Holocaust survivor, writer Wiesel dies at 87
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ACTIVIST and writer Elie Wiesel, the World War II death camp survivor who won a Nobel Peace Prize for becoming the life-long voice of millions of Holocaust victims, died on Saturday. He was 87.
Wiesel was a philosopher, speaker, playwright and professor who also campaigned for the tyrannized and forgotten around the world. He died at his home in New York City, the New York Times reported.
The Romanian-born Wiesel lived by the credo expressed in “Night,” his landmark story of the Holocaust — “to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”
In awarding the Peace Prize in 1986, the Nobel Committee praised him as a “messenger to mankind” and “one of the most important spiritual leaders and guides in an age when violence, repression and racism continue to characterize the world”.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed Wiesel as a ray of light, and said his extraordinary personality and unforgettable books demonstrated the triumph of the human spirit over the most unimaginable evil.
“Out of the darkness of the Holocaust, Elie became a powerful force for light, truth and dignity,” he said.
Wiesel did not waver in his campaign never to let the world forget the Holocaust horror. While at the White House in 1985 to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, he even rebuked US President Ronald Reagan for planning to lay a wreath at a German cemetery where some of Hitler’s notorious Waffen SS troops were buried.
“Don’t go to Bitburg,” Wiesel said. “That place is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.”
Wiesel became close to US President Barack Obama but the friendship did not deter him from criticizing US policy on Israel. He spoke in favor of Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and pushed the US and other powers to take a harder stance against Iran over its nuclear program.
Obama remembered him as “one of the great moral voices of our time, and in many ways, the conscience of the world.”
Wiesel had raised his voice, not just against anti-Semitism, but against hatred, bigotry and intolerance in all forms, Obama said in a statement. “His life, and the power of his example, urges us to be better. In the face of evil, we must summon our capacity for good. In the face of hate, we must love.”
German President Joachim Gauck wrote to Wiesel’s wife Marion praising him as a “wonderful person and extraordinary scholar and writer” who will never be forgotten.
Wiesel was a hollow-eyed 16-year-old when he emerged from the newly liberated Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945. He had been orphaned by the Nazis and their identification number, A-7713, was tattooed on his arm as a physical manifestation of his broken faith and the nightmares that would haunt him throughout his life.
Wiesel and his family had first been taken by the Nazis from the village of Sighetu Marmatiei in the Transylvania region of Romania to Auschwitz, where his mother and one of his sisters died. Wiesel and his father, Shlomo, ended up in Buchenwald, where Shlomo died. In “Night” Wiesel wrote of his shame at lying silently in his bunk while his father was beaten nearby.
After the war Wiesel went to France, studied at the Sorbonne and by 19 had become a journalist. He pondered suicide and never wrote of or discussed his Holocaust experience until 10 years after the war as a part of a vow to himself. He was 27 in 1955 when “Night” was published in Yiddish. He would later rewrite it for a world audience.
Wiesel wrote over 50 books — novels, non-fiction, memoirs, and many with a Holocaust theme. He and wife Marion married in 1969 and their son, Elisha, was born in 1972.
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