Amidst all of the news in the world this week, one story in particular seems to have been ignored, and it seems an injustice that it has been. Who is Elie Wiesel? Or rather, who was? He received a Nobel Peace Prize. You might have read his best-selling book that’s been spotlighted in Oprah’s Book Club. The 87-year-old man passed away this past week, leaving behind him a legacy of humanitarianism and advocacy for those who cannot speak. But who was he?
He was only fifteen in 1944 when the Nazis captured his Jewish family, including himself, his three sisters, and his parents, and shipped them on a cattle car to Auschwitz. Both parents and his younger sister were killed at either Auschwitz or Buchenwald concentration camps. He watched helplessly as 90 percent of the other people in the concentration camps were exterminated. Starving, exhausted, and traumatized, Wiesel survived and was liberated from Buchenwald after the war was over. However, surviving the Holocaust did not end the incredible feats in his life.
By the time he was 19, he could speak six languages (including Yiddish, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Hebrew, and French) and was writing for both Israeli and French newspapers (he would later learn English). He studied literature, philosophy, and psychology at Sorbonne. He became a wartime correspondent and began translating Hebrew to Yiddish and French, so that other Jews would be aware of the happenings of war in the world and in their homelands, as he believes his family’s fate would have been much different in WWII if someone had cared enough to tell them of the war and the concentration camps. In an interview with New York Times in 1981, he said, ''If anyone had told us where we really were going, many of us would have fled to the mountains,'' says Mr. Wiesel. ''That's what hurt - that no one told us. We were so isolated: the rest of the world knew, but we didn't even know what the word 'Auschwitz' meant. The first day there, I was walking with my father and a man came up to tell us what was going on, and I remember saying to my father, 'It is impossible. We live in the 20th century, not the Middle Ages - people cannot be silent.' People were silent.''
And so became his legacy. He was silent on his experiences in the Holocaust for ten years before he wrote the 900-page manuscript, titled And the World Remained Silent in Yiddish. It was abridged and translated into French and then later into English as Night, and it would shake the world with the realities that he lived through during the Holocaust. But he didn’t stop there.
He wrote 57 books. He was a religion and philosophy professor at Boston University. He received the Congressional Gold Medal; the Presidential Medal of Freedom; The International Center in New York’s Award of Excellence; the Nobel Peace Prize. He became the iconic voice for those without a voice. He started the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity with his wife. He stood with Israel; the Kurds; Ethiopian Jews; apartheid victims in South Africa. He became a shining light to end racism, oppression, and violence.
Reading Mr. Wiesel’s novel Night in the tenth grade was one of the most influential books I have ever read. His story is beautifully crafted, and opened my eyes to many horrors of what the Holocaust really was. It is raw; tragic; terrible; and is one book I credit to educating me fully and to giving me a passion for compassion. If you haven’t read it, please do. Educate yourself to something that isn’t in the textbooks. In times such as these, we need his message.
”For me, every hour is grace. And I feel gratitude in my heart each time I can meet someone and look at his or her smile.” Elie Wiesel, 1928-2016
