REMEMBERING JAYA, THEIR BABY
‘I wanted to tell her story,’ man says of infant daughter’s too-short life
When he woke up in tears the morning after he had cried himself to sleep, Rohit Saxena knew what he had to do.
Leaving his wife Lesley asleep in bed, Rohit went downstairs, opened his laptop and began to write.
“They say your kids are your hearts outside your body,” he wrote. “I’ll always be grateful that we got to share our heartbeats with each other, even if my heart will always be broken for it. Let’s remember her.”
“Her” is Jaya Anita Spencer Saxena, age six months, who died on June 4 while Rohit and Lesley Spencer, 37, an emergency room physician, were vacationing in North Carolina with Jaya, their three-year-old son, Navin, and family friends.
His extraordinary essay is at once a touching memorial to a lost child and an unblinking acknowledgment of what Rohit calls “one bad nap” — sudden infant death syndrome.
“I wanted to tell her story,” says the 36-year-old engineer. “I wrote down everything I was feeling. I wanted people to get to know her. She was only a baby. She was just six months old, but I think she still had the dignity of a story to be told, and it was important for me to tell that.”
SIDS is not a subject that many grieving parents will talk candidly about.
“That’s a problem,” says Lesley. “It’s the same thing with infertility and pregnancy loss: it’s a taboo subject. You’re supposed to just get over it,” she says.
“Having a dad reach out and say ‘This is really hard and it makes me cry’ — that’s a good thing. It’s OK to have these strong emotions as a man.”
• The frail, dapper man who sometimes greeted reporters in his Madison Avenue office spoke in an almost hushed voice, but with urgency, his hands gesturing gently for emphasis. Elie Wiesel’s smile was wry, diffident, a thin facade over the sadness imprinted in the weary eyes and deep creases of a face that mirrored his brutal past.
The Auschwitz survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who has died at age 87, was an ongoing reminder of one man’s endurance of the Nazi Holocaust. His words, destined to last far into the future, are a testament to some of the most unfathomable atrocities in recorded history.
“Whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation, take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented,” he said in 1986, upon accepting the Nobel.
Wiesel’s death was announced Saturday by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. He was memorialized Sunday at a private service in Manhattan, as family and friends gathered at Fifth Avenue Synagogue and praised his endurance and eloquence.
“This is really the double tragedy of it, not only the loss of someone who was so rare and unusual but the fact that those ranks are thinning out,” Rabbi Perry Berkowitz, president of the American Jewish Heritage Organization and a former assistant to Wiesel, said before the service. “At the same time, antiSemitism, Holocaust revisionism keeps rising. The fear is that when there are no more survivors left, will the world learn the lesson, because those voices will be silenced.”
One of the world’s foremost witnesses and humanitarians, Wiesel for more than a half-century voiced his passionate beliefs to world leaders, celebrities and general audiences in the name of victims of violence and oppression. He wrote more than 40 books, but his most influential by far was Night, a classic ranked with Anne Frank’s diary as standard reading about the Holocaust.
“Night is the most devastating account of the Holocaust that I have ever read,” wrote Ruth Franklin, a literary critic and author of A Thousand Darknesses, a study of Holocaust literature that was published in 2010.
“There are no epiphanies in Night. There is no extraneous detail, no analysis, no speculation. There is only a story: Eliezer’s account of what happened, spoken in his voice.”
Night was so bleak that publishers doubted it would appeal to readers. In a 2002 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Wiesel recalled that the book attracted little notice at first. “The English translation came out in 1960, and the first printing was 3,000 copies. And it took three years to sell them. Now, I get 100 letters a month from children about the book. And there are many, many million copies in print.”
Wiesel’s prolific stream of speeches, essays and books, including two sequels to Night and more than 40 books of fiction and nonfiction, emerged from the helplessness of a teenager deported from Hungary, which had annexed his native Romanian town of Sighet, to Auschwitz. Tattooed with the number A-7713, he was freed in 1945 — but only after his mother, father and one sister had all died in Nazi camps. Two other sisters survived.
After the liberation of Buchenwald, in April 1945, Wiesel spent a few years in a French orphanage, then landed in Paris. He studied literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne, and then became a journalist, writing for the French newspaper L’Arche and Israel’s Yediot Ahronot.
In 1956, Wiesel travelled on a journalistic assignment to New York to cover the United Nations. While there, he was struck by a car and confined to a wheelchair for a year. He became a lifetime New Yorker, continuing in journalism writing for the Yiddish-language newspaper, The Forward.
Wiesel became a U.S. citizen in 1963. Six years later, he married Marion Rose, a fellow Holocaust survivor who translated some of his books into English. They had a son, Shlomo.
Wiesel defended Soviet Jews, Nicaragua’s Miskito Indians, Cambodian refugees, the Kurds, victims of African famine and victims of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Wiesel was a longtime supporter of Israel.
The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, which he established in 1988, explored the problems of hatred and ethnic conflicts around the world. But like a number of other well-known charities in the Jewish community, the foundation fell victim to Bernard Madoff, the financier who was arrested in late 2008 and accused of running a $50-billion Ponzi scheme.
Wiesel said he ended up losing $15.2 million in foundation funds, plus his and his wife’s own personal investments.
Despite Wiesel’s mission to remind the world of past mistakes, the greatest disappointment of his life was that “nothing changed,” he said in an interview.
“Human nature remained what it was. Society remained what it was. Too much indifference in the world, to the Other, his pain, and anguish and hope.”