Note: Elie Wiesel served on the host committee of Defiant Requiem, a concert held in April at Lincoln Center to benefit the UJA-Federation of New York Community Initiative for Holocaust Survivors. In honor of JCF’s Special Gift Fund grant of $100,000 to the Community Initiative for Holocaust Survivors, our VP/Controller — Saul Wadowski — shares his own experiences as the child of survivors of the Holocaust. Excerpted from a letter Saul wrote three years ago to Elie Wiesel, he also reflects on the impact Wiesel has had on his own life.
As VP/Controller of a major philanthropic organization in New York City, the majority of my clients are Jewish, among them, Holocaust survivors. For over a decade, I have found the work and professional relationships to be profoundly satisfying and at its core deeply meaningful. It is one such particularly elegant, warm, and charismatic lady that suggested I write you and relate this story of personal enlightenment, due perhaps entirely to the words, the book, and the impression left on me by yourself. This truly and exceptionally affected my development as a man and my understanding of life and the world, probably in a manner you might find rather surprising.
My parents are survivors. We grew up knowing of our family’s past, but not much of its sadness which we were sheltered from. That notwithstanding, we did learn of the tragedies, as children do by observing and overhearing. Our mother lived the realities of the Holocaust, while our father, rest in peace, left Poland as a Zionist prior to the Nazi occupation through sheer luck, but his nightmares of guilt resulting from being his family’s only survivor were a lifelong conflict. Our mother lived the devastation of losing her entire family, and her survival laid completely at the generosity and compassion of the non-Jewish Polish villagers who sheltered her throughout the war. When liberation came, she was 17, and a Polish magistrate assisted her in bartering the family estate for a one-way ticket to Israel. It was in Israel that our parents met, married and began a family; we lived there until I was nine, when we emigrated to the U.S. for a better and safer life – at that time there were frequent attacks and air raids right into the heart of the land, Tel Aviv. A year after the crossing the ocean, Mom and Dad felt safe and comfortable enough to have a second blessed arrival, my brother, now Associate Dean of SUNY Downstate Medical Center Children’s Hospital, and Director of the Intensive Care Unit, and the Residence Program. We are living the American dream.
We made port in New York the summer of 1961, on the good ship Shalom, if memory serves. I remember being told that the first thing you see approaching the American land was the Statue of Liberty. On board that morning, I scrambled and strained among the crowds of grownups just to see the extended torch and the glory of the crown, but alas I saw only a new civilization as we entered the harbor – no torch, no crown. The Lady did finally grace our bow, but by then we were well into the Hudson Bay and my anticipation had waned. For a long while I struggled quite a bit with the loneliness and cultural differences, but it was the language barrier that was so isolating and withdrawing — I knew not a single word of English. Thought to be a bright child, when I began fourth grade school in Brooklyn any course or subject having to do with English, and they were nearly all, was a trying and defeatist ordeal, painstakingly frustrating. It seemed like the inadequacy and alienation would last forever.
My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Reilly, a most sympathetic and kindly person, gave me a simple book to read in the hope of improving my English, called “Cowboy Sam.” Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect – the book wasn’t interesting, seemed a silly story, and felt more like drudgery. It was this and similar such experiences that gave me a strong distaste for books and reading. Being impressionable, this episode had a ripple and lasting effect throughout the years, and manifested in the way of serious language deficiency in all disciplines of education. My ability to read, comprehension, and vocabulary suffered almost exponentially as I made deliberate efforts to avoid any kind of reading throughout elementary, junior, high school, and the formative years of college. By the time I entered college, my English aptitude was several years below grade level, though other subjects, math and science, allowed me to graduate timely. Everyone thought I was doing well in school, but I knew to the contrary.
While attending Brooklyn College, my primary criterion for selecting courses and a major was the requirement of least reading material – clearly the makings of a forlorn career path. One decisive day, walking out the college library, I noticed, and thought about, all the people pouring over the volumes of books. How can they do this and what was I missing here? So I began a search and asked anyone and everyone for the best book they have ever read. There was little consensus but one book was mentioned several times – “Night” and, forgive me, but I had never heard of it or its author. Soon after, I did purchased this slim, un-intimidating soft cover, but it would be a while before I would open it – overcoming a lifelong mindset seemed monumental and challenging.
On one uneventful evening, in my parents’ living room, I decided to crack open the “book.” I don’t know how much time passed, but the next moment of consciousness I was on the last page and the final words of the story. Where had the time gone? I had taken a voyage into a dreamland and I was discovering an unbeknownst source of power and self-awareness, that of the written word – what a revelation after so many years of suppression and dejection. It was at this defining moment that I set on a lifelong mission, to search, collect and read wonderful books – I became an avid reader. As a consequence, and predictably so, I became fairly adept in the spoken and usage of the English language, and as a result able to achieve a modicum of success in life.
Therefore, my Teacher, I am so grateful to you and your book – my heartfelt thank you for redirecting, advancing, and allowing me to have such accomplishments in my life. “Night” to many, perhaps most, raises consciousness as it recounts the nightmare of a child’s suffering through the genocide, and in many ways my mother’s horror as well, but for me, the book transcended and gave me so much more, it delivered a boy to the universe of knowledge and virtue.