Elie Wiesel, Auschwitz survivor, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, died recently at the age of 87. His book, Night, is one of the most unsparing accounts ever written of the horror man inflicts on his fellow man.
Elie Wiesel was deported to the death camp at the age of 15. The questions he asks in his book sicken the soul:
“Why were his friends and neighbours put into sealed cattle cars, to travel for two days with almost no air or water? Why were they delivered to a place fogged with the stench of human flesh, where pits of fire devoured the bodies of babies and children? Why were they stripped of everything, shaved, tattooed with numbers and made to run everywhere? Why, within a day, was he torn from his mother and younger sister, never to see them again?”
And then questions still more terrible:
“Why did fellow-inmates, as well as Germans, beat new arrivals and call them sons of bitches? Why did the prisoners watch the routine hangings for minor thefts without emotion, staring indifferently at the swaying, swollen faces? Why did he find himself thinking of nothing but his ration of soup and bread? What led him to claw his way through a pile of dying men to save just himself? Most dreadful of all, what led him to ignore his dying father’s request for water, when his father was the only and dearest thing he had left in the world?”
When he survived he knew his fate was to sear what happened in the Holocaust on human minds forever. He reminds us that horror and cruelty never depart this world.
A man drives a refrigerator truck down a holiday promenade in Nice deliberately targeting and crushing mothers playing with their children. That is simply the latest horror. There have been and will be more. In any case, hardly a day passes that one does not learn of some brutality without pity inflicted, most often on women and children, in our own Guyana.
Be reminded of the words of the playwright Edward Bond:
“If you look at life closely it is unbearable. What people suffer, what they do to each other, how they hate themselves in hating others. But you must never turn away. If you do, you lose everything. Listen to the howl of the flames.”
“Listen to the howl of the flames.” Let us never forget the whole problem of evil in the world. How can one account for evil? How can there be a God, supposedly of perfect goodness, when so much horror and evil infect the world?
The universe, it seems, is ruled by the principle of symmetry. In any stable system the positive electrical charges must be balanced by the negative electrical charges. The forces of attraction balance the forces of disruption. Newton’s Third Law of Motion decrees that any action must produce an equal and opposite reaction. Vishnu, the Preserver, could not exist without Vishnu, the Destroyer.
Let us appreciate that theologians and philosophers use much the same argument in explaining the problem of evil to despairing victims: “It stands to reason,” they say, “that without knowing evil you would not know the meaning of good; without pain you would not know joy.”
On this basis at least we poor mortals might be sure that the total quantity of evil in the universe should not exceed the quantity of good, and likewise that the total quantity of suffering should not exceed its equivalent of joy. For every murder of a small child there should be somewhere a huge explosion of joy.
But as I grow older and as I contemplate the recent history of the world – the cold-eyed slaughter of 6 million Jews; the Cambodian horrors of the Pol Pot regime; the Rwanda genocide, the reciprocal slaughtering in the Middle East – to take only four examples – I sometimes wonder whether even this universal law of parity between good and evil is not breaking down.
Arthur Koestler had a terrifying vision of a gigantic pair of scales, transfiguring the universe, and slowly but surely weighing down on the side of pain and evil. Pile all the cathedrals and the temples in the scale of goodness and they will be outweighed by a single obscure shower room in the Auschwitz death-camp. And how many Mozartian magic flites do you think are needed to drown the eternal thunder of the war drums?
As we survey the darkening scene of horror and vengeance in a thousand places, the fear creeps in that the universal law may have been repealed and that even God, cocooned in His chrysalis of perfect goodness, may have washed His hands of His own imperfect world and decided that there is no longer any point in being born again.
And yet, as I put down my pen, I happen to read a short poem by Octavio Paz which I place here as a small counter to despair:
Brotherhood
I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.
