Elie Wiesel (Modern Peacemakers)

Modern Peacemakers

Elie Wiesel Messenger for Peace

MODERN PEACEMAKERS Kofi Annan: Guiding the United Nations Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams: Partners for Peace in Northern Ireland Henry Kissinger: Ending the Vietnam War Nelson Mandela: Ending Apartheid in South Africa Desmond Tutu: Fighting Apartheid Elie Wiesel: Messenger for Peace

Modern Peacemakers

Elie Wiesel Messenger for Peace Heather Lehr Wagner

Elie Wiesel Copyright © 2007 by Infobase Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, contact: Chelsea House An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wagner, Heather Lehr.   Elie Wiesel, messenger for peace / Heather Lehr Wagner.    p. cm. — (Modern peacemakers)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 0-7910-9220-8 (hardcover)   1. Wiesel, Elie, 1928– 2. Authors, French—20th century—Biography. 3. Jewish authors—Biography. 4. Holocaust survivors—Biography. I. Title.   PQ2683.I32Z926 2006   813’.54—dc22   [B] 2006020453 Chelsea House books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Series design by Annie O’Donnell Cover design by Takeshi Takahashi Printed in the United States of America Bang FOF 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 A Time of Darkness

1

2 Childhood in Sighet

8

3 Into the Night

15

4 Prisoner at Auschwitz

25

5 Refugee in France

37

6 An Accidental American

51

7 A New Sense of Hope

60

8 Winner of the Nobel Prize

72

9 Human Rights Activist

84

Appendix

95

Chronology

99

Notes

102

Bibliography

105

Further Reading

106

Index

108

CHAPTER

1

A Time of Darkness

I

n March 1944, German tanks crossed into Hungary. Hitler’s Third Reich was entering its twilight. The mighty German military— which had swept across Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Austria, and had deluged London with bombs—had finally encountered defeat in Russia. The army was now drafting old men and young boys to replenish the ranks. Russian forces were sweeping west, encroaching on German-occupied territory. In only a few months, Allied forces would make the dramatic landing at Normandy known as D-Day. World War II was nearing its end. But in the midst of chaos and defeat, the Third Reich maintained a steady focus on one of its most terrible goals: the extermination of the Jewish people. In Hungary’s capital, Budapest, Adolf Eichmann and 35 members of Hitler’s elite paramilitary corps—the Schutzstaffel (“Protective Echelon”), or S.S.—began preparations for the transport of Hungary’s Jews to a concentration camp known as Auschwitz. In the town of Sighet, in the Transylvanian region of Hungary, news of the German occupation brought a mixture of

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uncertainty and alarm. For several weeks, German soldiers moved into Sighet. They treated the residents with courtesy and politeness even as a series of Nazi policies began to restrict Jewish freedoms. For 15-year-old Elie Wiesel, the true horror began on May 16, 1944. Wiesel and his family had been isolated in a ghetto for Jewish families shortly after the occupation began, but on that Tuesday the Hungarian police began calling for the Jews to come out to the street. Wiesel was soon outside in the heat with his father, a prominent Sighet shopkeeper, as well as his grandmother, mother, and three sisters. The family knew—from what they had seen their neighbors endure over the past few days—that their time had come to leave their home, and that they would be taken to some unknown destination. They were all wearing backpacks into which they had stuffed a few precious possessions. The previous night, Wiesel’s father had dug a hole in the backyard and buried the things they dared not carry with them—jewelry, money, and a few valuable objects. Wiesel added to the pile a gold watch he had received when he celebrated his thirteenth birthday. The family was marched through the streets to a smaller ghetto in Sighet, where they moved into Wiesel’s uncle’s home. His uncle, aunt, and cousins were gone, having been forced from the home so quickly that the table was still set with the food they had been unable to finish before leaving. For several days, the Wiesels remained in the ghetto, waiting. A woman who had worked for the family, a peasant named Martha, slipped passed the barricades and guards around the ghetto and begged the family to leave with her. “I know a safe place,” she said. “I wanted to come and tell you. . . . To beg you. . . . The cabin in the mountains. . . It’s ready. . . Come. . . .There’s nothing to fear there. . . .You’ll be safe. . . . There are no Germans there. . . .”1 The family debated whether or not to leave with their former housekeeper, but in the end, they did not.

A Time of Darkness

INTO THE DARKNESS On Saturday, the Jewish day of rest, the Wiesels and those remaining in the ghetto were ordered to assemble at dawn. They walked to Sighet’s main synagogue through empty and silent streets. The synagogue itself had been transformed into a makeshift shelter, so crowded with people and their belongings that it was difficult to breathe.2 The evidence that this had been a place of worship was gone: the walls were bare; the hangings that once covered them had been torn down; the altar was broken. For 24 hours, Wiesel and his family waited in the synagogue. Men and women were segregated; the men stayed downstairs while the women remained on the second floor. No one was allowed to leave. People were forced to relieve themselves indoors, in a corner. The next morning, they were marched to the train station, where a line of cattle cars was waiting. Hungarian police managed the operation, ordering their own citizens into the cars, 80 people to a car. A few loaves of bread and some buckets of water were passed in; then the doors were slammed shut and the bars at the window checked to confirm that they were secure. The train’s whistle sounded, and the cars began to move. There was not enough room to lie down. Sitting was only possible if Wiesel and the others took turns. There was not enough air. After two days, the heat became unbearable and the passengers suffered intense thirst. The train left Hungary and traveled into Czechoslovakia. A woman in Wiesel’s car began to scream, “I can see a fire! There are huge flames! It is a furnace!”3 Her 10-year-old son tried in vain to comfort her. Finally, the other passengers gagged her and beat her until she was quiet. Years later, Wiesel wrote, “Life in the cattle cars was the death of my adolescence. How quickly I aged.”4 Finally, the train’s wheels slowed and stopped. Those standing near the window could read the name of the station: Auschwitz. The name meant nothing to the passengers onboard. For several





Elie Wiesel

Jewish people deported from Hungary exited a boxcar onto a crowded railway platform at the Auschwitz concentration camp in May 1944. That month, the Wiesel family was sent from their home in Sighet, Hungary, to Auschwitz. After leaving the train, Elie Wiesel would never see his mother, his grandmother, or the youngest of his three sisters again.

hours, the train remained at the station. Some buckets of drinking water were passed into the train. Near midnight, the train began to move again, slowing down after about 15 minutes. Through cracks in the boards of the train, Wiesel could see endless rows of barbed wire. He could hear shouts and barking dogs. He could smell a strange odor in the night air. Suddenly, the doors of the cattle cars were pulled open. A few men, wearing striped shirts and black pants and carrying electric torches and clubs, climbed onto the train. “Everybody get out!” they yelled. “Everyone out of the wagon! Quickly!”5

A Time of Darkness

Possessions were left behind as the weak passengers scrambled out. A line of S.S. men stood guard with guns pointed at those who had climbed from the cars. “Stay together,” Wiesel’s mother said.6 It was only possible for a moment, and then an S.S. guard ordered the male passengers to the left and the women to the right. Wiesel glimpsed his mother, grandmother, and his three sisters move off in a line. He could see his mother stroking his seven-year-old sister’s golden hair. Then they were gone, while Wiesel, holding onto his father’s arm, moved off with the other men. He would never see his mother, his grandmother, or his youngest sister again. In Night, Wiesel’s powerful account of his life in the concentration camp, he wrote: 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 that 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.7

SURVIVAL Wiesel spent 11 months in the concentration camps. He was 16 years old when American troops finally liberated Buchenwald, the camp where he spent the final days of his imprisonment­—the camp in which his father died.





Elie Wiesel

After his release from the concentration camps, Elie Wiesel became a writer and later an outspoken advocate for victims of persecution. His advocacy and activism led to his winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. In 2002, he spoke at a conference on global anti-Semitism held by the Anti-Defamation League in New York, shown above.

After the liberation, Wiesel traveled to France, one of the few countries willing to accept Jewish refugees. He learned French, attended school, and became a journalist. For 10 years, he kept silent about what he had seen. Finally, a friend, French writer François Mauriac, suggested that Wiesel tell the world what he had witnessed. The result was Night, Wiesel’s searing account of his 11 months in the camps, which would ultimately be translated into more than 30 languages. Wiesel would be silent no longer, later authoring more than 40 books, many of which focus on his experiences during and after the war. He became an outspoken advocate for all those who have suffered persecution and death, including Soviet and Ethiopian

A Time of Darkness

Jews; Nicaragua’s Miskito Indians; Argentina’s Desaparecidos; Cambodian refugees; the Kurds; and victims of famine and genocide in Africa, apartheid in South Africa, and war in the former Yugoslavia. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed Wiesel as chairman of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust and, two years later, Wiesel became the founding chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. As a teacher and author, Wiesel has dedicated his life to working for peace, correcting injustice, and giving a voice to those unable to speak for themselves. In 1986, Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his role as “one of the most important spiritual leaders and guides in an age when violence, repression and racism continue to characterize the world.”8 The Nobel Committee stated that Wiesel, “with his message and through his practical work in the cause of peace, is a convincing spokesman for the view of mankind and for the unlimited humanitarianism which are at all times necessary for a lasting and just peace.”9 In his acceptance speech, Wiesel explained the mission that began on that train ride into the darkness, a mission that had become his life’s focus: As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our life will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs. . . . Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.10



CHAPTER

2

Childhood in Sighet

E

liezer Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, a small town in Transylvania. His parents were Shlomo and Sarah Wiesel. The family already included two daughters, Wiesel’s older sisters, Hilda and Bea. Sighet is in the northwestern corner of Transylvania, in what today is Romania, near the Hungarian border. The region has changed hands frequently. Wiesel’s grandparents lived under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. By the time Wiesel was born, Sighet and all of Transylvania had been seized by Romania. Romania allied itself with the Nazis in World War II, although the union came at a heavy price. In 1940, Romania lost about 30 percent of its land and population, being forced under German pressure to grant a portion of its territory to the Soviet Union, another portion to Bulgaria, and a third portion of its land (including northern Transylvania) to Hungary. When Wiesel was about 11 years old, Sighet became a Hungarian town. Soon after, Hungary would be invaded by German troops, but the region was known for anti-Semitism long before Nazi troops marched across the borders.

8

Childhood in Sighet

Sighet had a strong Jewish community when Wiesel was a boy—an estimated 15,000 Jews lived there at the time. Wiesel’s father worked at a community center, helping to assist Jewish prisoners and refugees, in addition to running his own business, a small grocery store. Shlomo Wiesel was a leader in his town, the sort of man that people consulted for advice and aid. Wiesel was strongly influenced by both of his grandfathers. His maternal grandfather, Reb Dodye Feig, was a devout man, a Hasidic Jew who encouraged Wiesel to study the Talmud (a Jewish scholarly text). Wiesel was named for his paternal grandfather, who died while serving in World War I. He had been working as a stretcher-bearer, and was killed while trying to help a wounded man. Wiesel’s paternal grandfather was also a very religious man. Wiesel’s grandmother once told young Elie, “Shabbat [the Sabbath] with him was paradise. The house and garden were bathed in an indescribable heavenly purity and I could hear angels singing with us, in his honor.”11 Wiesel’s family continued these devout traditions. Sighet’s Jewish community would begin to prepare for the Sabbath on Friday afternoons. Shops were closed before sundown. The family would bathe, and then walk to the synagogue for services. Wiesel began religious studies in classical Hebrew at a very young age, shortly after he began to talk. “I spent most of my time talking to God more than to people,” Wiesel recalled in an interview in 1996. “He was my partner, my friend, my teacher, my king, my sovereign, and I was so crazily religious that nothing else mattered.”12 Wiesel was especially influenced by the ideas of the Hasidic sect of Judaism, which is marked by mysticism. When he was eight years old, Wiesel’s mother took him to see Rabbi Israel of Wizhnitz, a prominent Jewish leader in Transylvania. The rabbi spoke first with Wiesel, then for a few moments with his mother while Wiesel waited outside. His mother emerged from the meeting sobbing, leaving Wiesel convinced that he had somehow embarrassed her or done something terrible for which the rabbi had scolded her.



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It was not until 25 years later that Wiesel learned the reason for his mother’s tears, from a cousin who was then living in New York and had witnessed the scene some two and a half decades earlier. The rabbi had told Wiesel’s mother, “Sarah, know that your son will become a gadol b’Israel, a great man in Israel, but neither you nor I will live to see the day. That’s why I’m telling you now.”13

TRACES OF UNREST Despite the relative calm in Sighet, there were hints of the coming darkness. Occasional outbursts of anti-Semitism threatened the community. Wiesel later recalled, Twice a year, Christmas and Easter, we were afraid to go out because those nights we used to be beaten up by hoodlums. It didn’t matter that much. In a way, I was almost used to that. I saw it as part of nature. It’s cold in the winter, it’s hot in the summer and at Christmas you are being beaten up by a few anti-Semitic hoodlums.14

Wiesel’s family spoke Yiddish at home, but they read newspapers and conducted business in the grocery store in German, Romanian, or Hungarian. In Sighet, Ukrainian, Russian, and other languages were also spoken. The family, although not wealthy, was more fortunate than many of their neighbors. Many of Wiesel’s classmates were poor and hungry. Wiesel frequently shared his food and gifts with them. His early memories of school contain a curious mixture of religious fervor and fear. He wrote, In my little village, which in winter was blanketed in snow, the Jewish children got up early, very early, to go to school—the heder [religious elementary school]—to say their morning prayers and study the Bible and the textual commentaries on

Childhood in Sighet

11

Refugees from the Carpatho-Ukraine region enter Sighet in March 1939, after Hungarian troops took over the region. Sighet, Elie Wiesel’s hometown, was like a melting pot, with residents who spoke Yiddish, Hungarian, Romanian, German, Ukrainian, and Russian. When Wiesel was born in 1928, Sighet was under Romanian control. A little more than a decade later, the city came under Hungarian control.

the Scripture. During the winter I lighted my way with an oil lamp. It was dark outside, and I was afraid.15

Wiesel was often ill as a child. His mother took him to religious leaders, to be blessed by them, and also to a series of doctors, once traveling as far as Budapest to visit a specialist. When Wiesel was eight years old, his sister Tzipora was born. While Wiesel’s older sisters helped in the family store, his father encouraged him to study. Wiesel’s father urged Wiesel to devote as much time to his secular studies and to the modern Hebrew language as to his classical religious studies. Wiesel’s mother hoped he would become a rabbi with a doctorate.

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Events in the rest of Europe seemed distant to Wiesel as his childhood continued. At synagogue and while listening to his father’s conversations, Wiesel would hear mention of a fire at Germany’s Reichstag, civil war in Spain, the end of the League of Nations, but these mattered little to Wiesel. Of more immediate concern was the rising tide of antiSemitism closer to home. Occasionally, the message “Jews to Palestine!” would be scrawled on the town’s walls. At the time, there was a movement to encourage Jews to leave Romania, which inspired anti-Semites to suggest that the Jews be forcibly deported to Palestine (then a British protectorate). Romania had its own version of the Nazis, known as Kuzists, who would attack Jews in the street for no apparent reason. When an attack threatened, Wiesel’s father would tell his children not to go to school, and the grocery store would be bolted shut. If danger seemed especially near, the family would sometimes hide in their cellar. Wiesel and his classmates questioned their teachers about the reasons for this anti-Semitism. The teachers responded by encouraging them to read the Bible and the words of the prophets. In these stories, they would find a history full of conflict between Jews and others. There were many tales of Jewish martyrs, people who suffered because of their faith. Wiesel spent his free time reading avidly. He did not know how to swim, and unlike many of his friends, he did not spend time skiing, playing soccer, or playing tennis. He would sometimes play chess or cards. In warm weather, he would walk along the Tisza or the Iza, the two rivers that ran through Sighet. He also learned to play the violin.

CHANGING RULE Sighet was caught in a region that shifted with politics and power. When Wiesel’s father was born, Sighet had been part of the AustroHungarian Empire and was called Máramarosszighet. By the time Wiesel was born, it had become part of the kingdom of Romania,

Childhood in Sighet

and was known as Sighetul Marmaţiei. As a teenager, Wiesel saw the region fall under Hungarian control, becoming known again as Máramarosszighet. Suddenly, Wiesel was forced to learn the Hungarian national anthem rather than the Romanian royal hymn. In 1938, when Wiesel was 10 years old, German troops invaded Czechoslovakia; as a result, Czech refugees began passing through Sighet. War soon spread, and Polish refugees joined the procession through town. The family learned of the persecution of Jews in Germany and Poland, but believed they would be safe; they trusted that Hitler would be overthrown, that the European powers would overwhelm the Third Reich. Stories of the German army’s strength, the brutality of Nazi Germany, and Hitler’s hatred of Jews reached Sighet. There were tales of arrests, persecution, and even massacres from the Polish refugees. Yet, even as Germany invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, the Wiesels did not panic. Wiesel explained this in his memoir All Rivers Run to the Sea: The truth is that, in spite of everything we knew about Nazi Germany, we had an inexplicable confidence in German culture and humanism. We kept telling ourselves that this was, after all, a civilized people, that we must not give credence to exaggerated rumors about its army’s behavior. . . .We all fell into the trap history had set for us. During World War I the Germany army had rescued Jews who, under Russian occupation, had been beaten, ridiculed, and oppressed by savage Cossacks whose mentality and traditions were steeped in antiSemitism. When they left, our region enjoyed a spell of calm. The German officers had been courteous and helpful, unlike the Cossacks. Lulled by memories of the Germans of that era, the Jews refused to believe that their sons could be inhuman. In this, the Jews were not alone.16

The war, with its sounds of distant gunfire, marked the end of Wiesel’s childhood in many ways. The child he had been stayed

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with him, however, urging him to make the most of the life he had been given. As an adult, he would often describe this sense that the child continued to shape the man: “Sometimes I feel that the child accompanies me, questions me, judges me. . . . It’s the child who asks you: ‘So, Adult, what have you done with my future?’”17

CHAPTER

3

Into the Night

W

iesel returned to his childhood home, Sighet, several times as an adult—once on his own, once with a television crew working on a documentary, and once as a guest of the Romanian-Jewish community. Each time, he found the town little changed in its appearance since his youth. The mountains and rivers, the small winding streets, the peasants in their traditional dress, all seemed to belong to another age. The town seemed untouched by the nightmare that had forever altered Wiesel’s life, but there was one important difference. “The Jews of my city are now forgotten,” Wiesel wrote, “erased from its memory. Before, there were some 30 synagogues in Sighet; today, only one survives. The Jewish tailors, the Jewish cobblers, the Jewish watchmakers have vanished without a trace, and strangers have taken their place.”18 The Holocaust in Sighet came with amazing swiftness. “In the space of six weeks,” Wiesel wrote, “a vibrant and creative community had been condemned first to isolation, then to misery, and finally to deportation and death.”19

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The Wiesels first learned that German troops were occupying Hungary on March 19, 1944. Word reached the family that the presence of German troops was encouraging outbursts of antiSemitic activity in many Hungarian towns and villages. Restrictions soon followed. Jewish stores were closed. The Wiesels and other Jews were only allowed to leave their homes at certain times. Adolf Eichmann The arrival of Adolf Eichmann in Sighet in May 1944 marked the beginning of a time of terror for the Jewish population of that town. Karl Adolf Eichmann was born in 1906 near Cologne, Germany. His family moved to Austria when Eichmann was about seven years old, and three years later, Eichmann’s mother died. As a young man, Eichmann worked first for his father’s oil-extraction business, and later for an electrical engineering company and for an oil company. In April 1932, Eichmann joined the Nazi Party. He was laid off from his job in 1933, and moved to Germany. There he spent time at an S.S. training center before being posted to Dachau concentration camp. From there he joined a Berlin branch of the SD, the Nazi Party Security Service. Eichmann soon joined the division of the SD known as the “Jewish section,” which specialized in determining a solution to dealing with Germany’s Jewish population, viewed by the Nazis as “enemies.” Initially, Eichmann worked on the idea of forced Jewish emigration to Palestine, even visiting Palestine in 1937. After only one day, Eichmann ended his trip and returned to Germany, where he cautioned the SD about the danger of creating a strong Jewish state. Instead, Eichmann recommended, the SD should encourage Jews to emigrate to underdeveloped countries where they would live in poverty. Eichmann was then assigned to the SD in Vienna. In March 1938, Germany invaded Austria. Eichmann was charged with finding a way to increase Jewish emigration from

Into the Night

Jewish government employees were fired. Jews could not walk in parks, go to the movies, or ride the bus or train. Germans dressed in black uniforms rode into Sighet in tanks, jeeps, and on motorcycles. At first, they behaved with great politeness. Officers moved into the wealthier Jewish homes, but treated their “hosts” politely, making their own beds and giving the country. He created an efficient, centralized system to process Jewish emigration papers and, within a few months, his office had overseen the emigration of 150,000 Jews, who left Austria with a passport and an exit visa but without their property or cash. This program was viewed as so successful that Eichmann was ordered to set up similar offices in Prague and later in Berlin. During the conquest of Poland, with its population of nearly a million Jews, Eichmann faced a difficulty: fewer countries willing to accept Jews, making emigration difficult. Instead, Eichmann devised a different plan: deporting all Jews to a specially designated “Jewish territory.” He traveled to Poland, found an area that seemed appropriate, and ordered thousands of Czech and Austrian Jews to be sent east to this territory. In March 1944, after German troops invaded Hungary, Eichmann traveled to Budapest and personally oversaw the deportation of more than 437,000 Jews in eight weeks. Most of these, including members of Wiesel’s family, were murdered when they arrived at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps. Eichmann escaped at the end of the war and went into hiding in Argentina under the name Ricardo Klement. He was abducted by Israeli agents on May 11, 1960, and taken to Jerusalem, where he stood trial for crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The trial lasted four months, and more than 100 witnesses testified against Eichmann. He was found guilty, sentenced to death, and hanged on May 31, 1962.

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the children candy. Restrictions soon changed life very quickly. Jewish people were forced to wear a yellow star on their clothing. Special units of the army and the Hungarian police began raiding Jewish homes, demanding jewelry, silver, and foreign money. At Wiesel’s home, three men went through the family’s house and the store. Cupboards were searched, drawers were opened, and books were thrown onto the floor. Posters appeared on the walls of Sighet announcing that anyone who opposed the new laws would be shot. Then an announcement came that all Jews must move into a ghetto—a designated section of the city—that had been created in the town. Wiesel noted that escape was still possible at this point. It was a mild spring, and they [the Jews of Sighet] had only to flee to the mountains until the ordeal was over. Maria—our old housekeeper, wonderful Maria who had worked for us since I was born—begged us to follow her to her home. She offered us her cabin in a remote hamlet. There would be room for all six of us, and Grandma Nissel as well. . . . She would take care of us, she would handle everything. We said no, politely but firmly. We did so because we still didn’t know what was in store for us.20

The Wiesel family home was within the portion of Sighet that had been designated as the Jewish ghetto, so they did not need to move. They did rearrange their rooms, however, keeping the largest one and giving other rooms to relatives. Adolf Eichmann and another high-ranking Gestapo officer arrived in Sighet in May. Wiesel’s father and other Jewish leaders were called to a meeting, where they learned that transports were to begin the following day. The Wiesels were not among the first to leave. Wiesel and his sister walked among those awaiting transport in the hot street, offering them pots and bottles filled with water. The family could hear the noise of Soviet artillery and see flashes of light in the mountains. The Soviet troops were only about a dozen miles away.

Into the Night

Once more Maria appeared at the Wiesel home; once more she offered to hide them. Again, they refused. Within a few days, the family would be forced from their home, onto the tightly packed cattle cars, and transported to Auschwitz.

THE KINGDOM OF DARKNESS The trains carried them to Birkenau, in Poland, where prisoners at Auschwitz were first processed. Men and women were separated. The young and old were immediately pulled away—sometimes violently—and sent directly to the gas chambers. In Night, Wiesel wrote of being approached by another prisoner while clinging to his father’s arm, after they had left the train and watched Wiesel’s mother, grandmother, and three sisters walk off in a different direction. The prisoner quietly asked Wiesel his age. “I’m not quite fifteen yet,” Wiesel replied. “No. Eighteen.” “But I’m not,” Wiesel said. “Fifteen.” “Fool. Listen to what I say.” Then the prisoner questioned Wiesel’s father, who replied: “Fifty.” “No, not fifty. Forty. Do you understand? Eighteen and forty.” He disappeared into the night shadows.21

The advice undoubtedly saved the lives of Wiesel and his father. The men were marched into a square, where Dr. Mengele—the S.S. officer charged with selecting prisoners for work or extermination—stood with a conductor’s baton, which he would wave to the right or left. When Wiesel reached him, he was asked his age: “Eighteen.” My voice was shaking. “Are you in good health?”

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A German soldier at Auschwitz selects which prisoners would live and which would be sent to the gas chamber. The men in line are wearing yellow stars, designating them as Jewish. The young and old were often selected to be killed. When Elie Wiesel and his father first arrived at Auschwitz, another prisoner told them to lie about their ages so they could avoid being automatically marked for death.

“Yes.” “What’s your occupation?” Should I say that I was a student? “Farmer,” I heard myself say.22

Wiesel and his father were ordered into a long barracks with blue-tinted skylights in the roof. There they were ordered to strip, keeping only shoes and belts in their hands. The prisoners guarding them yelled out orders while randomly striking anyone they could reach. Naked and shivering, Wiesel and his father, with the other captives, were ordered to a barber, where the hair was shaved from their heads and bodies.

Into the Night

Next, they were forced out of the barracks and into the icy air, where they were ordered to run to a new barracks. There they were soaked with gasoline, as a kind of disinfectant, and then ordered into a shower. After this, still wet from the shower, they were forced back outside, where they ran to another barracks. Inside, a series of long tables had been set up with mounds of prison clothes on them. Pants, shirts and socks were thrown to the prisoners as they ran past. “The night was gone,” Wiesel wrote more than a decade later. “The morning star was shining in the sky. I too had become a completely different person. The student of the Talmud, the child that I was, had been consumed in the flames. There remained only a shape that looked like me.”23 Later, an S.S. officer confronted the newly arrived prisoners. Remember this. Remember it forever. Engrave it into your minds. You are at Auschwitz. And Auschwitz is not a convalescent home. It’s a concentration camp. Here, you have got to work. If not, you will go straight to the furnace. To the crematory. Work or the crematory—the choice is in your hands.24

AUSCHWITZ Auschwitz was not initially intended as an extermination camp. The first prisoners arrived there on June 14, 1940. Located in southwest Poland, Auschwitz (or Oświęcim, as the camp was called in Polish) was founded on the site of dilapidated Polish army barracks on a stretch of flat and dreary land between the Sola and Vistula rivers. Initially, Auschwitz was intended to serve as a kind of holding concentration camp, or quarantine camp, as the Nazis described it, where Poles would be kept until they were sent on to other, more established concentration camps.25 S.S. Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Rudolf Höss arrived in Auschwitz on April 30, 1940, to take command of the camp—which did not yet exist. Quickly it became clear that the camp would serve not

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as a way station, but as a place where prisoners would be held indefinitely. The camp was first intended to help subdue the Polish population, but it quickly gained a reputation as a place for terror and high death rates—of the 20,000 Poles first sent to Auschwitz, more than half were dead by 1942. 26 On July 28, 1941, the process of murdering Auschwitz prisoners by gassing began. At first, the process was reserved for the sick—those unable to work. By late summer, experiments began at Auschwitz using Zyklon B (an insecticide) to gas prisoners. This was viewed as an improvement in efforts to deal with the vast number of Jews and other political prisoners the Germans had targeted for elimination—a method much easier on the S.S. officers. They could kill their victims at a safe distance, without having to look at them too closely. In September 1941, plans were made for Auschwitz to expand to accommodate additional prisoners. This expansion would become Birkenau, the section of Auschwitz where Wiesel and his family first arrived. Birkenau was built without consideration for sustaining life. The plans for the barracks reveal a design that gave prisoners one-quarter of the space given inmates in the older German concentration camps like Dachau. Birkenau was initially designed to accommodate Soviet prisoners of war. In October 1941, Auschwitz architects also designed a new crematorium for Birkenau to replace the one in use at the main camp. By 1942, Auschwitz had evolved from a prison camp where inmates worked—the gates at the entrance to Auschwitz carried the message “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work brings freedom”)—to a camp where, upon arrival, prisoners would be divided by gender and separated into two groups: those thought able to work and those who were not, due to illness or age. The latter would be killed within hours of their arrival. To avoid panic or rebellion, camp authorities informed those prisoners targeted for death that they were going to take a shower to be disinfected. As one S.S. guard at Auschwitz reported, the

Into the Night

This aerial view, taken in August 1944, shows the layout of Auschwitz I, the administrative center of the largest concentration camp run by the Nazis. In 1944, more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz, and more than 320,000 of them were dead within eight weeks of arriving at the camp.

Jews targeted for extermination were told: “You will now bathe and be disinfected. We don’t want any epidemics in the camp. Then you will be brought to your barracks where you’ll get some hot soup. You will be employed in accordance with your professional qualifications. Now undress and put your clothes in front of you on the ground.”27 The prisoners would then be gently encouraged into the gas chamber, the doors would be screwed shut, and gas poured into the openings. As Wiesel would learn, the secret to survival at Auschwitz lay first in being able to work, and then in obtaining the most favorable work conditions possible—working for a more lenient super-

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visor, ideally indoors, or becoming useful to a specific German who would be inconvenienced if you had to be replaced. The first Jews from outside Poland to be transported to Auschwitz arrived in the spring of 1942. They came from Slovakia. By early summer of 1943, four combination crematoria-gas chambers were operating at Auschwitz-Birkenau. These four crematoria had the capacity to murder and dispose of 4,400 people every day.28 Doctors were hired to assist in the selection process—to evaluate whether or not a prisoner was fit for work. Perhaps the most infamous—and the doctor who would evaluate Wiesel—was Josef Mengele, who arrived at Auschwitz in March 1943, when he was 32 years old. Mengele’s infamy came from his willingness to use the prisoners at Auschwitz for a series of medical experiments, many involving horrific torture. Wiesel and his family had the misfortune to arrive at Auschwitz in 1944, when it would become the site of an almost inconceivable mass murder. In fact, Hungarian Jews like Wiesel would form the greatest number of victims. The change from safety to imprisonment occurred more quickly for Hungarian Jews than in any other country where the Nazis attempted to exterminate Jews. More than 400,000 Hungarian Jews were transported to Auschwitz. The majority were murdered immediately upon arrival; more than 320,000 were killed in less than eight weeks.29 Wiesel and his father were among a very small number spared, simply because they were thought able to provide slave labor.

CHAPTER

4

Prisoner at Auschwitz

S

oon after their arrival at the camp, Wiesel and his father were forced on a half-hour march from Birkenau to Auschwitz. Wiesel’s first impression was that their conditions had improved—Auschwitz had two-story concrete buildings rather than wooden barracks, and a few small gardens were visible. Once more, Wiesel was forced into a shower, and once more forced to run naked through the cold night air. When he arrived at his new barracks, Wiesel was surprised when the prisoner in charge there—a young Pole—spoke kindly to him and to the others who were newly arrived: Comrades, you’re in the concentration camp of Auschwitz. There’s a long road of suffering ahead of you. But don’t lose courage. You’ve already escaped the gravest danger: selection. So now, muster your strength, and don’t lose heart. We shall all see the day of liberation. Have faith in life. Above all else, have faith. Drive out despair, and you will keep death away from yourselves. Hell is not for eternity. And now, a prayer—or rather a piece of advice: let

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Elie Wiesel there be comradeship among you. We are all brothers, and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive.30

The next day, the prisoners were tattooed with numbers on their left arms. Wiesel became A-7713, and for the next 11 months he would be addressed only by that number, never by name. For three weeks, Wiesel had little to do except to appear for each roll call and consume the meager food he was given—black coffee in the morning, soup at noon, and bread in the evening. He stayed close by his father’s side. The two men avoided any calls for skilled workers. Finally, they were sent to Buna, a work camp that was one of Auschwitz’s labor divisions. Wiesel was assigned to an electrical equipment warehouse, where he was told to sit on the ground and count bolts, bulbs, and small electrical fittings. Wiesel was able to work next to his father. During one of the routine medical examinations that were held at the camp, a doctor noticed that Wiesel had a gold crown on one of his teeth. Within a few days, he was ordered to a dentist in the hospital block, whose job was to extract gold fillings and teeth from all the prisoners. Wiesel pretended to be sick, and in this way temporarily avoided the extraction. Several weeks later, however, Wiesel was forced to give the gold crown to a foreman to spare his father a beating. It was pulled from his mouth with a rusty spoon. While Wiesel was fortunate to work indoors, on a relatively light assignment, his life was far from easy. He was always hungry. His supervisor would occasionally explode with fury and lash out for no apparent reason, once beating Wiesel bloody and nearly unconscious. Periodically, the prisoners would be assembled to witness the execution of a prisoner who had committed some offense, most often stealing food. Prisoners were hung from a gallows in the central assembly place, surrounded by other prisoners and armed S.S. guards.

Prisoner at Auschwitz

In Night, Wiesel wrote of one such execution, this one of a 13year-old boy, who was hung with two adults, who were suspected of sabotage against the camp. He described the S.S. officers as preoccupied and disturbed that day; the age of the boy made the execution no longer routine. The entire camp had been assembled to witness the executions of the three prisoners. While the head of the camp read the verdict, all eyes were focused on the young boy. The three prisoners were forced onto chairs, and nooses were placed around their necks. The chairs were tipped over; the assembled prisoners, though long accustomed to witnessing violence and death, wept for the young boy. They were forced to march past the gallows, where they could see that the adults were dead, but the young boy still struggled for life. He lingered for an agonizing half an hour, still alive when Wiesel shuffled past him. As Wiesel passed the boy, he heard a fellow prisoner ask, “Where is God now?” And I heard a voice within me answer him: “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows. . . .”31

A MEMORY OF EVIL As an adult, Wiesel would serve as a witness to those who died at Auschwitz, through his writing and testimony. His words are clearest, however, in describing the victims, not their murderers. He wrote that the murderers did not interest him: That is why I never felt the need to become a Nazi hunter. Though I respect those who did. . . my obsession was quite different. Of course I was shocked by the freedom and happiness enjoyed by these murderers. I saw it as an affront to the collective memory of victims and as a legal outrage. But I knew that

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Elie Wiesel I was incapable by nature and temperament of spending the years left to me tracking them down. The victims alone were worthy of my devotion.32

Wiesel was eventually transferred to a different cellblock, away from his father. This was a building unit, where for 12 hours a day Wiesel was charged with dragging heavy blocks of stone and loading them onto rail cars. The routine was broken by the dreaded periodic selections, in which those who had grown too ill or weak from the grueling labor and meager diet were pulled out and sent to the crematorium. At these times, Wiesel feared most for his father, who had aged and grown frail during their months in captivity. An experienced prisoner had advised them on how to survive the selection: You must get completely undressed. Then one by one you go before the S.S. doctors. I hope you will all succeed in getting through. But you must help your own chances. Before you go into the next room, move about in some way so that you give yourselves a little color. Don’t walk slowly, run! Run as if the devil were after you! Don’t look at the SS. Run, straight in front of you!33

Dr. Mengele and three S.S. officers conducted the selections. Mengele held a list with the prisoners’ numbers on it. He studied each prisoner from head to toe, occasionally making note of a number. Those whose numbers were called would be pulled aside, weeping. They knew their fate. Rations became more meager, and the guards became more brutal. Germany was suffering defeat in the war, although Wiesel did not know this. With the arrival of winter, the conditions became unbearable. The heavy stones Wiesel had to carry were icy, and a bitterly cold wind attacked him as he worked.

Prisoner at Auschwitz

29

Josef Mengele, shown in his S.S. uniform around 1945, was a doctor who conducted medical experiments, which often involved torture, on the prisoners at Auschwitz. He also performed the selections, sending those who had become too ill or weak from the forced labor to die in the crematorium.

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EVACUATION In the middle of January 1945, Wiesel’s right foot began to swell. He was soon unable to walk on it, and suffered from high fevers. He was sent to the hospital, where surgery was ordered. Wiesel was terrified—the hospital was not a safe place. Selections were held in the hospital, and the sickest prisoners were sent to die in the crematorium. Wiesel’s surgery was performed without anesthesia. He was told that his recovery would take two weeks. Only two days after his operation, however, Wiesel learned that Auschwitz was to be evacuated. The Russian Army was near the camp. All prisoners were to be sent to other camps in Germany. All prisoners—except those in the infirmary that is. They would not be evacuated. Wiesel slipped out of the infirmary, although he was barely able to walk. He held his right shoe, since it would not fit on his foot, and hurried through the snow, looking for his father. They discussed their options. Should they stay in the infirmary, where it was possible that the S.S. might murder all patients before leaving the camp? Or should they join the evacuation? Wiesel’s father said nothing, so it was Wiesel who finally decided that they should be evacuated with the other prisoners. Later, after the war, Wiesel learned that those who remained in the hospital were simply left behind; a few days after the evacuation, they were liberated by the Russians.

DEATH MARCH Wiesel did not go back to the hospital. Instead, he returned to his cellblock, his foot bleeding and leaving red marks in the snow. The prisoners were allowed to take additional clothing from the store to put on in layers, in an effort to keep warm. Wiesel tried to find a shoe large enough to fit his swollen foot, but was forced instead to tear up a blanket and wrap that around his foot. Bizarrely, the prisoners were ordered to wash the wooden floor of their barracks before departure, to leave a favorable

Prisoner at Auschwitz

impression on the Russian army. Then, at 6:00 p.m., they formed lines. It was dark and snowing. Searchlights were turned on. Surrounded by hundreds of armed S.S. guards, they were ordered to begin the march. The evacuation that began on January 18, 1945, would later be described as a death march. Some 65,000 prisoners were ordered to march west, on foot, heading for Germany. At times, Wiesel and the others were ordered to run. Anyone who stopped, even for a second, was shot. All around Wiesel, men collapsed in the snow and were shot. His foot ached with each step. Wiesel wrote that his father’s presence beside him was the only thing that kept him from collapsing: “I had no right to let myself die. What would he do without me? I was his only support.”34 Many of those who survived the march did so because they were not alone, but had a friend or relative encouraging them. Ibi Mann, a 19-year-old Czech prisoner, survived because her sister was with her: “I was saying, ‘This is the end—I can’t go any further,’ [but] she pulled me on by force.”35 Among the last prisoners to evacuate Auschwitz, Mann and her sister marched past ditches full of corpses. Why were the prisoners of Auschwitz forced on this brutal march? Principally because the Nazis still believed that they could provide useful slave labor, and wanted to pull them away from the front, where Nazi forces were rapidly losing ground, and into prisons located in the interior of Germany. Wiesel marched 42 miles before his group was allowed to stop and rest. They were quickly surrounded by corpses, the bodies of those who collapsed from the cold and exhaustion. Wiesel and his father found some shelter in a nearby shed, crammed in with the living and the dead. Again, they were ordered to march on through the snow. They marched northwest through Mikolów to Gleiwitz, urged on by S.S. officers on motorcycles. They reached a barbed wire enclosure at Gleiwitz and were allowed to rest, though they were forced to walk over the bodies of those who had gone before them and

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fallen during the march. Wiesel was pushed to the ground and others fell on top of him. He felt himself suffocating, and pushed and scratched until he was able to shift the body on top of him just enough so that he could get a bit of air. Wiesel and his father were held at Gleiwitz for three days without food or drink. S.S. officers guarded the barracks, preventing anyone from leaving. Wiesel heard rumors of a deportation to the center of Germany. There was another selection. Wiesel’s father was deemed too weak to continue, but in the confusion he was able to slip back and join the 30-minute march to the train station. There they waited for the train. Snow continued to fall. The prisoners were given some bread and ate snow to quench their thirst. Finally, they were herded onto open cattle cars, where no roof blocked out the snow. The prisoners huddled together for warmth as the train began to move. Periodically, the train was stopped and those who had died were tossed out. The prisoners were given no food. They traveled for 10 days. The snow continued to fall. More dead were tossed out of the car. Occasionally, as the train passed through German towns, the people would throw a piece of bread into the car. The starving men would scramble, attacking (and often killing) each other for this morsel of food. They finally arrived at their destination: Buchenwald concentration camp.

FREE AT LAST In Buchenwald, Wiesel’s father collapsed. Wiesel brought his father the coffee and soup he was given for himself. Suffering from dysentery, Shlomo Wiesel began to fail. Wiesel pleaded with a doctor to see his father, but was refused. For several days, Wiesel watched his father die. In Night, he recalled how fear and indecision warred with his love for his father. He left the cell block for roll call, then returned

Prisoner at Auschwitz

Buchenwald Elie Wiesel spent his final weeks in captivity in Buchenwald concentration camp. It was here that he was ultimately liberated; it was also here that his father died. Buchenwald was one of the largest Nazi concentration camps, built in 1937 and located five miles northwest of Weimar, in east-central Germany. Male prisoners began arriving at Buchenwald in July 1937; women were not imprisoned in the camp until 1944. The first inmates at Buchenwald were political prisoners; in 1938, nearly 10,000 Jews arrived at the camp, where they were subjected to extreme cruelty and torture. Later in the war, the camp became an important source of forced labor. To accommodate the demand for workers, the number of prisoners sent to Buchenwald increased steadily; by the end of 1945, the population of the prison had reached 110,000. When Soviet troops began sweeping over Poland, the concentration camps in Poland were evacuated, and thousands of prisoners (including Wiesel and his father) were forced on long, brutal marches to reach Buchenwald. In January 1945, some 10,000 exhausted prisoners arrived. Most of them were Jews. In early April 1945, American forces approached Buchenwald. The order was given to evacuate, and some 38,000 prisoners were ordered to march out of the camp. Many of them died from exhaustion or were shot. A group of resistance fighters within the camp prevented the evacuation of all prisoners, however, firing upon guards and delaying the evacuation. On April 11, 1945, soldiers from the Third U.S. Army division entered Buchenwald, where they found more than 20,000 starving and emaciated prisoners. Approximately 56,000 people were murdered at Buchenwald, among them Elie Wiesel’s father. Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Available at www. ushmm.org.

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and lay back down on the top bunk, pretending to be sick himself so that he would not have to leave his father. The cell block was silent, a silence broken only by the groans of those who were ill. An S.S. officer passed by the beds just as Wiesel’s father called to him, begging for some water. The officer ordered him to be quiet, but Wiesel’s father continued to call out to his son, begging for something to drink: The officer came up to him and shouted at him to be quiet. But my father did not hear him. He went on calling me. The officer dealt him a violent blow on the head with his truncheon. I did not move. I was afraid. My body was afraid of also receiving a blow. Then my father made a rattling noise and it was my name: “Eliezer.”36

Wiesel could see that his father was still breathing, although it was a ragged, sporadic breathing. Afraid of the officer, Wiesel lay without moving in his bunk. After roll call was over, Wiesel got down from the bunk. His father was murmuring something, too softly for Wiesel to understand. He bent down over his father, staring down at him for more than an hour, engraving forever into his memory the image of his father’s bloody, beaten face. During the night, as Wiesel slept, his father was carried away and taken to the crematorium. He may still have been alive. Wiesel last saw his father on January 28, 1945. He remained at Buchenwald until April 11. According to his writings, for him, this period was largely blank. There was no work to be done. He was transferred to the children’s block, joining some 600 other young prisoners. On April 6, an announcement was made that Buchenwald was to be liquidated and the prisoners evacuated to another camp. From that point on, there was no more bread or soup. At a rate of 10 blocks (or several thousand prisoners) a day, the evacuation began.

Prisoner at Auschwitz

This photograph from April 1945 shows inmates from Buchenwald inside their barracks, a few days after U.S. troops liberated the concentration camp. Elie Wiesel is in the second row of bunks from the bottom, seventh from the left, next to the vertical beam. Wiesel’s father died just a few months before the camp was liberated.

On April 10, with still about 20,000 prisoners left, an announcement was made that all remaining prisoners would now leave Buchenwald and the camp would then be blown up. But in the middle of the evacuation, air raid sirens sounded, and prisoners were ordered back to their barracks. Wiesel was starving. He had eaten nothing for six days except some grass and a few potato peelings he had found near the kitchen. On April 11, the evacuation resumed. Suddenly, armed members of the prison resistance took action, firing guns and throw-

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ing grenades. Wiesel and the other children flattened themselves on the ground. After about two hours, the camp was quiet. The S.S. guards had fled. By 6:00 p.m., an American tank had arrived outside the Buchenwald gates. Wiesel wrote: I will never forget the American soldiers and the horror that could be read in their faces. I will especially remember one black sergeant, a muscled giant, who wept tears of impotent rage and shame, shame for the human species, when he saw us. . . . We tried to lift him onto our shoulders to show our gratitude, but we didn’t have the strength. We were too weak even to applaud him.37

Three days after the liberation, Wiesel collapsed, suffering from food poisoning. He was taken to the former S.S. hospital, where he lingered for two weeks. At last, noticing a mirror on the opposite wall, he mustered his strength and walked across the room. The 16-year-old had not seen his reflection since leaving his home 11 months earlier. “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me,” Wiesel wrote. “The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.”38

CHAPTER

5

Refugee in France

A

fter the liberation of the concentration camp, Wiesel and about 400 other orphans were transported to France. The children and teenagers marched from the camp in a long line, carrying rations the American soldiers had given them and accompanied by two Jewish chaplains from the American army. This time they boarded comfortable trains, rather than cattle cars. Wiesel spotted a boy from Sighet in his train car. The boy knew a few words of French and reassured Wiesel that life in France would be good. The trip took about two days. When the train reached the border of France, it stopped, and the refugees got off the train. There, an official made a speech in French, and several of the refugees raised their hand. Wiesel, not understanding French, assumed that the official had asked for volunteers for some work assignment. His months in the concentration camp had trained him never to volunteer for any work detail, never to draw attention to himself. He kept his hand down, and only later learned that the official had asked those who wished to become French citizens to raise their hands.

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Young prisoners liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp walk to an American hospital to receive treatment. Elie Wiesel is the tall youth wearing a cap in line at left, fourth from the front. After the liberation, Wiesel and 400 other orphans were sent to France, to a home for refugees set up by the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants—the Children’s Aid Agency.

As the train crossed into France, Wiesel and the others began to clap. The land, as viewed from the train, seemed different to Wiesel. At every station, people waited at the train to offer hot meals, bread, coffee, fruit, and cookies to the young passengers. When the train reached its destination, Wiesel and the others were welcomed by representatives of the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE) (the Children’s Aid Agency) which had set up a home for the refugees in a large estate in Écouis, in northern France. They were given medical examinations, a place to live, clothing, and generous meals.

Refugee in France

Wiesel went to the director of the relief workers and asked for a pen and paper. He began a journal; his first entry read: “After the war, by the grace of God, blessed be His name, here I am in France. Far away. Alone.”39 Wiesel joined with a group of other devout young Jewish refugees who met for morning and evening prayers. They requested and received Bibles, prayer books, and some other Talmudic studies. Wiesel found a kind of comfort in his religious studies, no doubt because they represented a link with one piece of the past that remained unchanged. No matter how much his life had been altered, the scriptures he had studied as a young boy remained the same. Slowly, Wiesel attempted to return to a more normal life. The transition was difficult. For several weeks, he and the others hid bits of food under their pillows, finding it difficult to regain their confidence that they would have enough to eat each day. Wiesel found comfort in playing chess. He was photographed during one chess match, and the image was published in the French newspaper Défense de la France. A few days after the photographer snapped his picture, Wiesel learned that someone had spotted his picture in the newspaper and called the OSE office. That person was his sister.

A SUMMONS TO PARIS Wiesel had thought that, of all his family, he alone had survived the camps. The director who had taken the phone call could not give him many details. He did not know which of Wiesel’s sisters had phoned, and an attempt to trace the call revealed only that she had phoned from a post office and there was no way to reach her. She had left one message for Wiesel: She would meet him the following day in Paris. Wiesel boarded the train to Paris alone, speaking not a word of French. He was afraid and angry, certain that this was some joke and vowing to get off the train in Paris, look around quickly, and return immediately to Écouis.

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As the train pulled into Gare Saint-Lazare, the large Paris train station, Wiesel looked out onto the platform and saw his older sister, Hilda, waiting. They embraced, then Hilda introduced Wiesel to her fiancé, a survivor of the Dachau concentration camp. They had met after the liberation. Hilda explained that she had been informed that Wiesel had died, so she had gone with her fiancé to live with his family in France. Wiesel and his sister talked for hours, all the while avoiding the most painful of topics. Finally, Wiesel dared to ask Hilda about his other sister, Bea. To his relief, he learned that Bea was alive, that she had in fact gone back to Sighet to see if she could learn whether or not Wiesel had survived. The other members of their family, however, had not survived. Hilda spoke French fluently, and she brought Wiesel to the Consistoire, a religious seminary where Jewish students trained to be rabbis. Hilda spoke with its director, who invited Wiesel to enroll in the school, provided that he learned French. Wiesel did not accept at first. He had made friends among the refugees in Écouis, and wanted to return there. After a few weeks, the OSE divided the 400 refugees into two groups— those who were observant Jews and those who were not. The OSE was having difficulty obtaining kosher food, so they divided the group to provide kosher meals only to those who required them. Wiesel was in the first group, which numbered about 100, and with them was moved to the Château d’Ambloy in Vaucelles. Wiesel had attempted to join a group of the refugees who were emigrating to Palestine, the British-controlled territory in the Middle East, but his application was refused. Instead, he built friendships with the others at Vaucelles, enjoying the opportunity to immerse himself in religious studies and spend evenings around the campfire. He had little interest in the French and art lessons offered to the refugees, and only gradually became involved in discussions of current events.

Refugee in France

After a few months, the OSE again moved the refugees, this time to a home in Taverny, in the Paris suburbs, and Wiesel was able to see his sister more often. The OSE directors now gently began to encourage the refugees to make plans for their future. They could emigrate to Palestine; to the United States; to Canada, Colombia, or Australia, if they had family there; or they could remain in France. Those who chose to stay in France were encouraged to begin to learn a trade or pursue their education. Wiesel chose to remain in France, and a private tutor was arranged so that he could begin to learn French.

RETURN TO ACADEMICS While in the refugee camp, Wiesel met the religious philosopher Mordechai Rosenbaum, known as Shushani. Shushani was an eccentric but brilliant scholar of the Talmud, born in Lithuania, who was reportedly able to speak 30 languages and could converse for hours on a wide range of topics. Shushani became a kind of mentor to Wiesel, and the two would spend weeks studying a single page of Talmud. After a short time, the refugees were moved again, leaving Taverny to go to Versailles. For the first time, Wiesel found himself among not only those who had been imprisoned in Buchenwald, but among other refugees, girls and boys who had survived the war either in hiding or by assuming false identities. While at Versailles, Wiesel took the train to Paris, visiting Hilda and taking classes in French and mathematics. Wiesel began tutoring other students in Hebrew and formed a choir, which he also directed. During that time, he also visited his sister Bea, who was living in a displaced person’s camp in Germany and hoping to get a visa to move to Canada. Wiesel was disturbed by his sister’s poor living conditions in the camp. He gradually came to realize that the generous accommodations and arrangements made for him and the other “orphans” of

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Buchenwald were unique. “The suffering of the survivors did not end with the war,” Wiesel wrote later. Society wanted no part of them, either during or after. During the war all doors were closed to them, and afterward they remained shut. . . . Those who were stupid or naive enough to return to their countries of origin sometimes faced outright hostility from their former neighbors and countrymen. . . . When Bea went back to Sighet, she found strangers living in our house and had to stay with friends.40

Bea had contracted an illness in the refugee camps that had damaged her lungs; because of her illness, she was denied a visa by the United Displaced Persons Camps After the war, the Allies were faced with a refugee crisis—some two million so-called “displaced persons” (wartime refugees) who were afraid or unwilling to return home. Most of the Jewish survivors who had endured the war either in hiding or in concentration camps were reluctant or unable to return to their homes because of ongoing anti-Semitism or the destruction of their homes during the Holocaust. Many did attempt to reclaim their homes, only to find their valuables stolen, their homes occupied by strangers, and those who had persecuted them still living in their communities. In some instances, Jews who returned were threatened or attacked. In Poland, Jews were violently attacked on several occasions, the worst being an attack in Kielce in 1946 in which 42 Jews who had survived the Holocaust were murdered. Many refugees, like Wiesel and his sisters, traveled west to areas liberated by Allied forces. The Allies set up displaced persons camps and centers to accommodate the refugees. Conditions in these camps varied widely. The largest camps were set up in northern and southern Germany, some of which housed as

Refugee in France

States. Ultimately, she was granted a visa by Canadian authorities to work as a housekeeper for a Jewish family in Montreal. During Wiesel’s time with her, he found it difficult to speak of the life they had known before the war. Finally, on the last night of his visit, he was able to ask her about Sighet. He learned that very few Jews of Sighet had survived—only about a hundred or so; of their own family, only a few distant cousins were still alive. Wiesel learned that most of those who had persecuted the Jews were still living in Sighet—only a few had been arrested and imprisoned. Bea refused to speak of the family’s home, noting only that the family’s jewels and possessions had all been stolen, apparently looted by neighbors as soon as the Jewish families had been taken away. There was no many as six thousand people. One large camp was set up next to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. By 1947, the number of Jews displaced by the war reached approximately 250,000. Their condition was made more severe by the fact that so few countries would willingly accept them for immigration. Many countries closed their borders, and the United States severely restricted the number of Jewish refugees it would accept. Many refugees wished to emigrate to Palestine, but the British, who governed the territory, attempted to restrict the number of Jewish immigrants. Many refugees tried to enter Palestine illegally, only to be placed in prison camps on the island of Cyprus or to have their boats intercepted and returned to Germany. This treatment of the refugees, most of them Holocaust survivors, sparked international outrage. When the state of Israel was created in 1948, Holocaust survivors from displaced persons camps and from internment camps in Cyprus were welcomed to Israel, which was declared a Jewish homeland. Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Available at www. ushmm.org.

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home for Wiesel to return to. He would need to make a new life for himself.

A NEW BEGINNING Encouraged by Shushani, Wiesel began to write, focusing on Bible commentaries. He had a strong sense that the time would come when he would need to testify to what he had seen in the camps, but the time had not yet come; the memories were too raw. Wiesel later described these memories of the camps as something he carried within him “like poison,” explaining, I thought about it with apprehension day and night: the duty to testify, to offer depositions for history, to serve memory. What would man be without his capacity to remember? Memory is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. What does it mean to remember? It is to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading and to call upon the future to illuminate it. It is to revive fragments of existence, to rescue lost beings, to cast harsh light on faces and events, to drive back the sands that cover the surface of things, to combat oblivion and to reject death.41

Instead, Wiesel enrolled at the Sorbonne—the premier university in Paris—and began taking courses in psychology and philosophy. He was fascinated by lectures on existentialism and reveled in his studies, but he was frequently short on funds and unable to figure out how to support himself. He was often hungry and unable to pay for the small room he had rented. News of the conflict in Palestine inspired him to join in the Jewish struggle against the British. He volunteered at the Jewish Agency and was soon hired as a journalist. Initially, his work consisted of translating into Yiddish articles that had been published in Hebrew. Gradually, he became more involved, suggesting headlines, carrying manuscripts to the print shop, learning how to

Refugee in France

compose the front page and the cultural section. He began attending press conferences, public meetings, and demonstrations. Wiesel’s first article was published after the state of Israel was formally established. Titled “The Sacred Cannon” and published under the byline Ben Shlomo, the article told of the divided Jewish paramilitary groups then operating in Israel, using the illustration of two brothers who found themselves on opposite sides in the conflict, one becoming the victim of the other. His next article, “Victors and Vanquished,” was inspired by a visit to Bea’s camp, where she was still waiting for a visa. Again using the pseudonym Ben Shlomo, Wiesel raised the question about whether the Jews could be considered victors, even with the Germans as the “vanquished.” Finally, through a friend, Wiesel was able to get a press card to travel to Israel. He bought himself a leather jacket and a pair of sunglasses in an effort to look more like a reporter. He took copious notes about everything he saw and experienced, and was introduced as a “foreign correspondent.” Wiesel was amazed at the openness and friendliness that greeted him in Israel—he was welcomed everywhere. Accustomed to living in places where Jews held no positions of authority, he was surprised to find that the government officials, politicians, policemen, and army officers were all Jewish. Wiesel spent several months in Israel, eventually finding a job working as a Paris correspondent for an Israeli newspaper. He sailed back to France, arriving in Paris in January 1950. His newspaper would only publish articles directly or indirectly related to Israel or the Jewish people. Wiesel submitted a few articles related to the testimony of concentration camp survivors and resistance fighters, but the paper rejected them, preferring articles on current events. Wiesel began to travel, returning to Israel and trekking to Spain and Morocco. He visited India and was distressed by the many orphaned children he saw begging for money, starving and suffering from various physical ailments and diseases. He

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experienced a kind of spiritual renewal on this journey, finding it difficult to accept the Hindu belief in reincarnation and instead committing himself to combating injustice and doing good in the days he had been given. He went to Canada to visit his sister Bea, who was by then working at the Israeli consulate. He returned to Israel, then traveled to Brazil to report on Eastern European Jews who were being converted to Catholicism. It was on the ship journey to Brazil that Wiesel worked on his memoirs of his concentration camp years, writing them in Yiddish. It had been nearly 10 years since Buchenwald had been liberated, a period during which Wiesel had preserved his silence. Now he wrote feverishly, without rereading what he had written: “I wrote to testify, to stop the dead from dying, to justify my own survival. I wrote to speak to those who were gone. As long as I spoke to them, they would live on, at least in my memory.”42 When they reached South America, a Jewish book publisher took the manuscript pages, asking to read them and promising that, if they were good, he would publish them. Wiesel hesitated, convinced that no one would be interested in the “sad memories of a stranger.”43 Finally, he reluctantly handed over his only copy of the manuscript.

A CALL TO TESTIFY In 1954, Wiesel was back in France and received a choice assignment: he was to interview the French prime minister, Pierre Mendès-France. He decided to make contact with the prime minister by first interviewing one of Mendés-France’s mentors, French novelist François Mauriac. Wiesel had intended to lead the conversation around to the subject of the prime minister, but instead was fascinated by Mauriac, particularly his grasp of politics and his view of journalism. Wiesel was outraged, however, when Mauriac began to talk of the life and death of Jesus. Instead of listening quietly, Wiesel challenged Mauriac, noting the hypocrisy in a faith that focused on the murder of a single Jew two thousand years ago

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47

Influences on the Peacemaker In 1954, Elie Wiesel met the French novelist François Mauriac. Wiesel had hoped to persuade Mauriac to introduce him to Prime Minister Pierre Mendès-France, but instead the conversation led to Mauriac encouraging Wiesel to write down his experiences in the concentration camps. Those writings would become the basis for Night. At the time of their meeting, Mauriac had already won the 1952 Nobel Prize for Literature. Mauriac was born in Bordeaux, France, in 1885. His father had died when Mauriac In his early career as a journalwas little more than a year old, ist, Elie Wiesel met the French leaving his mother to support novelist François Mauriac Mauriac and his four brothers (above). During their meetand sisters. His mother was ing, Wiesel became angry with a devout Catholic, and at the Mauriac and left. The novelist age of seven Mauriac was followed Wiesel and implored sent away to a school run by him to tell of his experiences the Marianite Order. Religion during the war. From this would play an important role entreaty emerged Wiesel’s in his writing. He studied litbook La Nuit (Night), which erature in Bordeaux and Paris and published his first collecMauriac submitted to his own tion of poetry, Les Mainjointes publisher. (Clasped Hands), in 1909. During World War I, Mauriac served in the Red Cross as a hospital orderly dispatched to the Balkans. His novel Le Baiser aux (continues)

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(continued)

lepreux (A Kiss for a Leper), published in 1922, brought him fame. Many of his later writings, novels like Le Déser de l’Amour (published in 1925) and Thérèse Desqueyroux (published in 1927), would earn criticism from more conservative Catholics for their frank examinations of sin and redemption. Mauriac was elected to the Académie Française (the official organization charged with regulating the French language) in 1933. He served as a journalist for the French newspaper Le Figaro, often writing articles critical of the growth of Fascism in Europe. He also wrote several plays during the 1930s. When Germany occupied France during World War II, Mauriac was outspoken in his criticism of German oppression, a position that forced him into hiding when his life was threatened. After the war, Mauriac was named a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor by French president Charles de Gaulle. Mauriac supported de Gaulle’s anticolonial policies in Morocco, and was a supporter of French colony Algeria’s effort to win independence. His writings in his weekly newspaper column “Bloc-Notes” were often controversial, and included condemnation of the French army for its use of torture in Algeria and support for a more liberal approach to Catholicism. Mauriac wrote a biography of de Gaulle, published in 1964; his son Claude worked as a private secretary to de Gaulle from 1944 to 1949. Throughout his lifetime, Mauriac published numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, plays, poetry and essays, as well as a series of personal memoirs. He died in Paris on September 1, 1970. In the presentation speech awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature to Mauriac in 1952, Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, cited Mauriac’s ability to precisely recreate the landscape of Bordeaux that figured in nearly all of his novels, the landscape he had known as a child, and to use as background Catholic thought and sensitivity.

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“Mauriac remains unequalled in conciseness and expressive force of language,” Österling stated. “His prose can in a few suggestive lines shed light on the most complex and difficult things.”* *Available at www.nobelprize.org.

while, only 10 years earlier, millions of Jews had been murdered without protest. Mauriac never helped Wiesel get an interview with MendèsFrance, mainly because Wiesel never asked him for it. Instead, he gave Wiesel something more valuable: confirmation that the time had come for him to report what he had seen. Wiesel stormed out of their meeting, but Mauriac followed him, begging him to come back and to tell of his experiences. Wiesel then explained that he had been determined to keep silent for 10 years, to be certain that when he spoke, his words would do justice to the memories. Mauriac told him, “I think that you are wrong. You are wrong not to speak. . . . Listen to the old man that I am: one must speak out.”44 Wiesel’s vow of silence had, technically, already been broken. He had written the manuscript of his experiences in Yiddish while traveling to South America, and shortly before he met with Mauriac, Wiesel had learned that the manuscript was going to be published in Argentina. It was published in 1956 under the title Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Stayed Silent), and contained more than 800 pages. Mauriac encouraged Wiesel to reexamine the manuscript, promising to help him find a publisher in France. Wiesel began the extensive process of translating his memories into French, paring the book down to the slim, spare prose that eventually would be published under the title La Nuit (Night). Mauriac was

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the first person to read Night, and it was Mauriac who wrote a preface for the manuscript and submitted it to his own publisher. “No one’s interested in the death camps anymore,” Mauriac was told. “It won’t sell.”45 Mauriac refused to give up. He found a publisher for Wiesel’s work, then used his own status as a famous novelist to promote the book. The book was published in 1958. The memories Wiesel shared in Night would haunt readers for generations to come. As Wiesel explained in From the Kingdom of Memory, it was not merely his duty to keep his memories alive, but his right to claim those memories as true and real: For memory is a blessing: it creates bonds rather than destroys them. Bonds between present and past, between individuals and groups. It is because I remember our common beginning that I move closer to my fellow human beings. It is because I refuse to forget that their future is as important as my own.46

CHAPTER

6

An Accidental American

I

n 1956, Elie Wiesel came to the United States. He was sent to New York by an Israeli newspaper to serve as a correspondent, an assignment that he thought would last one year. Night had not yet been published (it would be published in 1958). Wiesel struggled with political issues, and continued to feel uncertain about his journalistic skills, once saying, Don’t ask me how I became a journalist. I don’t know. I needed to do something, so I became a reporter and managed to fool everybody. I wrote about politics but understood nothing about politics. I still don’t. I wrote about anything under the sun, because I had to, without understanding what I was writing.47

Wiesel found a small studio apartment on Riverside Drive and 103rd Street. The apartment’s most impressive feature was its view: It overlooked the Hudson River. Wiesel spent his time writing and gazing out at the lights of Manhattan and New Jersey.

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Wiesel befriended other correspondents, who helped him obtain a desk at the United Nations press room and taught him to gather the most critical news of the day by visiting the New York Times’ editorial office. He traveled to Washington to meet David Ben-Gurion, the Israeli prime minister, who was then meeting with President Eisenhower. He also reported on the civil rights struggle. Only a few months after his arrival in the United States, Wiesel was hit by a taxi while crossing the street. For 20 minutes he lay in the street until an ambulance arrived and transported him to the hospital. Wiesel’s left side had been shattered. After a 10-hour operation to reconstruct it, Wiesel was placed in a fullbody cast. The only thing he could move was his head. Confined to bed, Wiesel began to dictate articles, including a first-person account of the accident, some commentaries, and background pieces. His hospital room became a gathering place for friends and relatives, who discussed politics, news and the latest gossip. A fictionalized account of Wiesel’s experience became a novel; called The Accident, it reflects Wiesel’s emotions in the weeks following the disaster, although the “accident” related in the novel is a suicide attempt. In the novel, Wiesel writes, “The ten weeks I spent in a world of plaster made me richer. I learned that man lives differently, depending on whether he is in a horizontal or vertical position. The shadows on the walls, on the faces, are not the same.”48 Wiesel left the hospital in a wheelchair, and soon was able to return to his work at the UN using crutches. When his American visa expired, the paperwork needed to extend his visa was daunting. It required a trip back to France, which Wiesel, still confined to a wheelchair or crutches, was not in a physical or financial condition to make. French officials were not helpful, and Wiesel felt more than ever like a refugee. Finally, a U.S. immigration official suggested that he apply for American citizenship. Wiesel became a legal resident and, five years later, became an American

An Accidental American

Golda Meier While working as a correspondent at the United Nations, Elie Wiesel befriended Golda Meier, an Israeli politician who, at the time, was negotiating Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai. She would prove an important contact, supplying him with helpful information as she rose within Israeli politics. Meier was born Goldie Mabovitch in Kiev, in the former Soviet Union, in 1898. As a correspondent workConfronted with strong anti- ing at the United Nations in the late 1950s, Elie Wiesel Semitism and poverty, Meier’s met Israeli politician Golda family immigrated to America Meir, who would become in 1906, where they lived in Mil- a friend and an important waukee, Wisconsin. contact. Meir would go While in high school, Meier on to be prime minister of became active in the Zionist Israel from 1969 to 1974. movement, which was encouraging Jewish people from all over the world to immigrate to Palestine. Meier married Morris Myerson and, in 1921, the couple moved to Palestine. Meier quickly became active in a Jewish trade union and soon was traveling to the United States, helping to raise support and funds for Jewish women’s groups in Palestine. In 1946, she became head of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department, serving as a critical player as Britain negotiated its withdrawal from Palestine. She later returned to her fundraising activities in the United States, this time to support the state of Israel as it waged a war for independence. In 1948, when the state of Israel was formally declared, Meier was appointed to serve in its provisional government. (continues)

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(continued)

That same year, she was named Ambassador to the Soviet Union. She was elected to Israel’s legislature, the Knesset, in 1949, and served as Minister of Labor and National Insurance until 1956. From 1956 to 1966, she served as Foreign Minister, helping to build firmer relations between Israel and emerging nations in Africa, Latin America, and the United States. Meier served as Secretary-General of the Labor Party after it was formed and, in early 1969, she became premier at the age of 71. While Meier was premier, the Yom Kippur War broke out when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on October 6, 1973. Later, Meier’s government was charged with failing to accurately assess the threat of attack from the Arab nations. Meier was reelected in late 1973. She resigned in 1974 and died in December 1978. She is buried in Jerusalem.

citizen. He received an American passport, the first passport he had ever had. In 1981, Wiesel’s friend François Mitterand was elected president of France, and Wiesel was offered French citizenship. “Though I thanked him,” Wiesel wrote in his memoirs, “and not without some emotion, I declined the offer. When I had needed a passport, it was America that had given me one.”49

THE WRITER In 1957, Wiesel traveled with friends on a six-week cross-country trip from New York to Los Angeles. He still needed a cane to walk, but Wiesel was amazed by the America that existed between the two coasts: Interminable highways disappeared into a blue horizon ringing tall mountains embedded in skies of shifting colors. There were cascading rivers and peaceful brooks, green valleys and

An Accidental American yellow hills, violent storms and dramatic sunsets. Never before had I been so close to nature.50

He visited an Indian reservation in Arizona and discovered that the Indian who greeted him was actually Jewish, a Polish concentration camp survivor who had emigrated to America and posed as an Indian for tourists during the day. Wiesel’s network of friends and colleagues grew. Golda Meir, who had come to the United Nations to negotiate the Israeli withdrawal from Sinai, spotted Wiesel hobbling around on crutches. After speaking with him, she complimented him on his perfect Hebrew and offered to supply him with information so that he could rest his legs. They became friends, and Wiesel was warmly welcomed in Israel when Meir became prime minister. Wiesel, however, was growing increasingly disenchanted with journalism. He found most politicians disappointing, feeling that they were acting a part and that journalists were participating in the act by providing them with an audience. Wiesel was also under constant financial pressure. He lived essentially from day to day, dependent on friends to provide him with an occasional meal or an occasional assignment. In 1957, Wiesel joined the staff of the Jewish Daily Forward, which was at that time the best-known Yiddish language newspaper in America. It was also in 1957 that Wiesel learned that Mauriac had at last found a publisher for Night. Wiesel’s original title for the book had been And the World Remained Silent. The publisher suggested a more biblical phrase, but eventually he and Wiesel agreed upon the French La Nuit. The text was also further edited. Wiesel had trimmed his original manuscript from 862 pages to 245; the final text was edited down to 178 pages. An American edition would be published in 1960. Other books followed Night, many of them focusing on the painful stories of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Dawn, published in 1961, tells the story of a young member of the Jewish

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underground—a survivor of Auschwitz—in British-controlled Palestine, who is guarding a captured British officer, and is engulfed by emotion when he is ordered to shoot the officer. The Accident was published in 1962. Two years later, The Town Beyond the Wall was published; it is a novel that tells of a young Jew who returns to his hometown, a town behind the Iron Curtain, to understand why people did not act when he and his family were deported to a concentration camp. Wiesel, who writes in French, has said that, once the first sentence of a book is written, he knows instantly the rest of the story. The Accident begins with the simple phrase: “The accident occurred on an evening in July, right in the heart of New York, as Kathleen and I were crossing the street to go to see the movie The Brothers Karamazov.”51 All of Wiesel’s novels are written in the same spare, stark style as Night, a style that Wiesel has described as belonging to “the chroniclers of the ghettos, where everything has to be said swiftly, in one breath. You never know when the enemy might kick in the door, sweeping us away into nothingness. Every phrase was a testament.”52 Wiesel was disturbed when his writing received praise. His goal was not to make people like what he had written, but rather to make them angry—angry at what had happened, and determined that it should never happen again. “I never intended to be a novelist,” Wiesel has said. “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.”53

RETURN TO SIGHET At the beginning of his career, Wiesel developed a schedule that he has used throughout his life, writing from 6:00 to 10:00 in the morning, working on two projects simultaneously—one fiction and one nonfiction. After writing for four hours, he then pursues research, reading, or studying in areas related to what he is

An Accidental American

writing. He generally writes three drafts of each book, ultimately cutting and editing each work to preserve its simplest essential thought. “A writer’s whole heritage is in the choice of each word,” he has said.54 Wiesel also writes with a picture of his hometown, Sighet, placed before him. In 1964, Wiesel decided that he was ready to return to his hometown of Sighet, to seek traces of his past. He studied the official archives in Budapest, trying to determine which government officials had been there when the decision was made to send Sighet’s Jews to the concentration camps, and he walked the same streets that he had traveled with his mother when she had brought him to the city to visit the doctor. In From the Kingdom of Memory, Wiesel wrote that, in Sighet, he walked for hours through the streets. “Passersby saw me without seeing, and I saw them while beholding only the ghosts that surrounded them, and the ghosts were more real, more vivid than they. I saw friends long dead, comrades long dead, dead rabbis, dead disciples, and they were alive.”55 He traveled first to his grandfather’s grave, lighting candles there in keeping with the Jewish tradition. He was disconcerted by the fact that the town was, in so many ways, exactly as it had been before the war. The streets were full of people. Wiesel walked passed the movie house and the hospital. “The park was as it had been,” Wiesel wrote later, “the trees and benches still in place. Everything was there. As before. Everything except the Jews.”56 Most of the synagogues had been closed, but in one of them Wiesel found a pile of books covered with dust. They were books that had been recovered from abandoned Jewish homes; as Wiesel searched through them, he found a few books that had belonged to him, with his own handwritten notes on biblical texts. Wiesel’s experience during his return to Sighet would form the basis for his novel The Town Beyond the Wall, published in French as La Ville de la Chance in 1962 and in English in 1964. The novel tells of a young Jewish survivor who returns to his birthplace and walks through the streets like a stranger. From

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a window, an onlooker watches him silently, and the novel then tells, in flashback, of a similar moment when a silent person looked through the same window as the Jews were herded onto cattle cars bound for Auschwitz. It was this novel that earned Wiesel his first major literary prize, the Prix Ravarol, in 1963.

THE JEWS OF SILENCE In 1965, Wiesel received an assignment from the Tel Aviv newspaper Yediot Ahronot to travel to the Soviet Union and write about the fate of the 3 million Soviet Jews. The following year, he would return again to write more about this large group of people, who were being denied the freedom to wor-

In this photograph from 1959, Jewish congregants worship in a dilapidated synagogue in the Soviet Union. In 1965, Wiesel received an assignment to write about Jews in the Soviet Union. He found that they faced discrimination and persecution. The articles were the beginning of a new role for Wiesel—that of human rights activist.

An Accidental American

ship. Wiesel later described it as “a turning point in my life.”57 In Russia, he found intolerance, discrimination, and persecution facing the Jews living there. Wiesel, who had dedicated his life to giving testimony for the dead, now found himself a “messenger of the living.”58 The Jews he met had survived the Nazi era, the Stalinist era, and still continued to adhere to their faith in a country where practicing that faith was forbidden. Wiesel spoke with hundreds of Jews and traveled to five different cities. The series of articles he wrote later were collected and published as The Jews of Silence. In the introduction, Wiesel wrote: “The pages that follow are the report of a witness. Nothing more and nothing else. Their purpose is to draw attention to a problem about which no one should remain unaware.”59 Wiesel’s powerful testimony began a new phase in his life and work—human rights activist. He campaigned to involve many, including the American Jewish community, in providing support and aid to the Russian Jews. His legacy would be the release of Russian Jews to freedom—the small number of Jews allowed to leave Russia would gradually turn into a huge exodus of this community, traveling to Israel and other welcoming countries to lead a new life.

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7

A New Sense of Hope

T

he first volume of Wiesel’s memoirs ends with a wedding—his own. At the age of 40, Wiesel married Marion Erster Rose, a woman of Austrian descent who was also a Holocaust survivor. Wiesel met her in the mid-1960s, at a time when she was in the process of getting divorced. She was then a young mother. She was knowledgeable about art, music, and the theater. She had spent her childhood in Vienna, and was fluent in five languages. She would become the translator of Wiesel’s books. The couple was married in Jerusalem on April 2, 1969. Wiesel’s sisters, Bea and Hilda, attended the ceremony with their families. Marion, Wiesel’s wife, had a young daughter, Jennifer. Wiesel’s life changed: after 40 years alone, he found himself a husband and stepfather. He began to move away from journalism, focusing more and more on his novels and nonfiction essays. In 1970, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his liberation from Buchenwald, Wiesel wrote Entre deux soleils (published in English as One Generation After). This nonfiction narrative begins at the start of World War II and ends with Israel’s Six-Day War. The com-

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pilation of autobiographical essays and tales illuminates Wiesel’s struggle to evaluate the events of the past 25 years of his life. The book, as reflected in its English title, also deals with the lives of the children of survivors, and how they come to terms with their parents’ past. This theme would resonate for Wiesel two years later, with the birth of his first and only child, a son named Shlomo Elisha, on June 6, 1972. Describing that day, Wiesel wrote, “A dawn unlike any other. It will mark my existence forever. This little fellow in the arms of his mother will illuminate our life. I look at him and look at him. And as I look at him I feel the presence of others also seeking to protect him.”60 Wiesel later explained the significance of his son’s name: “My son’s first name is Shlomo. It was my father’s name. His middle name, Elisha, means ‘God is salvation.’ We [Jews] believe in middle names so much. I was the only son. I cannot break the chain. It is impossible that 3,500 years should end with me, so I took those 3,500 years and put them on the shoulders of this little child.”61 More than the choice of his name, it is the simple fact that the birth of this child represents a significant milestone for Wiesel, a choice of life over death, an expression of faith that up until now had seemed impossible for him. Wiesel wrote in his memoirs that he had long feared having a child: I was convinced that a cruel and indifferent world did not deserve our children. . . . It was Marion who persuaded me otherwise. It was wrong to give the killers one more victory. The long line from which I sprang must not end with me. She was right. And now? Because of my father and my son, I choose commitment.62

A NEW FOCUS In the early 1970s, Wiesel shifted his energy to a new profession: college professor. He was the Distinguished Professor of Judaic

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Studies at City University of New York from 1972 to 1976, then became the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Boston University. Because of his writing, Wiesel was also increasingly invited to speak to various groups and organizations. His schedule was grueling; he would work for 12 to 16 hours a day, teaching, traveling, speaking, and writing. His writing during this period reflected his ongoing efforts to provide testimony of what his generation had experienced as Jews and a historical context for Jewish traditions and religious thought, coupled with a hint of optimism for the future. In 1972, he published Souls on Fire, a collection of portraits of the leaders of the eighteenth century Hasidic movement. The inspiration for the book were his memories of childhood tales told to him by his Hasidic grandfather, and Wiesel shares the legends, the tales, and stories in a way that richly reflects the mysticism, prayer, religious zeal, and even joy of the Hasidic movement. In 1973, Wiesel composed Ani Maamin (I Believe), a literary work in blank verse that was set to music by the Franco-Jewish composer Darius Milhuad. The inspiration for this composition was a song of prayer expressing faith in the coming of the Messiah. Wiesel, at 16, heard this song sung by Jews in Auschwitz. In Wiesel’s version, the Biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob go to God to tell of the tragedy they have seen on Earth, the tragedy befalling God’s people. But God remains silent, and the three leave heaven to stand beside the victims below on Earth. The piece was first performed at New York’s Carnegie Hall on November 11 and 13, 1973. In his memoirs, Wiesel pointed out that the more optimistic tone of his later writings did not necessarily mean that he had made complete peace with God: I would not be the man I am, the Jew that I am, if I betrayed the child who once felt duty-bound to live for God. I never gave up my faith in God. Even over there I went on praying. Yes, my faith was wounded, and still is today. In Night, my earliest

A New Sense of Hope testimony, I tell of a boy’s death by hanging, and conclude that it is God Himself that the killer is determined to murder. I say this from within my faith, for had I lost it I would not rail against heaven. It is because I still believe in God that I argue with Him. As Job said: “Even if He kills me, I shall continue to place my hope in Him.”63

That same year, Wiesel wrote the novel The Oath. The oath that is referenced in the title is a pledge taken by an old man, a wanderer, who is the only survivor of genocide in his village. He makes an oath never to tell of what he has seen—that all of the Jews in his village were murdered by their neighbors—and waits 50 years before breaking the oath, telling a young man on the verge of committing suicide of what he witnessed, to give that man a purpose for living: the mission of carrying the story, so that it will not disappear. In August 1974, Wiesel’s sister Bea died of cancer. She was buried in Montreal, and on her tombstone, in addition to her own name, were added the names of Wiesel’s grandmother, mother and father, and youngest sister—all of whom had died without a proper burial.

A LIFE OF PURPOSE Wiesel has said that one of the main tenets of his life is the idea of not being indifferent to the bloodshed and suffering of his fellow man. “Not to take a stand,” Wiesel wrote, quoting Camus, “is in itself to take a stand.”64 As the years went by, Wiesel found his focus expanding beyond the suffering of Jews, to encompass the suffering of all people, everywhere. In 1976, Wiesel published Messengers of God, which places Biblical figures like Abraham, Adam, Moses, and Job in contemporary situations, where they are forced to react to the demands of life in the twentieth century. These patriarchs then counsel mankind to reject despair and faithlessness and instead choose

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President Jimmy Carter (left) and Elie Wiesel (right of Carter) commemorated the Holocaust Remembrance Days in April 1979. Wiesel helped establish the Remembrance Days. The year before, President Carter invited Wiesel to chair the Commission on the Holocaust, and later Wiesel was appointed chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.

faith and perseverance. Two years later, he published A Jew Today, which even more clearly expressed Wiesel’s new idea of the link connecting all humans. In it, he wrote of people suffering in Cambodia and Bangladesh, in South Africa, and in Vietnam. He addressed letters in the text to a young Israeli and to a young Palestinian Arab, underscoring his philosophy that, when one group of people suffer, the whole world suffers with them. In 1975, Wiesel traveled for the first time to South Africa, where the system of apartheid was still in place. From 1948 to 1994, a white minority government in South Africa enforced a policy of racial discrimination and segregation. Through a series of laws, different racial groups were assigned to different areas of cities, with nonwhites banned from living in any area

A New Sense of Hope

except those specifically designated for them. Blacks were forbidden from participating in the political process. Wiesel was troubled at how hate had been legitimized within the South African government, and how quickly prejudice was transformed into violence. Because of his speeches and writing, Wiesel continued to be a leading figure in the movement to remember the Holocaust and honor those who lost their lives. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter invited Wiesel to chair his Commission on the Holocaust. Wiesel was asked to join with other civic and religious leaders in finding the best way to commemorate the Holocaust on Washington’s Mall. In 1979, he was appointed chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, and soon helped to establish annual Holocaust Remembrance Days in Washington, D.C. Wiesel was pleased that America was, in this way, officially honoring the past of those who had suffered, but he was concerned about ensuring that the memories of those who had died would be honored appropriately. In January 1979, Wiesel addressed the council members at the White House in front of a large group that included Holocaust survivors, members of Congress, Jewish leaders, and journalists. As always, Wiesel’s remarks combined a sense of the history being made with a reminder of where leaders had fallen short in the past. Wiesel’s speech noted the challenge of determining how best to remember the victims of the Holocaust—whether they should be remembered individually or as a group, and whether monuments, education, or ceremonies would be the most fitting form of remembrance. Wiesel urged his listeners to be bold in their planning: Whatever we do, let it strike the imagination of people everywhere, of all faiths, of all creeds, of all nationalities, of all nations, and perhaps of all centuries. Let people know that our generation—probably the last that still has something to remember—does indeed remember.

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Elie Wiesel ...The Holocaust was possible because the enemy—the enemy of the Jewish people and of mankind, and it is always the same enemy—succeeded in dividing, in separating, in splitting the human society: nation against nation, Christian against Jew, young against old.65

Wiesel expressed his gratitude to President Carter for his concern about the Holocaust, but noted that the same concern did not come from America while the Holocaust was occurring. Had a presidential commission been appointed in 1942 or 1943, Wiesel said, many victims of the Holocaust might have been saved. When President Carter first asked Wiesel to chair the commission, at a meeting at the White House, Carter showed Wiesel photos from the CIA archives that had been taken by an American bomber flying over Auschwitz in 1944, the time when Wiesel was being held there. They showed the camp in broad daylight, clearly displaying the cellblocks at Auschwitz and Birkenau. Wiesel told the president that he remembered that day, a day in which American planes had been bombing the factories around the camp. Wiesel revealed that the inmates had hoped that the Americans would bomb the camp, to wipe out the facility. Learning that President Roosevelt had had these photos available to him in 1944, Wiesel questioned President Carter about why Roosevelt had done nothing, had not even bombed the railways leading to the camps. Carter did not have an answer. Wiesel requested Carter’s permission to make a fact-finding trip. His destination: the Treblinka and Auschwitz concentration camp sites, and Babi-Yar in Eastern Europe.

AGAINST THE SILENCE The trip was Wiesel’s first return to Poland since he left Auschwitz. At Auschwitz, Wiesel was shocked to discover that the camp had been turned into a kind of museum, complete with postcards and souvenirs. It was clean and well-maintained—there

A New Sense of Hope

were bright signs and maps directing visitors. Wiesel found it offensive, sanitizing the true horrors, as if, Wiesel noted in his memoirs, “there have never been any Jews here, or if there were, they arrived here by accident, visitors who lost their way.”66 In Birkenau, though, Wiesel found memories rushing back, nearly overwhelming him: the thick smoke, the barking dogs, the men running everywhere. Those in the delegation who had survived Birkenau took each other’s arms and walked across the camp to the ruins of the gas chambers and the crematorium. “At that moment,” Wiesel wrote, it became important to erase all the years, all the words, all the images that separated us from this event, from this place; it became essential to rediscover night in all its nakedness and truth; we had to recapture the unknown before it could become known. I heard the wind rushing through the trees, but it was not really the wind. I heard the murmur rising from the earth, but it was not the earth that spoke. It was night. It was death.67

The fact-finding mission concluded with a trip to Babi-Yar, on the outskirts of Kiev in the Soviet Union. Wiesel had been there once before, in 1965, when there was no monument to the nearly 100,000 Jews who were massacred by Nazis and thrown into mass graves over the course of 10 days beginning on September 29, 1941. Wiesel now saw that a grand, massive monument had been erected in response to international pressure. Nowhere on the monument was the word Jew. The victims are, instead, identified as “Soviet citizens.” In Poland and the Soviet Union, Wiesel heard the same official response—a reluctance to emphasize the Jewish victims who had died, coupled with the argument that others besides Jews had perished in the concentration camps and at Nazi hands. In 1995, at a ceremony marking the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Wiesel delivered a moving speech,

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Polish politician and activist Lech Walesa (left) and Elie Wiesel (right) are shown arriving at Auschwitz in 1988. During his trip to Auschwitz in the late 1970s, Wiesel was appalled to find that the camp had been turned into a kind of museum. He thought the horrors of what had occurred there had been sanitized.

A New Sense of Hope

noting that he spoke as a man who, 50 years and nine days earlier, was known only by his number, A7713. He spoke as a Jew, Wiesel said, a Jew who had witnessed an effort to exterminate all Jews. He had witnessed suffering and humiliation and death at Auschwitz, in that place where so many were victims—victims without a country, victims without a name. It was a place, Wiesel noted, where it was always night, where there were endless processions of victims: Close your eyes and listen. Listen to the silent screams of terrified mothers, the prayers of anguished old men and women. Listen to the tears of children, Jewish children, a beautiful little girl among them, with golden hair, whose vulnerable tenderness has never left me. Look and listen as they quietly walk towards dark flames so gigantic that the planet itself seemed in danger. All these men and women and children came from everywhere, a gathering of exiles drawn by death. . . .68

Wiesel reminded his audience that the victims of Auschwitz came from all the occupied lands of Europe, that they included not only Jews, but also Gypsies and Poles and Czechs. He urged his listeners to use the anniversary to remember the victims, to remember their solitude and pain, and to truly honor those who had died. He reminded his audience that there were still many victims of terror and bloodshed, in places like Bosnia, Rwanda and Chechnya, and noted that only those who remembered the past could ensure that another Birkenau was not created in the future. In late October 1981, Wiesel was invited to attend the International Liberators Conference, held at the U.S. State Department. A new president was in the White House—Ronald Reagan—and he had sent his secretary of state, General Alexander Haig, and the assistant secretary for human rights, Elliott Abrams, to participate. The conference opened with a dramatic gesture. American soldiers who had liberated the concentration camps carried out

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captured German flags and threw them at the feet of the survivors present, representing 20 different countries. In his speech, Wiesel began by noting the links that bound together survivors and those who had liberated them. Despite their different languages and different nationalities, there was a connection formed—a connection unlike that of friends or brothers. The survivors and liberators, Wiesel said, served as each other’s witnesses. Wiesel noted that he could never forget April 11, 1945—the day on which Buchenwald was liberated. He noted that what he saw in the eyes of the first American soldiers was astonishment, bewilderment, pain and anger, followed by tears. Wiesel said that he and his fellow survivors had no more tears left; what they felt was gratitude: And ultimately it was gratitude that brought us back to normalcy and to society. Do you remember, friends? In Lublin and Dachau, Stuthoff and Hordhausen, Ravensbruck and Maidanek and Belsen and Auschwitz, you were surrounded by sick and wounded and hungry wretches, barely alive, pathetic in their futile attempts to touch you, to smile at you, to reassure you, to console you and most of all to carry you in triumph on their frail soldiers. You were heroes, our idols: tell me, friends, have you ever felt such love, such admiration?69

Characteristically, Wiesel continued his address by urging all those listening to take the lessons learned in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, in Ravensbruck and Mauthausen, and apply them to current regions of the world where human rights were being violated: If we do not raise our voices against war, against hate, against indifference—who will? We speak with the authority of men and women who have seen war; we know what it is. We have seen the burnt villages, the devastated cities, the deserted

A New Sense of Hope homes, we still see the demented mothers whose children are being massacred before their eyes, we still follow the endless nocturnal processions to the flames rising up to the seventh heaven—if not higher. . . . We are gathered here to testify—together. Our tale is a tale of solitude and fear and anonymous death—but also of compassion, generosity, bravery, and solidarity. Together, you the liberators and we the survivors represent a commitment to memory whose intensity will remain. In its name we shall continue to voice our concerns and our hopes not for our own sake, but for the sake of humankind. Its very survival may depend on its ability and willingness to listen.70

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8

Winner of the Nobel Prize

B

y the 1980s, Wiesel was an internationally recognized figure, for his public role as an advocate for victims of the Holocaust and for his willingness to speak out on behalf of contemporary victims. In 1985, when President Reagan made a diplomatic trip to what was then West Germany, Wiesel was among those expressing outrage when it was revealed that the planned itinerary would include a stop at a German military cemetery named Bitburg, where German soldiers and members of the S.S. were buried, but no visit to a former concentration camp. Wiesel pleaded with the president to change his agenda without success, and then, on the occasion of his being awarded the Congressional Gold Medal on April 19, 1985, he privately and then publicly again asked the president to reconsider. In his acceptance speech, Wiesel noted: Mr. President: This medal is not mine alone. It belongs to all those who remember what S.S. killers have done to their victims.

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Winner of the Nobel Prize It was given to me for my writings, teaching, and for my testimony. When I write, I feel my invisible teachers looking over my shoulders, reading my words and judging their veracity. While I feel responsible to the living, I feel equally responsible to the dead. Their memory dwells in my memory. . . . I am convinced that you were not aware of the presence of S.S. graves in the Bitburg cemetery. But now we all are aware of that presence. I therefore implore you, Mr. President, in the spirit of this moment that justifies so many others, tell us now that you will not go there: that place is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the S.S.71

Wiesel’s speech increased public pressure on President Reagan. Ultimately, Reagan’s agenda was amended to include a trip to the former concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. He also stopped at Bitburg, however, where Reagan outraged countless survivors by declaring that the S.S. buried in Bitburg were victims much as those murdered in the concentration camps had been victims. Shortly after the trip, Wiesel resigned from the Holocaust Commission, disappointed in Reagan’s response to his request and in the politics and in-fighting that were marking efforts to build the Holocaust Museum.

NOBEL PRIZE In 1986, Wiesel learned that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He had spent the day in fasting and prayer for the Yom Kippur holiday, the Jewish Day of Atonement, when a reporter tipped him off that he had been the unanimous choice. Early the following morning, Jakub Sverdrup, director of the Nobel Committee and the Nobel Institute, phoned to confirm the news and to congratulate Wiesel. He was besieged by journalists and requests for interviews. But the request that most impressed Wiesel’s son was the invitation to throw out the first ball in the World Series. Wiesel refused,

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In 1985, President Ronald Reagan laid a wreath on the tomb of German soldiers from World War II at a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany. Elie Wiesel criticized Reagan when he learned that the president’s European itinerary included a stop at the cemetery but no visit to a former concentration camp. Reagan eventually changed his plans and went to the former camp at Bergen-Belsen.

Winner of the Nobel Prize

because the game it fell on a Jewish holiday. A special exception was made: no one threw out the first pitch on the first day of the World Series, and Wiesel was invited to throw out the pitch on the second day. As Wiesel wryly noted in his memoirs, “for the first—and surely the last—time in my life, my picture adorns the first page of the New York Times sports section.”72 Wiesel learned that the awarding of the Nobel Prize brought many changes, in addition to attention and acclaim. “For one,” he wrote in his memoirs, you learn who is a friend and who is not. Contrary to popular wisdom, a friend is not one who shares your suffering, but one who knows how to share your joy. I was pleasantly surprised by some and sadly disappointed by others. There are envious and jealous people everywhere; they are part of the human landscape. Some who praised my writings when I was poor and unknown now resent me for being “rich” and “famous.” Others were faithful to me as long as I wrote for a limited public; now it bothers them to see my name on pages other than literary. Sadly, some “admirers” turned against me after the Nobel, as though to punish me for a success some of them had actually helped me achieve. These betrayals hurt me the most. I cannot explain them.73

Wiesel arrived in Oslo, Norway, on December 9, 1986, for the Nobel ceremony. Following a press conference, he had a private audience with the Norwegian king, Olav V, who impressed Wiesel with his knowledge of current international events, as well as his simplicity and warmth. At the same time, Wiesel was astonished that demonstrators denying the existence of the Holocaust were gathered in Norway to distribute their propaganda. The award ceremony took place in the great hall of Oslo University. Wiesel’s wife and son were there, but he was overcome by emotion at the thought of all those who were not present.74 First, the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra played, then came a speech by

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Elie Wiesel posed with the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1986 along with his son, Shlomo Elisha, and Egil Aarvik (right), chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. During the award ceremony, Aarvik called Wiesel “a messenger to mankind whose message is not one of hate and revenge, but of brotherhood and atonement.”

Egil Aarvik, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. He spoke in Norwegian, citing Wiesel as “a witness for truth and justice” and “a messenger to mankind whose message is not one of hate and revenge, but of brotherhood and atonement”: It is in recognition of this particular human spirit’s victory over the powers of death and degradation, and as a support to the rebellion of good against the evil in the world, that the Norwegian Nobel Committee today presents the Nobel Peace Prize to Elie Wiesel. We do this on behalf of millions—from all peoples and races. We do it in deep reverence for the memory of the dead, but also with the deep-felt hope that

Winner of the Nobel Prize the prize will be a small contribution which will forward the cause which is the greatest of all humanity’s concerns—the cause of peace.75

Wiesel wrote of feeling overcome by the moment, of walking to the podium, looking out over the audience, and believing that he saw his father behind his son.76 For a few moments, he was unable to speak. Finally composing himself, Wiesel offered a moving acceptance speech, which included an expression of his sense of inadequacy in representing all the victims—victims who included his parents, his little sister, teachers, and friends from long ago. He noted that the honor he was receiving belonged to all the survivors and their children, and to all Jewish people. Wiesel told the audience of how the memories of Auschwitz were still clear, as clear as if they had happened yesterday. He remembered his bewilderment and anguish at the ghetto, the deportation, the cattle car, and the flames of Auschwitz. He remembered himself as a boy, asking his father how something like this could happen in the twentieth century. He remembered that boy asking how the world could have remained silent. And now the boy is turning to me. “Tell me,” he asks, “what have you done with my future, what have you done with your life?” And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices. And then I explain to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever, wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrel-

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Elie Wiesel evant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the center of the universe.77

History of the Nobel Peace Prize Alfred Nobel died on December 10, 1896. His will, written one year earlier, directed that the vast majority of his fortune— estimated at $9 million—was to be used for the establishment and award of annual prizes in five categories: literature, medicine or physiology, chemistry, physics, and for the person who has done the most to work “for the peace and brotherhood of men.” Ever since, people have marveled at the incongruity between the man, his career, and the award that was named for him. Alfred Nobel was a Swede who spent many years living in other nations— he spent a lot of time in Paris, and he died in Italy. He made his fortune in his 30s by perfecting the manufacture of explosives, which he patented in 1867, leading to the creation of dynamite. The first Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in 1901 to Henry Dunant, founder of the Red Cross, and Frédéric Passy, an international pacifist. Nobel specified that the Peace Prize, unlike the other Nobel Prizes (which were to be awarded by Swedish committees), would be awarded by a committee of five people elected by the Norwegian Parliament. The prize is often awarded to a single person, but more than one person may be chosen (as in the first prize in 1901), or an organization may be the recipient of a particular year’s Peace Prize. The first was the Institute for International Law, honored in 1904 for its efforts to formulate the general principles that would form the science of international law. The International Committee of the Red Cross has received the prize twice—in 1917 and 1944—for its efforts to promote international solidarity and brotherhood in the midst of war. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees received the prize in 1954; other organizations to receive the prize include the United

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After the speech, Wiesel had lunch with Aarvik and his family, and then spent several hours calling persecuted Jews in the Soviet Union, to let them know that he was thinking of them

Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in 1965, the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces (1988), International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (1985), Médécins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in 1999, and the International Atomic Energy Agency and its Director General—Mohamed ElBaradei— in 2005. Over the years, the award has highlighted the achievements of men and women from many different nations who represent widely varying backgrounds and experiences. An examination of recipients provides an interesting study of changing global events and issues of international concern for more than a century. As of 2005, only 12 women had received the Nobel Prize: Bertha von Suttner (1905), Jane Addams (1931), Emily Greene Balch (1946), Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan (1976), Mother Theresa (1979), Alva Myrdal (1982), Aung San Suu Kyi (1991), Rigoberta Menchú Tum (1992), Jody Williams (1997), Shirin Ebadi (2003), and Wangari Maathi (2004). The choices have often proved controversial, including the joint awarding of the Peace Prize in 1973 to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho for their efforts to negotiate a treaty to end to the conflict in Vietnam, efforts which ultimately failed to lead to peace. Awards were given in 1979 and 1993 to men attempting to negotiating peace settlements in the Middle East; sadly their efforts failed to yield a lasting peace. One of the most curious facts about the Nobel Peace Prize is the list of men and women who failed to win a prize. This list includes one of the people most closely identified with nonviolence, Mohandas Gandhi of India. Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace Prize, despite being nominated five times.

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and had spoken of their courage to those he met at the Nobel ceremony. Later, in the evening, a torchlight parade was held in Wiesel’s honor. People from all over Norway, young and old, paraded under Wiesel’s window, shouting “Shalom” as they passed him. Later, an official dinner was held. At Wiesel’s request, the dinner was kosher, requiring special food and wine imported from Israel and France, as well as new dishes and silverware. Novelist Gioeeske Anderson, the vice chairman of the Nobel Committees, spoke, as did Leo Etinger, representing the survivors. Wiesel offered a brief speech stressing his sense of gratitude, and the importance of gratitude in the world. Some of the dinner guests then followed the Wiesels back to their hotel room, where the conversation and the sharing of memories continued until dawn.

NOBEL ADDRESS On the following day, Wiesel followed the custom in which the Nobel laureate appears again at Oslo University’s Great Hall to offer his or her Nobel lecture. Wiesel startled many in the audience by opening his address by singing Ani Maamin, the prayer announcing belief in the coming of the Messiah, the prayer sung by many in the ghettos. Wiesel invited those in the audience familiar with the prayer to join him. His official lecture then focused on the need to speak out, to address injustice, to remember the past and yet retain hope for the future: Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair. I remember the killers and I despair; I remember the victims, and on their behalf and for their sake and for their children’s sake, I must invent a thousand and one reasons to hope.

Winner of the Nobel Prize There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. The Talmud tells us that by saving a single human being—and there are two versions: one version says a single Jewish human being and the other version says any human being—man can save the world. We may be powerless to open all the jails and free all the prisoners, but by declaring our solidarity with one prisoner, we indict all jailers. None of us is in a position to eliminate war, but it is our obligation to denounce it and expose it in all its hideousness. War leaves no victors, only victims.78

After the lecture, Wiesel and his family traveled to Stockholm, Sweden, where they were the invited guests at a dinner with local officials. They then traveled on to Copenhagen, Denmark, and to Israel. Wiesel was surprised to realize that Israel was the only non-Arab country where articles critical of him as the choice for the Nobel Prize appeared. These articles were, in particular, critical of Wiesel’s decision not to live in Israel.

AFTER THE PRIZE Wiesel decided to use the Nobel prize money he had been awarded to begin a Foundation for Humanity, which would support various humanitarian projects. He used his influence to ensure that several Soviet Jews were able to obtain exit visas. He organized a conference of Nobel laureates from all disciplines, inviting them to join together to discuss the threats and promises of the twentyfirst century. The conference was held in France. Seventy-nine writers, scientists, and politicians accepted the invitation to attend. Wiesel, astonished that so many accepted his invitation, asked one— Joshua Lederberg, winner of the 1958 Nobel Prize in Medicine— what motivated so many to take time from their busy schedules

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to attend. Lederberg replied, “At this point, what else can we hope to obtain? A Nobel Prize? We already have one. Now we must give something back.”79 It was a stimulating gathering of great thinkers. There was debate and disagreement, but the attendees were eager to learn, to move beyond their own areas of expertise. The speeches given by those in attendance were impressive and educational. At the conference’s conclusion, Wiesel summarized what had been accomplished: Have we resolved some of the problems that confront our society? Their number is as vast as their complexity. How can one resolve, in four days, what in fifty years or even five thousand years, since Cain and Abel, mankind has simply ignored or barely touched upon? The Nobel Foundation has not yet discovered the secret that would enable it to offer the laureates universal wisdom in addition to worldly glory. . . . We must seek and situate the success of this conference in the conference itself. The fact that it has taken place is in itself significant and important. And what is the goal we have set for ourselves? To identify the problems and prioritize them. To name the diseases, the epidemics, the famines, the fanaticism. Torture. Pollution. AIDS. The nuclear threat. The distress of children beaten and killed far from the eyes of men, and perhaps from the eyes of God Himself. Just by enumerating these problems, it would be easy to become discouraged. Every one of the participants is proof of what an individual is capable of undertaking and achieving for the benefit of mankind.80

In the years after he received the prize, Wiesel continued to be an outspoken advocate for all those seeking justice in oppressed regions of the world. He traveled to Poland to support Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, and to Japan to counter the rise of anti-

Winner of the Nobel Prize

Semitism there. He spoke against human rights abuses in South Africa, Bosnia, Brazil, Burma, Tibet, Central America, Cambodia, Rwanda, and Vietnam. He continued to teach, and to meet with American presidents to impress upon them a greater awareness of human rights abuses in American foreign policy.

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Human Rights Activist

O

n June 3, 1987, Elie Wiesel was asked to testify at the trial of accused Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie in Lyon, France. Wiesel had initially refused, believing that his testimony would be irrelevant, as neither he nor his family had suffered directly at the hands of Barbie, who had operated in Lyon. But when lawyers for the plaintiffs, historians, and many of Wiesel’s friends urged him to testify, at last he agreed. Barbie was accused of overseeing the transport of Jews to concentration camps while in Holland, and of torturing Jews and members of the French resistance while based in Lyon. As Allied troops neared Lyon in 1944, Barbie killed hundreds of French citizens who had first-hand knowledge of his activities, destroyed Gestapo records, and escaped back to Germany. He ultimately fled to Bolivia; and it was not until 1983 that his true identity was revealed and he was extradited to France, to be tried for crimes against humanity. There were many first-hand witnesses to Barbie’s atrocities who testified, but Wiesel’s role was different. He was asked to speak on

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the importance of remembrance and justice. He spoke of those, including those in his family, who had perished at the hands of the Nazis, and of the importance of ensuring that the crimes that had been committed were not whitewashed or forgotten: For the survivors, however, it is getting late. Their number is diminishing. They meet one another more and more often at funerals. Can one die more than once? Yes, one can. The survivor dies every time he rejoins, in his thoughts, the nightly procession he has never really left. How can he detach himself from them without betraying them? For a long time he talked to them, as I talk to my mother and my little sister: I still see them moving away under the fiery sky. . . . I ask them to forgive me for not following them. . . . It is for the dead, but also for the survivors, and even more for their children—and yours—that this trial is important: it will weigh on the future. In the name of justice? In the name of memory. Justice without memory is an incomplete justice, false and unjust. To forget would be an absolute injustice in the same way that Auschwitz was the absolute crime. To forget would be the enemy’s final triumph. The fact is that the enemy kills twice—the second time in trying to obliterate the traces of his crime. That is why he pushed his outrageous, terrifying plan to the limits of language, and well beyond: to situate it out of reach, our of our range of perception. “Even if you survive, even if you tell, no one will believe you,” an S.S. told a young Jew somewhere in Galicia. This trial has already contradicted that killer. The witnesses have spoken; their truth has entered the awareness of humanity. . . . As guardians of their invisible graves, graves of ash encrusted in a sky of eternal night and fog, we must remain faithful to them. We must try. To refuse to speak, when speech is awaited, would be to acknowledge the ultimate triumph of despair. . . .

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Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie was escorted from the courthouse in Lyon, France, in 1987, after he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Elie Wiesel was asked to testify at Barbie’s trial, but at first he thought his testimony would be irrelevant since he and his family had not suffered directly from Barbie. Wiesel eventually did testify, however, about the importance of remembrance and justice.

Human Rights Activist Thanks to this trial, the survivors have a justification for their survival. Their testimony counts, their memories will be part of the collective memory. Of course, nothing can bring the dead back to life. But because of the meetings that have taken place within these precincts, because of the words spoken, the accused will not be able to kill the dead again. If he had succeeded it would not have been his fault, but ours.81

FOR ALL HUMANITY Wiesel has continued to speak out, meeting with political and religious leaders to bring peace where there is war, and end violence and injustice. He was instrumental in President Bill Clinton’s decision to intervene in the genocide in Bosnia, urging him to take action at the ceremony marking the opening of the National Holocaust Museum in Washington. He ended a previously close relationship with former French President François Mitterand after learning that Mitterand had been a close friend of a Nazi collaborator and after Mitterand refused to express regret for his actions. Wiesel has maintained his prolific writing schedule. His recent works have included The Judges, published in 2002, a novel in which a plane is forced down by bad weather and five of its passengers encounter a man who questions them on their lives and then announces that one of them—the least worthy—will die. The Time of the Uprooted, published in 2005, tells of a Czech Jew, a child during the Holocaust, who was hidden by a Christian woman in Hungary, and has spent his life thereafter as a kind of refugee, living in constant exile and never truly feeling at home in the world. Wiesel’s mission remains the same: to speak for those who have no voice, and to serve as a witness for what came before. Through his writing and his speaking, he gives voice to so many

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President Bill Clinton, flanked by Elie Wiesel (right) and Bud Meyerhoff, chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Council, lit the eternal flame during the dedication of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in April 1993.

Human Rights Activist

who have been forgotten or overlooked. He speaks for them, all the while knowing that his task is often futile. In A Jew Today, Wiesel told his reader: Accept the idea that you will never see what they have seen— and go on seeing now, that you will never know the faces that haunt their nights, that you will never hear the cries that rent their sleep. Accept the idea that you will never penetrate the cursed and spellbound universe they carry within themselves with unfailing loyalty. And so I tell you: You who have not experienced their anguish, you who do not speak their language, you who do not mourn their dead, think before you offend them, before you betray them. Think before you substitute your memory for theirs.82

Wiesel has acknowledged that there is a consequence to speaking out, and a constant sense of frustration at trying to tell of events for which there should be no words, or trying to explain events that others find impossible to understand. Yet there is an obligation, a requirement, to continue to serve as a witness: After the liberation, illusions shaped our hopes. We were convinced that a new world would be built upon the ruins of Europe. A new civilization would dawn. No more wars, no more hate, no more intolerance, no fanaticism anywhere. And all this because the witnesses would speak, and speak they did. Was it to no avail? What matters is to struggle against silence with words, or through another form of silence. What matters is to gather a smile here and there, a tear here and there, a word here and there, and thus justify the faith placed in man, a long time ago, by so many victims. Why do I write? To wrest those victims from oblivion. To help the dead vanquish death.83

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WIESEL’S LEGACY According to Jack Kolbert, author of The Worlds of Elie Wiesel, Wiesel has served as the voice and conscience of the Jewish people for nearly a half-century.84 He has been honored with numerous awards which, in addition to the Nobel Prize, include the Martin Luther King Jr. Award, the Commander of the French Legion of Honor, the Medal of Liberty, and the Grand Prix de la Littéraire de la Ville de Paris, among others. He has received more than 100 honorary degrees from numerous universities, including Yale University, Notre Dame, Boston University, and Bar Ilan University in Israel. He continues his teaching career, and has served as a visiting scholar at Yale University, a Distinguished Professor of Judaic

Legacy of the Peacemaker One of the greatest legacies of Elie Wiesel is his dedication to ensuring that the events of the Holocaust are not forgotten. In 1978, Wiesel was invited by President Jimmy Carter to chair his Commission on the Holocaust. Wiesel joined with other religious and civic leaders in a mission to determine how best to ensure that the events of the Holocaust were remembered, and that its victims were appropriately honored. A year later, Wiesel was appointed chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. Wiesel’s efforts have led to annual Holocaust Remembrance Days in Washington, D.C., and the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, located adjacent to the National Mall in Washington. The museum was chartered by a unanimous act of Congress in 1980; its mission is to serve as a national institution for the study, documentation, and interpretation of Holocaust history, as well as serving as a memorial to the millions of people murdered during the Holocaust. The museum uses its resources in part to preserve the memories of those who survived the Holocaust, so that they might bear witness to what they suffered. Visitors to the museum

Human Rights Activist

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Studies at the City College of New York, and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University. He currently teaches at Boston University, serving as a faculty member in both the department of philosophy and the department of religion. The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, which he founded with his wife in 1986 after receiving the Nobel Prize, continues to serve its stated mission: “to combat indifference, intolerance and injustice through international dialogues and youth-focused programs that promote acceptance, understanding and equality.” In the United States, the foundation sponsors the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics Essay Contest for college juniors and seniors, and awards the Elie Wiesel Humanitarian Award to an individual who best represents the foundation’s mission. Past recipients have

are challenged to reflect upon the questions—both moral and spiritual—raised by the events of the Holocaust and to consider their own responsibilities to ensure that this bitter history is not repeated. At the museum, documents, photographs, and other evidence of the Holocaust are preserved. Programs, exhibitions, art and artifacts, and educational materials are all designed to provide greater public understanding of the history of the Holocaust, as well as current global events in which ethnic or religious groups are the victims of violence or oppression. The museum sponsors events for survivors and their children. Survivors work as volunteers at the museum. Exhibitions at the museum, traveling exhibitions, and on-line exhibitions focus on other areas of concern, global crises where genocide is threatened. The museum also maintains the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, which supports scholarship and publications in the field of Holocaust studies, promotes the growth of Holocaust studies at American universities, and initiates programs to train scholars specializing in Holocaust studies.

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Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel stands between two candles during a Holocaust commemoration ceremony held during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 26, 1995. That week marked the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. Wiesel remains an ardent advocate for justice for oppressed people around the world.

included King Juan Carlos of Spain, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and First Lady Laura Bush. The foundation also organizes international meetings for young people living in regions of the world experiencing conflict and war. In addition, the foundation runs the Beit Tzipora Centers for Study & Enrichment in Israel, sponsoring Ethiopian Jewish children who immigrate to Israel to receive academic and vocational training and emotional support. The Center is named for Wiesel’s younger sister, who died at Auschwitz. Wiesel has written more than 40 works of fiction and non-fiction. He remains a strong supporter of the state of Israel, but has also been an outspoken advocate for justice for Soviet Jews, the

Human Rights Activist

Miskito Indians of Nicaragua, Argentina’s Desaparecidos, Cambodian refugees, the Kurds, victims of apartheid in South Africa, victims of war in the former Yugoslavia, and victims of genocide and famine in Africa. Wiesel’s writing has been described as “a courageous, sustained protest against indifference.”85 In recent years, Wiesel has expressed concern about human rights violations in Iran, the Balkans, Rwanda, and Ireland. In a 1996 interview in Sun Valley, Idaho, Wiesel was asked his advice for young people who are just beginning their lives. “Sensitivity,” he replied. “Be sensitive in every way possible about everything in life. Be sensitive. Insensitivity bring indifference and nothing is worse than indifference.”86 Later in the interview, he was asked if there was anything he still wanted to accomplish. “I may seem silly or childish to you,” he replied, “but if I could bring back one child, I would give up anything I have. Just one child. If I could now—which is more possible— free one prisoner, I would give a lot. If I could give a feeling of solidarity to a person who is abandoned, I would still give a lot. So you see, I would like to do things that I cannot do. All I have is a few words, and I will give these words. That’s what I am trying to do.”87 Alan Dershowitz, author and professor of law at Harvard Law School, was among those who, in 1986, were asked to propose nominees to the Nobel Prize Committee. His letter, urging the Committee to consider Wiesel, included the following: There are many excellent reasons for recognizing Professor Wiesel. But none is more important than his role in teaching survivors and their children how to respond in constructive peace and justice to a worldwide conspiracy of genocide, the components of which included mass killing, mass silence and mass indifference. Professor Wiesel has devoted his life to teaching the survivors of a conspiracy which excluded so few

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Elie Wiesel to re-enter and adjust in peace to an alien world that deserved little forgiveness. Wiesel’s works merit the highest degree of recognition, especially from representatives of the world that stood silently by.88

Appendix

Nobel Address Delivered by Elie Wiesel on December 10, 1986, upon acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Peace Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Your excellencies, Chairman Aarvik, members of the Nobel Committee, ladies and gentlemen: Words of gratitude. First to our common Creator. This is what the Jewish tradition commands us to do. On special occasions, one is duty bound to recite the following prayer: Barukh shehekhyanu vekiymanu vehigianu lazman haze—“Blessed be Thou for having sustained us until this day.” Then—thank you, Chairman Aarvik, for the depth of your eloquence. And for the generosity of your gesture. Thank you for building bridges between people and generations. Thank you, above all, for helping humankind make peace its most urgent and noble aspiration. I am moved, deeply moved by your words, Chairman Aarvik. And it is with a profound sense of humility that I accept the honor—the highest there is—that you have chosen to bestow upon me. I know: your choice transcends my person. Do I have the right to represent the multitudes who have perished? Do I have the right to accept this great honor on their behalf? I do not. No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions. And yet, I sense their presence. I always do—and at this moment more than ever. The presence of my parents, that of my little sister. The presence of my teachers, my friends, my companions. . . . This honor belongs to all the survivors and their children and, through us, to the Jewish people with whose destiny I have always identified.

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Appendix

I remember: it happened yesterday or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the Kingdom of Night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed. I remember he asked his father, “Can this be true? This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?” And now the boy is turning to me. “Tell me,” he asks, “what have you done with my future? What have you done with your life?” And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices. And then I explain to him how naive we were—that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the center of the universe. Of course, since I am a Jew profoundly rooted in my people’s memory and tradition, my first response is to Jewish fears, Jewish needs, Jewish crises. For I belong to a traumatized generation, one that experienced the abandonment and solitude of our people. It would be unnatural for me not to make Jewish priorities my own: Israel, Soviet Jewry, Jews in Arab lands . . . . But others are

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important to me. Apartheid is, in my view, as abhorrent as antiSemitism. To me, Andrei Sakharov’s isolation is as much a disgrace as Josef Begun’s imprisonment and Ida Nudel’s exile. As is the denial of Solidarity and its leader Lech Walesa’s right to dissent. And Nelson Mandela’s interminable imprisonment. There is so much injustice and suffering crying out for our attention: victims of hunger, of racism and political persecution— in Chile, for instance, or in Ethiopia—writers and poets, prisoners in so many lands governed by the Left and by the Right. Human rights are being violated on every continent. More people are oppressed than free. How can one not be sensitive to their plight? Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere. That applies also to the Palestinians, to whose plight I am sensitive, but whose methods I deplore when they lead to violence. Violence is not the answer. Terrorism is the most dangerous of answers. They are frustrated, that is understandable; something must be done. The refugees and their misery; the children and their fears; the uprooted and their hopelessness: something must be done about their situation. Both the Jewish people and the Palestinian people have lost too many sons and daughters and have shed too much blood. This must stop, and all attempts to stop it must be encouraged. Israel will cooperate, I am sure of that. I trust Israel, for I have faith in the Jewish people. Let Israel be given a chance, let hatred and danger be removed from her horizons, and there will be peace in and around the Holy Land. Please understand my deep and total commitment to Israel: if you could remember what I remember, you would understand. Israel is the only nation in the world whose very existence is threatened. Should Israel lose but one war, it would mean her end and ours as well. But I have faith. Faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and even in His creation. Without it no action would be

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possible. And action is the only remedy to indifference, the most insidious danger of all. Isn’t this the meaning of Alfred Nobel’s legacy? Wasn’t his fear of war a shield against war? There is so much to be done, there is so much that can be done. One person—a Raoul Wallenberg, an Albert Schweitzer, a Martin Luther King, Jr.—one person of integrity can make a difference, a difference of life and death. As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs. This is what I say to the young Jewish boy wondering what I have done with his years. It is in his name that I speak to you and that I express to you my deepest gratitude. No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the Kingdom of Night. We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately. Thank you, Chairman Aarvik. Thank you, members of the Nobel Committee. Thank you, people of Norway, for declaring on this singular occasion that our survival has meaning for mankind.

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Chronology



1928 Elie Wiesel is born on September 30.



1940 S ighet becomes part of Hungary; first prisoners arrive at Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland on June 14.



1944 G  erman troops cross into Hungary in March; the Wiesel family is transported to Auschwitz in May.



1945 W  iesel and his father forced on the march from Auschwitz on January 18; they are transported to Buchenwald in Germany, where Wiesel last sees his father on January 28. American forces arrive at the camp on April 11 to liberate the prisoners. Wiesel is transported to France.



1947 N  umber of Jews displaced by World War II reaches approximately 250,000.



1948 W  iesel travels to Paris to study at the Sorbonne and later begins work as a journalist.



1949 W  iesel travels to Israel; obtains a job as a Paris correspondent for an Israeli newspaper.



1954 W  iesel writes down his memories of the concentration camp years while traveling to Brazil. In France, he interviews novelist François Mauriac, who persuades him to convert his memories into the book that would become Night.



1956 W  iesel’s original 800-page manuscript, written in Yiddish, is published in Argentina under the title Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Stayed Silent). Wiesel moves to New York; is hit by a taxi.

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Chronology



1957 W  iesel travels cross-country from New York to Los Angeles; meets Golda Meier while working as a journalist at the United Nations.



1958 Night is published in France under the title La Nuit.



1960 American edition of Night is published.



1961 Dawn is published.



1962 The Accident is published.



1963 W  iesel earns his first major literary prize, the Prix Ravarol.



1964 T  he Town Beyond the Wall is published in English; Wiesel decides to return to Sighet.



1965 W  iesel travels to the Soviet Union to write about the fate of the Soviet Jews.



1966 Jews of Silence is published.



1969 W  iesel marries Marion Erster Rose in Jerusalem on April 2.



1970 W  iesel writes Entre deux soleils (One Generation After).



1972 W  iesel’s son, Shlomo Elisha, is born on June 6. Wiesel becomes Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at City University of New York. Publishes Souls on Fire.



1973 W  iesel composes Ani Maamim (I Believe); it is performed at Carnegie Hall on November 11 and 13.



1974 Wiesel’s sister Bea dies of cancer.



1975 Wiesel travels to South Africa.

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Chronology



1976 W  iesel publishes Messengers of God; becomes Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Boston University.



 Jew Today is published; Wiesel chairs the 1978 A Commission on the Holocaust.



 iesel is appointed chairman of the U.S. 1979 W Holocaust Memorial Council.



1981 Wiesel attends Liberators’ Conference.



1985 W  iesel is awarded Congressional Gold Medal; criticizes President Ronald Reagan for his planned visit to Bitburg cemetery where members of the S.S. were buried. Resigns from Holocaust Commission.



 iesel is awarded Nobel Peace Prize; Wiesel 1986 W and his wife found Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.



 iesel is asked to testify at trial of accused Nazi 1987 W war criminal Klaus Barbie.



1990 From the Kingdom of Memory is published.



 iesel participates in the dedication of the U.S. 1993 W Holocaust Memorial Museum.



 publishes first volume of his memoirs, All 1995 Wiesel Rivers Run to the Sea.



1999 S econd volume of memoirs, And the Sea is Never Full, is published.



2002 The Judges is published.



2005 The Time of the Uprooted is published.

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Notes

Chapter 1 1. Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p. 69. 2. Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Bantam Books, 1960), p. 19. 3. Ibid., p. 23. 4. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, pp. 75–76. 5. Wiesel, Night, p. 26. 6. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, p. 77. 7. Wiesel, Night, p. 32. 8. Norwegian Nobel Committee, press release, “The Nobel Peace Prize for 1986,” October 14, 1986, www.nobelprize. org/peace/laureates/1986/press. html. 9. Ibid. 10. Elie Wiesel, Nobel Acceptance Speech, delivered in Oslo on December 10, 1986, www. elieweiselfoundation.org/ ElieWiesel/speech.html.

Chapter 2 11. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, p. 8. 12. Elie Wiesel, Interview: Nobel Prize for Peace, Sun Vally, Idaho, June 29, 1996. Downloaded from Academy of Achievement Web site, www. achievement.org 13. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, p. 13. 14. Wiesel, Interview: Nobel Prize for Peace, www.achievement. org.

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15. François Mitterand and Elie Wiesel, Memoir in Two Voices (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996), pp. 4–5. 16. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, pp. 27–28. 17. Mitterand and Wiesel, pp. 21–22.

Chapter 3 18. Elie Wiesel, From the Kingdom of Memory (New York: Summit Books, 1990), p. 126. 19. Ibid., p. 128. 20. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, p. 63. 21. Wiesel, Night, p. 28. 22. Ibid., p. 29. 23. Ibid., p. 34. 24. Ibid., p. 36. 25. Laurence Rees, Auschwitz (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), p. 19. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., p. 83. 28. Ibid., p. 169. 29. Ibid., pp. 227–228.

CHAPTER 4 30. Wiesel, Night, pp. 38–39. 31. Ibid., pp. 61–62. 32. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, p. 88. 33. Wiesel, Night, p. 67. 34. Ibid., p. 82. 35. Quoted in Rees, p. 264. 36. Wiesel, Night, pp. 105–106. 37. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, p. 97. 38. Wiesel, Night, p. 109.

Section Notes Title

Chapter 5

Chapter 7

39. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, p. 110. 40. Ibid., p. 145. 41. Ibid., p. 150. 42. Ibid., pp. 239–240. 43. Ibid., p. 241. 44. Quoted in Mark Chmiel, Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), p. 9. 45. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, p. 267. 46. Wiesel, From the Kingdom of Memory, p. 10.

60. Elie Wiesel, And the Sea is Never Full (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), p. 41. 61. Quoted in Kolbert, pp. 35–36. 62. Wiesel, And the Sea is Never Full, p. 43. 63. Ibid., p. 70. 64. Ibid., p. 88. 65. Ibid., pp. 180–181. 66. Ibid., p. 191. 67. Wiesel, From the Kingdom of Memory, pp. 115–116. 68. Speech delivered by Elie Wiesel in 1995, at the ceremony to mark the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, downloaded from www.pbs. org/eliewiesel/. 69. Wiesel, From the Kingdom of Memory, pp. 155–156. 70. Ibid., pp. 162–163.

Chapter 6 47. Quoted in Chmiel, p. 10. 48. Elie Wiesel, The Accident (New York: Hill and Wang), p. 110. 49. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, p. 301. 50. Ibid., pp. 301-302. 51. Wiesel, The Accident, p. 9. 52. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, p. 321. 53. Wiesel, From the Kingdom of Memory, p. 14. 54. Quoted in Jack Kolbert, The Worlds of Elie Wiesel (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2001), p. 32. 55. Wiesel, From the Kingdom of Memory, p. 126. 56. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, p. 358. 57. Ibid., p. 365. 58. Ibid., p. 366. 59. Elie Wiesel, The Jews of Silence (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), p. vii.

Chapter 8 71. Ibid., p. 173, 176. 72. Wiesel, And the Sea is Never Full, p. 261. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid., p. 268. 75. Presentation Speech by Egil Aarvik, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, on the Nobel Peace Prize 1986, downloaded from www.nobelprize.org/peace/laureates/1986/. 76. Wiesel, And the Sea is Never Full, p. 270. 77. Nobel Acceptance Speech, delivered by Elie Wiesel in Oslo on December 10, 1986, downloaded from

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Section Title Notes

www.eliewieselfoundation.org/ ElieWiesel/speech.html 78. Wiesel, From the Kingdom of Memory, pp. 239, 247–249. 79. Wiesel, And the Sea is Never Full, p. 283. 80. Ibid., p. 286.

Chapter 9

81. Wiesel, From the Kingdom of Memory, pp. 187–189. 82. Quoted in Robert McAfee Brown, Elie Wiesel: Messenger to all Humanity (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), p. 4.

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83. Wiesel, From the Kingdom of Memory, pp. 20–21. 84. Kolbert, p. 19. 85. Gary Henry, “Story and Silence: Transcendence in the Work of Elie Wiesel,” downloaded from www.pbs.org/eliewiesel/. 86. Academy of Achievement Interview: Elie Wiesel, Nobel Prize for Peace, June 29, 1996, Sun Valley, Idaho, downloaded from www.achievement.org. 87. Ibid. 88. Alan Dershowitz, “A Biblical Life,” downloaded from www. pbs.org/eliewiesel/.

Bibliography

Brown, Robert McAfee. Elie Wiesel: Messenger to all Humanity. Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989. Chmiel, Mark. Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001. Kolbert, Jack. The Worlds of Elie Wiesel. Selinsgrove, Pa: Susquehanna University Press, 2001. Mitterand, François and Wiesel, Elie. Memoir in Two Voices. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996. Rees, Laurence. Auschwitz. New York: Public Affairs, 2005. Rittner, Carol (ed.). Elie Wiesel: Between Memory and Hope. New York: New York University Press, 1990. Wiesel, Elie. The Accident. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961. ———. All Rivers Run to the Sea. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. ———. And the Sea is Never Full. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. ———. From the Kingdom of Memory. New York: Summit Books, 1990. ———. The Jews of Silence. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966. ———. Night. New York: Bantam Books, 1960.

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Further Reading

Cuomo, Kerry Kennedy. Speak Truth to Power. New York: Crown Publishers, 2000. Rees, Laurence. Auschwitz. New York: Public Affairs, 2005. Wiesel, Elie. Dawn. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961. ———. From the Kingdom of Memory. New York: Summit Books, 1990. ———. Night. New York: Bantam Books, 1960.

Web sites Official Site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum www.auschwitz-muzeum.oswiecim.pl Audio Interview with Elie Wiesel www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/wiesele1.shtml The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity www.eliewieselfoundation.org Nobel Prize—Official Web site www.nobelprize.org Speak Truth to Power: Elie Wiesel www.pbs.org/speaktruthtopower/elie.html United States Holocaust Memorial Museum www.ushmm.org

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Picture Credits

page 4: 6: 11: 20: 23: 29: 35:

Getty Images Associated Press, AP Getty Images Getty Images Associated Press Getty Images Associated Press, U.S. ARMY 38: Associated Press, AP 47: Getty Images

53: Associated Press, AP 58: Time & Life Pictures/ Getty Images 64: © Bettmann/CORBIS 68: Associated Press, AP 74: Getty Images 76: Associated Press, AP 86: AFP/Getty Images 88: Associated Press, FILES 92: Associated Press, AP

cover © Nancy R. Schiff/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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Index

A

Aarvik, Egil, 76–77 Abrams, Elliott, 69 Accident, The, 52, 55–56 activism beginnings of, 58–59 global, 82–83, 87–89 Klaus Barbie trial and, 84–87 All Rivers Run to the Sea, 13 And the World Stayed Silent, 49–50 Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities, 62, 91 Ani Maamin, 62, 80 anti-Semitism in Japan, 82 in Sighet, 10, 12 apartheid, 64–65, 93 Argentina, 17, 93 Auschwitz American photos of, 66 arrival in, 19–21 beginnings of, 21–24 evacuation from, 30–32 fact-finding visit to, 66–67, 68 life in, 25–29

B

Babi-Yar, fact-finding visit to, 67 Barbie, Klaus, 84–87 Beit Tzipora Centers for Study and Enrichment, 92 Bergen-Belsen, 72–73 Birkenau, 19–21, 67 Bitburg, 72–73, 74 “Bloc-Notes,” 48 Bosnia, 87 Boston University, 62, 91 Buchenwald, 4–6, 32–35 Buna, 26

108

C

Cambodian refugees, 93 camps, concentration. See also individual camps arrival at, 4–5 fact-finding visit to, 66–67 life in, 5–6 camps, displaced person, 42–43 Carter, Jimmy, 64, 65–66, 91 cattle cars, 32 Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, 91 Centers for Study and Enrichment, 92 Children’s Aid Agency, 38, 40–41 City University of New York, 61–62, 90–91 Clinton, William J., 87, 88 Commander of the French Legion of Honor, 90 Commission on the Holocaust, 7, 64–66, 73, 91 concentration camps. See also individual camps arrival at, 4–5 fact-finding visit to, 66–67 life in, 5–6 Congressional Gold Medal, 72–73 Consistoire, 40 controversy, Nobel Peace Prize and, 79 crown, gold, 26

D

Dawn, 55 de Gaulle, Charles, 48 degrees, honorary, 90 Dershowitz, Alan, 93–94 Desaperecidos of Argentina, 93

Section Index Title

displaced persons camps, 42–43 Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies, 61–62, 90–91 Doctors Without Borders, 79 Dunant, Henry, 78

E

Eichmann, Karl Adolf, 1, 16–17, 18 ElBaradei, Mohammed, 79 Elie Wiesel Humanitarian Award, 91–92 Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics Essay Contest, 91 emigration (forced), Adolf Eichmann and, 16–17 Entre Deux Soleils, 60 Ethiopian Jews, 92 evacuations from Auschwitz, 30–32 from Buchenwald, 34–35 from Sighet, 1–2, 3–5

F

Feig, Reb Dodye (grandfather), 9 Foundation for Humanity, 81–82, 90–92 France academics and, 41–44 arrival in, 37–39 reunion with Hilda and, 39–40 testimony and, 46–50 writing in, 44–46 From the Kingdom of Memory, 57

G

Gandhi, Mohandas, 79 gas chambers, 22–23 ghettos, relocation to, 18–19

Gleiwitz, 31–32 gold crown, 26 Grand Prix de la Littéraire de la Ville de Paris, 90

H

Haig, Alexander, 69 Holocaust Memorial Council, 7, 64, 88, 91 Holocaust Memorial Museum, 87, 88, 90–91 Holocaust Remembrance Days, 64, 65, 91 honorary degrees, 90 Höss, Rudolf, 21–22 housekeeper (Maria), 2, 18–19 Humanitarian Award, 91–92 Hungary, 8, 11, 12–13

I

I Believe, 62 Institute for International Law, 78 International Committee of the Red Cross, 78 International Liberators Conference, 69–71 Israel criticism from, 81 support of, 92 travel to, 45–46

J

Jew Today, A, 64, 89 Jewish Agency, 44–45 Jewish community, in Sighet, 9–10 Jewish Daily Forward, 55 Jews of Silence, The, 58–59 Judges, The, 87

109

Section Title Index

Night

K

age selections and, 19 death of father and, 32–34 description of, 6 lack of interest in murders and, 27 memories in, 5 writing of, 49–50, 55 Nobel Peace Prize history of, 78–80 Nobel address following, 7, 80–81, 95–98 nomination to, 93–94 time following, 81–83 winning of, 6, 73–78 Nobel Prize in Literature, François Mauriac and, 48

Kingdom of Memory, From the, 57 Kissinger, Henry, 79 Klement, Ricardo. See Eichmann, Karl Adolf Kurds, 93 Kuzists, 12

L

La Nuit. See Night Le Duc Tho, 79 Lederberg, Joshua, 81–82 legacy of Elie Wiesel, 90–94 Legion of Honor, 48

M

Mabovitch, Goldie. See Meier, Golda Mann, Ibi, 31 Máramarosszighet. See Sighet marches, 30–32, 33 Maria (housekeeper), 2, 18–19 Martin Luther King Jr. Award, 90 Mauriac, François, 46–50 Medal of Liberty, 90 Meier, Golda, 53–54, 55 Mendès-France, Pierre, 46–47 Mengele, Josef, selections and, 19, 28, 29 Messenger of God, 63–64 Meyerhoff, Bud, 88 Milhuad, Darius, 62 Miskito Indians, 93 Mitterand, François, 87

O

Oath, The, 63 Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE), 38, 40–41 Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 78 Olav V, King of Norway, 75 One Generation After, 60 Oslo University, 75

P

Palestine, 40, 43 Passey, Frédéric, 78 Prix Ravarol prize, 57 Prize in Ethics Essay Contest, 91 professorships, 61–62, 90–91

N

National Holocaust Museum, 87, 88, 90–91 New York, move to, 51–54 Nicaragua, 93

110

R

Reagan, Ronald, 69, 72–73, 74 Red Cross, 78 Romania, 8, 11, 12–13 Rose, Jennifer (stepdaughter), 60

Section Index Title

Rose, Marion Erster (wife). See Wiesel, Marion (wife) Rosenbaum, Mordechai, 41, 44

S

“Sacred Cannon, The,” 45 Schlomo, Ben, as pen name, 45 Schutzstaffel, 1 selections, 19–20, 28, 32 showers, 22–23 Shushani, 41, 44 Sighet childhood in, 8–14 evacuation from, 1–2, 3–5 Holocaust arrival in, 15–19 return to as adult, 15, 56–57 survivors from, 43–44 Sighetul Marmatiei. See Sighet Sorbonne, 44 Souls on Fire, 62 South Africa, 64–65 Soviet Union, Jews in, 58–59, 92 surgery, 30 Sverdrup, Jakub, 73

T

Talmud, 9, 39 tattoos, 26 taxi accident, 52 teaching, 61–62 testimony, 46–50 Tho, Le Duc, 79 Time of the Uprooted, The, 87 Town Beyond the Wall, The, 55–56, 57 Transylvania. See Sighet

United Nations Peacekeeping Force, 79 United Nations press room, 52–54 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 87, 88, 90–91 U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, 7, 64, 88, 91

V

Un di velt hot geshvign, 49–50 “Victors and Vanquished,” 45

W

Walesa, Lech, 68, 82 Wiesel, Bea (sister), 8, 40, 41–43, 46, 63 Wiesel, Eliezer (grandfather), 9 Wiesel, Hilda (sister), 8, 39–40 Wiesel, Marion (wife), 60–61 Wiesel, Sarah (mother), 8, 9–10 Wiesel, Schlomo Elisha (son), 61, 75–76 Wiesel, Schlomo (father) in Auschwitz, 30, 32 death of, 32–34 description of, 8–9 Wiesel, Tzipora (sister), 11 Wizhnitz, Israel, 9–10 World Economic Forum, 92 World Series, 73, 74, 75

Y

Yale University, 90 Yediot Ahronot, 58 Yugoslavia, 93

U

Un di velt hot geshvign, 49–50 UNICEF, 78

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About the Author

Heather Lehr Wagner is a writer and an editor. She is the

author of more than 30 books exploring social and political issues and focusing on the lives of prominent men and women. She earned a B.A. in political science from Duke University, and an M.A. in government from the College of William and Mary. She lives with her husband and family in Pennsylvania. She is also the author of Henry Kissenger in the modern peacemakers series.

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