Eliezer Wiesel KBE (commonly known as Elie Wiesel, born
September 30, 1928)[1] is a Romanian-born French-Jewish novelist, political activist, Nobel Laureate and
Holocaust survivor. He is the author of over 40 books, the best known of which is
Night, a memoir that describes his experiences during the Holocaust and his
imprisonment in several concentration camps.
Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. The Norwegian Nobel Committee called him a "messenger to mankind," noting that through his
struggle to come to terms with "his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in
Hitler's death camps," as well as his "practical work in the cause of peace," Wiesel has
delivered a powerful message "of peace, atonement and human dignity" to humanity.[2]
On November 30, 2006 Wiesel received an honorary
knighthood in London, England in recognition of
his work toward raising Holocaust education in the United Kingdom.[3]
Early life and experiences during the Holocaust
Buchenwald, 1945. Wiesel is on the second row from the bottom, seventh from the left.
Wiesel was born in Sighet (now Sighetu Marmaţiei), Maramureş, Kingdom of Romania, to Shlomo and Sarah Wiesel.
Sarah was the daughter of Dodye Feig, a Hasid and farmer from a nearby village. Elie
Wiesel had three sisters: Hilda and Bea, who were older than he, and Tzipora, who was the youngest in the family. Shlomo was an
Orthodox Jew of Hungarian descent, and a shopkeeper
who ran his own grocery store. He was active and trusted within the community, and had spent a few months in jail for having
helped Polish Jews who escaped to Hungary in the early years of the war. It
was Shlomo who instilled a strong sense of humanism in his son, encouraging him to learn
Modern Hebrew and to read literature, whereas his mother encouraged him to study
Torah and Kabbalah. Wiesel has said his father represented
reason, and his mother, faith (Fine 1982:4).
The town of Sighet was annexed to Hungary in 1940. In 1944 Elie, his family and
the rest of the town were placed in one of the two ghettos in Sighet. Elie and his family lived in the larger of the two, on
Serpent Street. On April 19, 1944, the Hungarian authorities
deported the Jewish community in Sighet to Auschwitz–Birkenau. While at Auschwitz the number A-7713 was tattooed into his left arm and
he became an avid smoker. Wiesel was separated from his mother and sister Tzipora, who are presumed to have been murdered at
Auschwitz. Wiesel and his father were sent to the attached work camp Buna-Werke, a subcamp of Auschwitz III Monowitz. He managed to remain with his father for a year as they were forced
to work under appalling conditions and shuffled between concentration camps in the closing days of the war. On January 28, 1945, just a few weeks after the two were marched to
Buchenwald and only months before the camp was liberated by the
American Third Army on April 11, Wiesel's father suffered from dysentery, starvation, and exhaustion, and was later sent to the crematory.
The last word his father spoke was “Eliezer”, Elie's name.
After the war
After the war,Wiesel was placed in a French orphanage,
where he learned the French language and was reunited with both his older sisters, Hilda
and Bea, who had also survived the war. In 1948[4],
Wiesel began studying philosophy at the Sorbonne. During this time, Wiesel became involved with Irgun, a
Zionist armed organization in Palestine, and translated for its newspaper.[4]
He taught Hebrew and worked as a choirmaster before becoming a professional
journalist. He wrote for Israeli and French newspapers, including Tsien in Kamf (in
Yiddish) and the French Jewish Magazine, L'arche. However, for 10 years after the war, Wiesel refused to write about or discuss his experiences
during the Holocaust. Like many survivors, Wiesel could not find the words to describe his experiences. However, a meeting with
François Mauriac, the 1952 Nobel Laureate in Literature, who eventually became Wiesel's close friend, persuaded him to
write about his Holocaust experiences.
Wiesel first wrote the 900-page tome Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent), in Yiddish, which was published in abridged form in Buenos Aires.
Wiesel rewrote a shortened version of the manuscript in French, and it was published as the 127-page novel La Nuit, and
later translated into English as Night. Even with Mauriac's support, Wiesel had
trouble finding a publisher for his book, and initially it sold poorly.
I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone–terribly alone in a world without God
and without man.
Elie Wiesel, 'Night' (1958) - Translated by Stella Rodway |
Life in the United States
The house where Elie Wiesel was born
In 1955, Wiesel moved to Manhattan, New York, having become a U.S. citizen: due to injuries
suffered in a traffic accident, he was forced to stay in New York past his visa's expiration and was offered citizenship to
resolve his status. In the U.S., Wiesel wrote over 40 books, both fiction and non-fiction, and won many literary prizes. Wiesel's
writing is considered among the most important in Holocaust
literature. Some historians credit Wiesel with giving the term 'Holocaust' its present meaning, but he does not feel that
the word adequately describes the event and wishes it were used less frequently to describe significant occurrences as everyday
tragedies (Wiesel:1999, 18).
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for speaking out against violence,
repression, and racism. He has received many other prizes and honors for his work, including the Congressional Gold Medal in 1985, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996. Wiesel has published two volumes
of his memoirs. The first, All Rivers Run to the Sea, was published in 1994 and covered
his life up to the year 1969 while the second, titled And the Sea is Never Full and published in 1999, covered 1969 to
1999.
Wiesel and his wife, Marion, started the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. He served as chairman for the Presidential Commission on the Holocaust (later renamed U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Council) from 1978 to 1986, spearheading the building of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
Wiesel is particularly fond of teaching and holds the position of Andrew Mellon
Professor of the Humanities at Boston University.
From 1972 to 1976, Wiesel was a Distinguished Professor at the City University of
New York and member of the American Federation of Teachers. In
1982 he served as the first Henry Luce Visiting Scholar in Humanities and Social Thought at
Yale University. He also co-instructs Winter Term (January) courses at Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Florida. From 1997 to
1999 he was Ingeborg Rennert Visiting Professor of Judaic Studies at Barnard College.
Wiesel has become a popular speaker on the subject of the Holocaust. As a political
activist, he has advocated for many causes, including Israel, the plight of
Soviet and Ethiopian
Jews, the victims of apartheid in
South Africa, Argentina's Desaparecidos, Bosnian victims of genocide in the former Yugoslavia, Nicaragua's Miskito Indians,
and the Kurds. He recently voiced support for intervention in Darfur, Sudan.[5] He also led a commission organized by the Romanian government to research and write a report, released in 2004, on the true history of the Holocaust in
Romania and the involvement of the Romanian wartime regime in atrocities against Jews and other groups, including the
Roma. The Romanian government accepted the findings in the report and committed to
implementing the commission's recommendations for educating the public on the history of the Holocaust in Romania. The
commission, formally called the International Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, came to be called the
Wiesel Commission in honor of his leadership.
Wiesel is the honorary chair of the Habonim Dror Camp Miriam Campership and Building
Fund, and a member of the International Council of the New York-based Human Rights
Foundation.
On March 27, 2001, Wiesel appeared at the University of
Florida for Jewish Awareness Month and was presented with an honorary doctor of humane letters degree from the University of
Florida by Dr. Charles Young.[6]
In 2002[7], he inaugurated the Elie Wiesel
Memorial House in Sighet in his childhood home.
In early 2006, Wiesel traveled to Auschwitz with Oprah Winfrey, a visit which was broadcast as part of The
Oprah Winfrey Show on May 24, 2006.[8] Wiesel said that this would most likely be his last trip there.
In September 2006, he appeared before the UN Security Council with
actor George Clooney to call attention to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.
On February 1, 2007, Wiesel was attacked in a
San Francisco hotel. Twenty-two year old Eric
Hunt confessed to the attack on an antisemitic website, saying he had tried to drag Wiesel out of the hotel elevator in
order to "bring [him] to my hotel room where he would truthfully answer my questions regarding the fact that his non-fiction
Holocaust memoir, Night, is almost entirely fictitious."[9] On February 17, 2007, Hunt was arrested in Montgomery Township, New
Jersey. He faces charges that include attempted kidnapping, false imprisonment, elder abuse, stalking, battery and the commission of a hate crime.[10]
On April 25, 2007, Wiesel was awarded an honorary doctorate of
humane letters degree from the University of Vermont.
During the early 2007 selection process for the Kadima candidate for President of Israel, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reportedly offered Wiesel the
nomination (and, as the ruling-party candidate and an apolitical figure, likely the Presidency), but Wiesel "was very not
interested".[11] Shimon
Peres was chosen as the Kadima candidate (and later President) instead.
Criticism
Wiesel has been criticized for exhibiting uncritical moral support for the state of Israel, and for the manner in which he
defends this position. Perhaps his harshest critic in this respect has been the journalist Christopher Hitchens, who, in an essay on Wiesel, wrote the following:
Is there a more contemptible poseur and windbag than Elie Wiesel? I suppose there may be. But not, surely, a poseur and
windbag who receives (and takes as his due) such grotesque deference on moral questions. Look, if you will, at his essay on
Jerusalem in the New York Times of January 24 [2001].
As a Jew living in the United States, I have long denied myself the right to intervene
in Israel's internal debates.... My critics have their conception of social and
individual ethics; I have mine. But while I grant them their right to criticize, they sometimes deny mine to abstain.
Such magnificent condescension, to grant his critics the right. And it is not certain from when Wiesel dates his high-minded
abstention from Israel's internal affairs; he was a member of Menachem Begin's Irgun in
the 1940s, when that force employed extreme violence against Arab civilians and was more than ready to use it against Jews.
...
In 1982, after Gen. Ariel Sharon had treated the inhabitants of the Sabra and Shatila
camps as target practice for his paid proxies, Wiesel favored us with another of his exercises in neutrality. Asked by the New
York Times to comment on the pogrom, he was one of the few American Jews approached on the matter to express zero remorse. "I
don't think we should even comment," he said, proceeding to comment bleatingly that he felt "sadness- with Israel, and not
against Israel." For the victims, not even a perfunctory word. [12]
Noam Chomsky also noted Wiesel's moral response to the Sabra and Shatila massacre with the following remarks:
Wiesel's position was that "I don't think we should even comment on [the massacre in the refugee camps] since the [Israeli
judicial] investigation is still on." "We should not pass judgement until the investigation takes place." Nevertheless, he did
feel "sadness," for the first time, he explains; nothing that had happened before in the occupied territories or in Lebanon had evoked any sadness on his part, and now the sadness was
"with Israel, and not against Israel" - surely not "with the Palestinians" who had been massacred or with the remnants who had
escaped. Furthermore, Wiesel continues, "after all the Israeli soldiers did not kill" - this time at least; they had often killed
at Sabra and Shatilla in the preceding weeks, arousing no "sadness" on Wiesel's part, even "sadness with Israel". Therefore,
Israel is basically exempt from criticism, as were the Czar and his officials, military forces and police at the time of the
Kishinev massacre, by his exalted standards.[13]
In a radio interview scholar Norman Finkelstein accused Wiesel of cheapening the
moral coinage of the Nazi Holocaust by asserting its uniqueness while profiting from public fascination with it:
Elie Wiesel is always wheeled out, and with his long face and anguished heart and cinematic eyes, he always says: "Oh, do not
compare." I beg your pardon, I think you should compare. Otherwise, if you don't want to compare, what's the point of it? What
are you going to learn from it? ... He says the only thing we can do before the Nazi Holocaust is silence. Well if silence is the
only answer, why are you charging $25,000 a lecture? And what are you going to learn from silence? I mean, this is sheer
nonsense.[14]
Books
ISBNs maybe of reissues or reprints. Most are paperback.
- Un di velt hot geshvign (Tsentral-Farband fun Poylishe Yidn in Argentine, 1956) ISBN 0-374-52140-9; includes the
following 3 books:
- Night (Hill and Wang 1958; 2006;) ISBN 0-553-27253-5
- Dawn (Hill and Wang 1961; 2006) ISBN 0-553-22536-7
- Day, previously titled "The Accident" (Hill and Wang 1962; 2006) ISBN
0-553-58170-8
- The Town Beyond the Wall (Atheneum 1964)
- The Gates of the Forest (Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1966)
- The Jews of Silence (Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1966) ISBN 0-935613-01-3
- Legends of our Time (Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1968)
- A Beggar in Jerusalem (Random House 1970)
- One Generation After (Random House 1970)
- Souls on Fire (Random House 1972) ISBN 0-671-44171-X
- Night Trilogy (Hill and Wang 1972)
- The Oath (Random House 1973) ISBN 0-935613-11-0
- Ani Maamin (Random House 1973)
- Zalmen, or the Madness of God (Random House 1974)
- Messengers of God (Random House 1976) ISBN 0-671-54134-X
- A Jew Today (Random House 1978) ISBN 0-935613-15-3
- Four Hasidic Masters (University of Notre Dame Press 1978)
- Images from the Bible (The Overlook Press 1980)
- The Trial of God (Random House 1979)
- The Testament (Summit 1981)
- Five Biblical Portraits (University of Notre Dame Press 1981)
- Somewhere a Master (Summit 1982)
- The Golem (illustrated by Mark Podwal) (Summit
1983) ISBN 0-671-49624-7
- The Fifth Son (Summit 1985)
- Against Silence (Holocaust Library 1985)
- Twilight (Summit 1988)
- The Six Days of Destruction (co-author Albert Friedlander, illustrated by
Mark Podwal) (Paulist Press 1988)
- A Journey of Faith (Donald I. Fine 1990)
- From the Kingdom of Memory (Summit 1990)
- Evil and Exile (University of Notre Dame Press 1990)
- Sages and Dreamers (Summit 1991)
- The Forgotten (Summit 1992) ISBN 0-8052-1019-9
- A Passover Haggadah (illustrated by Mark
Podwal) (Simon and Schuster 1993) ISBN 0-671-73541-1
- All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs, Vol. I, 1928-1969 (Knopf 1995) ISBN 0-8052-1028-8
- Memoir in Two Voices, with François Mitterrand (Arcade 1996)
- And the Sea is Never Full: Memoirs Vol. II, 1969 (Knopf 1999) ISBN 0-8052-1029-6
- King Solomon and his Magic Ring (illustrated by Mark Podwal) (Greenwillow
1999)
- Conversations with Elie Wiesel (Schocken 2001)
- The Judges (Knopf 2002)
- Wise Men and Their Tales (Schocken 2003) ISBN 0-8052-4173-6
- The Time of the Uprooted (Knopf 2005)
Quotations
- " '... I do not shout louder to change others. I shout louder so that they will not change me. Don't let anyone change you.'
"
- "Always question those who are certain of what they are saying." [1]
- "...I wanted to believe in it. In my eyes, to be a [human] was to belong to the [human] community in the broadest and most
immediate sense. It was to feel abused whenever a [person], any [person] anywhere, was humiliated..." All Rivers Run to the
Sea
- "Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."
- "I have learned two things in my life; first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human
tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to
one only by other human beings."
- "God made man because He loves stories." The Gates of the Forest,
where it is the title and last line of a story.
- "Death is a being without arms or legs or mouth or head; it is all eyes" Dawn
- "Man is not defined by what denies him, but by that which affirms him" The
Accident
- "Man is defined by what troubles him, not by what reassures him" All Rivers Run to the
Sea
- "Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed
and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I
saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those
moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned
to live as long as God himself. Never." Night
- "The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference."
- "A dark flame had entered my soul and devoured it."
- "One can be in Auschwitz without being in Auschwitz"
External links
Notes
- ^ Elie Wiesel, from Encyclopædia Britannica
- ^ 1986 Nobel Peace Prize Press Release
- ^ "Wiesel Receives Honorary Knighthood" ~ TotallyJewish.com
- ^ a b
- ^ Elie
Wiesel: On the Atrocities in Sudan
- ^ Independent Florida
Alligator article March 23, 2001
- ^ Elie Wiesel
Returns to his Home in Sighet, Romania, Embassy of Romania in the United States, 23 July 2002.
- ^ Press
Release ~ Oprah.com
- ^ "Suspect named in Weisel attack", MSNBC, February 16, 2007.
- ^ "N.J. man arrested in attack on Wiesel", Yahoo! News, February 17, 2007.
- ^ Olmert backs Peres as next president Jerusalem Post, 18 October 2006
- ^ "Wiesel Words", The
Nation, February 19, 2001
- ^ [Noam Chomsky, "Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the
Palestinians", Pluto Press, London, 1999, p.386/7]
- ^ WILL Radio Interview,
University of Illinois, October 4, 2004. Passage begins: 17:45
References
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
- Berenbaum, Michael: The Vision of the Void. Theological Reflections on the Works of Elie Wiesel, Middletown,
Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1979 ISBN 0-8195-6189-4 PA
- Fonseca, Isabel: Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, London, Vintage, 1996
- Elie Wiesel: First Person Singular PBS
special on Elie Wiesel
- Text and audio of Elie
Wiesel's famous speech on "The Perils of Indifference"
- 1988 Audio Interview with Elie Wiesel by
Don Swaim of CBS Radio, RealAudio
- Christopher
Hitchens criticizes Elie Wiesel in the Nation Magazine
- "8 Questions for Elie Wiesel", JEWSWEEK article briefly discussing Wiesel's view regarding
the moral necessity of the Iraq War.
- Fine, Ellen S. Legacy of Night: The Literary Universe of Elie Wiesel. State University of New York Press, 1982. ISBN
0-87395-590-0 (paperback)
- Wiesel, Elie. All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs. New York: Knopf, 1995.
- Wiesel, Elie. And the Sea is Never Full: Memoirs 1969-. New York: Schocken, 1999.
- New York Times - The Conversation with Elie Wiesel
- "Elie Wiesel on his Beliefs" ~ Toronto Star
See also
The Boys of Buchenwald- a documentary about the orphanage in which he
stayed after the Holocaust
| Persondata |
| NAME |
Wiesel, Elie |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES |
Wiesel, Eliezer |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION |
American-Jewish political activist, professor, and novelist |
| DATE OF BIRTH |
September 9 1928 (1928--) (age 79) |
| PLACE OF BIRTH |
Sighet, Maramures, County, Romania |
| DATE OF DEATH |
|
| PLACE OF DEATH |
|
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