What made Elie Wiesel such a powerful figure was his ability to make a huge moment in history consistently clear in the present. Like the interpretive political landscapes addressed by philosopher George Santayana, Wiesel saw memory not just as a cognitive tool to reconstruct the past, but as an instrument to build the future. But he also believed in balancing universal lessons of history with specific episodes of our most painful yesterdays. This aptly describes the curriculum developed by the organization he loved: Facing History and Ourselves.
Dimitry Anselme, Facing History's director for staff development, said he first met Wiesel in a huge assembly at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the spring of 1994.
“He was at an event talking with Maya Angelou, and the two of them were talking about the things that are important to them; issues of racism, issues of inclusion and exclusion—those dynamics—and using their own personal narratives and stories to come together and to speak around why it was important to stand up, to speak up," Anselme said. "And that is ultimately what we do at Facing History. We’re not doing victim Olympics. It’s ultimately a way to help young people think about what it means to be human, and what it means to be human is to learn to hear each others stories, to find compassion, to relate to and from one another and to engage.”
Anselme and I spoke on a street in Brookline where Wiesel spent a snippet of his 87-year life. Anselme is from Haiti, where thousands have died from civil war and hunger over the decades. He says finding common ground was key for Wiesel and describes how Facing History collaborated with the author.
“For example, around 1992, he used to do a gathering of world leaders, and it was around the time of the Bosnian genocide," Anselme said. "And he decided to bring in a core group of young people from conflict areas to join the congress of world leaders that he was engaging. And so he asked Facing History to organize that and to work with the young people.”
Wiesel regarded the utterance of “never again” to be a less than useful pronouncement, unless accompanied by a process to avoid the conditions that lead to genocide. In Wiesel’s words, Anselme says, “never again" becomes more than a slogan.
"It's a prayer, a promise, a vow,” Anselme said.
“He talked a lot about indifference and ultimately that’s what Facing History is about", Anselme said. "It’s about teaching and engaging young people so that they’re not indifferent. They’re not bystanders.”
And he connected dots that were not always clear, Anselme says.
“[Connecting] the dots, for him, was in being able to recognize when evil was present and to learn how to speak," he said. "That ultimately was the lesson about ‘never again.’ And he connected, not only about genocide, about racism, about violence, about disposition and the refugee crisis. And he had a way to let us know that we had a voice, that it was important to speak and to make those dots clear for young people.”
Facing History and Ourselves uses Wiesel’s famous memoir, “Night,” to shed light on the dark lessons of the Holocaust and to “encourage students to think about universal themes of human behavior.” "Night" tells the real-life story of surviving the final year of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, the most notorious of Nazi death camps.
“I read 'Night' in the original French, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t fully understand it," Anselme said. "I didn’t know the history of the Holocaust at the time. I was probably 12 when I started reading it. So it was not until much later when I became a teacher and I got involved with Facing History and I actually learned the history of the Holocaust and I was able to re-read 'Night' in English that it began to make sense.”
Facing History’s study guide for Wiesel’s Night addresses two primary questions: “What is the relationship between our stories and our identity” and to “what extent are we all witnesses of history and messengers to humanity?” Both questions were central to Elie Wiesel and his life’s work.
