In the fall of 1965 the Israeli newspaper Haaretz sent a young
journalist named Elie Wiesel to the Soviet Union to report on the lives
of Jews trapped behind the Iron Curtain. "I would approach Jews who had
never been placed in the Soviet show window by Soviet authorities,"
wrote Wiesel. "They alone, in their anonymity, could describe the
conditions under which they live; they alone could tell whether the
reports I had heard were true or false--and whether their children and
their grandchildren, despite everything, still wish to remain Jews. From
them I would learn what we must do to help . . . or if they want our
help at all."
What he discovered astonished him: Jewish men and women, young and old,
in Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad, Vilna, Minsk, and Tbilisi, completely cut
off from the outside world, overcoming their fear of the ever-present
KGB to ask Wiesel about the lives of Jews in America, in Western Europe,
and, most of all, in Israel. They have scant knowledge of Jewish history
or current events; they celebrate Jewish holidays at considerable risk
and with only the vaguest ideas of what these days commemorate. "Most of
them come [to synagogue] not to pray," Wiesel writes, "but out of a
desire to identify with the Jewish people--about whom they know next to
nothing." Wiesel promises to bring the stories of these people to the
outside world. And in the home of one dissident, he is given a gift--a
Russian-language translation of Night, published illegally by the
underground. "'My God, ' I thought, 'this man risked arrest and prison
just to make my writing available to people here!' I embraced him with
tears in my eyes."
