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Elie Wiesel

1928–2016 · 88 years

Survived Auschwitz, then took ten years deciding how to speak

Portrait of Elie Wiesel — John Mathew Smith &amp — www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA — 2010 — CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Sighet sat in the Carpathians, and the Wiesel household there spoke Yiddish, kept a shop, and raised a son who studied Talmud and wanted to study Kabbalah. Germany occupied Hungary, which then held the town, in March 1944. In May the Hungarian authorities, under German pressure, deported the town's Jews to Auschwitz. The SS killed his mother Sarah and his younger sister Tzipora on arrival. He and his father Shlomo were kept for labor and later sent to Buchenwald, where Shlomo died weeks before the U.S. Third Army reached the camp on April 11, 1945. Eliezer was 16. His older sisters, Beatrice and Hilda, had survived. A transport of orphaned children carried him to France.

He reached New York in 1955 for an Israeli paper and naturalized in 1963. The career and the institutions were American. For ten years he had refused to write about the camps. François Mauriac talked him out of it. A 900-page Yiddish manuscript became a short French book in 1955 and Night in 1960, after more than 15 publishers said no. It sold roughly 1,000 copies in 18 months. It is now so widely assigned in American schools that the New York Times reclassified it off the bestseller list as a classic. 57 books followed, and Boston University from 1976.

Jimmy Carter made him chairman of the President's Commission on the Holocaust on November 1, 1978. The museum it recommended opened in Washington in 1993 with a sentence of his cut into the stone at the entrance: For the dead and the living, we must bear witness. The Norwegian Nobel Committee gave him the Peace Prize in 1986 and called him a messenger to mankind. The sharpest moment came earlier. On April 19, 1985, Reagan handed him the Congressional Gold Medal and Wiesel asked him not to lay a wreath at Bitburg, where Waffen-SS men are buried. That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS. Reagan went on May 5. He kept intervening, on Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur, which he took to the UN Security Council in 2006.

Not everyone accepted the role. Peter Novick and others argued that his insistence on the Holocaust as a unique and uniquely Jewish event discouraged comparison. His Nobel lecture named Cambodians and Palestinians too. Critics on the left faulted his support for Jewish settlement and his 2010 ad placing Jerusalem above politics. In 1982 he quit the chair of a conference covering the Armenian genocide and lobbied against it, at Israel's request. In 2007 his foundation circulated a letter from 53 Nobel laureates condemning Armenian genocide denial. Bernard Madoff took 15.2 million dollars from that foundation and the Wiesels' savings. He called Madoff a thief, a scoundrel, a criminal. He died at his Manhattan home on July 2, 2016, at 87.

Lifespan

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Elie Wiesel's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Un di velt hot geshvign book
The 900-page Yiddish memoir, published in abridged form in Buenos Aires 1956
Night book
The English version, turned down by more than 15 publishers first 1960
The Trial of God book
A play built from three prisoners he saw put God on trial 1979
Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity other
Founded with his wife Marion after the Nobel 1986
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum other
Recommended by the commission he chaired from 1978 1993
All Rivers Run to the Sea book
The first volume of memoirs, carrying his life to 1969 1994

Life in brief

with age at each point

May 1944 aged 15 Deported from the Sighet ghetto to Auschwitz His mother Sarah and his younger sister Tzipora were killed on arrival.
April 11, 1945 aged 16 The U.S. Third Army liberates Buchenwald His father had died in the camp weeks earlier. Wiesel was 16.
1955 aged ~27 Moves to New York as correspondent for Yediot Ahronot He became an American citizen in 1963 after his stateless travel papers could not be renewed.
1960 aged ~32 Night appears in English The first printing was 3,000 copies and took three years to sell out.
November 1, 1978 aged 50 Carter names him chairman of the President's Commission on the Holocaust Its September 1979 report called for a national Holocaust museum.
April 19, 1985 aged 56 Takes the Congressional Gold Medal from Reagan and asks him not to go to Bitburg That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS. Reagan went on May 5.
October 14, 1986 aged 58 Named winner of the Nobel Peace Prize The committee called him a messenger to mankind.
April 22, 1993 aged 64 The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is dedicated in Washington He spoke at the ceremony and called the building a question mark rather than an answer.
July 2, 2016 aged 87 Dies at his home in Manhattan at 87 No cause was publicly disclosed.