Elie Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor who became an eloquent witness for the 6 million Jews slaughtered in World War-II and who, more than anyone else, seared the memory of the Holocaust on the world’s conscience, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.
Menachem Rosensaft, a long-time friend and founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, confirmed the death.
Charismatic lecturerMr. 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, the traumatised 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.”
Mr. Wiesel first gained attention in 1960 with the English translation of “Night,” his autobiographical account of the horrors he witnessed in the camps as a teenage boy. He wrote of how he had been plagued by guilt for having survived while millions died, and tormented by doubts about a God who would allow such slaughter.
President Barack Obama, who visited the site of the Buchenwald concentration camp with Wiesel in 2009, called him a “living memorial.”
“He raised his voice, not just against anti-Semitism, but against hatred, bigotry and intolerance in all its forms,” the president said Saturday in a statement.
“He implored each of us, as nations and as human beings, to do the same, to see ourselves in each other and to make real that pledge of ‘never again.'”
In his 1966 book The Jews of Silence: A Personal Report on Soviet Jewry , Mr. Wiesel called attention to Jews who were being persecuted for their religion and yet barred from emigrating. — New York Times News Service
