In 1944 a 15-year-old boy was taken from his home in Sighet, Hungary, and sent to a Nazi death camp. This spring, after a joint resolution of Congress, President Reagan will present him with a gold medal at the White House “in recognition of his humanitarian efforts and outstanding contributions to world literature and human rights.” There can be no longer journey than the one Elie Wiesel, 56, has taken from a cell in Auschwitz to the corridors of Washington. “How can you measure it?” he asks. “In the suffering of a people? In the recesses of history?” The questions are rhetorical. No gauge exists; no one has ever made the trip before. The voyage is charted in three words inscribed on his medal: AUTHOR, TEACHER, WITNESS. The witness was born in the charred world of the Holocaust. “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night,” he recalls in his first book. “Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.” As World War II came to a close, the gaunt and dolorous child was liberated at yet another death camp, Buchenwald. His parents and a sister had been murdered. How had he survived two of the most notorious killing fields of the century? “I will never know,” he says. “I was always weak. I never ate. The slightest wind would turn me over. In Buchenwald they sent 10,000 to their deaths each day. I was always in the last hundred near the gate. They stopped. Why?” The inquiry was a burden as ineradicable as the number, A-7713, tattooed on his arm by a German official. “So heavy was my anguish,” he remembers, “that in the spring of 1945 I made a vow: not to speak, not to touch upon the essential for at least ten years. Long enough to unite the language of humanity with the silence of the dead.” The boy refused repatriation and found his way to France, where he worked as a choir director, translator and, eventually, journalist. It was during an interview in 1954 with Roman Catholic Novelist Francois Mauriac that literature took an abrupt turn. “He spoke so much about Christ,” says Wiesel. “I was timid, but finally I said, ‘You speak of Christ’s suffering. What about the children who have suffered not 2,000 years ago, but yesterday? And they never talk about it.” Mauriac was to recall the look in the speaker’s pained eyes, “as of a Lazarus risen from the dead, yet still a prisoner within the grim confines where he had strayed, stumbling among the shameful corpses . . . I could only embrace him weeping.” Four years later, Night appeared in France with an introduction by Mauriac. The little book set the Wiesel style: austere, tense phrases articulating the unspeakable–the murder and torture of the innocent, the martyrdom of faith itself as a child watches the hanging of another child: ” ‘Where is God? Where is he?’ . . . And I heard a voice within me answer: ‘Where is he? Here he is–he is hanging here on this gallows.’ “
