Elie Wiesel, Auschwitz Survivor, Dies at 87

[Natalka]

Elie Wiesel, the Auschwitz survivor who became an eloquent witness for the six million Jews slaughtered in World War II and who, more than anyone, seared the memory of the Holocaust on the world’s conscience, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.

Mr. Wiesel was the author of several dozen books and was a charismatic lecturer and humanities professor. In 1986, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But he was defined not so much by the work he did as by the gaping void he filled. In the aftermath of the Germans’ systematic massacre of Jews, no voice had emerged to drive home the enormity of what had happened and how it had changed mankind’s conception of itself and of God. For almost two decades, both the traumatized survivors and American Jews, guilt-ridden that they had not done more to rescue their brethren, seemed frozen in silence.

But by the sheer force of his personality and his gift for the haunting phrase, Mr. Wiesel, who had been liberated from Buchenwald as a 16-year-old with the indelible tattoo A-7713 on his arm, gradually exhumed the Holocaust from the burial ground of the history books.

It was this speaking out against forgetfulness and violence that the Nobel committee recognized when it awarded him the peace prize in 1986.
“Wiesel is a messenger to mankind,” the Nobel citation said. “His message is one of peace, atonement and human dignity. His belief that the forces fighting evil in the world can be victorious is a hard-won belief.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/wo...ner=IFTTT&_r=1



Born in Sighet, Romania on 30 September 1928, Wiesel became best known for his book Night, which drew on his experiences in Nazi concentration camps during the final years of the second world war. Barely a teenager when Hungary annexed his town and forced its Jewish people into ghettos in 1940, Wiesel was then sent with his father to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, Poland.

His mother and sister were killed in gas chambers. After a forced march to Buchenwald, his father, already suffering from dysentery, was killed by an SS officer’s beating.

Freed from the camp at 16, Wiesel moved to France with other Jewish survivors and became a journalist for French and Israeli papers in the late 1940s. He moved to the US in 1955 and became a US citizen in 1963. In the late 1950s he completed Night, which was translated into English in 1960. The book, which was turned down by more than a dozen publishers, became a perennial bestseller, selling an estimated 10m copies.

Wiesel completed more than 40 other books, including Dawn and Day, which also addressed the Holocaust. He married Marion Rose, another survivor, in Jerusalem in 1969, and wrote and lectured at universities including Yale, Columbia, Boston University and City University of New York.

In 1986, the Nobel committee called Wiesel “a messenger to mankind”. He accepted the peace prize with characteristic grace.


“I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget,” he said in his acceptance speech, “because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.


“We must always 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 or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...-survivor-dies

[gryphon]

My grandfather met him but not under the best circumstances. They met in the camps.