A whole 10 years before he could begin to write. Many of us have been struck by the fact that it took Elie 10 years to prepare himself to put into words the horrors of what had been done to him and to his family and to his people. “The slightest wind would blow me over,” he later said. A boy who, as far as he knew, had lost his entire family, and who - when he gazed at himself in the mirror for the first time since being sent to the concentration camp - saw a corpse staring back at him. Imagine the 16-year-old boy who walked out of those gates. Nor can most of us fathom the aloneness that Elie experienced after he was liberated from Buchenwald on April 11, 1945. He tried to help us see and feel that pain, but he knew our limits. None of us will ever comprehend the depravity of what Elie experienced during the Holocaust. Of course, we must consider the context from which that joy somehow emerged. It was Elie’s belief in friendship that relates so powerfully to the miracle of his joyfulness. He used to quote someone who said in French, “Ma patrie, c’est les amis.” “My friends are my homeland.” Elie gave friendship with the intensity of a young man fresh out of college-with innocence and adamant conviction that that friendship would be an eternal bond, which, in Elie’s case, it usually was. When Elie Wiesel first tried to describe his experience in the camps, he later wrote, “I watched helplessly as language became an obstacle.” We who have the honor to speak about Elie have the opposite challenge, finding words that capture the fierce and magical essence of this marvelous man. Words tend to fail us most in two circumstances - in the face of profound evil and of transcendent decency.
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