“Influence comes from everywhere but when you are actually shooting you work primarily by instinct. But what is instinct? It is a lifetime of accumulation of influence, experience, knowledge, seeing and hearing. There is little time for reflection in taking a photograph. All your experience comes to a peak and you work on two levels, the conscious and the unconscious”
~ Arnold Newman
(1918-2006)
“I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead and anyone who does not remember. betrays them again"
~ Elie Wiesel
(1928-2016)
“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as god himself”
~ Elie Wiesel(from his 1956 work “Night")
Elie Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. The Norwegian Nobel Committee called him a “messenger to mankind” stating that through his struggle to come to terms with his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler’s death camp as well as his practical work in the cause of Peace, Wiesel delivered a message of peace, atonement and human dignity to humanity. The Nobel Committee also stressed that Wiesel’s commitment originated in the sufferings of the Jewish People but that he expanded it to embrace all represented peoples and races. He was a founding board member of the New York Human Rights Foundation and remained active in it throughout his life.
I remember the first time I read “Night”. I was living in Israel and studying there. It had such a profound experience on me, made even more devastating as I was living in a small flat hosted by my“adopted” parents both of whom were holocaust survivors. Every morning as we had breakfast together and plates were passed around I saw the camp numbers tattooed on their wrists. It fundamentally changed me.
Flash forward many years to New York. I was a member of a literary club there The Lotos Club where Eli Wiesel was a member too. I invited him to lunch as he was alone and it was such a special experience, a “gift” life sometimes bestows on us unexpectedly. I knew I was in the presence of someone truly special. His message to us I often reflect on, and in current times it is still relevant.
