ELIE WIESEL
Sept. 30, 1928 - July 2, 2016
Elie Wiesel, who died Saturday at age 87, will be remembered not just for bringing the horrors of the Holocaust to public consciousness, but for doing so in an intensely personal way that — in the words of U.S. President Barack Obama — made him the “conscience of the world.” Over a 60-year career the writer, activist and Nobel Laureate catalogued his own struggles with anger, disillusionment and a gnawing fear that humanity has learned nothing. Below, Tristin Hopper collected excerpts from Wiesel’s selected speeches, writings and interviews.
“I don’t know how I survived; I was weak, rather shy; I did nothing to save myself. A miracle? Certainly not. If heaven could or would perform a miracle for me, why not for others more deserving than myself? It was nothing more than chance.” Preface to a revised 2006 edition of Night
“I am among the first, if not the first to use (Holocaust) in that context … Then it became accepted, and everybody used it and then I stopped using it because it was abused. Everything was a holocaust all of a sudden. I heard myself on television once, a sportscaster on television speaking of the defeat of a sports team and he said, ‘Was that a holocaust!’ ” Interview with the Academy of Achievement, 1996
“In 1946 when the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel (a terrorist attack on a Jerusalem hotel by Zionist nationalists) I decided I would like to join the underground. Very naively, I went to the Jewish Agency in Paris. I got no further than the janitor who asked: ‘What do you want?’ I said, ‘I would like to join the underground.’ He threw me out … I felt I had to do something. I could only hope that if I had become a member I would not have had to kill.” Interview with the Paris Review, 1978
“If anyone had told us in 1945 that there are certain battles we’ll have to fight again we wouldn’t have believed it … I was convinced then, naively, that at least something happened in history that, because of myself, certain things cannot happen again. I was convinced that hatred among nations and among people perished in Auschwitz. It didn’t. The victims died but the haters are still here.” Interview with fellow Holocaust survivor Georg Klein, 2004
“There’s a seduction in fanaticism. It simplifies things. The leader decides everything for you and suddenly you have no more problems.’’ Interview with the Vancouver Sun, 1996