36. Elie Wiesel, Viktor Frankl, and the Survivors

The Christian Statement

The disciple who engages the Holocaust theologically must have read, at minimum, Elie Wiesel's Night and Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. These are not Christian books. They are the testimonies of Jewish survivors processing the worst that human beings have inflicted on each other. Reading them is an act of respect before it is a preparation for conversation.

Wiesel's Night chronicles the destruction of faith under the weight of the camps. Frankl's response is different: the psychiatrist who developed logotherapy in the camps argues that even in the most extreme suffering, the one thing that cannot be taken is the human being's freedom to choose their attitude toward their circumstances. He found, in the camps, people of extraordinary dignity and spiritual depth. He did not lose his faith in the possibility of meaning.

Neither Wiesel nor Frankl are Christian apologists. But their testimonies, read honestly, demonstrate the range of human responses to the worst that history has produced — and they frame the question the disciple is trying to engage: is there a God whose presence makes the difference, even in the camps? Wiesel said no. Frankl said something closer to yes, though not in Christian terms. The disciple's role is not to adjudicate between them. It is to bring the Jewish scriptures' own lament tradition and the cross's own answer to the conversation, and to let the Jewish person wrestle with both.

SOURCE: Elie Wiesel, Night (Hill and Wang, 1960, translated 1972). Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (Beacon Press, 1959).