Open Heart

From the time I heard Elie Wiesel speak at one of Brent’s graduations, I followed him and his ongoing quest to make sure that no one in the whole wide world was forgotten for years in prison camps, as the Jews had been during World War II. Even when he was criticized for interfering in other country’s problems, he persisted. He remembered his own desperation when he was forsaken.

Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate, Elie Wiesel, gave an impassioned speech in the East Room of the White House on April 12, 1999, as part of the Millennium Lecture series, hosted by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

In the summer of 1944, as a teenager in Hungary, Elie Wiesel, along with his father, mother and sisters, were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz extermination camp in occupied Poland. Upon arrival there, Wiesel and his father were selected by SS Dr. Josef Mengele for slave labor and wound up at the nearby Buna rubber factory.

Daily life included starvation rations of soup and bread, brutal discipline, and a constant struggle against overwhelming despair. At one point, young Wiesel received 25 lashes of the whip for a minor infraction.

In January 1945, as the Russian Army drew near, Wiesel and his father were hurriedly evacuated from Auschwitz by a forced march to Gleiwitz and then via an open train car to Buchenwald in Germany, where his father, mother, and a younger sister eventually died.

Wiesel was liberated by American troops in April 1945. After the war, he moved to Paris and became a journalist then later settled in New York. Since 1976, he has been Andrew Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University. He has received numerous awards and honors including the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was also the Founding Chair of the United States Holocaust Memorial. Wiesel has written over 40 books including Night, a harrowing chronicle of his Holocaust experience, first published in 1960.

At the White House lecture, Wiesel was introduced by Hillary Clinton who stated, "It was more than a year ago that I asked Elie if he would be willing to participate in these Millennium Lectures...I never could have imagined that when the time finally came for him to stand in this spot and to reflect on the past century and the future to come, that we would be seeing children in Kosovo crowded into trains, separated from families, separated from their homes, robbed of their childhoods, their memories, their humanity."

You can read his speech on the Internet.

I just finished listening to his book Open Heart.  I have a greater understanding and empathy for my brother, DeLoy’s, open heart surgery after listening to Elie Wiesel’s book. This excerpt from his book is an incident that happened much earlier than his open heart surgery (when he was 82 years old).

He had just arrived from Paris in 1954. Being a correspondent for the Israeli Daily, he bought the 1st edition of the paper. Clutching it under his arm, he crossed Times Square to send his daily cable. That cable was never sent. He was run over by a taxi and spent three months in the hospital in a full body cast.

He had multiple fractures of the hips, the vertebrae, the ankles.

Fortunately, he had made friends among his United Nations colleagues. From morning to night, he was rarely alone.

“One of them, Alexander Solberg, was endowed with a magnificent sense of humor

He loves to makes me laugh.

And while it makes me feel better, it also hurts.

On his first visit, he wanted to know everything about my accident.

I described my various fractures.

As I mentioned each one, he said,

‘It could be worse.’

I have terrible headaches.

‘It could be worse.’

My left ankle is broken

‘It could be worse.’

My knees are on fire.

‘It could be worse.’

Really Alexander, what could be worse?

‘It could have been me.'"

My favorite expression in the book was when talked about his parents’ and grandparents’ “murdered dreams.”

His talking about being in a full body cast,

reminded me of when Eddy was in a full body cast.

The doctor took skin from his leg to line his eye socket

when they were trying to enlarge it.

He cut too deeply and the sore on his leg never healed.

In desperation, they did a skin graft

and put him in a full-body cast so he could not move.

In elementary school,

Brooke wrote a Haiku about it.

My little brother

Lies abed in body cast

Seven long days now.