Ten Years Before the First Word

Elie Wiesel was liberated from Buchenwald in April 1945. He was sixteen years old. He had watched his father die. He had seen things no one should see.

He did not write about it.

Not that year. Not the next. Not for a decade.

He moved to Paris. He learned French. He became a journalist, interviewing subjects, filing stories, building a career with words. He proved he could write—clearly, professionally, on deadline.

But the one story that lived inside him stayed unwritten.

This silence was not laziness. It was not fear, exactly. It was something closer to respect.

Wiesel understood that some things, once spoken, cannot be taken back. He understood that words have weight, that testimony carries responsibility, that bearing witness is not the same as merely remembering.

He was not ready. The story was not ready. Something had to form first—something he could not rush.

He waited. He worked. He lived with the sealed room inside him and did not open the door.

What was happening in that silence?

Purpose was taking shape.

Not the memory—he already had the memory. Not the craft—he was building that through his journalism. Something else. The understanding of what the memory required. The clarity about what the words would need to do.

Wiesel was not asking himself how to write about the camps. He was asking why. What obligation did survival create? What did the dead require of him? What could words accomplish that silence could not?

These questions do not answer themselves quickly. They are not solved by technique or ambition. They mature slowly, in darkness, like seeds that need time underground before they break the surface.

Ten years after liberation, Wiesel met the French writer François Mauriac. Mauriac was Catholic, Nobel-bound, decades older. He spoke to Wiesel about suffering, about Christ on the cross.

Wiesel listened. Then he told Mauriac what he had seen—not in print, not for publication, just one man telling another what he had witnessed as a boy.

Mauriac wept. And then he said: You must write this. You must bear witness.

Something broke open.

Within a year, Wiesel had written 900 pages in Yiddish. He called it And the World Remained Silent. Then he cut and cut and cut—down to the slim volume that became Night.

Here is what the ten years taught him:

Purpose cannot be borrowed. Mauriac’s encouragement mattered, but Mauriac could not give Wiesel his purpose. The purpose had been forming all along, in silence, through the years of carrying what he carried. Mauriac’s words were the key, but the door had been built by a decade of waiting.

Purpose is not the same as subject. Wiesel always knew his subject—the camps, the dead, his father. But subject is not purpose. Subject is what you write about. Purpose is what the writing is for. It took ten years for the purpose to become clear: to prevent the enemy from claiming one last victory by erasing the crime from memory.

Purpose knows when it is ready. Writers who force purpose produce hollow work. Writers who wait—who let the questions mature, who live with the silence until it becomes unbearable—produce work that lasts. Wiesel did not choose when to write. The purpose told him.

You may be in your own ten years.

Carrying something you have not yet written. Knowing the subject but not the purpose. Sensing that the story matters but not yet understanding what it is for.

This is not failure. This is formation.

The questions you cannot answer today are doing their work in you. The silence is not empty. Something is taking shape in the dark—growing roots, gathering strength, preparing to break ground.

Your purpose may already be in you. The experiences you cannot release. The truth you keep circling. The thing you would write if you finally understood why it mattered.

You do not invent purpose. You discover it.

And when it is ready, it will tell you.

The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen explores what it means to write with purpose.

The book is available on Amazon: http://bit.ly/3K6o8AM. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

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