Holocaust survivor who won the Nobel Peace Prize

Elie Wiesel 1928-2016

For almost two decades

following the Nazi’s

systematic slaughter of nearly six million European Jews, the traumatised survivors of that genocide “seemed frozen in silence”, said The New York Times. “No voice had emerged to drive home the enormity of what had happened and how it had changed mankind’s conception of itself and of God.” In the 1960s, Elie Wiesel – a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald – became that voice. His devastating memoir, Night, was translated into English in 1960. He then dedicated the rest of his life to writing and speaking about the Holocaust. He could not let the world forget, he said, because “if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices”, because “the opposite of love is not hatred, it is indifference”. In 1986, after decades of speaking out against racism, violence and hatred everywhere from Darfur to Cambodia, Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, said The Times. Collecting the award, he reiterated his lifelong message. “We must speak, we must take sides, for neutrality helps the oppressor – never the victim.”

Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel was born in 1928 in a typical shtetl, or Eastern European Jewish community, in Transylvania. The son of a shopkeeper named Shlomo and his wife, Sarah, he grew up speaking Yiddish and Hebrew. In 1944, the Nazis arrived in his town, Sighet, and rounded up its inhabitants. They were transported to Auschwitz. On arrival, his mother and one of his sisters were sent to the gas chamber. Although only 16, he said he was 18, and was selected as a worker. In Night, he would describe the way the smell of burning flesh hung heavy in the air, how even the gruel the prisoners were given “tasted of corpses”, and how he wasted away to the point where he was merely “a starved stomach”. When the Russian army approached, he and his father were transferred to Buchenwald, where his father – beaten by a German guard – finally perished. By then, Wiesel recalled, he was too numb to grieve. “I had no more tears.”

He was liberated by the US army in 1945, and sent to recover in Paris. He learnt French, studied at the Sorbonne, and became a journalist – but he wasn’t yet ready to write about what he had seen. It was the writer François Mauriac who persuaded him to tell his story. Wiesel wrote his first version of Night in Yiddish, then wrote a shorter version in French. By the time the English translation came out, he had moved to the US. The New York Times described it as a “slim volume of terrifying power” – but it sold slowly. People could manage Anne Frank’s diary, he said, but were unprepared for a book that took them into the camps. Over time, it became a bestseller, said the Los Angeles Times. About 50 other books (including further volumes of memoirs, and several novels) followed. And though some critics questioned his role as a “self-appointed witness to history”, his work was well received.

Wiesel had married a fellow Holocaust survivor, Marion, in 1969; they had a son, Shlomo Elisha, and in 1986, founded The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. “If I survived, it must be for some reason,” he once said. “I must do something with my life. It is too serious to play games with any more, because in my place, someone else could have been saved. And so I speak for that person. On the other hand, I know I cannot.”