ONE GENERATION AFTER (Entre deux soleils)

Collection by Elie Wiesel, 1965

Elie Wiesel's One Generation After (1965; Entre deux soleils ) is a collection of vignettes, stories, essays, and dialogues that reflect on the Holocaust and other themes central to his writing. In the essay "Journey's Beginning," he remembers a madman named Moshe who nonetheless was distinguished through great piety. In this remembrance Wiesel betrays his reverence for the mentally ill: "they see things we do not see." He also remembers Moché the Beadle (discussed in Wiesel's first book, Night ), who tried to warn the Jews of Sighet of heinous crimes that would befall them but whose heroic sacrifice fell on deaf ears because people took him for a madman.

In his essay "Readings" Wiesel reflects on the many exhortations to testify on behalf of the victims of the Holocaust that occurred in the concentration camps. Such exhortations came from the prominent octogenarian historian Simon Dubnov, who knew he would not survive the concentration camps and from the inmates hosting literary evenings in Buchenwald; exhortations occurred in plays, poems, and autobiographical accounts of the Holocaust that continue to terrify and fascinate.

In the essay "Snapshots" we experience Wiesel's description of photographs of Holocaust victims: "I know that every image robs me of another reason for hope. And still my fingers turn the pages, and the shriveled bodies, the gaping twisted mouths, their screams lost in space, continue to follow one another. Then the anguish clutching me, choking me, grows darker and darker; it crushes me: with all these corpses before my eyes, I am afraid to stumble over my own." Reliving the Holocaust unleashes a massive cultural anxiety in us that in no way escapes the survivors of this catastrophic experience; however, "there is a thirst for knowledge, a desire to understand."

Wiesel describes a photograph of a man who committed suicide in one of the concentration camps: "Seen in profile, the prisoner seems strangely serene. One might think him seated, were it not for the belt tightened around his neck, its other end fastened to a pipe screwed into the ceiling. The hanged man could not have chosen a more fitting or symbolic place: the latrines." Wiesel expresses his pity for and solidarity with those who succumbed to the horrific and depraved environment of the concentration camps which presented monstrosities ordinary human beings could not endure.

—Peter R. Erspamer