Elie Wiesel's identity crisis |
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# posted by Greywolf : 9:21 PM |
 Photo by Harry Miller of slave laborers in the Buchenwald concentration camp after U.S. troops of the 80th Div. entered the camp. Taken on 16 April 1945. Miklos Grüner (Haft-Nr. 120762) is on the left at the bottom, while Elie Wiesel (Haft-Nr. 123565) is on the next row up, seventh along, nearest to the third pillar from the left.
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Related story: Elie Wiesel and the Catholics by David O'Connell
I feel for Elie Wiesel. I really do. Not only did this long-suffering Transylvanian native (he was born to Orthodox Jewish parents in what is now called Sighetu Marmaţiei in Maramureş County, a region in the Romanian Carpathians that was long a part of Hungary) have to suffer imprisonment and brutal treatment in several concentration camps during the Second World War, he has also had to put up with numerous assaults on his reputation in the decades since. Not the least of the slings and arrows were cast by our own Christopher Hitchens, who in an attempted exposé wickedly entitled Wiesel Words, attacked Elie's gung ho support for the Zionist Irgun terrorist group in the 1940s as well as his reaction to the 1948 Palestinian Exodus and the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982.
Is there a more contemptible poseur and windbag than Elie Wiesel? I suppose there may be. But not, surely, a poseur and windbag who receives (and takes as his due) such grotesque deference on moral questions......
But for Wiesel all Arabs are Muslims, and even if they happen to live in Jerusalem, this is nothing to the way that Jerusalem dwells within Wiesel. Indeed, it would evidently dwell more comfortably within him if they did not live in it at all. Do I exaggerate? I don't think so. In a propaganda tour of recent history, he asserts that in 1948, "incited by their leaders, 600,000 Palestinians left the country convinced that, once Israel was vanquished, they would be able to return home."
This claim is a cheap lie and is known by Wiesel to be a lie. It is furthermore an utterly discredited lie, and one that Israeli officialdom no longer cares to repeat. Israeli and Jewish historians have exposed it time and again: Every Arab broadcasting station in the region, in 1947 as well as 1948, was monitored and recorded and transcribed by the BBC, and every Arab newspaper has been scoured, and not one instance of such "incitement," in direct speech or reported speech, has ever come to light.
See what I mean? Harsh words indeed. But on top of that, Elie has been called a fraud and a charlatan by dozens of detractors, some of whom have gone as far as to doubt the factual accuracy of his autobiographical Holocaust memoir Night. He also got into a dispute with Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, apparently because he didn't agree with the latter's efforts to give equal publicity to non-Jewish Holocaust victims. Then he was accused of personally profiting from the Holocaust while downplaying other genocides by none other than Norman Finkelstein and frowned at by Noam Chomsky over his support of some of Israel's "harsh and ultimately self-destructive government policies."
Then in 2007, an old and frail Elie was attacked in a San Francisco hotel by a young Holocaust denier thug, although luckily he wasn't injured. And in December 2008, his foundation reported that it had lost over $15 million of the cash it had spent years scraping together when Bernard Madoff's investment firm collapsed, while Elie also lost a lot of his own private nest egg to the machinations of this latter day Ponzirian fraud.
After all this, surely Elie's patience must rival Job's. And indeed, both men are well known for having had the temerity to argue with God. But the Almighty, or His adversary who is known to appear in the form of a goat or a serpent, has prepared the material for yet more lamentations. This latest outrage comes in the shape of an accusation from the boy on the bunk at Buchenwald that the Elie Wiesel we all know and love is not Elie Wiesel at all but is in fact an impostor.
 Wiesel on Madoff: "'Psychopath' is too nice a word for him. 'Sociopath,' 'psychopath,' it means there is a sickness, a pathology. This man knew what he was doing. I would simply call him thief, scoundrel, criminal."
According to this article by Canadian conspiracy theorist and Renaissance man Henry Makow, in 1944 the 17-year-old Miklos Gruner became good friend with 31-year-old Lazar Wiesel (A-7713) at Auschwitz and they were both transferred to Buchenwald in January 1945. After liberation, they split up and Miklos went to live in Australia. Forty years later in 1986, Miklos was invited to Sweden by a journal in order to meet "an old friend" named Elie Wiesel, who he was told was the same Lazlar Wiesel with the same camp number. Miklos recalls:
I was very happy at the idea of meeting Lazar but when I got out of the plane, I was stunned to see a man I didn`t recognize at all, who didn`t even speak Hungarian and who was speaking English in a strong French accent... so, our meeting was over in about ten minutes. As a goodbye gift, the man gave me a book titled "Night" of which he claimed to be the author. I accepted the book I didn`t know at that time but told everyone there that this man was not the person he pretended to be!...
After that meeting with Elie Wiesel, I did research everywhere I could for twenty years and found out that the man calling himself Elie Wiesel has never been in a Nazi camp since he doesn`t figure on any official list of detainees.
So, who is telling the truth here and who is lying? I for one haven't got a clue. The person being presented as Gruner may himself be an imposter — I have been unable to find out much about him by googling. Could Madoff's minions be at work? But for me, what makes this claim really interesting, regardless of its validity, is that Elie's accuser, Miklos Gruner, is identified as a bonafide Holocaust survivor, so than would make anyone who dared contradict him into a Holocaust denier by default. At the same time, anyone who doubts Elie's word is a Holocaust denier too, in the finest ADL tradition. And with Holocaust denial or defaming the victims also being imprisonable offenses in Germany and several other European nations, we're all in a bit of a tiswas about the implications.
The Germans are a remarkably honest and upright people and far less duplicitous than their fellow Europeans, which is doubtless why they have a earned something of reputation for not getting the punchlines of jokes. It might also have something to do with the ironic mind being too warped and slippery to be grasped by the literal mind, to modify one of Hitch's observations. And of course, imprisoning people for thinking out loud is one of the negative results of this cultural mindset. But on the upside, the Germans are not shy of admitting that we all get a bit of salacious enjoyment out of other people's misfortune, particularly when we think it's thoroughly merited. They even coined a word for this feeling — schadenfreude — which the English have had to adopt as we never got around to inventing our own equivalent, since this would require us to admit that we too are sometimes guilty of such manners. If Elie Wiesel is being unjustly maligned, it will just be one more in a lifetlime of crosses that he's had to bear. But if Miklos Gruner's accusation proves true, a lot of people will be enjoying oodles of schadenfreude at Elie's expense. |
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Peace.
Michael Santomauro
Editorial Director
Call anytime: 917-974-6367
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Photo by Harry Miller of slave laborers in the Buchenwald concentration camp after U.S. troops of the 80th Div. entered the camp. Taken on 16 April 1945. Miklos Grüner (Haft-Nr. 120762) is on the left at the bottom, while Elie Wiesel (Haft-Nr. 123565) is on the next row up, seventh along, nearest to the third pillar from the left. 
Wiesel on Madoff: "'Psychopath' is too nice a word for him. 'Sociopath,' 'psychopath,' it means there is a sickness, a pathology. This man knew what he was doing. I would simply call him thief, scoundrel, criminal."
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