely persecuted? Or is it that they wish to go to Israel and are denied exit visas? What specifically is the plight of jewelry and in so apply it is they want to be Jews, and they cannot.

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I have written a book about them in 1965 66. That was the beginning of the romance of Soviet Jewry. I called it the Jews of silence, but I didn't mean that I meant us again. I met myself. Uh, when I came there, I didn't know that I would find Jews in Russia because half of them, I thought, had been killed by Hitler.

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The other half assimilated by starting. And then I found extraordinary people, young people from Communist background who returned to Judaism. And one evening I described it in my book. One evening there was a celebration. There were thousands and thousands and thousands of youngsters. The most beautiful girls I've ever seen in my life, the most beautiful boys I've ever seen in my life singing their allegiance to the Jewish people.

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And I couldn't understand. Where did they learn the meaning of being Jewish? There are no books. There are no clubs. There are no synagogues except a few for old people. Nothing. Nobody can teach them what they want to learn. And yet, somehow they managed to gain access to the collective Jewish memory and now they are proud, invincible.

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My pride is that I've been associated with that movement with the birth of that movement. And, you know, I admire all the dissidents, Safarov and the others and even soldier needs into the rest of the great because he's a fanatic. But still, I must remember, and I will always remember that before Safarov and before all the others.

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There were young Jews in the 18th college students, mm, who began the movement to defy the dictatorship and the terror and a few steps away from the Kremlin. They would sing and dance their faith and the Jewish people. What a remarkable faith and what extraordinary courage it must take envisioned and further and memory again.

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If I had one word to describe the Jewish faith, its memory well, is it memory in the sense of the rabbis of old who passed down the Talmud, the learning by verbal communication only, Or do they have in the Soviet Union collections of Judaica in book form?

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They don't. But they did organize in the late sixties clandestine seminars, and they taught Hebrew, Jewish culture, Jewish religion, Jewish literature, and it's amazing they would meet in cemeteries, the only place where they felt in a strange way at home among Jews was it cemeteries at night in Babi Yar, which is a place where 80,000 Jews had been killed during the war in 10 days.

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That is the place where young people would come in Kiev together to learn how to sing Jewish songs and tell us stories and remember Jewish events. So now they have a kind of educational system development themselves. The teachers are in jail. There is a man who is an extraordinary hero of Vladimir Slipper, who was the first?

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He's in jail. You know Sharansky is in jail. What? What else can we do to free these free people from jail? I don't know what we must do. Everything you spoke of, the Jews of silence. And it triggered something in my mind, a recollection of a series of stories which I read in The New York Times just several weeks back about a commission to investigate United States Jews reaction to the Holocaust.

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I think Arthur Goldberg Goldberg ended up as patron funding that study. What is your reaction to that exercise? I think we must know everything I don't think we should judge anybody, but we must know everything. Whatever happened in that period will have an effect on generations to come.

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And we must know why the world was silent. Why our so called friends, like Roosevelt, was silent. He knew and didn't do anything. I think again years and years ago, I I had criticized my own Jewish people for not having done enough. Nobody did. Mhm. In truth, we were abandoned then by men and creator alike, mhm staying within the confines of the United States.

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Now, do you find Jews in this country to be of a different order or character than Jews you have found in your travels all over the rest of the world? Is Judaism in this country unique as it has a special spirit? No, because it is not oppressed enough.

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I would always say that Judaism in a press countries is more unique in Russia. It's unique. Certain for second place is it is unique. Here it is blooming. It's a golden age. It's either y mar all the golden age in Spain when we had the commander in chief of the Catholic Army was a Jewish poet philosopher, when the finance minister was true when the prime minister was true under felt in out of visible.

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The Catholics? Yeah, to reserve a villa. Yes, but they didn't convert. She did, uh so I I wouldn't say, except I'm amazed. I'm amazed at those who are pessimistic over American jury because if we didn't give up on Russian Jews, how can we give up on American Jews?

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There is something about the Jewish survival, which is always a mystery to me. Why did we survive? No other people did. No other civilization did. And why did we when everybody wanted us out? Everybody wanted to expel us from history. Even God seduced us and persecute us at the same time and yet suddenly want to remain.

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Why? I don't know. I think in a small book that you wrote explaining the heart of Judaism. You said something to this effect that the survival of Judaism cannot be explained rationally only as a mystery. It's a mystery to me, but mysteries confound us and bother us.

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We want to plumb them and find the rational answer. If there is one, you can't figure it out. But I'm not against mystery I'm against political mystery but not religious. Mystery in politics should be open in philosophy. It should be a secret but unfortunately believe in times when it's just the opposite.

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When politics become mysterious and religion is to open, its not shouldn't they? A word about your literary career. You are the author of some 22 books, and you have just finished a book. Is it in the genre of fiction or s a 21 came out. It's called Somewhere Masters, my third book on Hasidism.

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And then I finished the novel, which is called The Fifth Sun, which which is coming out in Paris because I write in French and all my books are first published in Paris and then translated in the United States and other languages. What is it about fiction that attracts you?

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Oh, I don't think I can create. I like to recreate again. I think that we have been robbed of so many events, so many people, so many masters and disciples and princes and mad men and Children that I try to bring them back. I think that the killer should not have that victory, and therefore I, with my own modest means it worse and a little bit of silence.

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I try to defeat the killer by bringing back one child one old man from the 17th century from the 15th century. The 20th century. And give them a name. A haven? Yes. Have you already cast in your mind what your next book will be? Do you work ahead on a new book while you are completing the one at hand?

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No. I never give you to the publisher before I start something else. Uh, I'm superstitious, but since I work both fiction in fiction and nonfiction I'm always in the middle of the work. I'm now in the middle of the music book because I studied Tell me every day I tried to visualize Judaism as a celebration and I want to do seven volumes have already published 37 volumes to celebrate the Jewish civilization.

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Many philosophers, poets, moralist, scholars and so forth. Do you write by hand? I write first my hand and then I type fingers I cannot dictate And I do everything myself. I'm always pleased to find someone else who writes my hand. I do the same. I I sometimes think of myself as a not concurrent with what's happening in this high technological world.

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People are now using word processors. It's incredible, because one day the work processes will read. Not only right, they would read that there will be a dialogue between two world processes. Well, thank you for this dialogue. My guest, Elie Wiesel, and I Thank you very much for being with me on conversation.

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No. Mm hmm. Mhm. No.