It is true that the two events happened within a space of 48 hours but most will probably say that this was purely a coincidence. I refer to the passing on of the mace from one University rector to another on June 30. Then on Saturday, just two days later, the world was saddened by the news of the death of Holocaust survivor, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, author and human rights activist and academic, Elie Wiesel.
Wiesel, on the other hand, believed that there are no coincidences. Was the only connection because all three are academics?
Former rector of the University of Malta, Juanito Camilleri delivered a brilliant address. It’s great that a man of science crafted such a lyrical and visionary address. But that reveals my stereotype about men of science. His address was a reveille against a reductive vision of the human person and against a purely utilitarian concept of education. He defines an academic as someone who identifies and helps preserve “what it is that makes us human”. That echoes Wiesel poignantly.
Camilleri then turned to an artiste to find an answer. He constructed his whole address around Roberto Benigni’s wonderful film La vita è bella. If he were to seek an answer in the works of the now deceased professor of humanities, Camilleri could have tied it Wiesel’s equally powerful book Night. There Wiesel communicates his experience with his father in different Nazi concentration campss. The strategy would have been common: let’s look at a limit situation, in this case the Holocaust, to better understand what makes us human.
La vita è bella and Night are two different art forms but are so similar. They introduce us to the demeaning, dehumanising horrors of the Nazi man-made hells. Both communicate the pain, but both, albeit in different doses, communicate, at least, signs of hope and redemption.
Camilleri, in his swansong at the Jesuits’ church, rightly said that Benigni’s “beautiful masterpiece imparts an important message of hope… because it projects the indestructible force of unconditional love... a sweetness which refuses to allow bitterness, envy, or even hatred to darken life.”
The story centres on Guido, who shelters his son Giosuè from the horrors of the camp by persuading him that this is a game. Goodness and hope exudes from this exquisite Christ-figure. When Guido managed, for example, to commandeer a microphone he urged his wife: “…do not lose heart... the good in life is worth fighting for... the good in life will prevail.”
It is more difficult to ferret out the redemptive elements from Night as in this book Wiesel wanted to show that in one night “everything came to an end – man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left”. But the redemptive elements are still there.
Cynics are myopic. Their egoism prevents them from seeing the deep sense of things and events
In my commentary on Easter Sunday, I recalled from Night the terrible story of a child who was hanged and was dying slowly as his weight was not heavy enough to break his neck. Wiesel files past him, sees his tongue still pink and his eyes clear. Where is God? Someone asks angrily.
Wiesel writes that he heard a voice within him: “Here He is – He is hanging here on these gallows.” The book is replete with this painful dichotomy of an absent, but at the same time, present God. In his acceptance speech at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in 1986 he said that “it seemed as impossible to conceive of Auschwitz with God as to conceive of Auschwitz without God.”
Towards the end of the book, Wiesel, in a dark room where the dead, from cold and starvation, were heaped on the living, is close to desperation. Then he heard a fellow prisoner, Juliek, playing on his violin a fragment from Beethoven. That “concert given to an audience of dead and dying men” remained with Wiesel all his life as a beautiful and overpowering testimony of men’s indomitable spirit and of the presence of a pure and lovely grace.
The cynic would sneeringly and triumphantly interject: But Guido was killed in La vita è bella just as in the morning, Wiesel found Juliek’s corpse near his smashed and trampled violin.
Cynics are myopic. Their egoism prevents them from seeing the deep sense of things and events. From a humanistic point of view, cynics are the poorest of the poor. Their sneering is a sign of their weakness and their inflated sense of self. They don’t know any better. They should be pitied, not admired; only to be feared if they have power, as they would surely abuse it.
They gloat on what they perceive as the triumph of evil. Wiesel, on the other hand, feels that Juliek’s ‘concert’ was a manifestation of the victorious dignity of humanity in the face of adversity. Juliek’s death transformed Wiesel into a man with a mission. In Why I write (1978) he commented thus: “I was duty-bound to give meaning to my survival, to justify each moment of my life.”
This urge to give meaning is well explained in Victor Frankl’s oeuvre relating his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp. In Man’s Search for Meaning he narrates how he and others found meaning in those excruciatingly painful years.
Guido died a sacrificial death, not a barren one. His passion in the camp and his death gave birth to a new life for his son. At the beginning of the film, Giosuè, the adult son, provided the interpretative key to the whole film. “This is my story. This is the sacrifice my father made. This was his gift to me.”
Benigni and Wiesel showed that where there is pain there can be joy; where there is destruction there can be a new beginning; where there is a sacrificial death there is always a resurrection. At the end of the film, Giosuè told his mother “Abbiamo vinto!” (We have won!) This echoes Wiesel’s belief that “There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.” This is too difficult for a cynic to comprehend.
There is always a new day: Buongiorno, principessa!
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt