A magical 4 years with Elie Wiesel
Columnist reflects on working with Nobel Peace Prize laureate
The phone call came as quite a surprise.
It was my editor telling me who’d be receiving the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize later that year: Elie Wiesel.
With those two words, I instantly realized my life was about to change, but I had no idea by how much. For the editor clearly was going to ask if I’d like to interview the Nobel Peace Prize laureate for an article in the newspaper and, later, interview him onstage in Orchestra Hall, where Wiesel would receive the award in November 2012.
When the editor, Scott Powers, indeed asked, “Are you interested?” I immediately said, “Yes!”
Then, with my heart pounding faster, I began to ponder the implications, which were nearly overwhelming. For starters, I’d never read “Night,” Wiesel’s universally revered account of his life before and during the Holocaust.
As the son of two Holocaust survivors, I assiduously had avoided books and movies on this subject, which hit way too close to home.
I would dip into this material only on assignment: When you go into work mode, it’s somehow a bit easier to confront topics that cut deeply into your own family’s tragedies.
It wasn’t until I was nearly 50, in fact, that I even had learned what happened to my parents during the Holocaust, for they — like many survivors — chose not to burden their children with such sorrows. Even then I had to piece the narrative together myself, journalistically, via a Tribune story, “Prisoner of Her Past.”
I assumed it was that article, which later evolved into a book and a documentary film broadcast on PBS, that prompted Tribune editors to turn to me for the Wiesel interviews.
After several weeks of reading everything by him that I could find, I met Wiesel in his New York office, not sure what to expect. I was surprised to discover that after a few minutes we were speaking with a degree of familiarity and intimacy I’d never assumed with any interview subject, much less one of such colossal achievement and stature.
But Wiesel began to show me private documents that he said he never had shared with any “outsider.” It meant that he and I were together on the inside — of a cataclysmic event that had decimated both of our families.
I told Wiesel that he and my late father, Robert Reich, were liberated from the same death camp, Buchenwald, on April 11, 1945. I explained to Wiesel that my mother, Sonia Reich, is so haunted by what happened that she still believes a yellow Star of David — which marked Jews for death during the Holocaust — has been sewn onto her clothes.
With each subsequent sentence, Wiesel’s stories and mine became increasingly intertwined. It was as if we had known each other for years, decades even. Such was the power of our families’ pasts.
More than 2,500 people packed Orchestra Hall for our public conversation on Nov. 11, 2012, the auditorium at some moments becoming more hushed than I ever had heard in a lifetime of concert-going. Listeners hung on Wiesel’s every soft-spoken syllable, presumably realizing they were hearing profound words from a singular, poetic voice.
As I bid Wiesel farewell at the airport that afternoon, I assumed that would be the end of our brief journey together. But after we embraced, he said to me, in his lilting Eastern European accent, “You’ve got my number?”
You mean your phone number in New York?
“Yeah, you’ve got my number?”
Then he boarded the plane home, and I spent the next several days trying to puzzle out what he meant.
Did he really want me to call him? Was he saying we should stay in touch? Or was he just being polite?
It wasn’t until I was back in Orchestra Hall nearly two weeks later, to review a concert, that I suddenly realized what was happening between us: Our dialogue needed to continue and to be chronicled in a book — a conversation between two generations struggling to understand what perhaps never really can be fully comprehended.
When I phoned Wiesel to share that thought with him, he immediately agreed and invited me to come see him whenever I wished.
So we met in Florida, where he spent every winter teaching. We conversed for hours over the course of a few days, my recorder capturing his words, the man answering not only questions I’d been contemplating all my life but also those I didn’t realize had been hovering in the background.
How do we speak of the Holocaust? How do we talk to our parents about it? How do we deal with the guilt of knowing what our parents suffered? How does anyone maintain faith — in religion or humanity — after what happened? How does one sustain hope in the face of despair?
My conversations with Wiesel continued for four years, in Florida and New York and regularly on the phone. To my great delight, he often ended our conversations with the same tantalizing phrase: “To be continued!” Those were the most encouraging words I could have hoped to hear from him.
Finally, I finished the book, “The Art of Inventing Hope: Intimate Conversations with Elie Wiesel” (to be released by Chicago Review press May 7). He asked me to send the manuscript to him in Florida, then come visit so we could go over it.
I arrived at his hotel with some trepidation, wondering if I possibly could have done justice to the mountain of words he had given me.
When he appeared at our usual meeting place, I was surprised that he wasn’t holding the threering notebook I had sent him.
We sat down, and I asked him if he wanted to go over the book.
“No,” he said, nonchalantly.
Really? I asked.
“No, it’s very good. Nothing to change.”
Never before have I felt such a combination of euphoria and slight disappointment. For while thrilled that Wiesel was happy with what we had created, I’d been looking forward to working with him on word choice, sentence structure, tone, rhythm, color and more.
Still, I was greatly relieved, spending the rest of that week — and future visits — simply enjoying his company, sharing more stories, talking, laughing, lamenting.
Not long after, I was as shocked as the rest of the world to learn that Wiesel — who had done more than anyone else to shape our understanding of the Holocaust’s meaning and gravity — died on July 2, 2016, at 87.
What would the world be like without his compassionate voice, I wondered? What would my life be like without our conversations of the past four years? What would happen with no more “to be continued”?
But then I realized that my conversations with Wiesel — and the world’s engagement with him — would indeed continue, through the illuminating books and articles he wrote and the avalanche of questions he raised in them.
Now, whenever I open “The Art of Inventing Hope” and see his words on the page, I hear the gentle timbre of his voice as he said them to me, savor the answers I’d sought for so long and recall the privilege of those years.
For Wiesel gave me, and millions of others, words and ideas with which to confront onerous events.
Without his thoughts on guilt, genocide, anti-Semitism, memory, faith and so much more, the world would be an even darker place than it is today.
With them, there is hope.
Howard Reich will discuss “The Art of Inventing Hope” with journalist Regine Schlesinger 6:30 p.m. May 9 at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, 9603 Woods Drive, Skokie; 847-967-4000 or www.ilholocaustmuseum .org.
Reich also will speak about the book 11:45 a.m. May 16 at the Standard Club, 320 S. Plymouth Court; 312-4279100 or www.eventbrite .com.