RePortersNoteBook.com: Elie Wiesel and the Mossad, Part II

Elie Wiesel and the Mossad, Part II

by Carolyn Yeager

The activities of the Irgun dominate Wiesel's life and attention in 1948.

This propaganda poster was for distribution in central Europe. It was designed in 1937 by the wife of a Polish reserve officer who was working with Irgun representatives. [See story below: Irgun in Central/Eastern Europe] The entire area was called Eretz Israel and was claimed for a future Jewish state.

Dear Readers, As it has turned out, there is much to relate about this one year of 1948 before we get to Elie's travels. Therefore, I ask for your patience once again. When we left off in Part I, he had just gone to work for the Irgun newspaper, Zion in Kamf. It was November 1947. Here is how he describes his vision of the underground "resistance" at this time.

Physical courage, self-sacrifice, and solidarity could be found even in the lower depths; total compassion, rejection of humiliation either suffered or imposed, and altruism in the absolute sense were found only among those who fought for an idea and an ideal that went beyond themselves. Nobility of action was found only among those who espoused the cause of the weak and oppressed, the prisoners of evil and misfortune. 5

Strangely, this sounds like the "ideas and ideals" of the National Socialists in Germany in the 1920's who sought the way to lift themselves out of the humiliation and extreme economic hardship imposed on them by the Versailles dictate. But to young Wiesel, the only suffering worth seeing or talking about was that of the Jews. He had not a thought or concern about the native people in Palestine and what was happening to them, just as the Jews of the previous inter-war generation had no concern for the Germans they were exploiting. These others, for him, could not be seen as the "weak and oppressed," but only as the new enemy that must be overcome by whatever methods were necessary. To Wiesel, even in his youth, only the Jewish militant fighters were "noble" when they carried out their tough and "necessary" actions.

Wiesel admits that by going to work for the Irgun in Paris he was: "risking neither death nor imprisonment. Even deportation from France was unlikely. Stateless persons were rarely deported, that was one of the few advantages of the status." (Rivers, p162)

Continued at http://www.eliewieseltattoo.com/elie-wiesel-and-the-mossad-part-ii