Mondani A Mondhatatlant : Elie Wiesel Üzenete

Elie Wiesel, major French-speaking writer and Peace Nobel Prize winner, is a living symbol. His name became inseparable from the fate of the Jewish community and the memory of Holocaust victims to whom he serves as a living conscience. Through his story, I wish to recall the fate of the members of the Jewish community from Sighet – like him – or other nearby villages standing in the shade of the Carpathian mountains. In this part of Eastern Europe, various ethnic minorities – Hungarians, Jews, Rumanians, Ruthenians, Germans and Slovaks – have lived together for centuries on this very soil, alternately dominated by the Austrian, the Hungarian, the Rumanian, and the Hungarian again. This went on until 1944, when the Nazis occupied Hungary and decided that there was no place for Jews within this mosaic of nationalities. In less than three months, the Nazis implemented « the final solution » to the Jewish problem with the help of the Hungarian police force. Sighet, today a Rumanian town, symbolizes the history of Eastern Europe just as Elie Wiesel personifies the fate of the Jewish community during the 20th century. I truly believe this history is as vitally important to me as to anyone who will see the film, and this feeling overhelms me today with a desperate energy. Why? Maybe because today, four years before this century comes to an end and carries away part of us, and as communism – which thought itself immortal – has just disappeared, the hate of races and nationalities is killing people again and starting wars around the world. This same world, and especially Europe, which has survived two world wars through blood and shame, remains silent again. Or, when it doesn’t remain silent, it watches, helpless, a new generation, hardly aware of the past, let the same horrors reapper, under the aegis of the same ideologies and the same emblems. Never, over the past 50 years, has it been more urgent to remind the world of the tragedy that split our century in two and exterminated among many others, the Jewish community from Eastern Europe. The community my family is from. And the one I am from. I am also a survivor: my parents, my brother and I survived the Budapest Ghetto. Although I haven’t lost as much as Elie Wiesel, I have the feeling, despite all, we are like sister and brother. And I wish to share our common fate, our common responsability, whith the people who will see this film. We are both convinced our mission is to keep the memory alive and pass on to our children this history we have inherited from those who lost their life. It is the only way to protect the living and do the dead justice. Judit Elek