Nobel laureate, Holocaust survivor
Elie Wiesel, whose classic ‘Night’ detailed Nazi atrocities and launched a career that made him a Nobel laureate, dies at 87.
NEW YORK — Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, the Romanian-born Holocaust survivor whose classic “Night” became a landmark testament to the Nazis’ crimes and launched Wiesel’s long career as one of the world’s foremost witnesses and humanitarians, has died at age 87.
His death was announced Saturday by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. No other details were immediately available.
The short, sad-eyed Wiesel, his face an ongoing reminder of one man’s endurance of a shattering past, summed up his mission in 1986 when accepting the Nobel Peace Prize: “Whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation, take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
For more than a halfcentury, he voiced his passionate beliefs to world leaders, celebrities and general audiences in the name of victims of violence and oppression. He wrote more than 40 books, but his most influential by far was “Night,” a classic ranked with Anne Frank’s diary as standard reading about the Holocaust.
“Night” was his first book, and its journey to publication crossed both time and language. It began in the mid-1950s as an 800page story in Yiddish, was trimmed to under 300 pages for an edition released in Argentina, cut again to under 200 pages for the French market and finally published in the United States, in 1960, at just over 100 pages.
“‘Night’ is the most devastating account of the Holocaust that I have ever read,” wrote Ruth Franklin, a literary critic and author of “A Thousand Darknesses,” a study of Holocaust literature that was published in 2010.
“There are no epiphanies in ‘Night. There is no extraneous detail, no analysis, no speculation. There is only a story: Eliezer’s account of what happened, spoken in his voice.” Haunting passages
Wiesel began working on “Night” just a decade after the end of World War II, when memories were too raw for many survivors to even try telling their stories.
“Night” was so bleak that publishers doubted it would appeal to readers. In a 2002 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Wiesel recalled that the book attracted little notice at first.
“The English translation came out in 1960, and the first printing was 3,000 copies. And it took three years to sell them. Now, I get 100 letters a month from children about the book. And there are many, many million copies in print,” he said.
In one especially haunting passage, Wiesel sums up his feelings upon arrival in Auschwitz:
“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. … Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”
In 2006, a new translation returned “Night” to the best-seller lists after it was selected for Oprah Winfrey’s book club.
Wiesel’s prolific stream of speeches, essays and books, including two sequels to “Night” and more than 40 books overall of fiction and nonfiction, emerged from the helplessness of a teenager deported from Hungary, which had annexed his native Romanian town of Sighet, to Auschwitz. Tattooed with the number A-7713, he was freed in 1945 — but only after his mother, father and one sister had all died in Nazi camps. Two other sisters survived. Worked as journalist
After the liberation of Buchenwald, in April 1945, Wiesel spent a few years in a French orphanage, then landed in Paris. He studied literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne, and then became a journalist, writing for the French newspaper L’Arche and Israel’s Yediot Ahronot.
French author Francois Mauriac, winner of the 1952 Nobel in literature, encouraged Wiesel to break his vowed silence about the concentration camps and start sharing his experiences.
In 1956, Wiesel traveled on a journalistic as-
“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. … Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.” Elie Wiesel, from his book, “Night”
signment to New York to cover the United Nations. While there, he was struck by a car and confined to a wheelchair for a year. Wiesel became a U.S. citizen in 1963. Six years later, he married Marion Rose, a fellow Holocaust survivor who translated some of his books into English. They had a son, Shlomo. Based in New York, Wiesel commuted to Boston University for almost three decades, teaching philosophy, literature and Judaic studies and giving a popular lecture se- ries in the fall.
Wiesel also taught at Yale University and the City University of New York.
In 1978, he was chosen by President Jimmy Carter to head the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, and plan an American memorial museum to Holocaust victims. Among his most memorable spoken words came in 1985, when he received a Congressional Gold Medal from President Ronald Reagan and asked the president not to make a planned trip to a cemetery in Germany that contained graves of Adolf Hitler’s personal guards.
“We have met four or five times, and each time I came away enriched, for I know of your commitment to humanity,” Wiesel said, as Reagan looked on. “May I, Mr. President, if it’s possible at all, implore you to do something else, to find a way, to find another way, another site. That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims.”
Reagan visited the cemetery, in Bitburg, despite international protests.
Wiesel also spoke at the dedication of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in 1993. His words are now carved in stone at its entrance: “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”
Wiesel defended Soviet Jews, Nicaragua’s Miskito Indians, Cambodian refugees, the Kurds, victims of African famine and victims of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Wiesel was a longtime supporter of Israel although he was criticized at times for his closeness to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhayu. ‘Too much indifference’
The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, which he established in 1988, explored the problems of hatred and ethnic conflicts around the world. But like a number of other wellknown charities in the Jewish community, the foundation fell victim to Bernard Madoff, the financier who was arrested in late 2008 and accused of running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme.
Despite Wiesel’s mission to remind the world of past mistakes, the greatest disappointment of his life was that “nothing changed,” he said in an interview.
“Human nature remained what it was. Society remained what it was. Too much indifference in the world, to the Other, his pain, and anguish, and hope.”