Denial

[Editor's Note:  Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He authored 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. (Source: Wikipedia)]

First come the lies that justify the hatred, then the lies that erase any guilt.

After my father’s death, in his study, I found letters and essays by Holocaust deniers. One writer claimed that my father had lied about Auschwitz. Another asserted that no Jews had been murdered there. These documents had no place alongside my father’s Hasidic manuscripts and his lesson plans on Jean-Paul Sartre, but I knew why he had scrawled angry rebuttals in the margins. Denial is an act of violence not only against survivors but against the dead. To leave memory undefended, my father shared in his 1986 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “would be akin to killing them a second time.”

The medieval church declared the Jews Christ-killers and baby-snatchers. The Nazis declared us race-defilers and street vermin. The Soviets accused us of capitalist colonialism. And after Jews are kidnapped, tortured, and slaughtered, a final act of violence follows: denial, which chased my father until the day he died.

Lies set the stage for October 7, 2023. The Jews have no right to be in Israel. Israel is a war-mongering colonial occupier in Gaza. Israel is the source of all misery for the Palestinian people. These lies are taught in United Nations Relief and Works Agency schools for Palestinian refugees and transmitted across the globe, infecting a new generation with hatred for Jews.

The denial surrounding the atrocities of October 7 is no different than that which surrounded the Holocaust: It did not happen. If it happened, it was not so bad. If it happened, the Jews deserved it. It was just a few evil leaders. The local population did not know about it and did not support it.

But bearing witness can refute such lies, even if it takes time for the hateful lies to fall. It took millennia for the Catholic Church to acknowledge antisemitism. It took the fall of Berlin to begin denazification. It took the fall of the Berlin Wall to end Soviet repression.

We all have a role to play in these terrible times:

Every person who visits a Nova Music Festival memorial and hears the unforgettable accounts of sexual violence that occurred on October 7—

Every person who rehangs a hostage poster that has been torn down—

Every person who acknowledges the ugly truth that there were celebrations on the streets of Gaza as the hostages were brought in—

Every one of you becomes, as my father said, a witness themselves. And in so doing fights the battle for memory for which my father is no longer here to fight.

Please note: The views expressed herein have not been approved by the House of Delegates, the Board of Governors, the Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice or the Human Rights Editorial Board of the American Bar Association and, accordingly, should not be construed as representing the policy of the American Bar Association. They are the views of the individual authors themselves in their personal capacities.