Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel
Wiesel addressing the United States Congress Wiesel addressing the United States Congress
Born	(1928-09-30) September 30, 1928 Sighet, Maramureş County, Romania
Died	N/A N/A
Occupation	Political activist, professor, novelist

Eliezer Wiesel, KBE (commonly known as Elie Wiesel, born September 30, 1928) is a Romanian-born American-Jewish novelist, political activist, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor. He is the author of over 40 books, the best known of which is Night, a memoir that describes his experiences during the Holocaust and his imprisonment in several concentration camps.

Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. The Norwegian Nobel Committee called him a "messenger to mankind," noting that through his struggle to come to terms with "his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler's death camps," as well as his "practical work in the cause of peace," Wiesel has delivered a powerful message "of peace, atonement and human dignity" to humanity.

On November 30, 2006 Wiesel received an honorary knighthood in London, England in recognition of his work toward raising Holocaust education in the United Kingdom.

Early life and experiences during the Holocaust

Buchenwald, 1945. Wiesel is on the second row from the bottom, seventh from the left.

Wiesel was born in Sighet (now Sighetu Marmaţiei), Maramureş, Kingdom of Romania, to Shlomo and Sarah Wiesel. Sarah was the daughter of Dodye Feig, a Hasid and farmer from a nearby village. Elie Wiesel had three sisters: Hilda and Bea, who were older than he, and Tzipora, who was the youngest in the family. Shlomo was an Orthodox Jew of Hungarian descent, and a shopkeeper who ran his own grocery store. He was active and trusted within the community, and had spent a few months in jail for having helped Polish Jews who escaped to Hungary in the early years of the war. It was Shlomo who instilled a strong sense of humanism in his son, encouraging him to learn Modern Hebrew and to read literature, whereas his mother encouraged him to study Torah and Kabbalah. Wiesel has said his father represented reason, and his mother, faith (Fine 1982:4).

The town of Sighet was annexed to Hungary in 1940. In 1944 Elie, his family and the rest of the town were placed in one of the two ghettos in Sighet. Elie and his family lived in the larger of the two, on Serpent Street. On April 19, 1944, the Hungarian authorities deported the Jew community in Sighet to Auschwitz–Birkenau. While at Auschwitz the number A-7713 was tattooed into his left arm and he became an avid smoker. Wiesel was separated from his mother and sister Tzipora, who are presumed to have been murdered at Auschwitz. Wiesel and his father were sent to the attached work camp Buna-Werke, a subcamp of Auschwitz III Monowitz. He managed to remain with his father for a year as they were forced to work under appalling conditions and shuffled between concentration camps in the closing days of the war. On January 28, 1945, just a few weeks after the two were marched to Buchenwald and only months before the camp was liberated by the American Third Army on April 11, Wiesel's father suffered from dysentery, starvation, and exhaustion, and was later sent to the crematory. The last word his father spoke was “Eliezer”, Elie's name.

After the war

After the war, Wiesel was placed in a French orphanage, where he learned the French language and was reunited with both his older sisters, Hilda and Bea, who had also survived the war. In 1948, Wiesel began studying philosophy at the Sorbonne. During this time, Wiesel became involved with Irgun, a Zionist armed organization in Palestine, and translated for its newspaper.

He taught Hebrew and worked as a choirmaster before becoming a professional journalist. He wrote for Israeli and French newspapers, including Tsien in Kamf (in Yiddish) and the French Jewish Magazine, L'arche. However, for 10 years after the war, Wiesel refused to write about or discuss his experiences during the Holocaust. Like many survivors, Wiesel could not find the words to describe his experiences. However, a meeting with François Mauriac, the 1952 Nobel Laureate in Literature, who eventually became Wiesel's close friend, persuaded him to write about his Holocaust experiences.

Wiesel first wrote the 900-page tome Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent), in Yiddish, which was published in abridged form in Buenos Aires. Wiesel rewrote a shortened version of the manuscript in French, and it was published as the 127-page novel La Nuit, and later translated into English as Night. Even with Mauriac's support, Wiesel had trouble finding a publisher for his book, and initially it sold poorly.

I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone–terribly alone in a world without God and without man.

Elie Wiesel, 'Night' (1958) - Translated by Stella Rodway

Life in the United States

The house where Elie Wiesel was born

In 1955, Wiesel moved to Manhattan, New York, having become a U.S. citizen: due to injuries suffered in a traffic accident, he was forced to stay in New York past his visa's expiration and was offered citizenship to resolve his status. In the U.S., Wiesel wrote over 40 books, both fiction and non-fiction, and won many literary prizes. Wiesel's writing is considered among the most important in Holocaust literature. Some historians credit Wiesel with giving the term 'Holocaust' its present meaning, but he does not feel that the word adequately describes the event and wishes it were used less frequently to describe significant occurrences as everyday tragedies (Wiesel:1999, 18).

He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for speaking out against violence, repression, and racism. He has received many other prizes and honors for his work, including the Congressional Gold Medal in 1985, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996. Wiesel has published two volumes of his memoirs. The first, All Rivers Run to the Sea, was published in 1994 and covered his life up to the year 1969 while the second, titled And the Sea is Never Full and published in 1999, covered 1969 to 1999.

Wiesel and his wife, Marion, started the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. He served as chairman for the Presidential Commission on the Holocaust (later renamed U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council) from 1978 to 1986, spearheading the building of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

Wiesel is particularly fond of teaching and holds the position of Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Boston University. From 1972 to 1976, Wiesel was a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York and member of the American Federation of Teachers. In 1982 he served as the first Henry Luce Visiting Scholar in Humanities and Social Thought at Yale University. He also co-instructs Winter Term (January) courses at Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Florida. From 1997 to 1999 he was Ingeborg Rennert Visiting Professor of Judaic Studies at Barnard College.

Wiesel has become a popular speaker on the subject of the Holocaust. As a political activist, he has advocated for many causes, including Israel, the plight of Soviet and Ethiopian Jews, the victims of apartheid in South Africa, Argentina's Desaparecidos, Bosnian victims of genocide in the former Yugoslavia, Nicaragua's Miskito Indians, and the Kurds. He recently voiced support for intervention in Darfur, Sudan. He also led a commission organized by the Romanian government to research and write a report, released in 2004, on the true history of the Holocaust in Romania and the involvement of the Romanian wartime regime in atrocities against Jews and other groups, including the Roma. The Romanian government accepted the findings in the report and committed to implementing the commission's recommendations for educating the public on the history of the Holocaust in Romania. The commission, formally called the International Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, came to be called the Wiesel Commission in honor of his leadership.

Wiesel is the honorary chair of the Habonim Dror Camp Miriam Campership and Building Fund, and a member of the International Council of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation.

On March 27, 2001, Wiesel appeared at the University of Florida for Jewish Awareness Month and was presented with an honorary doctor of humane letters degree from the University of Florida by Dr. Charles Young.

In 2002, he inaugurated the Elie Wiesel Memorial House in Sighet in his childhood home.

In early 2006, Wiesel traveled to Auschwitz with Oprah Winfrey, a visit which was broadcast as part of The Oprah Winfrey Show on May 24, 2006. Wiesel said that this would most likely be his last trip there.

In September 2006, he appeared before the UN Security Council with actor George Clooney to call attention to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.

On February 1, 2007, Wiesel was attacked in a San Francisco hotel. Twenty-two year old Eric Hunt confessed to the attack on an antisemitic website, saying he had tried to drag Wiesel out of the hotel elevator in order to "bring [him] to my hotel room where he would truthfully answer my questions regarding the fact that his non-fiction Holocaust memoir, Night, is almost entirely fictitious." On February 17, 2007, Hunt was arrested in Montgomery Township, New Jersey. He faces charges that include attempted kidnapping, false imprisonment, elder abuse, stalking, battery and the commission of a hate crime.

On April 25, 2007, Wiesel was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters degree from the University of Vermont.

During the early 2007 selection process for the Kadima candidate for President of Israel, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reportedly offered Wiesel the nomination (and, as the ruling-party candidate and an apolitical figure, likely the Presidency), but Wiesel "was very not interested". Shimon Peres was chosen as the Kadima candidate (and later President) instead.

Criticism

Wiesel has been criticized for exhibiting uncritical moral support for the state of Israel, and for the manner in which he defends this position. Perhaps his harshest critic in this respect has been the journalist Christopher Hitchens, who, in an essay on Wiesel, wrote the following:

Is there a more contemptible poseur and windbag than Elie Wiesel? I suppose there may be. But not, surely, a poseur and windbag who receives (and takes as his due) such grotesque deference on moral questions. Look, if you will, at his essay on Jerusalem in the New York Times of January 24 [2001].

As a Jew living in the United States, I have long denied myself the right to intervene in Israel's internal debates.... My critics have their conception of social and individual ethics; I have mine. But while I grant them their right to criticize, they sometimes deny mine to abstain.

Such magnificent condescension, to grant his critics the right. And it is not certain from when Wiesel dates his high-minded abstention from Israel's internal affairs; he was a member of Menachem Begin's Irgun in the 1940s, when that force employed extreme violence against Arab civilians and was more than ready to use it against Jews.

...

In 1982, after Gen. Ariel Sharon had treated the inhabitants of the Sabra and Shatila camps as target practice for his paid proxies, Wiesel favored us with another of his exercises in neutrality. Asked by the New York Times to comment on the pogrom, he was one of the few American Jews approached on the matter to express zero remorse. "I don't think we should even comment," he said, proceeding to comment bleatingly that he felt "sadness- with Israel, and not against Israel." For the victims, not even a perfunctory word.

Noam Chomsky also noted Wiesel's moral response to the Sabra and Shatila massacre with the following remarks:

Wiesel's position was that "I don't think we should even comment on [the massacre in the refugee camps] since the [Israeli judicial] investigation is still on." "We should not pass judgement until the investigation takes place." Nevertheless, he did feel "sadness," for the first time, he explains; nothing that had happened before in the occupied territories or in Lebanon had evoked any sadness on his part, and now the sadness was "with Israel, and not against Israel" - surely not "with the Palestinians" who had been massacred or with the remnants who had escaped. Furthermore, Wiesel continues, "after all the Israeli soldiers did not kill" - this time at least; they had often killed at Sabra and Shatilla in the preceding weeks, arousing no "sadness" on Wiesel's part, even "sadness with Israel". Therefore, Israel is basically exempt from criticism, as were the Czar and his officials, military forces and police at the time of the Kishinev massacre, by his exalted standards.

In a radio interview scholar Norman Finkelstein accused Wiesel of cheapening the moral coinage of the Nazi Holocaust by asserting its uniqueness while profiting from public fascination with it:

Elie Wiesel is always wheeled out, and with his long face and anguished heart and cinematic eyes, he always says: "Oh, do not compare." I beg your pardon, I think you should compare. Otherwise, if you don't want to compare, what's the point of it? What are you going to learn from it? ... He says the only thing we can do before the Nazi Holocaust is silence. Well if silence is the only answer, why are you charging $25,000 a lecture? And what are you going to learn from silence? I mean, this is sheer nonsense.

Books

ISBNs maybe of reissues or reprints. Most are paperback.

• Un di velt hot geshvign (Tsentral-Farband fun Poylishe Yidn in Argentine, 1956) ISBN 0-374-52140-9; includes the following 3 books:
  • Night (Hill and Wang 1958; 2006;) ISBN 0-553-27253-5
  • Dawn (Hill and Wang 1961; 2006) ISBN 0-553-22536-7
  • Day, previously titled "The Accident" (Hill and Wang 1962; 2006) ISBN 0-553-58170-8
• The Town Beyond the Wall (Atheneum 1964)
• The Gates of the Forest (Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1966)
• The Jews of Silence (Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1966) ISBN 0-935613-01-3
• Legends of our Time (Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1968)
• A Beggar in Jerusalem (Random House 1970)
• One Generation After (Random House 1970)
• Souls on Fire (Random House 1972) ISBN 0-671-44171-X
• Night Trilogy (Hill and Wang 1972)
• The Oath (Random House 1973) ISBN 0-935613-11-0
• Ani Maamin (Random House 1973)
• Zalmen, or the Madness of God (Random House 1974)
• Messengers of God (Random House 1976) ISBN 0-671-54134-X
• A Jew Today (Random House 1978) ISBN 0-935613-15-3
• Four Hasidic Masters (University of Notre Dame Press 1978)
• Images from the Bible (The Overlook Press 1980)
• The Trial of God (Random House 1979)
• The Testament (Summit 1981)
• Five Biblical Portraits (University of Notre Dame Press 1981)
• Somewhere a Master (Summit 1982)
• The Golem (illustrated by Mark Podwal) (Summit 1983) ISBN 0-671-49624-7
• The Fifth Son (Summit 1985)
• Against Silence (Holocaust Library 1985)
• Twilight (Summit 1988)
• The Six Days of Destruction (co-author Albert Friedlander, illustrated by Mark Podwal) (Paulist Press 1988)
• A Journey of Faith (Donald I. Fine 1990)
• From the Kingdom of Memory (Summit 1990)
• Evil and Exile (University of Notre Dame Press 1990)
• Sages and Dreamers (Summit 1991)
• The Forgotten (Summit 1992) ISBN 0-8052-1019-9
• A Passover Haggadah (illustrated by Mark Podwal) (Simon and Schuster 1993) ISBN 0-671-73541-1
• All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs, Vol. I, 1928-1969 (Knopf 1995) ISBN 0-8052-1028-8
• Memoir in Two Voices, with François Mitterrand (Arcade 1996)
• And the Sea is Never Full: Memoirs Vol. II, 1969 (Knopf 1999) ISBN 0-8052-1029-6
• King Solomon and his Magic Ring (illustrated by Mark Podwal) (Greenwillow 1999)
• Conversations with Elie Wiesel (Schocken 2001)
• The Judges (Knopf 2002)
• Wise Men and Their Tales (Schocken 2003) ISBN 0-8052-4173-6
• The Time of the Uprooted (Knopf 2005)

Quotations

• " '... I do not shout louder to change others. I shout louder so that they will not change me. Don't let anyone change you.' "
• "Always question those who are certain of what they are saying." [1]
• "...I wanted to believe in it. In my eyes, to be a [human] was to belong to the [human] community in the broadest and most immediate sense. It was to feel abused whenever a [person], any [person] anywhere, was humiliated..." All Rivers Run to the Sea
• "Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."
• "I have learned two things in my life; first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings."
• "God made man because He loves stories." The Gates of the Forest, where it is the title and last line of a story.
• "Death is a being without arms or legs or mouth or head; it is all eyes" Dawn
• "Man is not defined by what denies him, but by that which affirms him" The Accident
• "Man is defined by what troubles him, not by what reassures him" All Rivers Run to the Sea
• "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 those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God himself. Never." Night
• "The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference."
• "A dark flame had entered my soul and devoured it."
• "One can be in Auschwitz without being in Auschwitz"

External links

• Voices on Antisemitism Interview with Elie Wiesel from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Text and Audio of Weisel's "Perils of Indifference" Speech
• Ubben Lecture at DePauw University
• Video of Ethics After the Holocaust speech
• Author attacked in S.F. hotel
• Ethical Issues for Today Remarks presented at the Carnegie Council's Nizer Public Policy Lecture

References

• Berenbaum, Michael: The Vision of the Void. Theological Reflections on the Works of Elie Wiesel, Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1979 ISBN 0-8195-6189-4 PA
• Fonseca, Isabel: Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, London, Vintage, 1996
• Elie Wiesel: First Person Singular PBS special on Elie Wiesel
• Text and audio of Elie Wiesel's famous speech on "The Perils of Indifference"
• 1988 Audio Interview with Elie Wiesel by Don Swaim of CBS Radio, RealAudio
• Christopher Hitchens criticizes Elie Wiesel in the Nation Magazine
• "8 Questions for Elie Wiesel", JEWSWEEK article briefly discussing Wiesel's view regarding the moral necessity of the Iraq War.
• Fine, Ellen S. Legacy of Night: The Literary Universe of Elie Wiesel. State University of New York Press, 1982. ISBN 0-87395-590-0 (paperback)
• Wiesel, Elie. All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs. New York: Knopf, 1995.
• Wiesel, Elie. And the Sea is Never Full: Memoirs 1969-. New York: Schocken, 1999.
• New York Times - The Conversation with Elie Wiesel
• "Elie Wiesel on his Beliefs" ~ Toronto Star

See also

The Boys of Buchenwald- a documentary about the orphanage in which he stayed after the Holocaust