‘I must do something with my life,’ a guiding philosophy

I was saddened to hear of Elie Wiesel’s recent death. He was 87 and had lived more than 70 years as a Holocaust survivor, having been liberated from Buchenwald in 1945, at the age of 16.

I felt a kinship with Wiesel, although we’d never met. In fact, I once bought tickets for my staff when I heard he was speaking in my town. I was so impressed, the next year we closed the office to visit the Washington, D.C., Holocaust Memorial Museum that Wiesel had helped develop.

On the one hand, that makes no sense. What do these issues have to do with career counseling? But to me, it had all become interlaced: One’s response to a life event seemed as relevant to career management as one’s choice of vocation.

My interest in Wiesel began when I read his book, “Night” (1956). I was a teenager (about the same age as he had been when he and his family were sent to the death camps) but it wasn’t a class assignment. I was riding my bike on a steamy summer day when I happened upon a garage sale whose proprietor seemed eager to dispense with all worldly possessions. Hence his almost immediate offer: $5 for all the books.

That summer I chewed through some of the most influential books of my life. “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” (Malcolm X and Alex Haley, 1964) shocked me to my toes while “Things Fall Apart” (Chinua Achebe, 1958) showed me the power of African literature — a genre that had never crossed my mind. Leon Uris’ books thrilled me, and one of those epic tomes by James Michener (I don’t remember which one), kept me glued to a lawn chair for two weeks.

Although I didn’t manage to read all the books, there was one I returned to repeatedly: “Night.” This slim volume introduced me to symbolic writing and gave me more than a personal perspective on the Holocaust. It told me how a person — a teenager, specifically — might survive the unthinkable and go on nonetheless.

It’s no exaggeration to say Wiesel’s early influence helped shape my path while providing a blueprint for a life of purpose. In particular, his story of survival influenced my response when asked by a family friend to help write a semi-scholarly book on his repatriation experiences after being held captive for almost four years during World War II.

To complete “Understanding the Former POW: Life After Liberation (Guy Kelnhofer; Amy Lindgren, ed., 1992), I spent two years intensively researching the relatively sparse collection of known medical and psychological effects of life in the labor camps, while also fact-checking assertions the author made in his essays about post-liberation survival.

Once the book was published, I spent another two years traveling on the author’s behalf to conventions across the nation, meeting hundreds of POW survivors of Bataan, Wake Island, Corregidor, Iwo Jima and other battles I had barely heard of. We were proud to have our book used by doctors with the Veterans Administration, where we hoped to influence care protocols for POWs and their families.

Dr. Kelnhofer has passed away but I still have books I would gladly give away for the price of shipping. The medical data is outdated but the essays are, sadly, deeply relevant today. (If you’d like a copy please email me or call my office at 651-224-2856.)

Coming back to Wiesel, I’m not sure I would have had the fortitude for this project without having ingested his sense of urgency at a critical time in my youth. His 1981 quote in a New York Times interview summarizes well what I took from reading “Night”: “I must do something with my life. It is too serious to play games with anymore, because in my place, someone else could have been saved. And so I speak for that person. On the other hand, I know I cannot.”

That’s a serious note for a mid-summer careers column, but I’ll leave you with this: If you have a sense of unfinished business, it’s time to get moving. At the very least, check your summer reading list to ensure you’ve included the biography of someone you admire. Summer is a good time to replenish your store of inspiration.