Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity | Wiesel, Elie

[SEPTEMBER 30, 1928–]

Romanian-born writer, novelist, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate 1986, spokesman for humanity, and Holocaust survivor.

Elie Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, Romania. The town of his birth is located in the region of Northern Transylvania annexed by Hungary in September 1940. The Wiesel family remained relatively untouched by the violence of the Holocaust until the German invasion of March 1944. At that time, the methods that the Germans had developed over three years within Poland were imposed immediately in Hungary. Within weeks, Hungarian Jews were ghettoized, and between May 15 and July 8, 1944, 437,402 of them were sent on 147 trains, primarily to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the death camp. Weisel was but fifteen years old when he deported to Auschwitz. It is through the lens of his religious worldview that Wiesel was later to write of his experience.

Wiesel arrived in Auschwitz with his parents and three sisters. He immediately faced the Nazi selection process: "men to the left, women to the right" is the way he described it. His mother and younger sister were sent to the gas chambers, and his older sisters were sent to work. He and his father, Shlomo Wiesel, were sent to Buna-Monowitz, the slave labor complex known as Auschwitz III. He remained there until the forcible evacuation of Auschwitz on January 18, 1945, after which he and his father set off on foot to Bergen-Belsen, on what became known as a death march. Wiesel and his father arrived in Bergen-Belsen, but within days of their arrival, Shlomo Wiesel died of exhaustion and despair. Wiesel was liberated from Bergen-Belsen on April 11, 1945, and was taken with a children's group to France where he began his recovery and resumed his education. He studied at the Sorbonne, where he worked on but never completed his Ph.D., and earned a meager living writing for Israeli newspapers. Wiesel came to the United States in 1956 as the United Nations correspondent for an Israeli newspaper, Yediot Acharonot. He became an American citizen in part because it was easier than dealing with the bureaucracy involved in renewing his French travel documents.

Weisel is the author of more than forty books. In his early books, Wiesel struggled to find meaning for his suffering, to endow his destiny and the history of the Jewish people with a transcendent purpose in the wake of what seemed to him to be the collapse of the religious covenantal framework. Night (1960), his first book to be published in English (translated from the French), is a memoir, although it is often described as a novel. It is the only book aside from a chapter in his autobiography, All Rivers Run to the Sea (1995), in which Wiesel directly deals with the Holocaust. Widely regarded as a classic in Holocaust literature, Night is the story of a young boy, reared in the ways of Torah and fascinated by the eternity of Israel. The protagonist is rudely shocked by history when he is transported from his hometown of Sighet to Auschwitz, from a world infused with God's presence to a world without God and humanity. An earlier version of the work, written in Yiddish and entitled When the World Was Silent, was first published in Argentina in 1956 after a decade of self-imposed silence. The later, French version of the book is shorter and couched in less overtly angry language, and featured an introduction by Wiesel's mentor, the French writer Francois Mauriac.

Night forms one part of a trilogy. It was followed by the novel Dawn (1961), which tells the story of a Holocaust survivor who is recruited to join a Jewish underground organization in pre-state Palestine. The protagonist of this novel is chosen to execute a British soldier in retaliation for the execution of one of his comrades. The final volume of the trilogy was originally published in English under the title Accident (1962; its title in French was Le Jour). This is the story of a Holocaust survivor who became a correspondent for an Israeli newspaper. The protagonist is struck by a car (the "accident" of the title) and hovers between life and death. His condition serves as the externalization of the survivor's inner struggle.

Only in Weisel's fourth book, The Town Beyond the Wall (1964), does the author succeed in the effort to endow suffering with meaning. The major character is a young Holocaust survivor who has made his way to Paris after the war. His mentor, the man who teaches him the meaning of survival, is not a Jew with memories of Sinai and Auschwitz. Rather, he is a Spaniard who learned his own lessons of death and love during the Spanish Civil War. From this man, Pedro, the young survivor learns two lessons that have shaped Wiesel's writings ever since. Pedro tells the young man:

You frighten me. . . . You want to eliminate suffering by pushing it to its extreme: to madness. To say "I suffer therefore I am" is to become the enemy of man. What you must say is "I suffer therefore you are." Camus wrote that to protest against a universe of unhappiness you had to create happiness. That's an arrow pointing the way: it leads to another human being. And not via absurdity.

In other words, Pedro teaches the protagonist that the only way to redeem suffering and endow it with meaning is to treat its memory as a source of healing. In his public career and in all the rest of his writings, Wiesel has remained faithful to this insight.

With Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Herschel, Wiesel came to represent Jewish history and values to Jews and non-Jews outside of Israel. He is particularly revered throughout the American Jewish community, having achieved iconic status. Non-Jews also perceive Wiesel as the non-Israeli embodiment of the Jewish people for this generation, and because he is not an Israeli, Wiesel is untainted by some of the negative aspects of Israel's late twentieth and early twenty-first century policies.

Wiesel neither directs any organization nor heads any movement, he has no institutional base. Unlike Jacob Neusner or the late Gershom Scholem, Wiesel has not defined a field of scholarship. Although employed by a university—Wiesel is the Andrew Mellon University professor of the Humanities at Boston University—he has not built a power base within academia. Widely regarded as a spokesperson for Israel, he deliberately stands apart from partisan Israeli politics. In Israel, for a time, he was regarded by many as yored, one who has left Israel and abandoned the quest for a national Jewish renaissance in the ancient homeland. The one institutional base he did enjoy—as chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council—was rather problematic, and Wiesel was uncomfortable with his institutional role. He served in this capacity for eight years, but resigned on the eve of his departure for Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1986. (The museum's architectural design and the creation of the exhibition's storyline were created after his resignation.) Wiesel is perhaps the only Jewish leader who speaks without the power of office or vast wealth to command the attention and respect of his audience. Seemingly aloof from politics, he stands above the controversies that consume most others within the American Jewish leadership.

Although Wiesel has influenced both Jewish and Christian theologians, he is not a religious figure in any ordinary sense. Rabbis lead their congregations; they speak from their pulpits; they are ordained by tradition. Hasidic masters have a court and a community, disciples and students, followers and supporters. They counsel their community and have authority over their followers. Theologians propose new religious interpretations and gain influence by virtue of their teachings. Wiesel has been called a non-Orthodox rebbe, the leader of a diverse group of admirers and followers, yet he does not exercise his authority in any direct way. Wiesel's teachings are open to diverse interpretations depending on the background of the critic. Like a Hasidic master, Wiesel has more admirers and followers than peers or friends.

What Wiesel offers is entry into the experience of the Holocaust and the shadows that remain in its aftermath. The sacred mystery of our time may be the face not of God, but of the anti-God: the evil side of humanity. Through Wiesel's work and persona, the non-survivor is offered a glimpse of what was but is no longer, of unspeakable horror and of the painful but productive process of regeneration after destruction. The non-survivor is offered only a glimpse, for as Wiesel has said: "only those who were there will ever know and those who were there can never tell."

Wiesel always writes as a Jew, but he does not speak only of Jews. He raises his voice on behalf of all who are in pain, all who are in need of refuge. He was a visible and influential spokesman for Soviet Jewry, taking trips to the Soviet Union during the 1960s and telling of his encounters with Soviet Jews in The Jews of Silence (1966). He is also an ardent supporter of Israel and refuses to criticize Israel outside of Israel. His attitude toward Israel is primarily one of gratitude for its creation, and in this he has much in common with many other Holocaust survivors. He worked against apartheid in South Africa, and continues to take up the cause of black South Africans and starving Ethiopians, as he did in earlier years for Biafrans. He has asked for refuge for Central Americans and for Iranian Bahais in much the same way as he pleaded for Soviet Jews. He traveled to Thailand to plead for the Cambodian victims of genocide and to Argentina to act of behalf of disappeared persons. Wiesel considers all these events a shadow of the Holocaust, a reflection of an evil unleashed across the planet—one whose mysterious implications are not yet known.

An example of Wiesel's style in influencing others can be seen in his encounter with president Ronald Reagan over the President's proposed 1985 trip to Bitburg to lay a wreathe at the graves of Waffen SS soldiers. Even within the American Jewish community, many were reluctant to confront the President, who had thus far been so supportive of Israel, but Wiesel provoked a confrontation with Reagan, and did so courteously, deliberately, and insistently. Just days before the president's scheduled trip to Germany, Wiesel attended a White House ceremony to receive the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal. While there, he took the opportunity to speak his mind, and said, "I belong to an ancient people that speaks truth to power." Speaking directly to president Reagan he said: "that place is not your place, Mr. President. Your place is with the victims of the SS."

Charles Silberman, a distinguished commentator on American Jewish history, regards this moment as a high point in the assertion of Jewish dignity and Jewish acceptance within America, ranking it with the nomination of senator Joseph I. Lieberman, an observant Jew, as the Democratic candidate for Vice President in 2000. A man of peace, Wiesel nonetheless supported president George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003. He explained that he opposed all war and the killing it entails, but believed that some evils must be confronted.

Teaching has always been central to Wiesel's very sense of self. He first taught as a Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at the City College of New York (1972–1976). Since 1976, he has been the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, where he also holds the title of University Professor. He is a member of the faculty in the Department of Religion as well as that of the Department of Philosophy. He was the first Henry Luce Visiting Scholar in Humanities and Social Thought at Yale University, a position he held from 1982 to 1983.

Wiesel has received numerous awards. In addition to the Nobel Prize for Peace, which he received in 1986, he was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal, and the Medal of Liberty. In addition, he was granted the rank of Grand-Croix in the French Legion of Honor. He is married to Marion Wiesel, who often serves as his translator, and they have one son, Elisha.

SEE ALSO Auschwitz; Holocaust; Memoirs of Survivors; Psychology of Survivors

Michael Berenbaum