Never forget
ELIE WIESEL 1928-2016
WORLD MOURNS BELOVED HOLOCAUST AUTHOR, NOBEL WINNER
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE winner Elie Wiesel, the world’s constant conscience on the Holocaust for six decades and a ceaseless global voice for the oppressed, died Saturday at age 87.
The survivor of four Nazi death camps before his 17th birthday passed away at his home in Manhattan. No details on the cause of his death were released.
“Elie was not just the world’s most prominent Holocaust survivor, he was a living memorial,” said President Obama, who recalled talking with Wiesel when the two men visited Buchenwald.
“Elie spoke words I’ve never forgotten—‘Memory has become as a- cred duty of all people of goodwill,’ ” said Obama. “Upholding that sacred duty was the purpose of Elie’s life.”
Wiesel’s renowned Holocaust memoir “Night,” an account of his near-fatal imprisonment in German concentration camps, was translated into 30 languages and became a worldwide — if not overnight — sensation.
“In the darkness of the Holocaust, in which our sisters and broth- ers were killed — 6 million — Elie Wiesel served as a ray of light and example of humanity who believed in the goodness in people,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In addition to serving as the world’s fore-most witness to the Nazi atrocities, Wiesel — tattooed with the number A -7713— became a humanitarian who embraced causes of all kinds.
Wiesel spoke out for Cambodian
refugees, African famine victims and Soviet Jews, for Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov and South African leader Nelson Mandela.
When Wiesel received his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, the selection committee cited him as “one of the most important spiritual leaders and guides in an age when violence, oppression and racism continue to characterize the world.”
His Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity probed the issues of hate and ethnicity around the world after its 1988 launch.
He even took on two Presidents, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton — the first for his visit to a German military graveyard in 1985, the latter over the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia eight years later.
“Elie shouldered blessing and the burden of survival,” said a statement from Bill and Hillary Clinton. “As he often said, one person of integrity can make a difference.”
That he lived into his 80s seemed a miracle, as Wiesel said his time in Auschwitz and Buchenwald left him an old manat18.
His son Elisha said he will never stop hearing the sound of the voice his father used in private, the cadence of a “gentle and devout man who wasalways interested in others and whose quiet voice moved them to better themselves.”
The Romanian-born Wiesel grew up in a small Carpathian Mountains village after his 1928 birth, leading a quiet and reverent Orthodox Jewish existence until the on set of World War II.
Hungary first annexed his hometown of Sighet and relocated the Jews into two ghettoes. In 1944, he was deported by the Germans to Auschwitz and loaded into a cattle car for the four-day ride to the camp.
His mother and younger sister were killed there in the gas chambers. His father died in January 1945 after a death march where the Jewish prisoners were forced to walk from the Buna camp to Buchenwald.
Wiesel barely survived to see the American troops liberate the camp in April 1945, and joined a group of 400 Jewish orphans sent to France.
He was later reunited with two sisters, Hilda and Bea, after one saw his face in a newspaper.
It took him more than a decade to come to grips with the horrors and recount his story in “Night,” the first of what became more than 60 nonfiction and fiction books written by Wiesel.
In one extraordinarily powerful passage, Wiesel recalled the terror of his first night as a Nazi prisoner.
“Never shall I forget that smoke,” he wrote. “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 those flames which consumed my faith forever.”
The memoir, initially an 800-page account written in Yid- dish, was pared own to just more than 100 chilling pages when released in English in 1960.
He once recalled that the first printing of the future classic was 3,000 copies — and those took three years to sell.
Thebook has since sold millions, and is regarded as required reading on the Holocaust, along with “The Diary of Anne Frank.” In 2006, “Night” zipped up the best-seller list again when it was chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her bookclub.
Wiesel, who moved to New York in 1956 to cover the United Nations, never left and became an American citizen in 1963. He married Holocaust survivor, Marion Rose, in 1969 and the two had a son, Shlomo Elisha.
Elie Wiesel eloquently voiced the horror that he lived through in Nazi Germany and wrote passionately about other humanitarian evils. These are some of his finest insights. "I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings s endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." (The Nobel Peace Prize speech, 1986) "The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy,heres it's indifference.enc And the oppositep of life is notn death, but indifference between life and death." (Interview with U.S. medi 1986) "No"N h human race isi superior;i no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them." (Interview to Parade magazine, 1992) "For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: His duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living . . . To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time." (from "Night") "No human being is illegal." (The Nobel Peace Prize speech, 1986) “The only role I sought was that of witness. I believed that having survived by chance, I was duty-bound to give meaning to my survival, to justify each moment of my life.” (from "Why I Write," 1978)