World-renowned author, Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel passed away on Saturday at the age of 87, and a memorial service was held in his honor on Sunday at a synagogue in Manhattan, NY.
Here are seven things you need to know about Wiesel.
1. Wiesel’s world-famous book Night chronicles the suffering that he and others experienced at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Wiesel and his family were sent to the death camp from the small city Sighet, which was located in Romania at the time. Wiesel recalls seeing his mother and sister, Tzipora, being sentenced to the death by barbaric Josef Mengele, and watched his father gradually deteriorate from being beaten with iron bars from Nazi officers to eventually perishing from starvation and dysentery when they were transferred to Buchenwald. And yet, Wiesel did not shed a tear for his father’s death, because as he wrote in Night, “I had no more tears.”
One of the more haunting passages in the book is when Wiesel recounts his first night at Auschwitz:
“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,” Mr. Wiesel wrote. “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.”
But there is no passage more haunting than his retelling of the hanging of a young child in front of the entire death camp but he was “too light to break his own neck.”
“Behind me, I heard [a] man asking: ‘Where is God now?'” Wiesel wrote. “And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘. . . Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.'”
2. Night put Wiesel on the map, and he wrote several books thereafter. Night didn’t sell well when it was first published in the late 1950s, as many people were not interested in learning the inhumane details of the Holocaust. But that all changed when the trial of the Adolf Eichmann captured the attention of the world. Then more were interested in learning the barbaric, bloody details of the unspeakable act of evil that had occurred during the Holocaust. Wiesel was one of the first Holocaust survivors to expose its true horrors, and his charismatic speaking style and prolific, elegant, yet haunting writing caused him to gain an enormous following. Consequently, Night has sold over 10 million copies and Wiesel has written a total of 60 books, including Dawn and Day, forming the Night trilogy. Wiesel has also written two plays and two cantatas.
According to The New York Times:
While many of his books were nominally about topics like Soviet Jews or Hasidic masters, they all dealt with profound questions resonating out of the Holocaust: What is the sense of living in a universe that tolerates unimaginable cruelty? How could the world have been mute? How can one go on believing? Mr. Wiesel asked the questions in spare prose and without raising his voice; he rarely offered answers.
“If I survived, it must be for some reason,” he told Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times in an interview in 1981. “I must do something with my life. It is too serious to play games with anymore, because in my place, someone else could have been saved. And so I speak for that person. On the other hand, I know I cannot.”
As Wiesel said in his Nobel acceptance speech, “If we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.”
3. In addition to ensuring that the Holocaust is never forgotten, Wiesel dedicated his life to being a human rights activist. When he received the Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement in 1985, Wiesel implored then-President Ronald Reagan “not to lay a wreath at the Bitburg military cemetery,” which held the bodies of 47 SS members.
“That place, Mr. President, is not your place,” Wiesel said. “Your place is with the victims of the SS.”
Additionally, Wiesel spoke out against apartheid in South Africa as well as the genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur. Wiesel also urged President Bill Clinton to take action against the slaughter occurring in Bosnia.
“Mr. President, I cannot not tell you something,” Wiesel said to Clinton in 1993. “I have been in the former Yugoslavia last fall. I cannot sleep since for what I have seen. As a Jew I am saying that we must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country! People fight each other and children die. Why? Something, anything must be done.”
4. Wiesel was also an ardent supporter of Israel, and many anti-Israel activists disgustingly attacked Wiesel for it when he died. No quote better encapsulates Wiesel’s support for the Jewish nation than when he said, “There is Israel, for us at least. What no other generation had, we have. We have Israel in spite of all the dangers, the threats and the wars, we have Israel. We can go to Jerusalem. Generations and generations could not and we can.”
In 2010, Wiesel wrote in an ad in The New York Times, “For me, the Jew that I am, Jerusalem is above politics. It is mentioned more than six hundred times in Scripture—and not a single time in the Koran . . . the first song I heard was my mother’s lullaby about and for Jerusalem.”
Wiesel also came out against President Barack Obama’s deal with Iran, writing in yet another New York Times ad, “Should we not show our support for what might be the last clear warning before a terrible deal is struck? As one who has seen the enemies of the Jewish people make good on threats to exterminate us, how can I remain silent?”
Wiesel warned about Iran’s “genocidal intent against Israel” and called for the “total dismantling of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.”
A number of anti-Israel advocates just couldn’t help themselves when Wiesel passed away, via FrontPageMag:
Ali Abunimah, co-founder of the hate site Electronic Intifada noted that, “Elie Wiesel will be remembered by Palestinians for his racism and his propaganda services to their oppressors, ethnic cleansers and killers.”
Iranian-American Reza Aslan, who is considered by some in the mainstream to be the “moderate” voice of Islam and is a frequent guest commentator on various news outlets, implied on his Twitter feed that Wiesel was a liar.
And of course, no Judeophobic tirade would be complete without the voice of the notorious anti-Semite Max Blumenthal, son of Hillary Clinton’s closest adviser, Sidney Blumenthal. Blumenthal’s Twitter rant includes the following gem: “Elie Wiesel went from a victim of war crimes to a supporter of those who commit them. He did more harm than good and should not be honored.” It should be noted that should Clinton win the general election, the rancid Max Blumenthal will be just one degree of separation from access to the White House, something one should bear in mind before pulling the lever on Election Day.
For more on Blumenthal and his connection to Clinton, read Josh Hammer’s piece at The Resurgent here.
5. Wiesel was a true student of the Torah and was committed to educating others about Jewish identity. Wiesel described growing up in Sieghet among 15,000 Jews as feeling “Shabbat in the air” on a Saturday and stuck by his faith for the rest of his life, even though he had his issues with God since he had difficulty “reconciling the concept of a benevolent God with the evil of the Holocaust,” according to the Times.
As Menachem Z. Rosensaft, who considered Wiesel to be a friend and a mentor, writes in Tablet Mag: (emphasis bolded)
Elie was always unabashedly, unequivocally Jewish. But in sharp contrast to many of his contemporaries, he neither flaunted his Jewishness nor presumed to impose it on others. Rather he sought to explain its mysteries and to convey his love of the Jewish religion, of Jewish culture and tradition, of Jewish mysticism and Jewish mysteries. And he did so with deep affection and an equally profound reverence for, the subject matter and, perhaps equally important, with respect for his readers and listeners. Most important, his Jewishness was never chauvinistic or exclusionary. “To be Jewish,” he explained, “is to recognize that every person is created in God’s image and thus worthy of respect. Being Jewish to me is to reject fanaticism everywhere.”
Wiesel was also a professor of Judaic Studies at City University of New York from 1972-1978 and, according to the Times, “became more devout as the years passed, praying near his home or in Brooklyn’s Hasidic synagogues.”
6. Wiesel was a friend of Obama’s and “he liked and respected Hillary Clinton,” according to Rosensaft. Wiesel also told Rosensaft that he was “repulsed” by real estate mogul Donald Trump’s “xenophobic rhetoric.”
7. Wiesel beautifully articulated freedom and why we should cherish it:
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.