Eliezer Wiesel
1928-
Nobel Prize Winner - Peace (1986)
"
Let us remember, let us remember the heroes of Warsaw, the martyrs of Treblinka,
the children of Auschwitz. They fought alone, they suffered alone, they lived alone,
but they did not die alone, for something in all of us died with them."
Early Life:
Eliezer (Elie) Wiesel was born to
Jewish parents in
Sighet,
Romania, on September
30, 1928. His parents, who owned a
grocery store in the township, were well
respected within the community, and Wiesel had three other siblings: his sisters Hilda,
Bea (both older) and Tsiporah. At age three, Wiesel began his education at a Jewish
school where he learnt
Hebrew (although he spoke
German,
Romanian and
Hungarian
in public) and began to study the major religious texts. His grandfather (mother's
side) was a
hasid of note in the area, and inspired Wiesel to take his studies further.
Against his father's wishes, Wiesel found himself a master of the
Talmud, known
simply as
Moché the Beadle (a
synagogue caretaker), and began to explore the
mysteries of Judaism. "
My childhood was a childhood blessed with love and hope
and faith and prayer," he once said in an interview.
This peaceful life changed in 1940, when
Hungary annexed the area. Although life
did not change much for Elie, by 1942 the Hungarian
government ruled that all Jews
who could not prove their Hungarian
citizenship would be
deported. Moché was one
such of these, and the only person to survive the trip, which comprised a train trip to
Poland, the digging of
mass graves and systematic
slaughter. Pretending to be dead,
Moché returned to Sighet with his story, but was ridiculed and shunted aside. The
warning that he provided about the proposed treatment of Hungarian Jews was
ignored, a fact mourned by Wiesel in his literary works. Also in his books, Wiesel
comments upon the normality of life during this time. He celebrated his
bar mitzvah
and continued his studies, now focusing on the kabbalah. In his quest to learn more of
the
kabbalah, he also studied
astrology,
parapsychology,
hypnotism and
magic. His
old, and now discredited, teacher was replaced with a Sighet kabbalist. His mother
began to think of finding a suitable match for Hilda. Wiesel became interested in the
Zionist movement, although his father refused to move to
Palestine. Life continued,
as usual, until 1944.
It was this year that the Nazi German occupation of Sighet began, and the Jewish
members of the community were forced into wearing a yellow
Star of David on their
clothes. In a moment of irony in his major work
Night, Wiesel recollects that his
father said: "
The yellow star? Oh well, what of it? You don't die of it..." to which the
older Eliezer replies "
Poor father! Of what then did you die?" Such irony appears
frequently in his literary works, the multiple ignored warnings featuring prominently,
and this has been the focus of Wiesel's life's work - to speak out about
injustice when
others remain
silent: "
...to remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all..."
Jewish stores in Sighet were closed, restrictions and
curfews put in place. A pair of
ghettos were created by the occupying
Nazi troops, and the Jews (Wiesel comments,
again from
Night) thought themselves well-off, living in a separate Jewish
community. By May of 1944, the deportations had begun. The Wiesel family
declined the invitation of their
Christian maid, Maria, to go and live in the mountains
with her, and were hence deported with the rest of the Sighet Jews. The four day
cattle car trip the Sighet Jews endured was "
the death of my adolescence". The group
arrived at
Birkenau (the Auschwitz reception centre) and the males of the Wiesel
family were immediately split from the females. Eliezer's mother, Sarah, and his little
sister, Tsiporah, were marched off to the
gas chambers, and he heard nothing from his
older sisters until he was living in France after the war had concluded. Left with his
father, Shlomo (also spelt Chlomo), Eliezer lied about his age (telling the
SS officer
that he was 18 instead of 15) and became known as A-7713. The pair became camp
labourers, and were later moved to the camp of
Buna.
At Buna, Eliezer and Shlomo endured more mental, physical and to some extent,
spiritual and moral
torture. Working in an
electronics factory, the pair survived eight
months of Buna at times simply by will-power, continuing to look out for each other.
One of the most vivid recollections of Buna that Wiesel has placed into text was the
hanging of a young pipel, a boy accused of
sabotage by SS Officers. The prisoners of
the camp were forced to watch the hanging for the half hour that it took the boy to die,
and at the end, Wiesel says that
God is hanging on the gallows... but this does not
indicate that he no longer has his
faith. Contrary to this, Wiesel still believes in God,
but says that he no longer believes in a merciful God. How else, he questions, would
such camps be allowed to exist?
In the Winter of 1944-5, Wiesel's right foot swelled up, and was operated upon in the
Buna hospital. In another recollected moment of irony, Wiesel tells in Night the
words of a neighbouring invalid's words: "
I've got more faith in Hitler than in anyone
else. he's the only one who's kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish
people." At this time, the
Russian forces are drawing closer to the camp, and
predictions are made that any Jewish prisoners not able to evacuated the camp will be
summarily shot. With this warning in mind, Eliezer left the hospital before having
finished the healing process, and joined the camp
exodus - 10 days of running in snow
without food or rest. Later, he discovered that when the camp had been liberated by
the Russian forces, all the prisoners were released.
Crammed into cattle cars again, the prisoners headed to Buchenwald. Of the 20 000
people who left Buna, only 6 000 survived the journey, a dramatic description being
given by Wiesel himself in Night: "
A hundred of us had got into the wagon. A dozen
of us got out - among them, my father and I." Tragically, the
suicidal dash through
winter had been too much for Shlomo, who died of a combination of
dysentery,
exhaustion,
abuse and
starvation a few weeks after their arrival. In a horrifying
moment, Eliezer recollects "
I awoke on January 29 at dawn. In my father's place lay
another invalid. They must have taken him to the crematory. He may still have been
breathing."
Following his father's death, Wiesel was relocated to a
children's block, where he
lived in a trance-like state amongst 600 other children, his only driving force being
food. By April 5-6 (date discrepancy), the prisoners were no longer fed, and were
being systematically murdered once more at a rate of approximately 10 000 people per
day. The reason for this was that the
front was drawing nearer, and the camp was
quickly being
liquidated. In an abrupt twist of fate, on April 10-11 (another date
discrepancy), the 20 000 surviving prisoners'
resistance movement rose up against the
SS Guards. Between 10am and 12 noon, fighting broke out over the camp, and finally
the SS guards fled the camp. By 6pm, Buchenwald was liberated by American forces.
The slow degradation of the prisoners from people to animals is a theme running
through Wiesel's Holocaust works, and this is once more illustrated by a passage
speaking of his new
emancipation: "
Our first act as free men was to throw ourselves
on to the provisions. We thought only of that. Not of revenge, not of our families.
Nothing but bread." We then learn about his situation at the end of the war: "
One day
I was able to get up, after gathering all my strength. I wanted to see myself in the
mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the
depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes has never left
me."
Europe:
Now freed from the
concentration camps, Wiesel promised himself to wait ten years
before publishing his story, as he was not ready to share it yet. Released from
hospital
(where he was placed with food poisoning), he joined in with a group of 400 orphans
who were being relocated to
France. Keeping with a promise he made in the camps,
he attempted to emigrate to Palestine immediately, but was not allowed to do so. The
Children's Rescue Society (a Jewish organisation) found him various French
foster
families, and in 1947, Wiesel began to study again, this time with a French
tutor. It
was in the same year that he had a stroke of luck - entirely by accident, his sister Hilda
saw his
photograph in a
newspaper, and the pair were reunited. Some months later,
also, he was reunited with his other older sister, Bea, in
Antwerp.
He renewed his studies with vigour, although he questioned his faith more than he had
when he was a strongly-believing child. In France, also, he met a Jewish
scholar who
would deeply effect his studies. Known simply as Shushani, this insightful man
became a
mentor to Wiesel, and he (like Moché the Beadle had, many years before)
taught his student to question. By the following year (after a number of
preparatory
schools), 1948, he was a student of the
Sorbonne, and his studies comprised
literature,
philosophy and
psychology. His university years, although not as bad as those of his
war, were not enjoyable. He was both poor (he taught Hebrew, translated and worked
as a
choirmaster for an income) and depressed, to the point where he contemplated
suicide. He also became involved with the
Irgun (a militant Jewish organisation in
Israel/Palestine), working as a translator for the group's newspaper by translating
documents between
Yiddish and Hebrew. This experience led to his next
appointment as a
reporter.
In 1949, within his new job, Wiesel realised his dream of travelling to Israel. As a
correspondent for the French newspaper
L'Arche, he then changed jobs to become the
Parisian correspondent for
Yediot Achronot, an Israeli newspaper. He spent a large
portion of the 1950s in travel worldwide, and was also involved in whether or not
Israel should accept
West German reparation payments. Still at work as a reporter,
Wiesel met the man who would change his life. In 1954, he was sent to interview a
devout French
Catholic author named
François Mauriac who spoke mainly on the
topic of
Christianity. Finally, Wiesel could stand hearing about the suffering of
Jesus
no longer, saying "
...ten years ago, not very far from here, I knew Jewish children
every one of whom suffered a thousand times more, six million times more than
Christ on the cross. And we don't speak about them." Having said this, Wiesel made
a hasty exit from the room, but was followed by the writer who convinced Wiesel to
begin publishing his experiences.
Writing and the United States of America:
The first book that Wiesel drafted, and what would become both his most famous and
influential piece, was an 862 page manuscript entitled
And the World Was Silent
which was sent to an
Argentinian publisher. The final manuscript was a mere 245
page book which would be published in French in 1958 and titled
La Nuit (
Night).
Published in the United States of America in 1960,
Night was the story of his life
from childhood until the end of the Holocaust, and follows the loss of his faith in God,
and the income goes to an Israeli
yeshiva that Wiesel established to commemorate his
father. I cannot more strongly recommend this as an important
autobiography to read.
The following passage, from
Night is one of the most influential passages of any
modern book and the point of his
crusade against injustice:
"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."
The mid-1950s saw Wiesel moving to the
USA still in his capacity as the
foreign
correspondent of
Yediot Achronot, and this period in his life saw him make the
decision to stop attending a synagogue except on special occasions, to protest what he
viewed as
divine injustice. In New York, also, in 1956, Wiesel was struck by a
taxi as
he crossed the road and endured a ten hour
operation, after which he focused more on
his literature (and finalised
Night), saying that he was writing for those who could not
speak. The taxi incident left him in an interesting situation, as he was still classed as a
stateless person, and was unable to return to France. However, he eventually received
his first passport (U.S.), and settled in
New York. Years later, his friend
François
Mitterand became the French
President, and offered Wiesel French
nationality, which
he declined, claiming that when he had needed a
passport, the United States of
America had come to his aid.
Night's sequels,
Dawn and
The Accident soon
followed, and from then on, Wiesel was a prolific writer (for a full listing of his
books, see the node above, but also note that a second part of his
memoirs And the
Sea is Never Full has been published). A 1965 visit to the
Soviet Union saw him
write about the Jews there (
The Jews of Silence), and the
Six-Day War inspired
A
Beggar in Jerusalem. This book looked at the Jewish reaction about Israel, and won
him the
Prix Medicis.
In 1969, Wiesel married an
Austrian named Marion Erster Rose (who would become
the translator of his books), and the pair had a son whom they named in honour of
Eliezer's father: Shlomo Elisha. Wiesel continued to write over the next three
decades, writing books that accuse God of
indifference and even
hostility (although he
never stopped believing in God as the
caretaker of the Jewish people), and further
memoirs of his life (1995 and 1999 respectively). One of my sources for this node
commented that "
Today, Wiesel thinks in Yiddish, writes in French, and, with his
wife Marion and his son Elisha, lives his life in English." During this period, he also
became a spokesperson against ignored injustice.
Social Impact and Contribution; Awards and the Nobel Prize:
Wiesel's international contribution is significant, in that he did not speak out against
only
anti-Semitism. The 1970s saw him protesting
apartheid, the 1980s delivering
food to
Cambodia. His reasons for doing so are explained by his reply to the
awarding of his Nobel Prize, saying that the world knew of the concentration camps,
but took no action. "
That is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever
human beings endure suffering and humiliation."
His outspoken stance against injustice has been acknowledged and celebrated around
the world. Between 1972-8, Wiesel was a Distinguished Professor of
Judaic Studies
at the
City University of New York, then went to
Boston University to be the
Mellon
Chair of Humanities (a position he still holds). It was in the same year that U.S.
President
Jimmy Carter asked Wiesel to front the
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council
(this appointment lasted for six years). Between 1982-3, he was the
Henry Luce
Visiting Scholar in Humanities and Social Thought at
Yale University In 1985,
Wiesel was the recipient of the
Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement, and three
years later, he established a humanitarian foundation that bore his name: the
Elie
Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. This foundation works to explore conflicts caused
by hatred and different ethnicities (and also is a non-profit teaching organisation), and
is a
colloquium of scholars worldwide. Following his awarding of the Nobel Prize,
Wiesel also held a new type of conference, a meeting of all Nobel recipients to discuss
worldwide issues. He has also been awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom and
is a Member (
Grand-Croix) of the
French Legion of Honour.
In the 1990s, Wiesel was still carrying on his personal mission against injustice,
lobbying the United States government about the
ethnic cleansing taking place in
Bosnia. His work, over the years to open eyes and minds against injustice has been
him be awarded numerous awards, and approximately seventy-five
honorary
doctorates from various establishments. He was also chosen to speak, in 1993, at the
dedication of the
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (
Washington, D.C.). His
immortal words are engraved over the museum's entrance: "
For the dead and the
living, we must bear witness." This museum was the result of the Holocaust
Memorial Council, which also recommended to
Congress that a memorial day be
established (this was passed). Wiesel's grounds for establishing the museum are that
he wishes to deny the Nazis victory, honour the wishes of the victims of the
Holocaust (they wished their story to be told), and to also educate so that such a
horrific event does not occur again. The museum focuses mainly on the Jewish
genocide, as Wiesel believes that although not all Holocaust victims were Jewish, all
Jews were victims of the Holocaust.
More recently, in 1995, he spoke powerfully at the fiftieth anniversary of the
liberation of Auschwitz, a speech which included:
"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." (This speech is under copyright,
and for the link, please refer to 'Recommended Further Reading".)
Wiesel was recognised for his work in 1986 with the awarding of the
Nobel Prize for
Peace, one of the world's most distinguished honours. The following are extracts
from both the Nobel Committee and Eliezer Wiesel's acceptance speech, detailing
both thoughts and reasons for this award (again, both are under
copyright, but links
are provided below):
"From the abyss of the death camps he has come as a messenger to mankind — not
with a message of hate and revenge, but with one of brotherhood and atonement. He
has become a powerful spokesman for the view of mankind and the unlimited
humanity which is, at all times, the basis of a lasting peace.... We know that the
unimaginable has happened. What are we doing now to prevent it happening again?
Do not forget, do not sink into a new blind indifference, but involve yourselves in
truth and justice, in human dignity, freedom, and atonement. That is this Peace Prize
laureate's message to us... The man raises himself up. The spirit conquers. The answer
to the riddle of the night is not hate based on what has happened, but a believing and
hopeful rebirth into future events. This is what he calls The Refound Song which
appears in his credo, his Ani Maamin: I believe in God — in spite of God! I believe in
Mankind — in spite of Mankind! I believe in the Future — in spite of the Past!" -
Nobel Committee's speech in 1986 at the awards ceremony.
"...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 irrelevant. 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.... Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they
belong to all those who need us desperately." - Eliezer Wiesel's acceptance speech of
the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Today, Eliezer Wiesel still lives in New York city, and is recognised worldwide as a
teacher,
writer and
visionary of high repute. He is a survivor of the death camps, a
family man, a worker, and an
advocate for peace.
Sources:
- Night and All Rivers Run to the Sea - Eliezer Wiesel
- http://www.pbs.org/eliewiesel/life/index.html (and other, related pages)
- http://gtrplaya33.f2o.org/emily/archives/000032.html
- http://www.britannica.com/nobel/micro/639_34.html
- http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/HOLO/ELIEBIO.HTM
- http://store.yahoo.com/jewish146/eliewiesel.html
Reccommended Further Reading:
- Literary Works - As many as possible, although Night would be my strongest
reccommendation.
- Auschwitz Anniversary Speech - http://www.pbs.org/eliewiesel/life/auschwitz.html
- Nobel Prize speeches - http://www.pbs.org/eliewiesel/nobel/index.html (and also click
on the links down the side for others)
- To get a sense of him as a man, read the Bold Type interview -
http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/1299/wiesel/interview.html