Even if you remember a spark of the flame, that's enough. Even if you remember one face, it would be enough.
Elie Wiesel
In Conversations With Elie Wiesel, by Elie Wiesel and Richard Heffner, Wiesel talks about why trauma survivors should tell their stories. Elie Wiesel, a world-famous author and peace activist who survived the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, gives several reasons. The first, not surprisingly, is to prevent genocide. Sadly, as we are only too aware after Rwanda and Darfur, this hasn't happened. Still, it is a large part of the reason why Wiesel began to write about the Holocaust.
"We tell the tale of our nightmare and of our darkness in order to prevent other people from entering that nightmare," Wiesel told journalist Heffner. Speaking out, however, is never easy, even for someone who later became a prize-winning author. Immediately after the war, Wiesel found that people were not interested in hearing his story and few other Holocaust survivors were speaking out. Wiesel explains the impact that this response had.
"The question is really not how we survived the war," Wiesel told Heffner, "but how we survived mentally afterwards, when we came out and we saw that life was business as usual and how few people cared." (Wiesel and Heffner, p. 151) My own experiences with trauma have been similar. Not that my personal traumas can compare to the Holocaust. Of course not. However, my experience has been that people don't want to hear about what has happened to me.
Encouraging other survivors to speak out was, perhaps, the main reason that Wiesel chose to write about his experiences. Despite his efforts, however, it wasn't until 1960 that his acclaimed memoir Night was first published in English. Sadly, the debut of this book was anything but spectacular. The initial printing was 3,000 and it took three years to sell the books.
"When I wrote my first book," Wiesel remembers, "my goal, really, was to reach the survivors, my peers. Why? Because in the beginning they didn't talk. They didn't talk because nobody wanted to hear them. And I wanted to show them, 'Look it's possible to talk, and even if it isn't, we must talk.'" He also remembers that it took "years and years and years" of work to convince Holocaust survivors that they could share their stories. Wiesel persisted, however, and he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 and was termed a "messenger to mankind," for speaking out about the atrocities of the Holocaust.
Moving as this recognition was, Wiesel still works tirelessly to encourage Holocaust survivors to speak out about their experiences and to share his own stories.
Wiesel acknowledges, however, that - in the end - there is truly no way to make the incomprehensible, comprehensible. "What I try to do is to bring you closer to the gate, and I will tell you you cannot go beyond that - that only those who were there know what it was being there. But come closer . . . and the only way to come closer is to come closer to my memory, meaning the memory of those who survived." (Ibid., p. 115). Wiesel is outspoken about the role of the listener. He suggests that turning away is not a morally or ethically acceptable position. (I agree - more on that in a future post.)
"To forget the victims means to kill them a second time. We couldn't prevent the first killing," Wiesel said, "but we are responsible for the second one if it takes place." (p. 166) Dr. Kathleen Young also covers the topic of speaking out on her blog. (It's worth reading, particularly the beautiful quote by e.e. cummings.) I've also written about this topic on my blog. See, for example Why Is It Important for Trauma Survivors to Speak Out?
Finally, I love what Danish writer Isak Dinesen (of Out of Africa fame) has to say on the subject. "All sorrows can be borne," she said, "if you tell a story about them." She would know; within the span of several years she lost her lover in a plane crash, had a miscarriage, and lost her farm in Africa and had to return to Denmark. And, she survived.
Next time, more on how - and why - others silence trauma survivors and what we can do about that.
What experiences have you had about sharing your experiences of trauma? I'd love to hear from you.
