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JERUSALEM, July 3, 2016

Updated: July 3, 2016 08:24 IST

Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and Nobel

laureate, has died
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"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life
into long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed ...," Wiesel wrote.
Elie Wiesel, who survived the Holocaust and went on to become an influential author and Nobel
Peace Prize winner, has died, Israel's Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem said on Saturday.
Activist and writer Elie Wiesel, the World War Two death camp survivor who won a Nobel Peace
Prize for becoming the life-long voice of millions of Holocaust victims, has died, Israel's
Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem said on Saturday.

Wiesel, a philosopher, speaker, playwright and professor who also campaigned for the tyrannized
and forgotten around the world, was 87.

The Romanian-born Wiesel lived by the credo expressed in "Night, his landmark story of the
Holocaust - to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

In awarding the Peace Prize in 1986, the Nobel Committee praised Wiesel as a messenger to
mankind and one of the most important spiritual leaders and guides in an age when violence,
repression and racism continue to characterize the world.

Wiesel did not waver in his campaign never to let the world forget the Holocaust horror. While at
the White House in 1985 to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, he even rebuked U.S.
President Ronald Reagan for planning to lay a wreath at a German cemetery where some of
Hitler's notorious Waffen SS troops were buried.

Don't go to Bitburg, Wiesel said. That place is not your place. Your place is with the victims of
the SS.

Wiesel became close to U.S. President Barack Obama but the friendship did not deter him from
criticizing U.S. policy on Israel. He spoke out in favor of Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem
and pushed the United States and other world powers to take a harder stance against Iran over its
nuclear program. Wiesel attended the joint session of the U.S. Congress in 2015 when Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke on the dangers of Iran's program.

Wiesel and his foundation both were victims of the wide-ranging Ponzi scheme run by New York
financier Bernie Madoff, with Wiesel and his wife losing their life's savings and the foundation
losing $15.2 million. 'Psychopath' - it's too nice a word for him, he said of Madoff in 2009.

Wiesel was a hollow-eyed 16-year-old when he emerged from the newly liberated Buchenwald
concentration camp in 1945. He had been orphaned by the Nazis and their identification number,
A-7713, was tattooed on his arm as a physical manifestation of his broken faith and the
nightmares that would haunt him throughout his life.

Wiesel and his family had first been taken by the Nazis from the village of Sighetu Marmatiei in
the Transylvania region of Romania to Auschwitz, where his mother and one of his sisters died.
Wiesel and his father, Shlomo, ended up in Buchenwald, where Shlomo died. In Night Wiesel
wrote of his shame at lying silently in his bunk while his father was beaten nearby.

After the war Wiesel made his way to France, studied at the Sorbonne and by 19 had become a
journalist. He pondered suicide and never wrote of or discussed his Holocaust experience until 10
years after the war as a part of a vow to himself. He was 27 years old in 1955 when Night was
published in Yiddish, and Wiesel would later rewrite it for a world audience.

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into long night,
seven times cursed and seven times sealed ..., Wiesel wrote. Never shall I forget those flames
that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me,
for all eternity, of the desire to live.

Asked by an interviewer in 2000 why he did not go insane, Wiesel said, To this day that is a
mystery to me.

By 2008, the New York Times said Night had sold an estimated 10 million copies, including 3
million after talk-show hostess Oprah Winfrey made it a spotlight selection for her book club in
2006.

In 1985 Wiesel helped break ground in Washington for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
and the following year was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In typical fashion, he dedicated the
prize to all those who survived the Nazi horror, calling them an example to humankind how not
to succumb to despair.

Wiesel, who became a U.S. citizen in 1963, was slight in stature but a compelling figure when he
spoke. With a chiseled profile, burning eyes and a shock of gray hair, he could silence a crowd by
merely standing up.

He was often described as somber. An old friend, Chicago professor Irving Abrahamson, once
said of him: I've never seen Elie give a belly laugh. He'll chuckle, he'll smile, there'll be a twinkle
in his eye. But never a laugh from within.

A few years after winning the peace prize, he established the Elie Wiesel Foundation for
Humanity, which, in addition to Israeli and Jewish causes, campaigned for Miskito Indians in
Nicaragua, Cambodian refugees, victims of South African apartheid and of famine and genocide
in Africa.

Wiesel wrote more than 50 books - novels, non-fiction, memoirs and many with a Holocaust
theme - and held a long-running professorship at Boston University. In one of his later books,
Open Heart, he used his 2011 quintuple-bypass surgery as impetus for reflection on his life.

I have already been the beneficiary of so many miracles, which I know I owe to my ancestors, he
wrote. All I have achieved has been and continues to be dedicated to their murdered dreams -
and hopes.

He collected scores of awards and honors, including an honorary knighthood in Britain. Mr.
Obama presented him the National Humanities Medal in 2009.

Wiesel was attacked in a San Francisco hotel in 2007 by a 22-year-old Holocaust denier, but not
injured.

Wiesel and wife Marion married in 1969 and their son, Elisha, was born in 1972.

Keywords: Elie Wiesel, Holocaust, Nobel laureate

International

July 3, 2016
Updated: July 4, 2016 03:50 IST

Holocaust survivor, Nobel winner,

conscience keeper
Joseph Berger

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Elie Wiesel speaking at the White House on September 28 1979. To his right is
then U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
V Geetanath

B Rishikesh Bahadurdesai

Zahid Rafiq

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Elie Wiesel, who seared the memory of the Holocaust on

the worlds conscience, died at the age of 87
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 worlds 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 lecturer

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
mankinds 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

Keywords: Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, Nobel prize

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Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, has diedJuly 3, 2016

OPINION COMMENT
July 17, 2016
Updated: July 17, 2016 00:15 IST
BOOK SCAN

Reading Elie Wiesel in Auschwitz

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This picture, of April 16, 1945, shows inmates of the German KZ Buchenwald inside their
barrack, a few days after U.S. troops liberated this concentration camp near Weimar, Germany.
The young man, seventh from left in the middle row bunk, is Elie Wiesel. PHOTO: AP/U.S.
ARMY


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Elie Wiesel at a news conference in Budapest, Hungary, on December 10, 2009. -- PHOTO:
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His special genius lay in rendering the survivor narrative as a

transformative experience
Has it ever happened to you that you discover a new author, and on the very day you
finish reading his book, he dies? It makes you wonder if it means anything in particular.

The name Elie Wiesel did not mean much to me until a month ago. I could have told you
he was a famous Holocaust survivor, nothing more. My first encounter with his work was
in Auschwitz on June 14, two weeks before he died. I was visiting Krakow, and had
signed up for the day tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

A numbing experience

I spent the morning absorbing the grisly history of the Auschwitz concentration camp. As
storm clouds gathered overhead, we walked in and out of barracks, prison cells, and
courtyards where, the guide told us, women and children had been starved to death, or
beaten to death, or lined up and shot, or set upon each other in numberless innovations
of cruelty. It was a numbing experience. I struggled to grasp the reality of what my eyes
saw: masses of human hair, mounds of shoes and suitcases, saucepans, mugs, and
chipped pieces of cutlery, the bare walls of what I was told was the gas chamber, piles of
Zyklon-B canisters that held the gas used in the gas chamber, ruins of crematoria that
once had a combined capacity of 4,576 corpses a day the stream of images seemed to
pass me by at one remove, as if we were in an immersive reality video about life in a
parallel universe.

At noon, the tour group dispersed for a half-hour lunch break. I headed for the museum
caf and bought myself a cheese sandwich. Unlike other museums, the one in Auschwitz
does not sell souvenirs. No crematorium-shaped fridge magnets. No cattle car key
chains. No blue-striped prisoner uniforms. But they sold books. I picked up, almost at
random, Elie Wiesels Night, a memoir of life in Auschwitz as a 15-year-old inmate.

It began to drizzle. I found shelter in the parking lot where we had to wait for the bus
that would take us to Birkenau, 3 km away. I opened the book and began to read, Did I
write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the
nature of madness, the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in
the conscience of mankind?

As I read, the images and words of that morning began to crystallise out of the semantic
fog that had shrouded them. The more vague his writing, the more meaning they seemed
to pack. The guide had said that when inmates arrived at the camp, all their belongings
were taken away from them. Wiesel writes, The beloved objects that we had carried with
us from place to place were now left behind in the wagon and, with them, finally, our
illusions.

What these beloved objects were, Wiesel does not tell us. But his words convey a more
important truth that they were illusions. None of the Jews on the train to Auschwitz
had any idea what awaited them. That is why they carried suitcases full of beloved
objects, piles of which I had seen on display earlier in the day.

It wasnt easy for me to read Night, and I did not finish it until two weeks later. What
remained with me was Wiesels first impressions of Auschwitz. This is the passage I was
copying into my diary on July 2. It contains little physical detail, but is all the more
powerful for it.

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long
night seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smokeNever shall I forget those
flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that
deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments that
murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
The survivor narrative

Wiesels special genius as a chronicler of the Holocaust lay not in his ability to invoke the
particular horrors of Auschwitz but in his gift for rendering the survivor narrative as a
transformative religious experience. His moral response to the unimaginable depravity
of man was to bear witness. The purpose of writing, too, was to bear witness. And the
reader, by reading, becomes a witness in turn, and that is how, he believed, evil is
defeated by fortifying memory against the forces of forgetting.

Yet Wiesels legacy is more ambiguous than it would appear. His critics have accused
him of sacralising the Jewish experience of the Holocaust and presenting Auschwitz as a
unique event that transcends history. These are serious charges, and not without merit.
Treating the Holocaust as outside the realm of ordinary human experience blinds us to
those elements of our civilisation that do carry the germs of Holocaust, and are capable
of causing an outbreak when the historical climate is propitious.

Another problem is the implicit Eurocentrism. For us postcolonials, isnt it more

important to get the white man to own up to the Holocausts visited upon every
continent that wasnt Europe? Why should the intra-European Jewish Holocaust
concern us more than the genocidal depredations of colonialism and slavery concern the
Jews of today? Maybe these questions are moot in a globalised world, maybe not.
Wiesels lasting achievement was to help create the space where they can be posed at all.

He did it by making the world listen to the stories of Holocaust survivors at a time when
it was not ready to do so. When Night came out in 1956, it sold less than 1,000 copies. It
went on to sell over 40 million. Wiesels intervention was instrumental in entrenching
the Holocaust as the pre-eminent morality tale of the 20th century an inspirational
tale in which good triumphs over evil, and the weak over the strong. The form of this
triumph is survival, and its armour, remembrance.

sampath.g@thehindu.co.in

Keywords: Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, Auschwitz-Birkenau