[In the following review, Bandler praises Wiesel's courage, insight, and compassion in addressing the Holocaust and its aftermath, particularly in Legends of Our Time.]

In this era of good feelings between Jew and non-Jew—a period of forgiveness, reparations, and recognition of Israel as a sovereign Jewish state—it becomes easy to forget the events of 25 years ago in Central Europe. The memory of six million is sometimes invoked, but with it some doubt and uncertainty often lingers: did six million really go to their deaths, and if so, why did they go without a strong fight?

[In Legends of Our Time] Elie Wiesel, the literary laureate of the holocaust, the sweetest singer of the most bitter and tragic era of our times, has tackled these questions with a force and stylistic drive that leaves the reader stunned, and should lead to a rethinking of each person's private involvement. As a Jew and as a survivor of the concentration camps, he has searched his soul for the explanation of what transpired there and why. Having reached an understanding, if not an explanation, he shares it with his many devotees.

Wiesel's key sections in the book stem from the evidence presented and omitted at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. “The role played in the annihilation program by all humanity—Nazified or otherwise—was brought up only in passing,” he writes. “We never attempted the impossible—we never even exhausted the possible.”

Each person who was spared in the camps, be it for a day, a week or longer, developed a feeling of guilt—first, because he was not chosen for death while others were, and then guilt for living to experience a sense of gladness that he indeed was not chosen. Conscious of this guilt, Wiesel writes, the Jews “came to believe that they were neither worthy nor capable of an act of honor” such as choosing the honorable death of defiance, with knife in hand and hate on their lips.

“To die struggling would have meant a betrayal of those who had gone to their death submissive and silent,” he writes. “The only way was to follow in their footsteps, die their kind of death—only then could the living make their peace with those who had already gone.”

Now, however, the author points out, in the name of objectivity toward the Germans, as well as good will or ecumenism or what have you, the question often arises as to why the Jews marched like cattle to their deaths. But in the face of all the collusion on the part of humanity, the author maintains, the time has come to emulate the silence of the victims. “The dead have earned something other than this posthumous humiliation,” he declares. We dare not dig up the coffins of the victims of the holocaust; we should “be content they do not wake up, that they do not come back to the earth to judge the living.”

Can anyone truly understand the meaning of what happened in the camps? Wiesel posed this question to one of the Israeli judges at the Eichmann trial. The jurist admitted that although he knew the facts, the events and the details on how the tragedy unfolded minute by minute, “this knowledge,” he said, “as if coming from outside, has nothing to do with understanding. There is in all this a portion which will always remain a mystery; a kind of forbidden zone, inaccessible to reason.” In truth, the author emphasizes, “Auschwitz signifies not only the failure of 2,000 years of Christian civilization, but also the defeat of the intellect that wants to find a Meaning—with a capital M—in history. What Auschwitz embodied has none. The executioner killed for nothing, the victim died for nothing.”

During 1943 and 1944, Wiesel emphasizes, the world ignored the events in Eastern Europe. Listening to short-wave radio reports from London and Moscow, the author's fellow Jews in Transylvania heard no broadcast warning them not to leave with the transports; “not one disclosed the existence, not even the name of Auschwitz.” Ironically, the Russian front was only 30 kilometers from Sighet, his town. But the Jews were kept in the dark by Western insensitivity, or at the least, a lack of concern.

In light of this, one must agree sadly with Wiesel's conclusion that “the victims suffered more, and more profoundly, from the indifference of the onlookers than from the brutality of the executioner. The cruelty of the enemy would have been incapable of breaking the prisoner; it was the silence of those he believed to be his friends—cruelty more cowardly, more subtle—which broke his heart.”

And so, in the face of the silence and lack of indignation during the 1940's on the part of the West, it is incumbent upon the descendants and countrymen of the Roosevelts, the Churchills and the Popes “not to make an effort to understand, but rather to lower our eyes and not understand.” Like the camp victims, we must “learn to be silent,” and not question the actions of those we failed to help.

In other sections, the author describes three traumatic personal journeys—to the Transylvanian village of his youth, to today's “new” Germany, and to the Jewish community in Moscow.

All three are directly related to the key questions of the book. For here we have the Jewish community before the destruction, the land in which the destruction was conceived and executed, and the scene of a possible future holocaust.

His return to Sighet is filled with a sense of emptiness and impotence. “My journey to the source of all events had been merely a journey to nothingness,” he writes. Nothing in the town had really changed; “the house was the same, the street was the same, the world was the same, God was the same. Only the Jews had disappeared.”