Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Elie Wiesel, witness to Holocaust, dies
Elie Wiesel, the Nazi concentration camp survivor, Nobel Peace Prize winner and author whose seminal work “Night” is regarded as one of the most powerful achievements in Holocaust literature, has died, Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial said. He was 87.
Based on his experiences and those of other Holocaust survivors, Wiesel wrote dozens of semi-autobiographical books, memoirs and plays. His message “of peace, atonement and human dignity” earned him the Nobel in 1986.
For a decade, he had remained silent about the horrors he witnessed after being transported by train to Auschwitz with his parents and three sisters when he was 15.
After a year, he was lib-
erated at the end of World War II with other prisoners from the German camp Buchenwald — and soon learned that his mother and younger sister had been murdered in the gas chambers. He already had seen his captive father die a brutal death.
First penned in Yiddish, the harrowing yet unsentimental account based on Wiesel’s year in the death camps was published in French in 1958 and eventually printed in more than 30 languages.
“Elie Wiesel opened the eyes of the world to the Holocaust with his penetrating books,” Rabbi Marvin Hier, who founded the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, told the Los Angeles Times in 2004. “The memories were so terrible and frightful that at first, few survivors spoke about the events.
“The book illuminated the hidden darkness of Auschwitz,” Hier said. “It opened the floodgates of personal testimonies by other survivors.”
The first version of “Night” — originally called “And the World Remained Silent” — ran 800 pages, but it had been drastically shortened by the time it debuted in the U.S. in 1960 to positive reviews and lukewarm sales.
The Nation called it “the single most powerful literary relic of the Holocaust,” while The New York Times said it was “a slim volume of terrifying power.” It also was recognized as one of the first books to raise a haunting question for people of faith: Where was God at Auschwitz?
Wiesel later theorized that the public wasn’t ready for such a graphic account of the Holocaust. “The Diary of Anne Frank” had sold well when it was published in the U.S. in 1952, but the diary of the Jewish teenager’s life in hiding from the Nazis did not extend to the concentration camp where she died.
When Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann went on trial in 1961, it brought the Holocaust renewed attention in mainstream America and heightened the visibility of Wiesel and other survivors who were writing their stories. Wiesel’s books were largely well-reviewed, but over time, some critics questioned his role as a self-appointed witness to history.
In 1985, Wiesel received one of the highest U.S. civilian honors, the Congressional Gold Medal. The controversy caused by his acceptance speech inadvertently brought greater attention to “Night,” he later said. The speech urged President Ronald Reagan to forgo a trip to West Germany that included Bitburg Military Cemetery, where many Nazi SS soldiers who deported Jews and ran concentration camps are buried.
“That place is not your place, Mr. President,” Wiesel said. “Your place is with the victims of the SS. The issue here is not politics, but good and evil. And we must never confuse them.” Reagan went to Bitburg but added a stop at a concentration camp.
By the 1990s, “Night” was a standard high school and college text, selling an estimated 400,000 copies a year. When Oprah Winfrey selected an updated version of the book for her television book club in 2006, it became a bestseller but reignited a debate over whether it was a novelized memoir. Wiesel maintained that it was a true account.
Using his personal story as a testimonial and departure point for his writing, he earned a reputation as the leading spiritual archivist of the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
He never put to rest a question that had haunted him since the war: Why did those who knew about the Nazis’ effort to exterminate the Jews not do more to prevent it? “The free world, including Jewish leaders in America and Palestine, had known since 1942, but we knew nothing,” he wrote in his 1995 memoir, “All Rivers Run to the Sea.” “Why didn’t they warn us?”
Eliezer Wiesel was born Sept. 30, 1928, in Sighet in what is now Romania, a remote farming community where his father, Shlomo Wiesel, was a grocer. Many relatives of his mother, Sarah, were rabbis, and he was raised an Orthodox Jew in the Hasidic tradition.
At 40, Wiesel married Marion Erster Rose in 1969. A Vienna native, she was a survivor of death camps and had a daughter, Jennifer, from a previous marriage. The couple had one son, Shlomo Elisha, and two grandchildren.
The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity — established with his Nobel Prize money — announced in 2008 that it had lost more than $15 million through investments with Wall Street financier Bernard L. Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme defrauded thousands of individuals and charities of billions.
Wiesel and his wife lost their life savings. “This was a personal tragedy where we discovered all of a sudden what we had done in 40 years — my books, my lectures, everything — was gone,” Wiesel said in a public discussion of the Madoff case. He called Madoff a “sociopath” and “scoundrel” but told the AP, with a wry grin: “I’ve seen worse.”