Modern Peacemakers

Elie
Wiesel
Messenger for Peace
MODERN PEACEMAKERS
Kofi Annan: Guiding the United Nations
Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams:
Partners for Peace in Northern Ireland
Henry Kissinger: Ending the Vietnam War
Nelson Mandela: Ending Apartheid in
South Africa
Desmond Tutu: Fighting Apartheid
Elie Wiesel: Messenger for Peace
Modern Peacemakers

Elie
Wiesel
Messenger for Peace

Heather Lehr Wagner

Elie Wiesel

Copyright © 2007 by Infobase Publishing

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wagner, Heather Lehr.
  Elie Wiesel, messenger for peace / Heather Lehr Wagner.
   p. cm. — (Modern peacemakers)
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  ISBN 0-7910-9220-8 (hardcover)
  1. Wiesel, Elie, 1928– 2. Authors, French—20th century—Biography. 3. Jewish
authors—Biography. 4. Holocaust survivors—Biography. I. Title.
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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 A Time of Darkness 1
2 Childhood in Sighet 8
3 Into the Night 15
4 Prisoner at Auschwitz 25
5 Refugee in France 37
6 An Accidental American 51
7 A New Sense of Hope 60
8 Winner of the Nobel Prize 72
9 Human Rights Activist 84
Appendix 95
Chronology 99
Notes 102
Bibliography 105
Further Reading 106
Index 108
 CHAPTER 1

A Time of
Darkness

I
n March 1944, German tanks crossed into Hungary. Hitler’s Third
Reich was entering its twilight. The mighty German military—
which had swept across Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Austria,
and had deluged London with bombs—had finally encountered
defeat in Russia. The army was now drafting old men and young
boys to replenish the ranks. Russian forces were sweeping west,
encroaching on German-occupied territory. In only a few months,
Allied forces would make the dramatic landing at Normandy
known as D-Day.
World War II was nearing its end. But in the midst of chaos and
defeat, the Third Reich maintained a steady focus on one of its most
terrible goals: the extermination of the Jewish people. In Hungary’s
capital, Budapest, Adolf Eichmann and 35 members of Hitler’s elite
paramilitary corps—the Schutzstaffel (“Protective Echelon”), or
S.S.—began preparations for the transport of Hungary’s Jews to a
concentration camp known as Auschwitz.
In the town of Sighet, in the Transylvanian region of Hun-
gary, news of the German occupation brought a mixture of

1
 Elie Wiesel

uncertainty and alarm. For several weeks, German soldiers

moved into Sighet. They treated the residents with courtesy
and politeness even as a series of Nazi policies began to restrict
Jewish freedoms.
For 15-year-old Elie Wiesel, the true horror began on May 16,
1944. Wiesel and his family had been isolated in a ghetto for Jew-
ish families shortly after the occupation began, but on that Tues-
day the Hungarian police began calling for the Jews to come out
to the street. Wiesel was soon outside in the heat with his father, a
prominent Sighet shopkeeper, as well as his grandmother, mother,
and three sisters.
The family knew—from what they had seen their neighbors
endure over the past few days—that their time had come to leave
their home, and that they would be taken to some unknown des-
tination. They were all wearing backpacks into which they had
stuffed a few precious possessions. The previous night, Wiesel’s
father had dug a hole in the backyard and buried the things they
dared not carry with them—jewelry, money, and a few valuable
objects. Wiesel added to the pile a gold watch he had received
when he celebrated his thirteenth birthday.
The family was marched through the streets to a smaller
ghetto in Sighet, where they moved into Wiesel’s uncle’s home.
His uncle, aunt, and cousins were gone, having been forced from
the home so quickly that the table was still set with the food they
had been unable to finish before leaving.
For several days, the Wiesels remained in the ghetto, waiting.
A woman who had worked for the family, a peasant named Mar-
tha, slipped passed the barricades and guards around the ghetto
and begged the family to leave with her.
“I know a safe place,” she said. “I wanted to come and tell
you. . . . To beg you. . . . The cabin in the mountains. . . It’s ready. . .
Come. . . .There’s nothing to fear there. . . .You’ll be safe. . . .
There are no Germans there. . . .”1
The family debated whether or not to leave with their former
housekeeper, but in the end, they did not.
 A Time of Darkness 

INTO THE DARKNESS

On Saturday, the Jewish day of rest, the Wiesels and those remain-
ing in the ghetto were ordered to assemble at dawn. They walked
to Sighet’s main synagogue through empty and silent streets. The
synagogue itself had been transformed into a makeshift shelter,
so crowded with people and their belongings that it was difficult
to breathe.2 The evidence that this had been a place of worship
was gone: the walls were bare; the hangings that once covered
them had been torn down; the altar was broken.
For 24 hours, Wiesel and his family waited in the synagogue.
Men and women were segregated; the men stayed downstairs
while the women remained on the second floor. No one was
allowed to leave. People were forced to relieve themselves indoors,
in a corner.
The next morning, they were marched to the train station,
where a line of cattle cars was waiting. Hungarian police man-
aged the operation, ordering their own citizens into the cars, 80
people to a car. A few loaves of bread and some buckets of water
were passed in; then the doors were slammed shut and the bars at
the window checked to confirm that they were secure. The train’s
whistle sounded, and the cars began to move.
There was not enough room to lie down. Sitting was only pos-
sible if Wiesel and the others took turns. There was not enough
air. After two days, the heat became unbearable and the passen-
gers suffered intense thirst.
The train left Hungary and traveled into Czechoslovakia. A
woman in Wiesel’s car began to scream, “I can see a fire! There
are huge flames! It is a furnace!”3 Her 10-year-old son tried in
vain to comfort her. Finally, the other passengers gagged her and
beat her until she was quiet.
Years later, Wiesel wrote, “Life in the cattle cars was the death
of my adolescence. How quickly I aged.”4
Finally, the train’s wheels slowed and stopped. Those standing
near the window could read the name of the station: Auschwitz.
The name meant nothing to the passengers onboard. For several
 Elie Wiesel

Jewish people deported from Hungary exited a boxcar onto a

crowded railway platform at the Auschwitz concentration camp in
May 1944. That month, the Wiesel family was sent from their home
in Sighet, Hungary, to Auschwitz. After leaving the train, Elie Wiesel
would never see his mother, his grandmother, or the youngest of his
three sisters again.

hours, the train remained at the station. Some buckets of drink-

ing water were passed into the train. Near midnight, the train
began to move again, slowing down after about 15 minutes.
Through cracks in the boards of the train, Wiesel could see
endless rows of barbed wire. He could hear shouts and barking
dogs. He could smell a strange odor in the night air.
Suddenly, the doors of the cattle cars were pulled open. A few
men, wearing striped shirts and black pants and carrying electric
torches and clubs, climbed onto the train. “Everybody get out!”
they yelled. “Everyone out of the wagon! Quickly!”5
 A Time of Darkness 

Possessions were left behind as the weak passengers scram-

bled out. A line of S.S. men stood guard with guns pointed at
those who had climbed from the cars.
“Stay together,” Wiesel’s mother said.6 It was only possible for
a moment, and then an S.S. guard ordered the male passengers to
the left and the women to the right. Wiesel glimpsed his mother,
grandmother, and his three sisters move off in a line. He could
see his mother stroking his seven-year-old sister’s golden hair.
Then they were gone, while Wiesel, holding onto his father’s arm,
moved off with the other men. He would never see his mother, his
grandmother, or his youngest sister again.
In Night, Wiesel’s powerful account of his life in the concen-
tration camp, he wrote:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which
has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed
and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never
shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw
turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith
forever.
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived
me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget
those moments which murdered my God and my soul and
turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things,
even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself.
Never.7

SURVIVAL
Wiesel spent 11 months in the concentration camps. He was 16
years old when American troops finally liberated Buchenwald,
the camp where he spent the final days of his imprisonment­—the
camp in which his father died.
 Elie Wiesel

After his release from the concentration camps, Elie Wiesel became
a writer and later an outspoken advocate for victims of persecution.
His advocacy and activism led to his winning the Nobel Peace Prize in
1986. In 2002, he spoke at a conference on global anti-Semitism held
by the Anti-Defamation League in New York, shown above.

After the liberation, Wiesel traveled to France, one of the few

countries willing to accept Jewish refugees. He learned French,
attended school, and became a journalist. For 10 years, he kept
silent about what he had seen. Finally, a friend, French writer
François Mauriac, suggested that Wiesel tell the world what he
had witnessed. The result was Night, Wiesel’s searing account of
his 11 months in the camps, which would ultimately be translated
into more than 30 languages.
Wiesel would be silent no longer, later authoring more than 40
books, many of which focus on his experiences during and after
the war. He became an outspoken advocate for all those who have
suffered persecution and death, including Soviet and Ethiopian
 A Time of Darkness 

Jews; Nicaragua’s Miskito Indians; Argentina’s Desaparecidos;

Cambodian refugees; the Kurds; and victims of famine and geno-
cide in Africa, apartheid in South Africa, and war in the former
Yugoslavia.
In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed Wiesel as chair-
man of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust and, two
years later, Wiesel became the founding chairman of the United
States Holocaust Memorial Council. As a teacher and author,
Wiesel has dedicated his life to working for peace, correct-
ing injustice, and giving a voice to those unable to speak for
themselves.
In 1986, Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recog-
nition of his role as “one of the most important spiritual leaders
and guides in an age when violence, repression and racism con-
tinue to characterize the world.”8 The Nobel Committee stated
that Wiesel, “with his message and through his practical work
in the cause of peace, is a convincing spokesman for the view of
mankind and for the unlimited humanitarianism which are at all
times necessary for a lasting and just peace.”9
In his acceptance speech, Wiesel explained the mission that
began on that train ride into the darkness, a mission that had
become his life’s focus:

As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be

true. As long as one child is hungry, our life will be filled with
anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to
know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them,
that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that
while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our free-
dom depends on theirs. . . . Our lives no longer belong to us
alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.10
CHAPTER 2

Childhood
in Sighet

E
liezer Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, a small
town in Transylvania. His parents were Shlomo and Sarah
Wiesel. The family already included two daughters, Wie-
sel’s older sisters, Hilda and Bea.
Sighet is in the northwestern corner of Transylvania, in what
today is Romania, near the Hungarian border. The region has
changed hands frequently. Wiesel’s grandparents lived under the
rule of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. By the time Wiesel was
born, Sighet and all of Transylvania had been seized by Romania.
Romania allied itself with the Nazis in World War II, although
the union came at a heavy price. In 1940, Romania lost about 30 per-
cent of its land and population, being forced under German pressure
to grant a portion of its territory to the Soviet Union, another portion
to Bulgaria, and a third portion of its land (including northern Tran-
sylvania) to Hungary. When Wiesel was about 11 years old, Sighet
became a Hungarian town. Soon after, Hungary would be invaded
by German troops, but the region was known for anti-Semitism long
before Nazi troops marched across the borders.

8
 Childhood in Sighet 

Sighet had a strong Jewish community when Wiesel was a

boy—an estimated 15,000 Jews lived there at the time. Wiesel’s
father worked at a community center, helping to assist Jewish
prisoners and refugees, in addition to running his own business,
a small grocery store. Shlomo Wiesel was a leader in his town, the
sort of man that people consulted for advice and aid.
Wiesel was strongly influenced by both of his grandfathers. His
maternal grandfather, Reb Dodye Feig, was a devout man, a Hasidic
Jew who encouraged Wiesel to study the Talmud (a Jewish scholarly
text). Wiesel was named for his paternal grandfather, who died while
serving in World War I. He had been working as a stretcher-bearer,
and was killed while trying to help a wounded man. Wiesel’s pater-
nal grandfather was also a very religious man. Wiesel’s grandmother
once told young Elie, “Shabbat [the Sabbath] with him was paradise.
The house and garden were bathed in an indescribable heavenly
purity and I could hear angels singing with us, in his honor.”11
Wiesel’s family continued these devout traditions. Sighet’s
Jewish community would begin to prepare for the Sabbath on
Friday afternoons. Shops were closed before sundown. The family
would bathe, and then walk to the synagogue for services. Wiesel
began religious studies in classical Hebrew at a very young age,
shortly after he began to talk.
“I spent most of my time talking to God more than to people,”
Wiesel recalled in an interview in 1996. “He was my partner, my
friend, my teacher, my king, my sovereign, and I was so crazily
religious that nothing else mattered.”12 Wiesel was especially
influenced by the ideas of the Hasidic sect of Judaism, which is
marked by mysticism.
When he was eight years old, Wiesel’s mother took him to see
Rabbi Israel of Wizhnitz, a prominent Jewish leader in Transyl-
vania. The rabbi spoke first with Wiesel, then for a few moments
with his mother while Wiesel waited outside. His mother emerged
from the meeting sobbing, leaving Wiesel convinced that he had
somehow embarrassed her or done something terrible for which
the rabbi had scolded her.
10 Elie Wiesel

It was not until 25 years later that Wiesel learned the reason
for his mother’s tears, from a cousin who was then living in New
York and had witnessed the scene some two and a half decades
earlier. The rabbi had told Wiesel’s mother, “Sarah, know that
your son will become a gadol b’Israel, a great man in Israel, but
neither you nor I will live to see the day. That’s why I’m telling
you now.”13

TRACES OF UNREST
Despite the relative calm in Sighet, there were hints of the coming
darkness. Occasional outbursts of anti-Semitism threatened the
community. Wiesel later recalled,

Twice a year, Christmas and Easter, we were afraid to go out

because those nights we used to be beaten up by hoodlums. It
didn’t matter that much. In a way, I was almost used to that.
I saw it as part of nature. It’s cold in the winter, it’s hot in the
summer and at Christmas you are being beaten up by a few
anti-Semitic hoodlums.14

Wiesel’s family spoke Yiddish at home, but they read newspapers

and conducted business in the grocery store in German, Roma-
nian, or Hungarian. In Sighet, Ukrainian, Russian, and other lan-
guages were also spoken. The family, although not wealthy, was
more fortunate than many of their neighbors. Many of Wiesel’s
classmates were poor and hungry. Wiesel frequently shared his
food and gifts with them.
His early memories of school contain a curious mixture of
religious fervor and fear. He wrote,

In my little village, which in winter was blanketed in snow, the

Jewish children got up early, very early, to go to school—the
heder [religious elementary school]—to say their morning
prayers and study the Bible and the textual commentaries on
 Childhood in Sighet 11

Refugees from the Carpatho-Ukraine region enter Sighet in March

1939, after Hungarian troops took over the region. Sighet, Elie Wiesel’s
hometown, was like a melting pot, with residents who spoke Yiddish,
Hungarian, Romanian, German, Ukrainian, and Russian. When Wiesel
was born in 1928, Sighet was under Romanian control. A little more
than a decade later, the city came under Hungarian control.

the Scripture. During the winter I lighted my way with an oil

lamp. It was dark outside, and I was afraid.15

Wiesel was often ill as a child. His mother took him to reli-
gious leaders, to be blessed by them, and also to a series of doc-
tors, once traveling as far as Budapest to visit a specialist.
When Wiesel was eight years old, his sister Tzipora was born.
While Wiesel’s older sisters helped in the family store, his father
encouraged him to study. Wiesel’s father urged Wiesel to devote
as much time to his secular studies and to the modern Hebrew
language as to his classical religious studies. Wiesel’s mother
hoped he would become a rabbi with a doctorate.
12 Elie Wiesel

Events in the rest of Europe seemed distant to Wiesel as his

childhood continued. At synagogue and while listening to his
father’s conversations, Wiesel would hear mention of a fire at
Germany’s Reichstag, civil war in Spain, the end of the League of
Nations, but these mattered little to Wiesel.
Of more immediate concern was the rising tide of anti-
Semitism closer to home. Occasionally, the message “Jews to
Palestine!” would be scrawled on the town’s walls. At the time,
there was a movement to encourage Jews to leave Romania,
which inspired anti-Semites to suggest that the Jews be forcibly
deported to Palestine (then a British protectorate). Romania had
its own version of the Nazis, known as Kuzists, who would attack
Jews in the street for no apparent reason. When an attack threat-
ened, Wiesel’s father would tell his children not to go to school,
and the grocery store would be bolted shut. If danger seemed
especially near, the family would sometimes hide in their cellar.
Wiesel and his classmates questioned their teachers about
the reasons for this anti-Semitism. The teachers responded by
encouraging them to read the Bible and the words of the prophets.
In these stories, they would find a history full of conflict between
Jews and others. There were many tales of Jewish martyrs, people
who suffered because of their faith.
Wiesel spent his free time reading avidly. He did not know
how to swim, and unlike many of his friends, he did not spend
time skiing, playing soccer, or playing tennis. He would some-
times play chess or cards. In warm weather, he would walk along
the Tisza or the Iza, the two rivers that ran through Sighet. He
also learned to play the violin.

CHANGING RULE
Sighet was caught in a region that shifted with politics and power.
When Wiesel’s father was born, Sighet had been part of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire and was called Máramarosszighet. By the time
Wiesel was born, it had become part of the kingdom of Romania,
 Childhood in Sighet 13

and was known as Sighetul Marmaţiei. As a teenager, Wiesel saw

the region fall under Hungarian control, becoming known again as
Máramarosszighet. Suddenly, Wiesel was forced to learn the Hun-
garian national anthem rather than the Romanian royal hymn.
In 1938, when Wiesel was 10 years old, German troops
invaded Czechoslovakia; as a result, Czech refugees began pass-
ing through Sighet. War soon spread, and Polish refugees joined
the procession through town. The family learned of the persecu-
tion of Jews in Germany and Poland, but believed they would
be safe; they trusted that Hitler would be overthrown, that the
European powers would overwhelm the Third Reich.
Stories of the German army’s strength, the brutality of Nazi
Germany, and Hitler’s hatred of Jews reached Sighet. There were
tales of arrests, persecution, and even massacres from the Pol-
ish refugees. Yet, even as Germany invaded the Netherlands,
Belgium, and Luxembourg, the Wiesels did not panic. Wiesel
explained this in his memoir All Rivers Run to the Sea:

The truth is that, in spite of everything we knew about Nazi

Germany, we had an inexplicable confidence in German cul-
ture and humanism. We kept telling ourselves that this was,
after all, a civilized people, that we must not give credence to
exaggerated rumors about its army’s behavior. . . .We all fell
into the trap history had set for us. During World War I the
Germany army had rescued Jews who, under Russian occu-
pation, had been beaten, ridiculed, and oppressed by savage
Cossacks whose mentality and traditions were steeped in anti-
Semitism. When they left, our region enjoyed a spell of calm.
The German officers had been courteous and helpful, unlike
the Cossacks. Lulled by memories of the Germans of that era,
the Jews refused to believe that their sons could be inhuman.
In this, the Jews were not alone.16

The war, with its sounds of distant gunfire, marked the end of
Wiesel’s childhood in many ways. The child he had been stayed
14 Elie Wiesel

with him, however, urging him to make the most of the life he
had been given. As an adult, he would often describe this sense
that the child continued to shape the man: “Sometimes I feel
that the child accompanies me, questions me, judges me. . . .
It’s the child who asks you: ‘So, Adult, what have you done with
my future?’”17
 CHAPTER 3

Into the
Night

W
iesel returned to his childhood home, Sighet, several times as
an adult—once on his own, once with a television crew
working on a documentary, and once as a guest of the
Romanian-Jewish community. Each time, he found the town little
changed in its appearance since his youth. The mountains and riv-
ers, the small winding streets, the peasants in their traditional dress,
all seemed to belong to another age.
The town seemed untouched by the nightmare that had forever
altered Wiesel’s life, but there was one important difference. “The
Jews of my city are now forgotten,” Wiesel wrote, “erased from its
memory. Before, there were some 30 synagogues in Sighet; today,
only one survives. The Jewish tailors, the Jewish cobblers, the Jew-
ish watchmakers have vanished without a trace, and strangers have
taken their place.”18
The Holocaust in Sighet came with amazing swiftness. “In the
space of six weeks,” Wiesel wrote, “a vibrant and creative community
had been condemned first to isolation, then to misery, and finally to
deportation and death.”19

15
16 Elie Wiesel

The Wiesels first learned that German troops were occupying

Hungary on March 19, 1944. Word reached the family that the
presence of German troops was encouraging outbursts of anti-
Semitic activity in many Hungarian towns and villages. Restric-
tions soon followed. Jewish stores were closed. The Wiesels and
other Jews were only allowed to leave their homes at certain times.

Adolf Eichmann

The arrival of Adolf Eichmann in Sighet in May 1944 marked

the beginning of a time of terror for the Jewish population of
that town. Karl Adolf Eichmann was born in 1906 near Cologne,
Germany. His family moved to Austria when Eichmann was
about seven years old, and three years later, Eichmann’s
mother died.
As a young man, Eichmann worked first for his father’s
oil-extraction business, and later for an electrical engineer-
ing company and for an oil company. In April 1932, Eichmann
joined the Nazi Party. He was laid off from his job in 1933, and
moved to Germany. There he spent time at an S.S. training
center before being posted to Dachau concentration camp.
From there he joined a Berlin branch of the SD, the Nazi Party
Security Service.
Eichmann soon joined the division of the SD known as the
“Jewish section,” which specialized in determining a solution to
dealing with Germany’s Jewish population, viewed by the Nazis
as “enemies.” Initially, Eichmann worked on the idea of forced
Jewish emigration to Palestine, even visiting Palestine in 1937.
After only one day, Eichmann ended his trip and returned to
Germany, where he cautioned the SD about the danger of cre-
ating a strong Jewish state. Instead, Eichmann recommended,
the SD should encourage Jews to emigrate to underdeveloped
countries where they would live in poverty. Eichmann was then
assigned to the SD in Vienna.
In March 1938, Germany invaded Austria. Eichmann was
charged with finding a way to increase Jewish emigration from
 Into the Night 17

Jewish government employees were fired. Jews could not walk in

parks, go to the movies, or ride the bus or train.
Germans dressed in black uniforms rode into Sighet in tanks,
jeeps, and on motorcycles. At first, they behaved with great
politeness. Officers moved into the wealthier Jewish homes, but
treated their “hosts” politely, making their own beds and giving

the country. He created an efficient, centralized system to

process Jewish emigration papers and, within a few months,
his office had overseen the emigration of 150,000 Jews, who
left Austria with a passport and an exit visa but without their
property or cash.
This program was viewed as so successful that Eichmann
was ordered to set up similar offices in Prague and later in
Berlin. During the conquest of Poland, with its population
of nearly a million Jews, Eichmann faced a difficulty: fewer
countries willing to accept Jews, making emigration difficult.
Instead, Eichmann devised a different plan: deporting all
Jews to a specially designated “Jewish territory.” He trav-
eled to Poland, found an area that seemed appropriate, and
ordered thousands of Czech and Austrian Jews to be sent
east to this territory.
In March 1944, after German troops invaded Hungary,
Eichmann traveled to Budapest and personally oversaw
the deportation of more than 437,000 Jews in eight weeks.
Most of these, including members of Wiesel’s family, were
murdered when they arrived at the Auschwitz-Birkenau con-
centration camps.
Eichmann escaped at the end of the war and went into
hiding in Argentina under the name Ricardo Klement. He was
abducted by Israeli agents on May 11, 1960, and taken to
Jerusalem, where he stood trial for crimes against the Jewish
people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The trial
lasted four months, and more than 100 witnesses testified
against Eichmann. He was found guilty, sentenced to death,
and hanged on May 31, 1962.
18 Elie Wiesel

the children candy. Restrictions soon changed life very quickly.

Jewish people were forced to wear a yellow star on their clothing.
Special units of the army and the Hungarian police began raiding
Jewish homes, demanding jewelry, silver, and foreign money.
At Wiesel’s home, three men went through the family’s house
and the store. Cupboards were searched, drawers were opened,
and books were thrown onto the floor. Posters appeared on the
walls of Sighet announcing that anyone who opposed the new
laws would be shot. Then an announcement came that all Jews
must move into a ghetto—a designated section of the city—that
had been created in the town. Wiesel noted that escape was still
possible at this point.

It was a mild spring, and they [the Jews of Sighet] had only to
flee to the mountains until the ordeal was over. Maria—our old
housekeeper, wonderful Maria who had worked for us since I
was born—begged us to follow her to her home. She offered us
her cabin in a remote hamlet. There would be room for all six of
us, and Grandma Nissel as well. . . . She would take care of us,
she would handle everything. We said no, politely but firmly. We
did so because we still didn’t know what was in store for us.20

The Wiesel family home was within the portion of Sighet that
had been designated as the Jewish ghetto, so they did not need to
move. They did rearrange their rooms, however, keeping the larg-
est one and giving other rooms to relatives.
Adolf Eichmann and another high-ranking Gestapo officer
arrived in Sighet in May. Wiesel’s father and other Jewish leaders
were called to a meeting, where they learned that transports were
to begin the following day. The Wiesels were not among the first to
leave. Wiesel and his sister walked among those awaiting transport
in the hot street, offering them pots and bottles filled with water.
The family could hear the noise of Soviet artillery and see
flashes of light in the mountains. The Soviet troops were only
about a dozen miles away.
 Into the Night 19

Once more Maria appeared at the Wiesel home; once more

she offered to hide them. Again, they refused. Within a few days,
the family would be forced from their home, onto the tightly
packed cattle cars, and transported to Auschwitz.

THE KINGDOM OF DARKNESS

The trains carried them to Birkenau, in Poland, where prisoners at
Auschwitz were first processed. Men and women were separated.
The young and old were immediately pulled away—sometimes
violently—and sent directly to the gas chambers.
In Night, Wiesel wrote of being approached by another pris-
oner while clinging to his father’s arm, after they had left the
train and watched Wiesel’s mother, grandmother, and three sis-
ters walk off in a different direction. The prisoner quietly asked
Wiesel his age.

“I’m not quite fifteen yet,” Wiesel replied.

“No. Eighteen.”
“But I’m not,” Wiesel said. “Fifteen.”
“Fool. Listen to what I say.”
Then the prisoner questioned Wiesel’s father, who replied:
“Fifty.”
“No, not fifty. Forty. Do you understand? Eighteen and
forty.”
He disappeared into the night shadows.21

The advice undoubtedly saved the lives of Wiesel and his father.
The men were marched into a square, where Dr. Mengele—the S.S.
officer charged with selecting prisoners for work or extermina-
tion—stood with a conductor’s baton, which he would wave to the
right or left. When Wiesel reached him, he was asked his age:

“Eighteen.” My voice was shaking.

“Are you in good health?”
20 Elie Wiesel

A German soldier at Auschwitz selects which prisoners would live

and which would be sent to the gas chamber. The men in line are
wearing yellow stars, designating them as Jewish. The young and old
were often selected to be killed. When Elie Wiesel and his father first
arrived at Auschwitz, another prisoner told them to lie about their ages
so they could avoid being automatically marked for death.

“Yes.”
“What’s your occupation?”
Should I say that I was a student?
“Farmer,” I heard myself say.22

Wiesel and his father were ordered into a long barracks with
blue-tinted skylights in the roof. There they were ordered to strip,
keeping only shoes and belts in their hands. The prisoners guard-
ing them yelled out orders while randomly striking anyone they
could reach. Naked and shivering, Wiesel and his father, with
the other captives, were ordered to a barber, where the hair was
shaved from their heads and bodies.
 Into the Night 21

Next, they were forced out of the barracks and into the icy
air, where they were ordered to run to a new barracks. There they
were soaked with gasoline, as a kind of disinfectant, and then
ordered into a shower. After this, still wet from the shower, they
were forced back outside, where they ran to another barracks.
Inside, a series of long tables had been set up with mounds of
prison clothes on them. Pants, shirts and socks were thrown to
the prisoners as they ran past.
“The night was gone,” Wiesel wrote more than a decade later.
“The morning star was shining in the sky. I too had become a
completely different person. The student of the Talmud, the child
that I was, had been consumed in the flames. There remained
only a shape that looked like me.”23
Later, an S.S. officer confronted the newly arrived prisoners.

Remember this. Remember it forever. Engrave it into your

minds. You are at Auschwitz. And Auschwitz is not a conva-
lescent home. It’s a concentration camp. Here, you have got to
work. If not, you will go straight to the furnace. To the crema-
tory. Work or the crematory—the choice is in your hands.24

AUSCHWITZ
Auschwitz was not initially intended as an extermination camp.
The first prisoners arrived there on June 14, 1940. Located in
southwest Poland, Auschwitz (or Oświęcim, as the camp was
called in Polish) was founded on the site of dilapidated Polish
army barracks on a stretch of flat and dreary land between the
Sola and Vistula rivers. Initially, Auschwitz was intended to serve
as a kind of holding concentration camp, or quarantine camp, as
the Nazis described it, where Poles would be kept until they were
sent on to other, more established concentration camps.25 S.S.
Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Rudolf Höss arrived in Auschwitz
on April 30, 1940, to take command of the camp—which did not
yet exist. Quickly it became clear that the camp would serve not
22 Elie Wiesel

as a way station, but as a place where prisoners would be held

indefinitely.
The camp was first intended to help subdue the Polish
population, but it quickly gained a reputation as a place for ter-
ror and high death rates—of the 20,000 Poles first sent to Aus-
chwitz, more than half were dead by 1942. 26 On July 28, 1941,
the process of murdering Auschwitz prisoners by gassing began.
At first, the process was reserved for the sick—those unable to
work. By late summer, experiments began at Auschwitz using
Zyklon B (an insecticide) to gas prisoners. This was viewed as an
improvement in efforts to deal with the vast number of Jews and
other political prisoners the Germans had targeted for elimina-
tion—a method much easier on the S.S. officers. They could kill
their victims at a safe distance, without having to look at them
too closely.
In September 1941, plans were made for Auschwitz to expand
to accommodate additional prisoners. This expansion would
become Birkenau, the section of Auschwitz where Wiesel and his
family first arrived. Birkenau was built without consideration for
sustaining life. The plans for the barracks reveal a design that
gave prisoners one-quarter of the space given inmates in the older
German concentration camps like Dachau. Birkenau was initially
designed to accommodate Soviet prisoners of war. In October
1941, Auschwitz architects also designed a new crematorium for
Birkenau to replace the one in use at the main camp.
By 1942, Auschwitz had evolved from a prison camp where
inmates worked—the gates at the entrance to Auschwitz carried
the message “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work brings freedom”)—to a
camp where, upon arrival, prisoners would be divided by gender
and separated into two groups: those thought able to work and
those who were not, due to illness or age. The latter would be
killed within hours of their arrival.
To avoid panic or rebellion, camp authorities informed those
prisoners targeted for death that they were going to take a shower
to be disinfected. As one S.S. guard at Auschwitz reported, the
 Into the Night 23

This aerial view, taken in August 1944, shows the layout of Auschwitz I,
the administrative center of the largest concentration camp run by the
Nazis. In 1944, more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to Aus-
chwitz, and more than 320,000 of them were dead within eight weeks
of arriving at the camp.

Jews targeted for extermination were told: “You will now bathe
and be disinfected. We don’t want any epidemics in the camp.
Then you will be brought to your barracks where you’ll get some
hot soup. You will be employed in accordance with your profes-
sional qualifications. Now undress and put your clothes in front
of you on the ground.”27 The prisoners would then be gently
encouraged into the gas chamber, the doors would be screwed
shut, and gas poured into the openings.
As Wiesel would learn, the secret to survival at Auschwitz lay
first in being able to work, and then in obtaining the most favor-
able work conditions possible—working for a more lenient super-
24 Elie Wiesel

visor, ideally indoors, or becoming useful to a specific German

who would be inconvenienced if you had to be replaced.
The first Jews from outside Poland to be transported to Aus-
chwitz arrived in the spring of 1942. They came from Slovakia. By
early summer of 1943, four combination crematoria-gas chambers
were operating at Auschwitz-Birkenau. These four crematoria had
the capacity to murder and dispose of 4,400 people every day.28
Doctors were hired to assist in the selection process—to eval-
uate whether or not a prisoner was fit for work. Perhaps the most
infamous—and the doctor who would evaluate Wiesel—was Josef
Mengele, who arrived at Auschwitz in March 1943, when he was
32 years old. Mengele’s infamy came from his willingness to use
the prisoners at Auschwitz for a series of medical experiments,
many involving horrific torture.
Wiesel and his family had the misfortune to arrive at Aus-
chwitz in 1944, when it would become the site of an almost
inconceivable mass murder. In fact, Hungarian Jews like Wiesel
would form the greatest number of victims. The change from
safety to imprisonment occurred more quickly for Hungarian
Jews than in any other country where the Nazis attempted to
exterminate Jews.
More than 400,000 Hungarian Jews were transported to Aus-
chwitz. The majority were murdered immediately upon arrival;
more than 320,000 were killed in less than eight weeks.29 Wiesel
and his father were among a very small number spared, simply
because they were thought able to provide slave labor.
 CHAPTER 4

Prisoner
at Auschwitz

S
oon after their arrival at the camp, Wiesel and his father were
forced on a half-hour march from Birkenau to Auschwitz.
Wiesel’s first impression was that their conditions had
improved—Auschwitz had two-story concrete buildings rather than
wooden barracks, and a few small gardens were visible. Once more,
Wiesel was forced into a shower, and once more forced to run naked
through the cold night air.
When he arrived at his new barracks, Wiesel was surprised when
the prisoner in charge there—a young Pole—spoke kindly to him
and to the others who were newly arrived:

Comrades, you’re in the concentration camp of Auschwitz.

There’s a long road of suffering ahead of you. But don’t lose cour-
age. You’ve already escaped the gravest danger: selection. So now,
muster your strength, and don’t lose heart. We shall all see the day
of liberation. Have faith in life. Above all else, have faith. Drive
out despair, and you will keep death away from yourselves. Hell is
not for eternity. And now, a prayer—or rather a piece of advice: let

25
26 Elie Wiesel

there be comradeship among you. We are all brothers, and we

are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all
our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive.30

The next day, the prisoners were tattooed with numbers on their
left arms. Wiesel became A-7713, and for the next 11 months he
would be addressed only by that number, never by name.
For three weeks, Wiesel had little to do except to appear for
each roll call and consume the meager food he was given—black
coffee in the morning, soup at noon, and bread in the evening. He
stayed close by his father’s side. The two men avoided any calls
for skilled workers. Finally, they were sent to Buna, a work camp
that was one of Auschwitz’s labor divisions. Wiesel was assigned
to an electrical equipment warehouse, where he was told to sit on
the ground and count bolts, bulbs, and small electrical fittings.
Wiesel was able to work next to his father.
During one of the routine medical examinations that were
held at the camp, a doctor noticed that Wiesel had a gold crown
on one of his teeth. Within a few days, he was ordered to a dentist
in the hospital block, whose job was to extract gold fillings and
teeth from all the prisoners. Wiesel pretended to be sick, and in
this way temporarily avoided the extraction. Several weeks later,
however, Wiesel was forced to give the gold crown to a foreman
to spare his father a beating. It was pulled from his mouth with a
rusty spoon.
While Wiesel was fortunate to work indoors, on a relatively
light assignment, his life was far from easy. He was always hungry.
His supervisor would occasionally explode with fury and lash out
for no apparent reason, once beating Wiesel bloody and nearly
unconscious.
Periodically, the prisoners would be assembled to witness the
execution of a prisoner who had committed some offense, most
often stealing food. Prisoners were hung from a gallows in the
central assembly place, surrounded by other prisoners and armed
S.S. guards.
 Prisoner at Auschwitz 27

In Night, Wiesel wrote of one such execution, this one of a 13-

year-old boy, who was hung with two adults, who were suspected
of sabotage against the camp.
He described the S.S. officers as preoccupied and disturbed
that day; the age of the boy made the execution no longer routine.
The entire camp had been assembled to witness the executions of
the three prisoners. While the head of the camp read the verdict,
all eyes were focused on the young boy.
The three prisoners were forced onto chairs, and nooses
were placed around their necks. The chairs were tipped over;
the assembled prisoners, though long accustomed to witnessing
violence and death, wept for the young boy. They were forced
to march past the gallows, where they could see that the adults
were dead, but the young boy still struggled for life. He lingered
for an agonizing half an hour, still alive when Wiesel shuffled
past him.
As Wiesel passed the boy, he heard a fellow prisoner ask,

“Where is God now?”

And I heard a voice within me answer him:
“Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this
gallows. . . .”31

A MEMORY OF EVIL
As an adult, Wiesel would serve as a witness to those who died
at Auschwitz, through his writing and testimony. His words are
clearest, however, in describing the victims, not their murderers.
He wrote that the murderers did not interest him:

That is why I never felt the need to become a Nazi hunter.

Though I respect those who did. . . my obsession was quite dif-
ferent. Of course I was shocked by the freedom and happiness
enjoyed by these murderers. I saw it as an affront to the collec-
tive memory of victims and as a legal outrage. But I knew that
28 Elie Wiesel

I was incapable by nature and temperament of spending the

years left to me tracking them down. The victims alone were
worthy of my devotion.32

Wiesel was eventually transferred to a different cellblock, away

from his father. This was a building unit, where for 12 hours a
day Wiesel was charged with dragging heavy blocks of stone and
loading them onto rail cars.
The routine was broken by the dreaded periodic selec-
tions, in which those who had grown too ill or weak from the
grueling labor and meager diet were pulled out and sent to
the crematorium. At these times, Wiesel feared most for his
father, who had aged and grown frail during their months in
captivity. An experienced prisoner had advised them on how
to survive the selection:

You must get completely undressed. Then one by one you go

before the S.S. doctors. I hope you will all succeed in getting
through. But you must help your own chances. Before you go
into the next room, move about in some way so that you give
yourselves a little color. Don’t walk slowly, run! Run as if the
devil were after you! Don’t look at the SS. Run, straight in
front of you!33

Dr. Mengele and three S.S. officers conducted the selections.

Mengele held a list with the prisoners’ numbers on it. He studied
each prisoner from head to toe, occasionally making note of a
number. Those whose numbers were called would be pulled aside,
weeping. They knew their fate.
Rations became more meager, and the guards became
more brutal. Germany was suffering defeat in the war,
although Wiesel did not know this. With the arrival of winter,
the conditions became unbearable. The heavy stones Wiesel
had to carry were icy, and a bitterly cold wind attacked him
as he worked.
 Prisoner at Auschwitz 29

Josef Mengele, shown in his S.S. uniform around 1945, was a doctor
who conducted medical experiments, which often involved torture, on
the prisoners at Auschwitz. He also performed the selections, sending
those who had become too ill or weak from the forced labor to die in
the crematorium.
30 Elie Wiesel

EVACUATION
In the middle of January 1945, Wiesel’s right foot began to swell.
He was soon unable to walk on it, and suffered from high fevers.
He was sent to the hospital, where surgery was ordered. Wiesel
was terrified—the hospital was not a safe place. Selections were
held in the hospital, and the sickest prisoners were sent to die in
the crematorium.
Wiesel’s surgery was performed without anesthesia. He was
told that his recovery would take two weeks. Only two days after
his operation, however, Wiesel learned that Auschwitz was to be
evacuated. The Russian Army was near the camp. All prisoners
were to be sent to other camps in Germany. All prisoners—except
those in the infirmary that is. They would not be evacuated.
Wiesel slipped out of the infirmary, although he was barely
able to walk. He held his right shoe, since it would not fit on his
foot, and hurried through the snow, looking for his father. They
discussed their options. Should they stay in the infirmary, where
it was possible that the S.S. might murder all patients before leav-
ing the camp? Or should they join the evacuation?
Wiesel’s father said nothing, so it was Wiesel who finally
decided that they should be evacuated with the other prisoners.
Later, after the war, Wiesel learned that those who remained in
the hospital were simply left behind; a few days after the evacua-
tion, they were liberated by the Russians.

DEATH MARCH
Wiesel did not go back to the hospital. Instead, he returned to his
cellblock, his foot bleeding and leaving red marks in the snow.
The prisoners were allowed to take additional clothing from the
store to put on in layers, in an effort to keep warm. Wiesel tried
to find a shoe large enough to fit his swollen foot, but was forced
instead to tear up a blanket and wrap that around his foot.
Bizarrely, the prisoners were ordered to wash the wooden
floor of their barracks before departure, to leave a favorable
 Prisoner at Auschwitz 31

impression on the Russian army. Then, at 6:00 p.m., they formed

lines. It was dark and snowing. Searchlights were turned on. Sur-
rounded by hundreds of armed S.S. guards, they were ordered to
begin the march.
The evacuation that began on January 18, 1945, would later be
described as a death march. Some 65,000 prisoners were ordered
to march west, on foot, heading for Germany. At times, Wiesel
and the others were ordered to run. Anyone who stopped, even
for a second, was shot. All around Wiesel, men collapsed in the
snow and were shot. His foot ached with each step. Wiesel wrote
that his father’s presence beside him was the only thing that kept
him from collapsing: “I had no right to let myself die. What would
he do without me? I was his only support.”34
Many of those who survived the march did so because they
were not alone, but had a friend or relative encouraging them. Ibi
Mann, a 19-year-old Czech prisoner, survived because her sister
was with her: “I was saying, ‘This is the end—I can’t go any fur-
ther,’ [but] she pulled me on by force.”35 Among the last prisoners
to evacuate Auschwitz, Mann and her sister marched past ditches
full of corpses.
Why were the prisoners of Auschwitz forced on this brutal
march? Principally because the Nazis still believed that they
could provide useful slave labor, and wanted to pull them away
from the front, where Nazi forces were rapidly losing ground,
and into prisons located in the interior of Germany.
Wiesel marched 42 miles before his group was allowed to stop
and rest. They were quickly surrounded by corpses, the bodies of
those who collapsed from the cold and exhaustion. Wiesel and his
father found some shelter in a nearby shed, crammed in with the
living and the dead.
Again, they were ordered to march on through the snow.
They marched northwest through Mikolów to Gleiwitz, urged on
by S.S. officers on motorcycles. They reached a barbed wire enclo-
sure at Gleiwitz and were allowed to rest, though they were forced
to walk over the bodies of those who had gone before them and
32 Elie Wiesel

fallen during the march. Wiesel was pushed to the ground and
others fell on top of him. He felt himself suffocating, and pushed
and scratched until he was able to shift the body on top of him
just enough so that he could get a bit of air.
Wiesel and his father were held at Gleiwitz for three days with-
out food or drink. S.S. officers guarded the barracks, preventing
anyone from leaving. Wiesel heard rumors of a deportation to the
center of Germany. There was another selection. Wiesel’s father
was deemed too weak to continue, but in the confusion he was
able to slip back and join the 30-minute march to the train sta-
tion. There they waited for the train.
Snow continued to fall. The prisoners were given some bread
and ate snow to quench their thirst. Finally, they were herded onto
open cattle cars, where no roof blocked out the snow. The pris-
oners huddled together for warmth as the train began to move.
Periodically, the train was stopped and those who had died were
tossed out.
The prisoners were given no food. They traveled for 10 days.
The snow continued to fall. More dead were tossed out of the car.
Occasionally, as the train passed through German towns, the
people would throw a piece of bread into the car. The starving
men would scramble, attacking (and often killing) each other
for this morsel of food. They finally arrived at their destination:
Buchenwald concentration camp.

FREE AT LAST
In Buchenwald, Wiesel’s father collapsed. Wiesel brought his
father the coffee and soup he was given for himself. Suffering
from dysentery, Shlomo Wiesel began to fail. Wiesel pleaded with
a doctor to see his father, but was refused. For several days, Wiesel
watched his father die.
In Night, he recalled how fear and indecision warred with his
love for his father. He left the cell block for roll call, then returned
 Prisoner at Auschwitz 33

Buchenwald

Elie Wiesel spent his final weeks in captivity in Buchenwald con-

centration camp. It was here that he was ultimately liberated; it
was also here that his father died.
Buchenwald was one of the largest Nazi concentration
camps, built in 1937 and located five miles northwest of Wei-
mar, in east-central Germany. Male prisoners began arriving
at Buchenwald in July 1937; women were not imprisoned
in the camp until 1944. The first inmates at Buchenwald
were political prisoners; in 1938, nearly 10,000 Jews arrived at the
camp, where they were subjected to extreme cruelty and torture.
Later in the war, the camp became an important source of
forced labor. To accommodate the demand for workers, the
number of prisoners sent to Buchenwald increased steadily;
by the end of 1945, the population of the prison had reached
110,000.
When Soviet troops began sweeping over Poland, the
concentration camps in Poland were evacuated, and thou-
sands of prisoners (including Wiesel and his father) were
forced on long, brutal marches to reach Buchenwald. In Jan-
uary 1945, some 10,000 exhausted prisoners arrived. Most of
them were Jews.
In early April 1945, American forces approached Buch-
enwald. The order was given to evacuate, and some 38,000
prisoners were ordered to march out of the camp. Many of them
died from exhaustion or were shot. A group of resistance fight-
ers within the camp prevented the evacuation of all prisoners,
however, firing upon guards and delaying the evacuation. On
April 11, 1945, soldiers from the Third U.S. Army division entered
Buchenwald, where they found more than 20,000 starving and
emaciated prisoners. Approximately 56,000 people were mur-
dered at Buchenwald, among them Elie Wiesel’s father.

Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Available at www.

ushmm.org.
34 Elie Wiesel

and lay back down on the top bunk, pretending to be sick himself
so that he would not have to leave his father.
The cell block was silent, a silence broken only by the groans
of those who were ill. An S.S. officer passed by the beds just as
Wiesel’s father called to him, begging for some water. The officer
ordered him to be quiet, but Wiesel’s father continued to call out
to his son, begging for something to drink:

The officer came up to him and shouted at him to be quiet. But

my father did not hear him. He went on calling me. The officer
dealt him a violent blow on the head with his truncheon.
I did not move. I was afraid. My body was afraid of also
receiving a blow.
Then my father made a rattling noise and it was my name:
“Eliezer.”36

Wiesel could see that his father was still breathing, although
it was a ragged, sporadic breathing. Afraid of the officer, Wiesel
lay without moving in his bunk.
After roll call was over, Wiesel got down from the bunk. His
father was murmuring something, too softly for Wiesel to under-
stand. He bent down over his father, staring down at him for more
than an hour, engraving forever into his memory the image of his
father’s bloody, beaten face.
During the night, as Wiesel slept, his father was carried away
and taken to the crematorium. He may still have been alive.
Wiesel last saw his father on January 28, 1945. He remained
at Buchenwald until April 11. According to his writings, for him,
this period was largely blank. There was no work to be done. He
was transferred to the children’s block, joining some 600 other
young prisoners.
On April 6, an announcement was made that Buchenwald
was to be liquidated and the prisoners evacuated to another camp.
From that point on, there was no more bread or soup. At a rate of 10
blocks (or several thousand prisoners) a day, the evacuation began.
 Prisoner at Auschwitz 35

This photograph from April 1945 shows inmates from Buchenwald

inside their barracks, a few days after U.S. troops liberated the con-
centration camp. Elie Wiesel is in the second row of bunks from the
bottom, seventh from the left, next to the vertical beam. Wiesel’s
father died just a few months before the camp was liberated.

On April 10, with still about 20,000 prisoners left, an

announcement was made that all remaining prisoners would now
leave Buchenwald and the camp would then be blown up. But in
the middle of the evacuation, air raid sirens sounded, and prison-
ers were ordered back to their barracks.
Wiesel was starving. He had eaten nothing for six days except
some grass and a few potato peelings he had found near the
kitchen.
On April 11, the evacuation resumed. Suddenly, armed mem-
bers of the prison resistance took action, firing guns and throw-
36 Elie Wiesel

ing grenades. Wiesel and the other children flattened themselves

on the ground. After about two hours, the camp was quiet. The
S.S. guards had fled. By 6:00 p.m., an American tank had arrived
outside the Buchenwald gates. Wiesel wrote:

I will never forget the American soldiers and the horror that
could be read in their faces. I will especially remember one
black sergeant, a muscled giant, who wept tears of impotent rage
and shame, shame for the human species, when he saw us. . . .
We tried to lift him onto our shoulders to show our gratitude,
but we didn’t have the strength. We were too weak even to
applaud him.37

Three days after the liberation, Wiesel collapsed, suffering

from food poisoning. He was taken to the former S.S. hospital,
where he lingered for two weeks. At last, noticing a mirror on the
opposite wall, he mustered his strength and walked across the
room. The 16-year-old had not seen his reflection since leaving
his home 11 months earlier.
“From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me,”
Wiesel wrote. “The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has
never left me.”38
 CHAPTER 5

Refugee
in France

A
fter the liberation of the concentration camp, Wiesel and about
400 other orphans were transported to France. The children
and teenagers marched from the camp in a long line, carry-
ing rations the American soldiers had given them and accompanied
by two Jewish chaplains from the American army. This time they
boarded comfortable trains, rather than cattle cars. Wiesel spotted a
boy from Sighet in his train car. The boy knew a few words of French
and reassured Wiesel that life in France would be good.
The trip took about two days. When the train reached the border
of France, it stopped, and the refugees got off the train. There, an
official made a speech in French, and several of the refugees raised
their hand. Wiesel, not understanding French, assumed that the offi-
cial had asked for volunteers for some work assignment. His months
in the concentration camp had trained him never to volunteer for
any work detail, never to draw attention to himself. He kept his hand
down, and only later learned that the official had asked those who
wished to become French citizens to raise their hands.

37
38 Elie Wiesel

Young prisoners liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp

walk to an American hospital to receive treatment. Elie Wiesel is the
tall youth wearing a cap in line at left, fourth from the front. After the
liberation, Wiesel and 400 other orphans were sent to France, to a
home for refugees set up by the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants—the
Children’s Aid Agency.

As the train crossed into France, Wiesel and the others began
to clap. The land, as viewed from the train, seemed different to
Wiesel. At every station, people waited at the train to offer hot
meals, bread, coffee, fruit, and cookies to the young passengers.
When the train reached its destination, Wiesel and the others
were welcomed by representatives of the Oeuvre de Secours aux
Enfants (OSE) (the Children’s Aid Agency) which had set up a
home for the refugees in a large estate in Écouis, in northern
France. They were given medical examinations, a place to live,
clothing, and generous meals.
 Refugee in France 39

Wiesel went to the director of the relief workers and asked for
a pen and paper. He began a journal; his first entry read: “After
the war, by the grace of God, blessed be His name, here I am in
France. Far away. Alone.”39
Wiesel joined with a group of other devout young Jewish refu-
gees who met for morning and evening prayers. They requested and
received Bibles, prayer books, and some other Talmudic studies.
Wiesel found a kind of comfort in his religious studies, no doubt
because they represented a link with one piece of the past that
remained unchanged. No matter how much his life had been altered,
the scriptures he had studied as a young boy remained the same.
Slowly, Wiesel attempted to return to a more normal life. The
transition was difficult. For several weeks, he and the others hid
bits of food under their pillows, finding it difficult to regain their
confidence that they would have enough to eat each day. Wiesel
found comfort in playing chess. He was photographed during one
chess match, and the image was published in the French news-
paper Défense de la France. A few days after the photographer
snapped his picture, Wiesel learned that someone had spotted his
picture in the newspaper and called the OSE office. That person
was his sister.

A SUMMONS TO PARIS
Wiesel had thought that, of all his family, he alone had survived
the camps. The director who had taken the phone call could not
give him many details. He did not know which of Wiesel’s sisters
had phoned, and an attempt to trace the call revealed only that
she had phoned from a post office and there was no way to reach
her. She had left one message for Wiesel: She would meet him the
following day in Paris.
Wiesel boarded the train to Paris alone, speaking not a word
of French. He was afraid and angry, certain that this was some
joke and vowing to get off the train in Paris, look around quickly,
and return immediately to Écouis.
40 Elie Wiesel

As the train pulled into Gare Saint-Lazare, the large Paris

train station, Wiesel looked out onto the platform and saw his
older sister, Hilda, waiting. They embraced, then Hilda intro-
duced Wiesel to her fiancé, a survivor of the Dachau concentra-
tion camp. They had met after the liberation. Hilda explained that
she had been informed that Wiesel had died, so she had gone with
her fiancé to live with his family in France.
Wiesel and his sister talked for hours, all the while avoiding
the most painful of topics. Finally, Wiesel dared to ask Hilda
about his other sister, Bea. To his relief, he learned that Bea was
alive, that she had in fact gone back to Sighet to see if she could
learn whether or not Wiesel had survived. The other members of
their family, however, had not survived.
Hilda spoke French fluently, and she brought Wiesel to the
Consistoire, a religious seminary where Jewish students trained
to be rabbis. Hilda spoke with its director, who invited Wiesel to
enroll in the school, provided that he learned French.
Wiesel did not accept at first. He had made friends among
the refugees in Écouis, and wanted to return there. After a few
weeks, the OSE divided the 400 refugees into two groups—
those who were observant Jews and those who were not. The
OSE was having difficulty obtaining kosher food, so they
divided the group to provide kosher meals only to those who
required them. Wiesel was in the first group, which numbered
about 100, and with them was moved to the Château d’Ambloy
in Vaucelles.
Wiesel had attempted to join a group of the refugees who
were emigrating to Palestine, the British-controlled territory in
the Middle East, but his application was refused. Instead, he built
friendships with the others at Vaucelles, enjoying the opportu-
nity to immerse himself in religious studies and spend evenings
around the campfire. He had little interest in the French and
art lessons offered to the refugees, and only gradually became
involved in discussions of current events.
 Refugee in France 41

After a few months, the OSE again moved the refugees, this
time to a home in Taverny, in the Paris suburbs, and Wiesel
was able to see his sister more often. The OSE directors now
gently began to encourage the refugees to make plans for their
future. They could emigrate to Palestine; to the United States;
to Canada, Colombia, or Australia, if they had family there; or
they could remain in France. Those who chose to stay in France
were encouraged to begin to learn a trade or pursue their educa-
tion. Wiesel chose to remain in France, and a private tutor was
arranged so that he could begin to learn French.

RETURN TO ACADEMICS
While in the refugee camp, Wiesel met the religious philosopher
Mordechai Rosenbaum, known as Shushani. Shushani was an
eccentric but brilliant scholar of the Talmud, born in Lithuania,
who was reportedly able to speak 30 languages and could con-
verse for hours on a wide range of topics. Shushani became a kind
of mentor to Wiesel, and the two would spend weeks studying a
single page of Talmud.
After a short time, the refugees were moved again, leaving
Taverny to go to Versailles. For the first time, Wiesel found him-
self among not only those who had been imprisoned in Buchen-
wald, but among other refugees, girls and boys who had survived
the war either in hiding or by assuming false identities. While at
Versailles, Wiesel took the train to Paris, visiting Hilda and tak-
ing classes in French and mathematics.
Wiesel began tutoring other students in Hebrew and formed
a choir, which he also directed. During that time, he also visited
his sister Bea, who was living in a displaced person’s camp in
Germany and hoping to get a visa to move to Canada. Wiesel
was disturbed by his sister’s poor living conditions in the camp.
He gradually came to realize that the generous accommodations
and arrangements made for him and the other “orphans” of
42 Elie Wiesel

Buchenwald were unique. “The suffering of the survivors did not

end with the war,” Wiesel wrote later.

Society wanted no part of them, either during or after. Dur-

ing the war all doors were closed to them, and afterward they
remained shut. . . . Those who were stupid or naive enough to
return to their countries of origin sometimes faced outright
hostility from their former neighbors and countrymen. . . .
When Bea went back to Sighet, she found strangers living in
our house and had to stay with friends.40

Bea had contracted an illness in the refugee camps that had damaged
her lungs; because of her illness, she was denied a visa by the United

Displaced Persons Camps

After the war, the Allies were faced with a refugee crisis—some
two million so-called “displaced persons” (wartime refugees)
who were afraid or unwilling to return home. Most of the Jew-
ish survivors who had endured the war either in hiding or in
concentration camps were reluctant or unable to return to their
homes because of ongoing anti-Semitism or the destruction of
their homes during the Holocaust. Many did attempt to reclaim
their homes, only to find their valuables stolen, their homes
occupied by strangers, and those who had persecuted them
still living in their communities. In some instances, Jews who
returned were threatened or attacked. In Poland, Jews were
violently attacked on several occasions, the worst being an
attack in Kielce in 1946 in which 42 Jews who had survived the
Holocaust were murdered.
Many refugees, like Wiesel and his sisters, traveled west
to areas liberated by Allied forces. The Allies set up displaced
persons camps and centers to accommodate the refugees. Con-
ditions in these camps varied widely. The largest camps were set
up in northern and southern Germany, some of which housed as
 Refugee in France 43

States. Ultimately, she was granted a visa by Canadian authorities to

work as a housekeeper for a Jewish family in Montreal.
During Wiesel’s time with her, he found it difficult to
speak of the life they had known before the war. Finally, on
the last night of his visit, he was able to ask her about Sighet.
He learned that very few Jews of Sighet had survived—only
about a hundred or so; of their own family, only a few distant
cousins were still alive. Wiesel learned that most of those who
had persecuted the Jews were still living in Sighet—only a few
had been arrested and imprisoned. Bea refused to speak of the
family’s home, noting only that the family’s jewels and pos-
sessions had all been stolen, apparently looted by neighbors as
soon as the Jewish families had been taken away. There was no

many as six thousand people. One large camp was set up next to
the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.
By 1947, the number of Jews displaced by the war reached
approximately 250,000. Their condition was made more severe
by the fact that so few countries would willingly accept them
for immigration. Many countries closed their borders, and the
United States severely restricted the number of Jewish refugees
it would accept. Many refugees wished to emigrate to Palestine,
but the British, who governed the territory, attempted to restrict
the number of Jewish immigrants. Many refugees tried to enter
Palestine illegally, only to be placed in prison camps on the
island of Cyprus or to have their boats intercepted and returned
to Germany. This treatment of the refugees, most of them Holo-
caust survivors, sparked international outrage.
When the state of Israel was created in 1948, Holocaust
survivors from displaced persons camps and from intern-
ment camps in Cyprus were welcomed to Israel, which was
declared a Jewish homeland.

Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Available at www.

ushmm.org.
44 Elie Wiesel

home for Wiesel to return to. He would need to make a new life
for himself.

A NEW BEGINNING
Encouraged by Shushani, Wiesel began to write, focusing on Bible
commentaries. He had a strong sense that the time would come
when he would need to testify to what he had seen in the camps,
but the time had not yet come; the memories were too raw. Wiesel
later described these memories of the camps as something he car-
ried within him “like poison,” explaining,

I thought about it with apprehension day and night: the duty to

testify, to offer depositions for history, to serve memory. What
would man be without his capacity to remember? Memory is
a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. What does
it mean to remember? It is to live in more than one world, to
prevent the past from fading and to call upon the future to
illuminate it. It is to revive fragments of existence, to rescue
lost beings, to cast harsh light on faces and events, to drive back
the sands that cover the surface of things, to combat oblivion
and to reject death.41

Instead, Wiesel enrolled at the Sorbonne—the premier university

in Paris—and began taking courses in psychology and philoso-
phy. He was fascinated by lectures on existentialism and reveled
in his studies, but he was frequently short on funds and unable
to figure out how to support himself. He was often hungry and
unable to pay for the small room he had rented.
News of the conflict in Palestine inspired him to join in the
Jewish struggle against the British. He volunteered at the Jewish
Agency and was soon hired as a journalist. Initially, his work con-
sisted of translating into Yiddish articles that had been published
in Hebrew. Gradually, he became more involved, suggesting head-
lines, carrying manuscripts to the print shop, learning how to
 Refugee in France 45

compose the front page and the cultural section. He began attend-
ing press conferences, public meetings, and demonstrations.
Wiesel’s first article was published after the state of Israel was
formally established. Titled “The Sacred Cannon” and published
under the byline Ben Shlomo, the article told of the divided
Jewish paramilitary groups then operating in Israel, using the
illustration of two brothers who found themselves on opposite
sides in the conflict, one becoming the victim of the other. His
next article, “Victors and Vanquished,” was inspired by a visit to
Bea’s camp, where she was still waiting for a visa. Again using
the pseudonym Ben Shlomo, Wiesel raised the question about
whether the Jews could be considered victors, even with the Ger-
mans as the “vanquished.”
Finally, through a friend, Wiesel was able to get a press card
to travel to Israel. He bought himself a leather jacket and a pair
of sunglasses in an effort to look more like a reporter. He took
copious notes about everything he saw and experienced, and was
introduced as a “foreign correspondent.” Wiesel was amazed at
the openness and friendliness that greeted him in Israel—he was
welcomed everywhere. Accustomed to living in places where Jews
held no positions of authority, he was surprised to find that the
government officials, politicians, policemen, and army officers
were all Jewish.
Wiesel spent several months in Israel, eventually finding a
job working as a Paris correspondent for an Israeli newspaper.
He sailed back to France, arriving in Paris in January 1950. His
newspaper would only publish articles directly or indirectly
related to Israel or the Jewish people. Wiesel submitted a few
articles related to the testimony of concentration camp survivors
and resistance fighters, but the paper rejected them, preferring
articles on current events.
Wiesel began to travel, returning to Israel and trekking to
Spain and Morocco. He visited India and was distressed by the
many orphaned children he saw begging for money, starving
and suffering from various physical ailments and diseases. He
46 Elie Wiesel

experienced a kind of spiritual renewal on this journey, finding it

difficult to accept the Hindu belief in reincarnation and instead
committing himself to combating injustice and doing good in the
days he had been given. He went to Canada to visit his sister Bea,
who was by then working at the Israeli consulate. He returned to
Israel, then traveled to Brazil to report on Eastern European Jews
who were being converted to Catholicism.
It was on the ship journey to Brazil that Wiesel worked on
his memoirs of his concentration camp years, writing them in
Yiddish. It had been nearly 10 years since Buchenwald had been
liberated, a period during which Wiesel had preserved his silence.
Now he wrote feverishly, without rereading what he had writ-
ten: “I wrote to testify, to stop the dead from dying, to justify my
own survival. I wrote to speak to those who were gone. As long
as I spoke to them, they would live on, at least in my memory.”42
When they reached South America, a Jewish book publisher took
the manuscript pages, asking to read them and promising that,
if they were good, he would publish them. Wiesel hesitated, con-
vinced that no one would be interested in the “sad memories of
a stranger.”43 Finally, he reluctantly handed over his only copy of
the manuscript.

A CALL TO TESTIFY
In 1954, Wiesel was back in France and received a choice assign-
ment: he was to interview the French prime minister, Pierre
Mendès-France. He decided to make contact with the prime min-
ister by first interviewing one of Mendés-France’s mentors, French
novelist François Mauriac. Wiesel had intended to lead the conver-
sation around to the subject of the prime minister, but instead was
fascinated by Mauriac, particularly his grasp of politics and his
view of journalism. Wiesel was outraged, however, when Mauriac
began to talk of the life and death of Jesus. Instead of listening
quietly, Wiesel challenged Mauriac, noting the hypocrisy in a faith
that focused on the murder of a single Jew two thousand years ago
 Refugee in France 47

Influences on the Peacemaker

In 1954, Elie Wiesel met the

French novelist François
Mauriac. Wiesel had hoped
to persuade Mauriac to intro-
duce him to Prime Minister
Pierre Mendès-France, but
instead the conversation led to
Mauriac encouraging Wiesel
to write down his experiences
in the concentration camps.
Those writings would become
the basis for Night.
At the time of their meet-
ing, Mauriac had already won
the 1952 Nobel Prize for Lit-
erature. Mauriac was born in
Bordeaux, France, in 1885. His
father had died when Mauriac
was little more than a year old, In his early career as a journal-
leaving his mother to support ist, Elie Wiesel met the French
Mauriac and his four brothers novelist François Mauriac
and sisters. His mother was (above). During their meet-
a devout Catholic, and at the ing, Wiesel became angry with
age of seven Mauriac was Mauriac and left. The novelist
sent away to a school run by followed Wiesel and implored
the Marianite Order. Religion him to tell of his experiences
would play an important role during the war. From this
in his writing. He studied lit- entreaty emerged Wiesel’s
erature in Bordeaux and Paris book La Nuit (Night), which
and published his first collec- Mauriac submitted to his own
tion of poetry, Les Mainjointes publisher.
(Clasped Hands), in 1909.
During World War I, Mauriac served in the Red Cross as a
hospital orderly dispatched to the Balkans. His novel Le Baiser aux
(continues)
48 Elie Wiesel

(continued)
lepreux (A Kiss for a Leper), published in 1922, brought him fame.
Many of his later writings, novels like Le Déser de l’Amour (published
in 1925) and Thérèse Desqueyroux (published in 1927), would earn
criticism from more conservative Catholics for their frank examina-
tions of sin and redemption.
Mauriac was elected to the Académie Française (the official
organization charged with regulating the French language) in 1933.
He served as a journalist for the French newspaper Le Figaro, often
writing articles critical of the growth of Fascism in Europe. He also
wrote several plays during the 1930s.
When Germany occupied France during World War II, Mauriac
was outspoken in his criticism of German oppression, a position
that forced him into hiding when his life was threatened. After the
war, Mauriac was named a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor
by French president Charles de Gaulle. Mauriac supported de
Gaulle’s anticolonial policies in Morocco, and was a supporter of
French colony Algeria’s effort to win independence. His writings
in his weekly newspaper column “Bloc-Notes” were often con-
troversial, and included condemnation of the French army for its
use of torture in Algeria and support for a more liberal approach
to Catholicism.
Mauriac wrote a biography of de Gaulle, published in 1964;
his son Claude worked as a private secretary to de Gaulle from
1944 to 1949. Throughout his lifetime, Mauriac published numer-
ous works of fiction and nonfiction, plays, poetry and essays, as
well as a series of personal memoirs. He died in Paris on Sep-
tember 1, 1970.
In the presentation speech awarding the Nobel Prize in Litera-
ture to Mauriac in 1952, Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of
the Swedish Academy, cited Mauriac’s ability to precisely recreate
the landscape of Bordeaux that figured in nearly all of his novels,
the landscape he had known as a child, and to use as background
Catholic thought and sensitivity.
 Refugee in France 49

“Mauriac remains unequalled in conciseness and expressive

force of language,” Österling stated. “His prose can in a few sug-
gestive lines shed light on the most complex and difficult things.”*

*Available at www.nobelprize.org.

while, only 10 years earlier, millions of Jews had been murdered

without protest.
Mauriac never helped Wiesel get an interview with Mendès-
France, mainly because Wiesel never asked him for it. Instead,
he gave Wiesel something more valuable: confirmation that
the time had come for him to report what he had seen. Wiesel
stormed out of their meeting, but Mauriac followed him, beg-
ging him to come back and to tell of his experiences. Wiesel
then explained that he had been determined to keep silent for
10 years, to be certain that when he spoke, his words would do
justice to the memories. Mauriac told him, “I think that you are
wrong. You are wrong not to speak. . . . Listen to the old man that
I am: one must speak out.”44
Wiesel’s vow of silence had, technically, already been broken.
He had written the manuscript of his experiences in Yiddish
while traveling to South America, and shortly before he met with
Mauriac, Wiesel had learned that the manuscript was going to be
published in Argentina. It was published in 1956 under the title
Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Stayed Silent), and con-
tained more than 800 pages.
Mauriac encouraged Wiesel to reexamine the manuscript,
promising to help him find a publisher in France. Wiesel began
the extensive process of translating his memories into French,
paring the book down to the slim, spare prose that eventually
would be published under the title La Nuit (Night). Mauriac was
50 Elie Wiesel

the first person to read Night, and it was Mauriac who wrote a
preface for the manuscript and submitted it to his own publisher.
“No one’s interested in the death camps anymore,” Mauriac
was told. “It won’t sell.”45 Mauriac refused to give up. He found a
publisher for Wiesel’s work, then used his own status as a famous
novelist to promote the book. The book was published in 1958.
The memories Wiesel shared in Night would haunt readers for
generations to come. As Wiesel explained in From the Kingdom
of Memory, it was not merely his duty to keep his memories alive,
but his right to claim those memories as true and real:

For memory is a blessing: it creates bonds rather than destroys

them. Bonds between present and past, between individuals
and groups. It is because I remember our common beginning
that I move closer to my fellow human beings. It is because I
refuse to forget that their future is as important as my own.46
 CHAPTER 6

An
Accidental
American

I
n 1956, Elie Wiesel came to the United States. He was sent to New York
by an Israeli newspaper to serve as a correspondent, an assign-
ment that he thought would last one year. Night had not yet been
published (it would be published in 1958).
Wiesel struggled with political issues, and continued to feel
uncertain about his journalistic skills, once saying,

Don’t ask me how I became a journalist. I don’t know. I needed to

do something, so I became a reporter and managed to fool every-
body. I wrote about politics but understood nothing about poli-
tics. I still don’t. I wrote about anything under the sun, because I
had to, without understanding what I was writing.47

Wiesel found a small studio apartment on Riverside Drive and

103rd Street. The apartment’s most impressive feature was its view:
It overlooked the Hudson River. Wiesel spent his time writing and
gazing out at the lights of Manhattan and New Jersey.

51
52 Elie Wiesel

Wiesel befriended other correspondents, who helped him

obtain a desk at the United Nations press room and taught him
to gather the most critical news of the day by visiting the New
York Times’ editorial office. He traveled to Washington to meet
David Ben-Gurion, the Israeli prime minister, who was then
meeting with President Eisenhower. He also reported on the
civil rights struggle.
Only a few months after his arrival in the United States,
Wiesel was hit by a taxi while crossing the street. For 20 minutes
he lay in the street until an ambulance arrived and transported
him to the hospital. Wiesel’s left side had been shattered. After a
10-hour operation to reconstruct it, Wiesel was placed in a full-
body cast. The only thing he could move was his head.
Confined to bed, Wiesel began to dictate articles, including
a first-person account of the accident, some commentaries, and
background pieces. His hospital room became a gathering place
for friends and relatives, who discussed politics, news and the
latest gossip.
A fictionalized account of Wiesel’s experience became a
novel; called The Accident, it reflects Wiesel’s emotions in the
weeks following the disaster, although the “accident” related in
the novel is a suicide attempt. In the novel, Wiesel writes, “The ten
weeks I spent in a world of plaster made me richer. I learned that
man lives differently, depending on whether he is in a horizontal
or vertical position. The shadows on the walls, on the faces, are
not the same.”48
Wiesel left the hospital in a wheelchair, and soon was able to
return to his work at the UN using crutches. When his American
visa expired, the paperwork needed to extend his visa was daunt-
ing. It required a trip back to France, which Wiesel, still confined
to a wheelchair or crutches, was not in a physical or financial
condition to make. French officials were not helpful, and Wiesel
felt more than ever like a refugee. Finally, a U.S. immigration
official suggested that he apply for American citizenship. Wiesel
became a legal resident and, five years later, became an American
 An Accidental American 53

Golda Meier

While working as a correspon-

dent at the United Nations,
Elie Wiesel befriended Golda
Meier, an Israeli politician who,
at the time, was negotiating
Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai.
She would prove an important
contact, supplying him with
helpful information as she rose
within Israeli politics.
Meier was born Goldie
Mabovitch in Kiev, in the for-
mer Soviet Union, in 1898. As a correspondent work-
Confronted with strong anti- ing at the United Nations in
the late 1950s, Elie Wiesel
Semitism and poverty, Meier’s
met Israeli politician Golda
family immigrated to America
Meir, who would become
in 1906, where they lived in Mil- a friend and an important
waukee, Wisconsin. contact. Meir would go
While in high school, Meier on to be prime minister of
became active in the Zionist Israel from 1969 to 1974.
movement, which was encour-
aging Jewish people from all over the world to immigrate to
Palestine. Meier married Morris Myerson and, in 1921, the
couple moved to Palestine.
Meier quickly became active in a Jewish trade union and
soon was traveling to the United States, helping to raise support
and funds for Jewish women’s groups in Palestine. In 1946, she
became head of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department, serv-
ing as a critical player as Britain negotiated its withdrawal from
Palestine. She later returned to her fundraising activities in the
United States, this time to support the state of Israel as it waged
a war for independence.
In 1948, when the state of Israel was formally declared,
Meier was appointed to serve in its provisional government.
(continues)
54 Elie Wiesel

(continued)
That same year, she was named Ambassador to the Soviet
Union. She was elected to Israel’s legislature, the Knesset, in
1949, and served as Minister of Labor and National Insurance
until 1956. From 1956 to 1966, she served as Foreign Minister,
helping to build firmer relations between Israel and emerging
nations in Africa, Latin America, and the United States.
Meier served as Secretary-General of the Labor Party after
it was formed and, in early 1969, she became premier at the
age of 71. While Meier was premier, the Yom Kippur War broke
out when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on October 6, 1973.
Later, Meier’s government was charged with failing to accurately
assess the threat of attack from the Arab nations.
Meier was reelected in late 1973. She resigned in 1974 and
died in December 1978. She is buried in Jerusalem.

citizen. He received an American passport, the first passport he

had ever had.
In 1981, Wiesel’s friend François Mitterand was elected
president of France, and Wiesel was offered French citizenship.
“Though I thanked him,” Wiesel wrote in his memoirs, “and not
without some emotion, I declined the offer. When I had needed a
passport, it was America that had given me one.”49

THE WRITER
In 1957, Wiesel traveled with friends on a six-week cross-country
trip from New York to Los Angeles. He still needed a cane to walk,
but Wiesel was amazed by the America that existed between the
two coasts:

Interminable highways disappeared into a blue horizon ring-

ing tall mountains embedded in skies of shifting colors. There
were cascading rivers and peaceful brooks, green valleys and
 An Accidental American 55

yellow hills, violent storms and dramatic sunsets. Never before

had I been so close to nature.50

He visited an Indian reservation in Arizona and discovered that

the Indian who greeted him was actually Jewish, a Polish concen-
tration camp survivor who had emigrated to America and posed
as an Indian for tourists during the day.
Wiesel’s network of friends and colleagues grew. Golda Meir,
who had come to the United Nations to negotiate the Israeli with-
drawal from Sinai, spotted Wiesel hobbling around on crutches.
After speaking with him, she complimented him on his perfect
Hebrew and offered to supply him with information so that he
could rest his legs. They became friends, and Wiesel was warmly
welcomed in Israel when Meir became prime minister.
Wiesel, however, was growing increasingly disenchanted
with journalism. He found most politicians disappointing, feel-
ing that they were acting a part and that journalists were partici-
pating in the act by providing them with an audience.
Wiesel was also under constant financial pressure. He lived
essentially from day to day, dependent on friends to provide him
with an occasional meal or an occasional assignment. In 1957, Wie-
sel joined the staff of the Jewish Daily Forward, which was at that
time the best-known Yiddish language newspaper in America.
It was also in 1957 that Wiesel learned that Mauriac had at
last found a publisher for Night. Wiesel’s original title for the
book had been And the World Remained Silent. The publisher
suggested a more biblical phrase, but eventually he and Wiesel
agreed upon the French La Nuit. The text was also further edited.
Wiesel had trimmed his original manuscript from 862 pages to
245; the final text was edited down to 178 pages. An American
edition would be published in 1960.
Other books followed Night, many of them focusing on the
painful stories of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Dawn, pub-
lished in 1961, tells the story of a young member of the Jewish
56 Elie Wiesel

underground—a survivor of Auschwitz—in British-controlled

Palestine, who is guarding a captured British officer, and is
engulfed by emotion when he is ordered to shoot the officer. The
Accident was published in 1962. Two years later, The Town Beyond
the Wall was published; it is a novel that tells of a young Jew who
returns to his hometown, a town behind the Iron Curtain, to
understand why people did not act when he and his family were
deported to a concentration camp.
Wiesel, who writes in French, has said that, once the first
sentence of a book is written, he knows instantly the rest of the
story. The Accident begins with the simple phrase: “The accident
occurred on an evening in July, right in the heart of New York, as
Kathleen and I were crossing the street to go to see the movie The
Brothers Karamazov.”51
All of Wiesel’s novels are written in the same spare, stark
style as Night, a style that Wiesel has described as belonging to
“the chroniclers of the ghettos, where everything has to be said
swiftly, in one breath. You never know when the enemy might
kick in the door, sweeping us away into nothingness. Every
phrase was a testament.”52
Wiesel was disturbed when his writing received praise. His
goal was not to make people like what he had written, but rather to
make them angry—angry at what had happened, and determined
that it should never happen again. “I never intended to be a novel-
ist,” Wiesel has said. “The only role I sought was that of witness. I
believed that, having survived by chance, I was duty-bound to give
meaning to my survival, to justify each moment of my life.”53

RETURN TO SIGHET
At the beginning of his career, Wiesel developed a schedule that
he has used throughout his life, writing from 6:00 to 10:00 in the
morning, working on two projects simultaneously—one fiction
and one nonfiction. After writing for four hours, he then pur-
sues research, reading, or studying in areas related to what he is
 An Accidental American 57

writing. He generally writes three drafts of each book, ultimately

cutting and editing each work to preserve its simplest essential
thought. “A writer’s whole heritage is in the choice of each word,”
he has said.54 Wiesel also writes with a picture of his hometown,
Sighet, placed before him.
In 1964, Wiesel decided that he was ready to return to his
hometown of Sighet, to seek traces of his past. He studied the
official archives in Budapest, trying to determine which govern-
ment officials had been there when the decision was made to send
Sighet’s Jews to the concentration camps, and he walked the same
streets that he had traveled with his mother when she had brought
him to the city to visit the doctor.
In From the Kingdom of Memory, Wiesel wrote that, in Sighet,
he walked for hours through the streets. “Passersby saw me with-
out seeing, and I saw them while beholding only the ghosts that
surrounded them, and the ghosts were more real, more vivid than
they. I saw friends long dead, comrades long dead, dead rabbis,
dead disciples, and they were alive.”55
He traveled first to his grandfather’s grave, lighting candles
there in keeping with the Jewish tradition. He was disconcerted
by the fact that the town was, in so many ways, exactly as it had
been before the war. The streets were full of people. Wiesel walked
passed the movie house and the hospital. “The park was as it had
been,” Wiesel wrote later, “the trees and benches still in place.
Everything was there. As before. Everything except the Jews.”56
Most of the synagogues had been closed, but in one of them
Wiesel found a pile of books covered with dust. They were books
that had been recovered from abandoned Jewish homes; as Wiesel
searched through them, he found a few books that had belonged
to him, with his own handwritten notes on biblical texts.
Wiesel’s experience during his return to Sighet would form
the basis for his novel The Town Beyond the Wall, published in
French as La Ville de la Chance in 1962 and in English in 1964.
The novel tells of a young Jewish survivor who returns to his
birthplace and walks through the streets like a stranger. From
58 Elie Wiesel

a window, an onlooker watches him silently, and the novel then

tells, in flashback, of a similar moment when a silent person
looked through the same window as the Jews were herded onto
cattle cars bound for Auschwitz. It was this novel that earned
Wiesel his first major literary prize, the Prix Ravarol, in 1963.

THE JEWS OF SILENCE

In 1965, Wiesel received an assignment from the Tel Aviv
newspaper Yediot Ahronot to travel to the Soviet Union and
write about the fate of the 3 million Soviet Jews. The follow-
ing year, he would return again to write more about this large
group of people, who were being denied the freedom to wor-

In this photograph from 1959, Jewish congregants worship in a dilapi-

dated synagogue in the Soviet Union. In 1965, Wiesel received an
assignment to write about Jews in the Soviet Union. He found that
they faced discrimination and persecution. The articles were the
beginning of a new role for Wiesel—that of human rights activist.
 An Accidental American 59

ship. Wiesel later described it as “a turning point in my life.”57

In Russia, he found intolerance, discrimination, and persecu-
tion facing the Jews living there. Wiesel, who had dedicated
his life to giving testimony for the dead, now found himself
a “messenger of the living.”58 The Jews he met had survived
the Nazi era, the Stalinist era, and still continued to adhere to
their faith in a country where practicing that faith was forbid-
den. Wiesel spoke with hundreds of Jews and traveled to five
different cities.
The series of articles he wrote later were collected and pub-
lished as The Jews of Silence. In the introduction, Wiesel wrote:
“The pages that follow are the report of a witness. Nothing more
and nothing else. Their purpose is to draw attention to a problem
about which no one should remain unaware.”59
Wiesel’s powerful testimony began a new phase in his life and
work—human rights activist. He campaigned to involve many,
including the American Jewish community, in providing sup-
port and aid to the Russian Jews. His legacy would be the release
of Russian Jews to freedom—the small number of Jews allowed
to leave Russia would gradually turn into a huge exodus of this
community, traveling to Israel and other welcoming countries to
lead a new life.
CHAPTER 7

A New
Sense of Hope

T
he first volume of Wiesel’s memoirs ends with a wedding—his own.
At the age of 40, Wiesel married Marion Erster Rose, a woman
of Austrian descent who was also a Holocaust survivor. Wiesel
met her in the mid-1960s, at a time when she was in the process of
getting divorced. She was then a young mother. She was knowledge-
able about art, music, and the theater. She had spent her childhood
in Vienna, and was fluent in five languages. She would become the
translator of Wiesel’s books.
The couple was married in Jerusalem on April 2, 1969. Wiesel’s
sisters, Bea and Hilda, attended the ceremony with their families.
Marion, Wiesel’s wife, had a young daughter, Jennifer. Wiesel’s
life changed: after 40 years alone, he found himself a husband and
stepfather. He began to move away from journalism, focusing more
and more on his novels and nonfiction essays.
In 1970, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his liberation from
Buchenwald, Wiesel wrote Entre deux soleils (published in English
as One Generation After). This nonfiction narrative begins at the
start of World War II and ends with Israel’s Six-Day War. The com-

60
 A New Sense of Hope 61

pilation of autobiographical essays and tales illuminates Wiesel’s

struggle to evaluate the events of the past 25 years of his life. The
book, as reflected in its English title, also deals with the lives of
the children of survivors, and how they come to terms with their
parents’ past.
This theme would resonate for Wiesel two years later, with the
birth of his first and only child, a son named Shlomo Elisha, on
June 6, 1972. Describing that day, Wiesel wrote, “A dawn unlike
any other. It will mark my existence forever. This little fellow in
the arms of his mother will illuminate our life. I look at him and
look at him. And as I look at him I feel the presence of others also
seeking to protect him.”60
Wiesel later explained the significance of his son’s name: “My
son’s first name is Shlomo. It was my father’s name. His middle
name, Elisha, means ‘God is salvation.’ We [Jews] believe in mid-
dle names so much. I was the only son. I cannot break the chain. It
is impossible that 3,500 years should end with me, so I took those
3,500 years and put them on the shoulders of this little child.”61
More than the choice of his name, it is the simple fact that the
birth of this child represents a significant milestone for Wiesel, a
choice of life over death, an expression of faith that up until now
had seemed impossible for him. Wiesel wrote in his memoirs that
he had long feared having a child:

I was convinced that a cruel and indifferent world did not

deserve our children. . . . It was Marion who persuaded me
otherwise. It was wrong to give the killers one more victory.
The long line from which I sprang must not end with me. She
was right. And now? Because of my father and my son, I choose
commitment.62

A NEW FOCUS
In the early 1970s, Wiesel shifted his energy to a new profession:
college professor. He was the Distinguished Professor of Judaic
62 Elie Wiesel

Studies at City University of New York from 1972 to 1976, then

became the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at
Boston University. Because of his writing, Wiesel was also increas-
ingly invited to speak to various groups and organizations.
His schedule was grueling; he would work for 12 to 16 hours
a day, teaching, traveling, speaking, and writing. His writing dur-
ing this period reflected his ongoing efforts to provide testimony
of what his generation had experienced as Jews and a historical
context for Jewish traditions and religious thought, coupled with
a hint of optimism for the future. In 1972, he published Souls
on Fire, a collection of portraits of the leaders of the eighteenth
century Hasidic movement. The inspiration for the book were his
memories of childhood tales told to him by his Hasidic grandfa-
ther, and Wiesel shares the legends, the tales, and stories in a way
that richly reflects the mysticism, prayer, religious zeal, and even
joy of the Hasidic movement.
In 1973, Wiesel composed Ani Maamin (I Believe), a literary
work in blank verse that was set to music by the Franco-Jewish
composer Darius Milhuad. The inspiration for this composition
was a song of prayer expressing faith in the coming of the Mes-
siah. Wiesel, at 16, heard this song sung by Jews in Auschwitz.
In Wiesel’s version, the Biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob go to God to tell of the tragedy they have seen on Earth, the
tragedy befalling God’s people. But God remains silent, and the
three leave heaven to stand beside the victims below on Earth.
The piece was first performed at New York’s Carnegie Hall on
November 11 and 13, 1973.
In his memoirs, Wiesel pointed out that the more optimistic
tone of his later writings did not necessarily mean that he had
made complete peace with God:

I would not be the man I am, the Jew that I am, if I betrayed
the child who once felt duty-bound to live for God. I never gave
up my faith in God. Even over there I went on praying. Yes,
my faith was wounded, and still is today. In Night, my earliest
 A New Sense of Hope 63

testimony, I tell of a boy’s death by hanging, and conclude that

it is God Himself that the killer is determined to murder. I
say this from within my faith, for had I lost it I would not rail
against heaven. It is because I still believe in God that I argue
with Him. As Job said: “Even if He kills me, I shall continue to
place my hope in Him.”63

That same year, Wiesel wrote the novel The Oath. The oath
that is referenced in the title is a pledge taken by an old man, a
wanderer, who is the only survivor of genocide in his village. He
makes an oath never to tell of what he has seen—that all of the
Jews in his village were murdered by their neighbors—and waits
50 years before breaking the oath, telling a young man on the
verge of committing suicide of what he witnessed, to give that
man a purpose for living: the mission of carrying the story, so
that it will not disappear.
In August 1974, Wiesel’s sister Bea died of cancer. She was
buried in Montreal, and on her tombstone, in addition to her own
name, were added the names of Wiesel’s grandmother, mother
and father, and youngest sister—all of whom had died without a
proper burial.

A LIFE OF PURPOSE
Wiesel has said that one of the main tenets of his life is the idea
of not being indifferent to the bloodshed and suffering of his fel-
low man. “Not to take a stand,” Wiesel wrote, quoting Camus, “is
in itself to take a stand.”64 As the years went by, Wiesel found his
focus expanding beyond the suffering of Jews, to encompass the
suffering of all people, everywhere.
In 1976, Wiesel published Messengers of God, which places
Biblical figures like Abraham, Adam, Moses, and Job in contem-
porary situations, where they are forced to react to the demands
of life in the twentieth century. These patriarchs then counsel
mankind to reject despair and faithlessness and instead choose
64 Elie Wiesel

President Jimmy Carter (left) and Elie Wiesel (right of Carter) com-
memorated the Holocaust Remembrance Days in April 1979.
Wiesel helped establish the Remembrance Days. The year before,
President Carter invited Wiesel to chair the Commission on the
Holocaust, and later Wiesel was appointed chairman of the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Council.

faith and perseverance. Two years later, he published A Jew Today,

which even more clearly expressed Wiesel’s new idea of the link
connecting all humans. In it, he wrote of people suffering in
Cambodia and Bangladesh, in South Africa, and in Vietnam. He
addressed letters in the text to a young Israeli and to a young Pal-
estinian Arab, underscoring his philosophy that, when one group
of people suffer, the whole world suffers with them.
In 1975, Wiesel traveled for the first time to South Africa,
where the system of apartheid was still in place. From 1948 to
1994, a white minority government in South Africa enforced
a policy of racial discrimination and segregation. Through a
series of laws, different racial groups were assigned to different
areas of cities, with nonwhites banned from living in any area
 A New Sense of Hope 65

except those specifically designated for them. Blacks were for-

bidden from participating in the political process. Wiesel was
troubled at how hate had been legitimized within the South Afri-
can government, and how quickly prejudice was transformed
into violence.
Because of his speeches and writing, Wiesel continued to be a
leading figure in the movement to remember the Holocaust and
honor those who lost their lives. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter
invited Wiesel to chair his Commission on the Holocaust. Wiesel
was asked to join with other civic and religious leaders in finding
the best way to commemorate the Holocaust on Washington’s
Mall. In 1979, he was appointed chairman of the U.S. Holo-
caust Memorial Council, and soon helped to establish annual
Holocaust Remembrance Days in Washington, D.C. Wiesel was
pleased that America was, in this way, officially honoring the past
of those who had suffered, but he was concerned about ensur-
ing that the memories of those who had died would be honored
appropriately.
In January 1979, Wiesel addressed the council members at the
White House in front of a large group that included Holocaust
survivors, members of Congress, Jewish leaders, and journal-
ists. As always, Wiesel’s remarks combined a sense of the history
being made with a reminder of where leaders had fallen short in
the past. Wiesel’s speech noted the challenge of determining how
best to remember the victims of the Holocaust—whether they
should be remembered individually or as a group, and whether
monuments, education, or ceremonies would be the most fitting
form of remembrance.
Wiesel urged his listeners to be bold in their planning:

Whatever we do, let it strike the imagination of people every-

where, of all faiths, of all creeds, of all nationalities, of all
nations, and perhaps of all centuries.
Let people know that our generation—probably the last that
still has something to remember—does indeed remember.
66 Elie Wiesel

...The Holocaust was possible because the enemy—the

enemy of the Jewish people and of mankind, and it is always
the same enemy—succeeded in dividing, in separating, in
splitting the human society: nation against nation, Christian
against Jew, young against old.65

Wiesel expressed his gratitude to President Carter for his

concern about the Holocaust, but noted that the same concern did
not come from America while the Holocaust was occurring. Had
a presidential commission been appointed in 1942 or 1943, Wiesel
said, many victims of the Holocaust might have been saved.
When President Carter first asked Wiesel to chair the com-
mission, at a meeting at the White House, Carter showed Wiesel
photos from the CIA archives that had been taken by an Ameri-
can bomber flying over Auschwitz in 1944, the time when Wiesel
was being held there. They showed the camp in broad daylight,
clearly displaying the cellblocks at Auschwitz and Birkenau.
Wiesel told the president that he remembered that day, a day in
which American planes had been bombing the factories around
the camp. Wiesel revealed that the inmates had hoped that the
Americans would bomb the camp, to wipe out the facility. Learn-
ing that President Roosevelt had had these photos available to him
in 1944, Wiesel questioned President Carter about why Roosevelt
had done nothing, had not even bombed the railways leading to
the camps. Carter did not have an answer.
Wiesel requested Carter’s permission to make a fact-finding
trip. His destination: the Treblinka and Auschwitz concentration
camp sites, and Babi-Yar in Eastern Europe.

AGAINST THE SILENCE

The trip was Wiesel’s first return to Poland since he left Aus-
chwitz. At Auschwitz, Wiesel was shocked to discover that the
camp had been turned into a kind of museum, complete with
postcards and souvenirs. It was clean and well-maintained—there
 A New Sense of Hope 67

were bright signs and maps directing visitors. Wiesel found it

offensive, sanitizing the true horrors, as if, Wiesel noted in his
memoirs, “there have never been any Jews here, or if there were,
they arrived here by accident, visitors who lost their way.”66
In Birkenau, though, Wiesel found memories rushing back,
nearly overwhelming him: the thick smoke, the barking dogs,
the men running everywhere. Those in the delegation who had
survived Birkenau took each other’s arms and walked across the
camp to the ruins of the gas chambers and the crematorium. “At
that moment,” Wiesel wrote,

it became important to erase all the years, all the words, all
the images that separated us from this event, from this place;
it became essential to rediscover night in all its nakedness
and truth; we had to recapture the unknown before it could
become known. I heard the wind rushing through the trees,
but it was not really the wind. I heard the murmur rising from
the earth, but it was not the earth that spoke. It was night. It
was death.67

The fact-finding mission concluded with a trip to Babi-Yar, on

the outskirts of Kiev in the Soviet Union. Wiesel had been there
once before, in 1965, when there was no monument to the nearly
100,000 Jews who were massacred by Nazis and thrown into mass
graves over the course of 10 days beginning on September 29,
1941. Wiesel now saw that a grand, massive monument had been
erected in response to international pressure. Nowhere on the
monument was the word Jew. The victims are, instead, identified
as “Soviet citizens.”
In Poland and the Soviet Union, Wiesel heard the same offi-
cial response—a reluctance to emphasize the Jewish victims who
had died, coupled with the argument that others besides Jews had
perished in the concentration camps and at Nazi hands.
In 1995, at a ceremony marking the fiftieth anniversary of
the liberation of Auschwitz, Wiesel delivered a moving speech,
68 Elie Wiesel

Polish politician and activist Lech Walesa (left) and Elie Wiesel (right)
are shown arriving at Auschwitz in 1988. During his trip to Auschwitz
in the late 1970s, Wiesel was appalled to find that the camp had been
turned into a kind of museum. He thought the horrors of what had
occurred there had been sanitized.
 A New Sense of Hope 69

noting that he spoke as a man who, 50 years and nine days ear-
lier, was known only by his number, A7713. He spoke as a Jew,
Wiesel said, a Jew who had witnessed an effort to exterminate all
Jews. He had witnessed suffering and humiliation and death at
Auschwitz, in that place where so many were victims—victims
without a country, victims without a name. It was a place, Wiesel
noted, where it was always night, where there were endless pro-
cessions of victims:

Close your eyes and listen. Listen to the silent screams of ter-
rified mothers, the prayers of anguished old men and women.
Listen to the tears of children, Jewish children, a beautiful little
girl among them, with golden hair, whose vulnerable tender-
ness has never left me. Look and listen as they quietly walk
towards dark flames so gigantic that the planet itself seemed
in danger.
All these men and women and children came from every-
where, a gathering of exiles drawn by death. . . .68

Wiesel reminded his audience that the victims of Auschwitz

came from all the occupied lands of Europe, that they included
not only Jews, but also Gypsies and Poles and Czechs. He urged
his listeners to use the anniversary to remember the victims, to
remember their solitude and pain, and to truly honor those who
had died. He reminded his audience that there were still many
victims of terror and bloodshed, in places like Bosnia, Rwanda
and Chechnya, and noted that only those who remembered the
past could ensure that another Birkenau was not created in the
future.
In late October 1981, Wiesel was invited to attend the Interna-
tional Liberators Conference, held at the U.S. State Department. A
new president was in the White House—Ronald Reagan—and he
had sent his secretary of state, General Alexander Haig, and the
assistant secretary for human rights, Elliott Abrams, to partici-
pate. The conference opened with a dramatic gesture. American
soldiers who had liberated the concentration camps carried out
70 Elie Wiesel

captured German flags and threw them at the feet of the survivors
present, representing 20 different countries.
In his speech, Wiesel began by noting the links that bound
together survivors and those who had liberated them. Despite
their different languages and different nationalities, there was
a connection formed—a connection unlike that of friends or
brothers. The survivors and liberators, Wiesel said, served as each
other’s witnesses.
Wiesel noted that he could never forget April 11, 1945—the
day on which Buchenwald was liberated. He noted that what he
saw in the eyes of the first American soldiers was astonishment,
bewilderment, pain and anger, followed by tears.
Wiesel said that he and his fellow survivors had no more tears
left; what they felt was gratitude:

And ultimately it was gratitude that brought us back to nor-

malcy and to society. Do you remember, friends? In Lublin
and Dachau, Stuthoff and Hordhausen, Ravensbruck and
Maidanek and Belsen and Auschwitz, you were surrounded by
sick and wounded and hungry wretches, barely alive, pathetic
in their futile attempts to touch you, to smile at you, to reassure
you, to console you and most of all to carry you in triumph on
their frail soldiers. You were heroes, our idols: tell me, friends,
have you ever felt such love, such admiration?69

Characteristically, Wiesel continued his address by urging

all those listening to take the lessons learned in Auschwitz and
Buchenwald, in Ravensbruck and Mauthausen, and apply them
to current regions of the world where human rights were being
violated:

If we do not raise our voices against war, against hate, against

indifference—who will? We speak with the authority of men
and women who have seen war; we know what it is. We have
seen the burnt villages, the devastated cities, the deserted
 A New Sense of Hope 71

homes, we still see the demented mothers whose children are

being massacred before their eyes, we still follow the endless
nocturnal processions to the flames rising up to the seventh
heaven—if not higher. . . .
We are gathered here to testify—together. Our tale is a
tale of solitude and fear and anonymous death—but also of
compassion, generosity, bravery, and solidarity. Together, you
the liberators and we the survivors represent a commitment
to memory whose intensity will remain. In its name we shall
continue to voice our concerns and our hopes not for our own
sake, but for the sake of humankind. Its very survival may
depend on its ability and willingness to listen.70
CHAPTER 8

Winner of
the Nobel
Prize

B
y the 1980s, Wiesel was an internationally recognized figure,
for his public role as an advocate for victims of the Holocaust
and for his willingness to speak out on behalf of contempo-
rary victims. In 1985, when President Reagan made a diplomatic trip
to what was then West Germany, Wiesel was among those express-
ing outrage when it was revealed that the planned itinerary would
include a stop at a German military cemetery named Bitburg, where
German soldiers and members of the S.S. were buried, but no visit
to a former concentration camp.
Wiesel pleaded with the president to change his agenda without
success, and then, on the occasion of his being awarded the Congres-
sional Gold Medal on April 19, 1985, he privately and then publicly
again asked the president to reconsider. In his acceptance speech,
Wiesel noted:

Mr. President:
This medal is not mine alone. It belongs to all those who
remember what S.S. killers have done to their victims.

72
 Winner of the Nobel Prize 73

It was given to me for my writings, teaching, and for my

testimony. When I write, I feel my invisible teachers looking
over my shoulders, reading my words and judging their verac-
ity. While I feel responsible to the living, I feel equally respon-
sible to the dead. Their memory dwells in my memory. . . .
I am convinced that you were not aware of the presence of
S.S. graves in the Bitburg cemetery. But now we all are aware
of that presence. I therefore implore you, Mr. President, in the
spirit of this moment that justifies so many others, tell us now
that you will not go there: that place is not your place. Your
place is with the victims of the S.S.71

Wiesel’s speech increased public pressure on President Reagan.

Ultimately, Reagan’s agenda was amended to include a trip to
the former concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. He also stopped
at Bitburg, however, where Reagan outraged countless survivors
by declaring that the S.S. buried in Bitburg were victims much
as those murdered in the concentration camps had been victims.
Shortly after the trip, Wiesel resigned from the Holocaust Com-
mission, disappointed in Reagan’s response to his request and in
the politics and in-fighting that were marking efforts to build the
Holocaust Museum.

NOBEL PRIZE
In 1986, Wiesel learned that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize. He had spent the day in fasting and prayer for the Yom
Kippur holiday, the Jewish Day of Atonement, when a reporter
tipped him off that he had been the unanimous choice. Early the
following morning, Jakub Sverdrup, director of the Nobel Com-
mittee and the Nobel Institute, phoned to confirm the news and
to congratulate Wiesel.
He was besieged by journalists and requests for interviews.
But the request that most impressed Wiesel’s son was the invita-
tion to throw out the first ball in the World Series. Wiesel refused,
74 Elie Wiesel

In 1985, President Ronald Reagan laid a wreath on the tomb of Ger-

man soldiers from World War II at a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany.
Elie Wiesel criticized Reagan when he learned that the president’s
European itinerary included a stop at the cemetery but no visit to
a former concentration camp. Reagan eventually changed his plans
and went to the former camp at Bergen-Belsen.
 Winner of the Nobel Prize 75

because the game it fell on a Jewish holiday. A special exception

was made: no one threw out the first pitch on the first day of the
World Series, and Wiesel was invited to throw out the pitch on
the second day. As Wiesel wryly noted in his memoirs, “for the
first—and surely the last—time in my life, my picture adorns the
first page of the New York Times sports section.”72
Wiesel learned that the awarding of the Nobel Prize brought
many changes, in addition to attention and acclaim. “For one,” he
wrote in his memoirs,

you learn who is a friend and who is not. Contrary to popular

wisdom, a friend is not one who shares your suffering, but one
who knows how to share your joy. I was pleasantly surprised
by some and sadly disappointed by others. There are envious
and jealous people everywhere; they are part of the human
landscape. Some who praised my writings when I was poor
and unknown now resent me for being “rich” and “famous.”
Others were faithful to me as long as I wrote for a limited pub-
lic; now it bothers them to see my name on pages other than
literary. Sadly, some “admirers” turned against me after the
Nobel, as though to punish me for a success some of them had
actually helped me achieve. These betrayals hurt me the most.
I cannot explain them.73

Wiesel arrived in Oslo, Norway, on December 9, 1986, for the

Nobel ceremony. Following a press conference, he had a private
audience with the Norwegian king, Olav V, who impressed Wiesel
with his knowledge of current international events, as well as his
simplicity and warmth. At the same time, Wiesel was astonished
that demonstrators denying the existence of the Holocaust were
gathered in Norway to distribute their propaganda.
The award ceremony took place in the great hall of Oslo Uni-
versity. Wiesel’s wife and son were there, but he was overcome by
emotion at the thought of all those who were not present.74 First,
the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra played, then came a speech by
76 Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel posed with the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1986 along
with his son, Shlomo Elisha, and Egil Aarvik (right), chairman of the
Norwegian Nobel Committee. During the award ceremony, Aarvik
called Wiesel “a messenger to mankind whose message is not one of
hate and revenge, but of brotherhood and atonement.”

Egil Aarvik, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. He

spoke in Norwegian, citing Wiesel as “a witness for truth and
justice” and “a messenger to mankind whose message is not one
of hate and revenge, but of brotherhood and atonement”:

It is in recognition of this particular human spirit’s victory

over the powers of death and degradation, and as a support
to the rebellion of good against the evil in the world, that the
Norwegian Nobel Committee today presents the Nobel Peace
Prize to Elie Wiesel. We do this on behalf of millions—from
all peoples and races. We do it in deep reverence for the
memory of the dead, but also with the deep-felt hope that
 Winner of the Nobel Prize 77

the prize will be a small contribution which will forward the

cause which is the greatest of all humanity’s concerns—the
cause of peace.75

Wiesel wrote of feeling overcome by the moment, of walk-

ing to the podium, looking out over the audience, and believing
that he saw his father behind his son.76 For a few moments, he
was unable to speak. Finally composing himself, Wiesel offered a
moving acceptance speech, which included an expression of his
sense of inadequacy in representing all the victims—victims who
included his parents, his little sister, teachers, and friends from
long ago. He noted that the honor he was receiving belonged to all
the survivors and their children, and to all Jewish people.
Wiesel told the audience of how the memories of Auschwitz
were still clear, as clear as if they had happened yesterday. He
remembered his bewilderment and anguish at the ghetto, the
deportation, the cattle car, and the flames of Auschwitz. He
remembered himself as a boy, asking his father how something
like this could happen in the twentieth century. He remembered
that boy asking how the world could have remained silent.

And now the boy is turning to me. “Tell me,” he asks, “what
have you done with my future, what have you done with your
life?” And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep
memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget.
Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.
And then I explain to him how naive we were, that the
world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore
never to be silent whenever, wherever human beings endure
suffering and humiliation. We must 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 irrel-
78 Elie Wiesel

evant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of

their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that
moment—become the center of the universe.77

History of the Nobel Peace Prize

Alfred Nobel died on December 10, 1896. His will, written one
year earlier, directed that the vast majority of his fortune—
estimated at $9 million—was to be used for the establishment
and award of annual prizes in five categories: literature, medicine
or physiology, chemistry, physics, and for the person who has
done the most to work “for the peace and brotherhood of men.”
Ever since, people have marveled at the incongruity between
the man, his career, and the award that was named for him. Alfred
Nobel was a Swede who spent many years living in other nations—
he spent a lot of time in Paris, and he died in Italy. He made his
fortune in his 30s by perfecting the manufacture of explosives,
which he patented in 1867, leading to the creation of dynamite.
The first Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in 1901 to Henry
Dunant, founder of the Red Cross, and Frédéric Passy, an inter-
national pacifist. Nobel specified that the Peace Prize, unlike
the other Nobel Prizes (which were to be awarded by Swedish
committees), would be awarded by a committee of five people
elected by the Norwegian Parliament.
The prize is often awarded to a single person, but more than
one person may be chosen (as in the first prize in 1901), or an
organization may be the recipient of a particular year’s Peace
Prize. The first was the Institute for International Law, honored
in 1904 for its efforts to formulate the general principles that
would form the science of international law. The International
Committee of the Red Cross has received the prize twice—in
1917 and 1944—for its efforts to promote international solidarity
and brotherhood in the midst of war. The Office of the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees received the prize in
1954; other organizations to receive the prize include the United
 Winner of the Nobel Prize 79

After the speech, Wiesel had lunch with Aarvik and his fam-
ily, and then spent several hours calling persecuted Jews in the
Soviet Union, to let them know that he was thinking of them

Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in 1965, the United Nations

Peacekeeping Forces (1988), International Physicians for the
Prevention of Nuclear War (1985), Médécins sans Frontières
(Doctors Without Borders) in 1999, and the International Atomic
Energy Agency and its Director General—Mohamed ElBaradei—
in 2005.
Over the years, the award has highlighted the achievements
of men and women from many different nations who represent
widely varying backgrounds and experiences. An examination
of recipients provides an interesting study of changing global
events and issues of international concern for more than a cen-
tury. As of 2005, only 12 women had received the Nobel Prize:
Bertha von Suttner (1905), Jane Addams (1931), Emily Greene
Balch (1946), Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan (1976),
Mother Theresa (1979), Alva Myrdal (1982), Aung San Suu Kyi
(1991), Rigoberta Menchú Tum (1992), Jody Williams (1997),
Shirin Ebadi (2003), and Wangari Maathi (2004).
The choices have often proved controversial, including the
joint awarding of the Peace Prize in 1973 to Henry Kissinger
and Le Duc Tho for their efforts to negotiate a treaty to end to
the conflict in Vietnam, efforts which ultimately failed to lead to
peace. Awards were given in 1979 and 1993 to men attempting
to negotiating peace settlements in the Middle East; sadly their
efforts failed to yield a lasting peace.
One of the most curious facts about the Nobel Peace Prize
is the list of men and women who failed to win a prize. This list
includes one of the people most closely identified with non-
violence, Mohandas Gandhi of India. Gandhi never received the
Nobel Peace Prize, despite being nominated five times.
80 Elie Wiesel

and had spoken of their courage to those he met at the Nobel

ceremony. Later, in the evening, a torchlight parade was held
in Wiesel’s honor. People from all over Norway, young and old,
paraded under Wiesel’s window, shouting “Shalom” as they
passed him.
Later, an official dinner was held. At Wiesel’s request, the
dinner was kosher, requiring special food and wine imported
from Israel and France, as well as new dishes and silverware.
Novelist Gioeeske Anderson, the vice chairman of the Nobel
Committees, spoke, as did Leo Etinger, representing the survi-
vors. Wiesel offered a brief speech stressing his sense of grati-
tude, and the importance of gratitude in the world. Some of the
dinner guests then followed the Wiesels back to their hotel room,
where the conversation and the sharing of memories continued
until dawn.

NOBEL ADDRESS
On the following day, Wiesel followed the custom in which the
Nobel laureate appears again at Oslo University’s Great Hall to
offer his or her Nobel lecture. Wiesel startled many in the audi-
ence by opening his address by singing Ani Maamin, the prayer
announcing belief in the coming of the Messiah, the prayer sung
by many in the ghettos. Wiesel invited those in the audience
familiar with the prayer to join him.
His official lecture then focused on the need to speak out, to
address injustice, to remember the past and yet retain hope for
the future:

Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the

duty to reject despair.
I remember the killers and I despair; I remember the victims,
and on their behalf and for their sake and for their children’s
sake, I must invent a thousand and one reasons to hope.
 Winner of the Nobel Prize 81

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent

injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to
protest. The Talmud tells us that by saving a single human
being—and there are two versions: one version says a single
Jewish human being and the other version says any human
being—man can save the world. We may be powerless to
open all the jails and free all the prisoners, but by declaring
our solidarity with one prisoner, we indict all jailers. None of
us is in a position to eliminate war, but it is our obligation to
denounce it and expose it in all its hideousness. War leaves no
victors, only victims.78

After the lecture, Wiesel and his family traveled to Stockholm,

Sweden, where they were the invited guests at a dinner with local
officials. They then traveled on to Copenhagen, Denmark, and
to Israel. Wiesel was surprised to realize that Israel was the only
non-Arab country where articles critical of him as the choice for
the Nobel Prize appeared. These articles were, in particular, criti-
cal of Wiesel’s decision not to live in Israel.

AFTER THE PRIZE

Wiesel decided to use the Nobel prize money he had been awarded
to begin a Foundation for Humanity, which would support vari-
ous humanitarian projects. He used his influence to ensure that
several Soviet Jews were able to obtain exit visas. He organized a
conference of Nobel laureates from all disciplines, inviting them
to join together to discuss the threats and promises of the twenty-
first century.
The conference was held in France. Seventy-nine writers, sci-
entists, and politicians accepted the invitation to attend. Wiesel,
astonished that so many accepted his invitation, asked one—
Joshua Lederberg, winner of the 1958 Nobel Prize in Medicine—
what motivated so many to take time from their busy schedules
82 Elie Wiesel

to attend. Lederberg replied, “At this point, what else can we hope
to obtain? A Nobel Prize? We already have one. Now we must give
something back.”79
It was a stimulating gathering of great thinkers. There was
debate and disagreement, but the attendees were eager to learn,
to move beyond their own areas of expertise. The speeches given
by those in attendance were impressive and educational. At the
conference’s conclusion, Wiesel summarized what had been
accomplished:

Have we resolved some of the problems that confront our soci-

ety? Their number is as vast as their complexity. How can one
resolve, in four days, what in fifty years or even five thousand
years, since Cain and Abel, mankind has simply ignored or
barely touched upon? The Nobel Foundation has not yet dis-
covered the secret that would enable it to offer the laureates
universal wisdom in addition to worldly glory. . . .
We must seek and situate the success of this conference in
the conference itself. The fact that it has taken place is in itself
significant and important.
And what is the goal we have set for ourselves? To identify
the problems and prioritize them. To name the diseases, the
epidemics, the famines, the fanaticism. Torture. Pollution.
AIDS. The nuclear threat. The distress of children beaten and
killed far from the eyes of men, and perhaps from the eyes of
God Himself. Just by enumerating these problems, it would
be easy to become discouraged. Every one of the participants
is proof of what an individual is capable of undertaking and
achieving for the benefit of mankind.80

In the years after he received the prize, Wiesel continued to be

an outspoken advocate for all those seeking justice in oppressed
regions of the world. He traveled to Poland to support Solidar-
ity leader Lech Walesa, and to Japan to counter the rise of anti-
 Winner of the Nobel Prize 83

Semitism there. He spoke against human rights abuses in South

Africa, Bosnia, Brazil, Burma, Tibet, Central America, Cambo-
dia, Rwanda, and Vietnam. He continued to teach, and to meet
with American presidents to impress upon them a greater aware-
ness of human rights abuses in American foreign policy.
CHAPTER 9

Human
Rights
Activist

O
n June 3, 1987, Elie Wiesel was asked to testify at the trial of
accused Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie in Lyon, France.
Wiesel had initially refused, believing that his testimony
would be irrelevant, as neither he nor his family had suffered directly
at the hands of Barbie, who had operated in Lyon. But when lawyers
for the plaintiffs, historians, and many of Wiesel’s friends urged him
to testify, at last he agreed.
Barbie was accused of overseeing the transport of Jews to
concentration camps while in Holland, and of torturing Jews and
members of the French resistance while based in Lyon. As Allied
troops neared Lyon in 1944, Barbie killed hundreds of French
citizens who had first-hand knowledge of his activities, destroyed
Gestapo records, and escaped back to Germany. He ultimately
fled to Bolivia; and it was not until 1983 that his true identity was
revealed and he was extradited to France, to be tried for crimes
against humanity.
There were many first-hand witnesses to Barbie’s atrocities who
testified, but Wiesel’s role was different. He was asked to speak on

84
 Human Rights Activist 85

the importance of remembrance and justice. He spoke of those,

including those in his family, who had perished at the hands of
the Nazis, and of the importance of ensuring that the crimes that
had been committed were not whitewashed or forgotten:

For the survivors, however, it is getting late. Their number is

diminishing. They meet one another more and more often at
funerals. Can one die more than once? Yes, one can. The sur-
vivor dies every time he rejoins, in his thoughts, the nightly
procession he has never really left. How can he detach himself
from them without betraying them? For a long time he talked
to them, as I talk to my mother and my little sister: I still see
them moving away under the fiery sky. . . . I ask them to forgive
me for not following them. . . .
It is for the dead, but also for the survivors, and even more
for their children—and yours—that this trial is important: it
will weigh on the future. In the name of justice? In the name
of memory. Justice without memory is an incomplete justice,
false and unjust. To forget would be an absolute injustice in
the same way that Auschwitz was the absolute crime. To forget
would be the enemy’s final triumph.
The fact is that the enemy kills twice—the second time
in trying to obliterate the traces of his crime. That is why he
pushed his outrageous, terrifying plan to the limits of lan-
guage, and well beyond: to situate it out of reach, our of our
range of perception. “Even if you survive, even if you tell, no
one will believe you,” an S.S. told a young Jew somewhere in
Galicia.
This trial has already contradicted that killer. The wit-
nesses have spoken; their truth has entered the awareness of
humanity. . . .
As guardians of their invisible graves, graves of ash encrusted
in a sky of eternal night and fog, we must remain faithful to
them. We must try. To refuse to speak, when speech is awaited,
would be to acknowledge the ultimate triumph of despair. . . .
86 Elie Wiesel

Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie was escorted from the courthouse in
Lyon, France, in 1987, after he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Elie Wiesel was asked to testify at Barbie’s trial, but at first he thought
his testimony would be irrelevant since he and his family had not
suffered directly from Barbie. Wiesel eventually did testify, however,
about the importance of remembrance and justice.
 Human Rights Activist 87

Thanks to this trial, the survivors have a justification

for their survival. Their testimony counts, their memories
will be part of the collective memory. Of course, nothing
can bring the dead back to life. But because of the meetings
that have taken place within these precincts, because of the
words spoken, the accused will not be able to kill the dead
again. If he had succeeded it would not have been his fault,
but ours.81

FOR ALL HUMANITY

Wiesel has continued to speak out, meeting with political and
religious leaders to bring peace where there is war, and end
violence and injustice. He was instrumental in President Bill
Clinton’s decision to intervene in the genocide in Bosnia, urging
him to take action at the ceremony marking the opening of the
National Holocaust Museum in Washington. He ended a previ-
ously close relationship with former French President François
Mitterand after learning that Mitterand had been a close friend of
a Nazi collaborator and after Mitterand refused to express regret
for his actions.
Wiesel has maintained his prolific writing schedule. His
recent works have included The Judges, published in 2002, a novel
in which a plane is forced down by bad weather and five of its
passengers encounter a man who questions them on their lives
and then announces that one of them—the least worthy—will
die. The Time of the Uprooted, published in 2005, tells of a Czech
Jew, a child during the Holocaust, who was hidden by a Christian
woman in Hungary, and has spent his life thereafter as a kind of
refugee, living in constant exile and never truly feeling at home
in the world.
Wiesel’s mission remains the same: to speak for those who
have no voice, and to serve as a witness for what came before.
Through his writing and his speaking, he gives voice to so many
88 Elie Wiesel

President Bill Clinton, flanked by Elie Wiesel (right) and Bud Mey-
erhoff, chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Council, lit the eternal flame
during the dedication of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in
April 1993.
 Human Rights Activist 89

who have been forgotten or overlooked. He speaks for them, all

the while knowing that his task is often futile.
In A Jew Today, Wiesel told his reader:

Accept the idea that you will never see what they have seen—
and go on seeing now, that you will never know the faces that
haunt their nights, that you will never hear the cries that rent
their sleep. Accept the idea that you will never penetrate the
cursed and spellbound universe they carry within themselves
with unfailing loyalty.
And so I tell you: You who have not experienced their
anguish, you who do not speak their language, you who do
not mourn their dead, think before you offend them, before
you betray them. Think before you substitute your memory
for theirs.82

Wiesel has acknowledged that there is a consequence to speaking

out, and a constant sense of frustration at trying to tell of events
for which there should be no words, or trying to explain events
that others find impossible to understand. Yet there is an obliga-
tion, a requirement, to continue to serve as a witness:

After the liberation, illusions shaped our hopes. We were

convinced that a new world would be built upon the ruins of
Europe. A new civilization would dawn. No more wars, no
more hate, no more intolerance, no fanaticism anywhere. And
all this because the witnesses would speak, and speak they did.
Was it to no avail?
What matters is to struggle against silence with words, or
through another form of silence. What matters is to gather a
smile here and there, a tear here and there, a word here and
there, and thus justify the faith placed in man, a long time ago,
by so many victims.
Why do I write? To wrest those victims from oblivion. To
help the dead vanquish death.83
90 Elie Wiesel

WIESEL’S LEGACY
According to Jack Kolbert, author of The Worlds of Elie Wiesel,
Wiesel has served as the voice and conscience of the Jewish people
for nearly a half-century.84 He has been honored with numerous
awards which, in addition to the Nobel Prize, include the Martin
Luther King Jr. Award, the Commander of the French Legion of
Honor, the Medal of Liberty, and the Grand Prix de la Littéraire
de la Ville de Paris, among others. He has received more than
100 honorary degrees from numerous universities, including Yale
University, Notre Dame, Boston University, and Bar Ilan Univer-
sity in Israel.
He continues his teaching career, and has served as a visiting
scholar at Yale University, a Distinguished Professor of Judaic

Legacy of the Peacemaker

One of the greatest legacies of Elie Wiesel is his dedication to

ensuring that the events of the Holocaust are not forgotten. In
1978, Wiesel was invited by President Jimmy Carter to chair his
Commission on the Holocaust. Wiesel joined with other religious
and civic leaders in a mission to determine how best to ensure
that the events of the Holocaust were remembered, and that
its victims were appropriately honored. A year later, Wiesel was
appointed chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.
Wiesel’s efforts have led to annual Holocaust Remembrance
Days in Washington, D.C., and the creation of the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum, located adjacent to the National
Mall in Washington. The museum was chartered by a unanimous
act of Congress in 1980; its mission is to serve as a national
institution for the study, documentation, and interpretation of
Holocaust history, as well as serving as a memorial to the millions
of people murdered during the Holocaust.
The museum uses its resources in part to preserve the memo-
ries of those who survived the Holocaust, so that they might
bear witness to what they suffered. Visitors to the museum
 Human Rights Activist 91

Studies at the City College of New York, and Andrew W. Mellon

Professor in the Humanities at Boston University. He currently
teaches at Boston University, serving as a faculty member in both
the department of philosophy and the department of religion.
The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, which he founded
with his wife in 1986 after receiving the Nobel Prize, continues
to serve its stated mission: “to combat indifference, intolerance
and injustice through international dialogues and youth-focused
programs that promote acceptance, understanding and equality.”
In the United States, the foundation sponsors the Elie Wiesel
Prize in Ethics Essay Contest for college juniors and seniors, and
awards the Elie Wiesel Humanitarian Award to an individual
who best represents the foundation’s mission. Past recipients have

are challenged to reflect upon the questions—both moral and

spiritual—raised by the events of the Holocaust and to consider
their own responsibilities to ensure that this bitter history is not
repeated.
At the museum, documents, photographs, and other evidence
of the Holocaust are preserved. Programs, exhibitions, art and
artifacts, and educational materials are all designed to provide
greater public understanding of the history of the Holocaust, as
well as current global events in which ethnic or religious groups
are the victims of violence or oppression.
The museum sponsors events for survivors and their children.
Survivors work as volunteers at the museum. Exhibitions at the
museum, traveling exhibitions, and on-line exhibitions focus on
other areas of concern, global crises where genocide is threat-
ened. The museum also maintains the Center for Advanced
Holocaust Studies, which supports scholarship and publications
in the field of Holocaust studies, promotes the growth of Holo-
caust studies at American universities, and initiates programs to
train scholars specializing in Holocaust studies.
92 Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel stands between two candles during a Holocaust com-

memoration ceremony held during the World Economic Forum in
Davos, Switzerland, on January 26, 1995. That week marked the
fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the liberation of the Nazi con-
centration camps. Wiesel remains an ardent advocate for justice for
oppressed people around the world.

included King Juan Carlos of Spain, Senator Hillary Rodham

Clinton, and First Lady Laura Bush.
The foundation also organizes international meetings for
young people living in regions of the world experiencing con-
flict and war. In addition, the foundation runs the Beit Tzipora
Centers for Study & Enrichment in Israel, sponsoring Ethiopian
Jewish children who immigrate to Israel to receive academic and
vocational training and emotional support. The Center is named
for Wiesel’s younger sister, who died at Auschwitz.
Wiesel has written more than 40 works of fiction and non-fic-
tion. He remains a strong supporter of the state of Israel, but has
also been an outspoken advocate for justice for Soviet Jews, the
 Human Rights Activist 93

Miskito Indians of Nicaragua, Argentina’s Desaparecidos, Cam-

bodian refugees, the Kurds, victims of apartheid in South Africa,
victims of war in the former Yugoslavia, and victims of genocide
and famine in Africa.
Wiesel’s writing has been described as “a courageous, sus-
tained protest against indifference.”85 In recent years, Wiesel has
expressed concern about human rights violations in Iran, the
Balkans, Rwanda, and Ireland.
In a 1996 interview in Sun Valley, Idaho, Wiesel was asked
his advice for young people who are just beginning their lives.
“Sensitivity,” he replied. “Be sensitive in every way possible
about everything in life. Be sensitive. Insensitivity bring indif-
ference and nothing is worse than indifference.”86 Later in the
interview, he was asked if there was anything he still wanted
to accomplish. “I may seem silly or childish to you,” he replied,
“but if I could bring back one child, I would give up anything I
have. Just one child. If I could now—which is more possible—
free one prisoner, I would give a lot. If I could give a feeling of
solidarity to a person who is abandoned, I would still give a lot.
So you see, I would like to do things that I cannot do. All I have
is a few words, and I will give these words. That’s what I am
trying to do.”87
Alan Dershowitz, author and professor of law at Harvard Law
School, was among those who, in 1986, were asked to propose
nominees to the Nobel Prize Committee. His letter, urging the
Committee to consider Wiesel, included the following:

There are many excellent reasons for recognizing Professor

Wiesel. But none is more important than his role in teaching
survivors and their children how to respond in constructive
peace and justice to a worldwide conspiracy of genocide, the
components of which included mass killing, mass silence and
mass indifference. Professor Wiesel has devoted his life to
teaching the survivors of a conspiracy which excluded so few
94 Elie Wiesel

to re-enter and adjust in peace to an alien world that deserved

little forgiveness. Wiesel’s works merit the highest degree of
recognition, especially from representatives of the world that
stood silently by.88
 Appendix

Nobel Address Delivered by Elie Wiesel

on December 10, 1986, upon acceptance
of the Nobel Prize for Peace

Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Your excellencies, Chairman

Aarvik, members of the Nobel Committee, ladies and gentlemen:
Words of gratitude. First to our common Creator. This is
what the Jewish tradition commands us to do. On special occa-
sions, one is duty bound to recite the following prayer: Barukh
shehekhyanu vekiymanu vehigianu lazman haze—“Blessed be
Thou for having sustained us until this day.”
Then—thank you, Chairman Aarvik, for the depth of your
eloquence. And for the generosity of your gesture. Thank you for
building bridges between people and generations. Thank you,
above all, for helping humankind make peace its most urgent and
noble aspiration.
I am moved, deeply moved by your words, Chairman Aar-
vik. And it is with a profound sense of humility that I accept
the honor—the highest there is—that you have chosen to bestow
upon me. I know: your choice transcends my person.
Do I have the right to represent the multitudes who have
perished? Do I have the right to accept this great honor on their
behalf? I do not. No one may speak for the dead, no one may
interpret their mutilated dreams and visions. And yet, I sense
their presence. I always do—and at this moment more than ever.
The presence of my parents, that of my little sister. The presence
of my teachers, my friends, my companions. . . .
This honor belongs to all the survivors and their children
and, through us, to the Jewish people with whose destiny I have
always identified.

95
Appendix

I remember: it happened yesterday or eternities ago. A young

Jewish boy discovered the Kingdom of Night. I remember his
bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast.
The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar
upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind
were meant to be sacrificed.
I remember he asked his father, “Can this be true? This is the
twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such
crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?”
And now the boy is turning to me. “Tell me,” he asks, “what
have you done with my future? What have you done with your
life?” And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep
memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget.
Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.
And then I explain to him how naive we were—that the world
did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to
be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering
and humiliation. 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.
Of course, since I am a Jew profoundly rooted in my people’s
memory and tradition, my first response is to Jewish fears, Jewish
needs, Jewish crises. For I belong to a traumatized generation, one
that experienced the abandonment and solitude of our people.
It would be unnatural for me not to make Jewish priorities my
own: Israel, Soviet Jewry, Jews in Arab lands . . . . But others are

96
 Appendix

important to me. Apartheid is, in my view, as abhorrent as anti-

Semitism. To me, Andrei Sakharov’s isolation is as much a dis-
grace as Josef Begun’s imprisonment and Ida Nudel’s exile. As is
the denial of Solidarity and its leader Lech Walesa’s right to dis-
sent. And Nelson Mandela’s interminable imprisonment.
There is so much injustice and suffering crying out for our
attention: victims of hunger, of racism and political persecution—
in Chile, for instance, or in Ethiopia—writers and poets, prison-
ers in so many lands governed by the Left and by the Right.
Human rights are being violated on every continent. More
people are oppressed than free. How can one not be sensitive
to their plight? Human suffering anywhere concerns men and
women everywhere. That applies also to the Palestinians, to whose
plight I am sensitive, but whose methods I deplore when they lead
to violence. Violence is not the answer. Terrorism is the most dan-
gerous of answers. They are frustrated, that is understandable;
something must be done. The refugees and their misery; the chil-
dren and their fears; the uprooted and their hopelessness: some-
thing must be done about their situation. Both the Jewish people
and the Palestinian people have lost too many sons and daughters
and have shed too much blood. This must stop, and all attempts
to stop it must be encouraged. Israel will cooperate, I am sure of
that. I trust Israel, for I have faith in the Jewish people. Let Israel
be given a chance, let hatred and danger be removed from her
horizons, and there will be peace in and around the Holy Land.
Please understand my deep and total commitment to Israel: if you
could remember what I remember, you would understand. Israel
is the only nation in the world whose very existence is threatened.
Should Israel lose but one war, it would mean her end and ours
as well. But I have faith. Faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob, and even in His creation. Without it no action would be

97
Appendix

possible. And action is the only remedy to indifference, the most

insidious danger of all. Isn’t this the meaning of Alfred Nobel’s
legacy? Wasn’t his fear of war a shield against war?
There is so much to be done, there is so much that can be
done. One person—a Raoul Wallenberg, an Albert Schweitzer, a
Martin Luther King, Jr.—one person of integrity can make a dif-
ference, a difference of life and death.
As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be
true. As long as one child is hungry, our lives will be filled with
anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to
know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them,
that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that
while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom
depends on theirs.
This is what I say to the young Jewish boy wondering what I
have done with his years. It is in his name that I speak to you and
that I express to you my deepest gratitude. No one is as capable
of gratitude as one who has emerged from the Kingdom of Night.
We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an
offering; not to share them would mean to betray them. Our lives
no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need
us desperately.
Thank you, Chairman Aarvik. Thank you, members of the
Nobel Committee. Thank you, people of Norway, for declar-
ing on this singular occasion that our survival has meaning for
mankind.

98
 Chronology

1928 Elie Wiesel is born on September 30.

1940 S ighet becomes part of Hungary; first prisoners
arrive at Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland
on June 14.
1944 G
 erman troops cross into Hungary in March; the
Wiesel family is transported to Auschwitz in May.
1945 W
 iesel and his father forced on the march from
Auschwitz on January 18; they are transported to
Buchenwald in Germany, where Wiesel last sees
his father on January 28. American forces arrive
at the camp on April 11 to liberate the prisoners.
Wiesel is transported to France.
1947 N
 umber of Jews displaced by World War II
reaches approximately 250,000.
1948 W
 iesel travels to Paris to study at the Sorbonne
and later begins work as a journalist.
1949 W
 iesel travels to Israel; obtains a job as a Paris
correspondent for an Israeli newspaper.
1954 W
 iesel writes down his memories of the
concentration camp years while traveling to
Brazil. In France, he interviews novelist François
Mauriac, who persuades him to convert his
memories into the book that would become Night.
1956 W
 iesel’s original 800-page manuscript, written
in Yiddish, is published in Argentina under the
title Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Stayed
Silent). Wiesel moves to New York; is hit by a taxi.

99
Chronology

1957 W
 iesel travels cross-country from New York to
Los Angeles; meets Golda Meier while working as
a journalist at the United Nations.
1958 Night is published in France under the title La Nuit.
1960 American edition of Night is published.
1961 Dawn is published.
1962 The Accident is published.
1963 W
 iesel earns his first major literary prize, the Prix
Ravarol.
1964 T
 he Town Beyond the Wall is published in English;
Wiesel decides to return to Sighet.
1965 W
 iesel travels to the Soviet Union to write about
the fate of the Soviet Jews.
1966 Jews of Silence is published.
1969 W
 iesel marries Marion Erster Rose in Jerusalem
on April 2.
1970 W
 iesel writes Entre deux soleils (One Generation
After).
1972 W
 iesel’s son, Shlomo Elisha, is born on June 6.
Wiesel becomes Distinguished Professor of Judaic
Studies at City University of New York. Publishes
Souls on Fire.
1973 W
 iesel composes Ani Maamim (I Believe); it is
performed at Carnegie Hall on November 11
and 13.
1974 Wiesel’s sister Bea dies of cancer.
1975 Wiesel travels to South Africa.

100
 Chronology

1976 W
 iesel publishes Messengers of God; becomes
Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at
Boston University.
1978 A
 Jew Today is published; Wiesel chairs the
Commission on the Holocaust.
1979 W
 iesel is appointed chairman of the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Council.
1981 Wiesel attends Liberators’ Conference.
1985 W
 iesel is awarded Congressional Gold Medal;
criticizes President Ronald Reagan for his planned
visit to Bitburg cemetery where members of
the S.S. were buried. Resigns from Holocaust
Commission.
1986 W
 iesel is awarded Nobel Peace Prize; Wiesel
and his wife found Elie Wiesel Foundation for
Humanity.
1987 W
 iesel is asked to testify at trial of accused Nazi
war criminal Klaus Barbie.
1990 From the Kingdom of Memory is published.
1993 W
 iesel participates in the dedication of the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum.
1995 Wiesel
 publishes first volume of his memoirs, All
Rivers Run to the Sea.
1999 S econd volume of memoirs, And the Sea is Never
Full, is published.
2002 The Judges is published.
2005 The Time of the Uprooted is published.

101
Notes
Chapter 1
1. Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to
the Sea (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1995), p. 69.
2. Elie Wiesel, Night (New York:
Bantam Books, 1960), p. 19.
3. Ibid., p. 23.
4. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the
Sea, pp. 75–76.
5. Wiesel, Night, p. 26.
6. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the
Sea, p. 77.
7. Wiesel, Night, p. 32.
8. Norwegian Nobel Commit-
tee, press release, “The Nobel
Peace Prize for 1986,” October
14, 1986, www.nobelprize.
org/peace/laureates/1986/press.
html.
9. Ibid.
10. Elie Wiesel, Nobel Acceptance
Speech, delivered in Oslo on
December 10, 1986, www.
elieweiselfoundation.org/
ElieWiesel/speech.html.
Chapter 2
11. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the
Sea, p. 8.
12. Elie Wiesel, Interview: Nobel
Prize for Peace, Sun Vally,
Idaho, June 29, 1996. Down-
loaded from Academy of
Achievement Web site, www.
achievement.org
13. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the
Sea, p. 13.
14. Wiesel, Interview: Nobel Prize
for Peace, www.achievement.
org.
102
15. François Mitterand and Elie
Wiesel, Memoir in Two Voices
(New York: Arcade Publishing,
1996), pp. 4–5.
16. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the
Sea, pp. 27–28.
17. Mitterand and Wiesel, pp. 21–22.
Chapter 3
18. Elie Wiesel, From the Kingdom
of Memory (New York: Summit
Books, 1990), p. 126.
19. Ibid., p. 128.
20. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the
Sea, p. 63.
21. Wiesel, Night, p. 28.
22. Ibid., p. 29.
23. Ibid., p. 34.
24. Ibid., p. 36.
25. Laurence Rees, Auschwitz (New
York: Public Affairs, 2005), p.
19.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., p. 83.
28. Ibid., p. 169.
29. Ibid., pp. 227–228.
CHAPTER 4
30. Wiesel, Night, pp. 38–39.
31. Ibid., pp. 61–62.
32. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the
Sea, p. 88.
33. Wiesel, Night, p. 67.
34. Ibid., p. 82.
35. Quoted in Rees, p. 264.
36. Wiesel, Night, pp. 105–106.
37. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the
Sea, p. 97.
38. Wiesel, Night, p. 109.

Chapter 5
39. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the
Sea, p. 110.
40. Ibid., p. 145.
41. Ibid., p. 150.
42. Ibid., pp. 239–240.
43. Ibid., p. 241.
44. Quoted in Mark Chmiel, Elie
Wiesel and the Politics of Moral
Leadership (Philadelphia: Tem-
ple University Press, 2001), p. 9.
45. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the
Sea, p. 267.
46. Wiesel, From the Kingdom of
Memory, p. 10.
Chapter 6
47. Quoted in Chmiel, p. 10.
48. Elie Wiesel, The Accident (New
York: Hill and Wang), p. 110.
49. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the
Sea, p. 301.
50. Ibid., pp. 301-302.
51. Wiesel, The Accident, p. 9.
52. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the
Sea, p. 321.
53. Wiesel, From the Kingdom of
Memory, p. 14.
54. Quoted in Jack Kolbert, The
Worlds of Elie Wiesel (Selins-
grove: Susquehanna University
Press, 2001), p. 32.
55. Wiesel, From the Kingdom of
Memory, p. 126.
56. Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the
Sea, p. 358.
57. Ibid., p. 365.
58. Ibid., p. 366.
59. Elie Wiesel, The Jews of Silence
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1966), p. vii.
103
Section
Notes
Title
Chapter 7
60. Elie Wiesel, And the Sea is
Never Full (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1999), p. 41.
61. Quoted in Kolbert, pp. 35–36.
62. Wiesel, And the Sea is Never
Full, p. 43.
63. Ibid., p. 70.
64. Ibid., p. 88.
65. Ibid., pp. 180–181.
66. Ibid., p. 191.
67. Wiesel, From the Kingdom of
Memory, pp. 115–116.
68. Speech delivered by Elie Wiesel
in 1995, at the ceremony to
mark the 50th anniversary of
the liberation of Auschwitz,
downloaded from www.pbs.
org/eliewiesel/.
69. Wiesel, From the Kingdom of
Memory, pp. 155–156.
70. Ibid., pp. 162–163.
Chapter 8
71. Ibid., p. 173, 176.
72. Wiesel, And the Sea is Never
Full, p. 261.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid., p. 268.
75. Presentation Speech by Egil
Aarvik, Chairman of the Nor-
wegian Nobel Committee, on
the Nobel Peace Prize 1986,
downloaded from www.nobel-
prize.org/peace/laureates/1986/.
76. Wiesel, And the Sea is Never
Full, p. 270.
77. Nobel Acceptance Speech,
delivered by Elie Wiesel in
Oslo on December 10, 1986,
downloaded from
Section Title
Notes
www.eliewieselfoundation.org/
ElieWiesel/speech.html
78. Wiesel, From the Kingdom of
Memory, pp. 239, 247–249.
79. Wiesel, And the Sea is Never
Full, p. 283.
80. Ibid., p. 286.
Chapter 9
81. Wiesel, From the Kingdom of
Memory, pp. 187–189.
82. Quoted in Robert McAfee
Brown, Elie Wiesel: Messenger
to all Humanity (Notre Dame,
Indiana: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1989), p. 4.
104
83. Wiesel, From the Kingdom of
Memory, pp. 20–21.
84. Kolbert, p. 19.
85. Gary Henry, “Story and Silence:
Transcendence in the Work of
Elie Wiesel,” downloaded from
www.pbs.org/eliewiesel/.
86. Academy of Achievement
Interview: Elie Wiesel, Nobel
Prize for Peace, June 29, 1996,
Sun Valley, Idaho, downloaded
from www.achievement.org.
87. Ibid.
88. Alan Dershowitz, “A Biblical
Life,” downloaded from www.
pbs.org/eliewiesel/.
 Bibliography

Brown, Robert McAfee. Elie Wiesel: Messenger to all Humanity.

Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989.
Chmiel, Mark. Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.
Kolbert, Jack. The Worlds of Elie Wiesel. Selinsgrove, Pa: Susque-
hanna University Press, 2001.
Mitterand, François and Wiesel, Elie. Memoir in Two Voices. New
York: Arcade Publishing, 1996.
Rees, Laurence. Auschwitz. New York: Public Affairs, 2005.
Rittner, Carol (ed.). Elie Wiesel: Between Memory and Hope. New
York: New York University Press, 1990.
Wiesel, Elie. The Accident. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961.
———. All Rivers Run to the Sea. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1995.
———. And the Sea is Never Full. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1999.
———. From the Kingdom of Memory. New York: Summit Books,
1990.
———. The Jews of Silence. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Win-
ston, 1966.
———. Night. New York: Bantam Books, 1960.

105
Further Reading

Cuomo, Kerry Kennedy. Speak Truth to Power. New York: Crown

Publishers, 2000.
Rees, Laurence. Auschwitz. New York: Public Affairs, 2005.
Wiesel, Elie. Dawn. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961.
———. From the Kingdom of Memory. New York: Summit Books,
1990.
———. Night. New York: Bantam Books, 1960.

Web sites
Official Site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum
www.auschwitz-muzeum.oswiecim.pl

Audio Interview with Elie Wiesel

www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/wiesele1.shtml

The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity

www.eliewieselfoundation.org

Nobel Prize—Official Web site

www.nobelprize.org

Speak Truth to Power: Elie Wiesel

www.pbs.org/speaktruthtopower/elie.html

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

www.ushmm.org

106
 Picture Credits

page
4: Getty Images 53: Associated Press, AP
6: Associated Press, AP 58: Time & Life Pictures/
11: Getty Images Getty Images
20: Getty Images 64: © Bettmann/CORBIS
23: Associated Press 68: Associated Press, AP
29: Getty Images 74: Getty Images
35: Associated Press, 76: Associated Press, AP
U.S. ARMY 86: AFP/Getty Images
38: Associated Press, AP 88: Associated Press, FILES
47: Getty Images 92: Associated Press, AP

cover
© Nancy R. Schiff/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

107
Index

A C
Aarvik, Egil, 76–77 Cambodian refugees, 93
Abrams, Elliott, 69 camps, concentration. See also indi-
Accident, The, 52, 55–56 vidual camps
activism arrival at, 4–5
beginnings of, 58–59 fact-finding visit to, 66–67
global, 82–83, 87–89 life in, 5–6
Klaus Barbie trial and, 84–87 camps, displaced person, 42–43
All Rivers Run to the Sea, 13 Carter, Jimmy, 64, 65–66, 91
And the World Stayed Silent, 49–50 cattle cars, 32
Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Center for Advanced Holocaust
Humanities, 62, 91 Studies, 91
Ani Maamin, 62, 80 Centers for Study and Enrichment,
anti-Semitism 92
in Japan, 82 Children’s Aid Agency, 38, 40–41
in Sighet, 10, 12 City University of New York, 61–62,
apartheid, 64–65, 93 90–91
Argentina, 17, 93 Clinton, William J., 87, 88
Auschwitz Commander of the French Legion of
American photos of, 66 Honor, 90
arrival in, 19–21 Commission on the Holocaust, 7,
beginnings of, 21–24 64–66, 73, 91
evacuation from, 30–32 concentration camps. See also indi-
fact-finding visit to, 66–67, vidual camps
68 arrival at, 4–5
life in, 25–29 fact-finding visit to, 66–67
life in, 5–6
B Congressional Gold Medal,
Babi-Yar, fact-finding visit to, 67 72–73
Barbie, Klaus, 84–87 Consistoire, 40
Beit Tzipora Centers for Study and controversy, Nobel Peace Prize and,
Enrichment, 92 79
Bergen-Belsen, 72–73 crown, gold, 26
Birkenau, 19–21, 67
Bitburg, 72–73, 74 D
“Bloc-Notes,” 48 Dawn, 55
Bosnia, 87 de Gaulle, Charles, 48
Boston University, 62, 91 degrees, honorary, 90
Buchenwald, 4–6, 32–35 Dershowitz, Alan, 93–94
Buna, 26 Desaperecidos of Argentina, 93

108
 Section
Index
Title

displaced persons camps, 42–43 Gleiwitz, 31–32

Distinguished Professor of Judaic gold crown, 26
Studies, 61–62, 90–91 Grand Prix de la Littéraire de la Ville
Doctors Without Borders, 79 de Paris, 90
Dunant, Henry, 78
H
E Haig, Alexander, 69
Eichmann, Karl Adolf, 1, 16–17, 18 Holocaust Memorial Council, 7, 64,
ElBaradei, Mohammed, 79 88, 91
Elie Wiesel Humanitarian Award, Holocaust Memorial Museum, 87,
91–92 88, 90–91
Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics Essay Holocaust Remembrance Days, 64,
Contest, 91 65, 91
emigration (forced), Adolf Eichmann honorary degrees, 90
and, 16–17 Höss, Rudolf, 21–22
Entre Deux Soleils, 60 housekeeper (Maria), 2, 18–19
Ethiopian Jews, 92
Humanitarian Award, 91–92
evacuations
Hungary, 8, 11, 12–13
from Auschwitz, 30–32
from Buchenwald, 34–35
from Sighet, 1–2, 3–5 I
I Believe, 62
Institute for International Law, 78
F
International Committee of the Red
Feig, Reb Dodye (grandfather), 9
Foundation for Humanity, 81–82, Cross, 78
90–92 International Liberators Conference,
France 69–71
academics and, 41–44 Israel
arrival in, 37–39 criticism from, 81
reunion with Hilda and, support of, 92
39–40 travel to, 45–46
testimony and, 46–50
writing in, 44–46 J
From the Kingdom of Memory, Jew Today, A, 64, 89
57 Jewish Agency, 44–45
Jewish community, in Sighet,
G 9–10
Gandhi, Mohandas, 79 Jewish Daily Forward, 55
gas chambers, 22–23 Jews of Silence, The, 58–59
ghettos, relocation to, 18–19 Judges, The, 87

109
Section Title
Index

K Night
Kingdom of Memory, From the, 57 age selections and, 19
Kissinger, Henry, 79 death of father and, 32–34
Klement, Ricardo. See Eichmann, description of, 6
Karl Adolf lack of interest in murders
Kurds, 93 and, 27
Kuzists, 12 memories in, 5
writing of, 49–50, 55
Nobel Peace Prize
L history of, 78–80
La Nuit. See Night
Nobel address following, 7,
Le Duc Tho, 79
80–81, 95–98
Lederberg, Joshua, 81–82
nomination to, 93–94
legacy of Elie Wiesel, 90–94
time following, 81–83
Legion of Honor, 48
winning of, 6, 73–78
Nobel Prize in Literature, François
M Mauriac and, 48
Mabovitch, Goldie. See Meier,
Golda
O
Mann, Ibi, 31
Oath, The, 63
Máramarosszighet. See Sighet
Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants
marches, 30–32, 33
(OSE), 38, 40–41
Maria (housekeeper), 2, 18–19
Office of the United Nations High
Martin Luther King Jr. Award, 90
Commissioner for Refugees, 78
Mauriac, François, 46–50
Olav V, King of Norway, 75
Medal of Liberty, 90
One Generation After, 60
Meier, Golda, 53–54, 55
Oslo University, 75
Mendès-France, Pierre, 46–47
Mengele, Josef, selections and, 19,
28, 29 P
Messenger of God, 63–64 Palestine, 40, 43
Meyerhoff, Bud, 88 Passey, Frédéric, 78
Milhuad, Darius, 62 Prix Ravarol prize, 57
Miskito Indians, 93 Prize in Ethics Essay Contest, 91
Mitterand, François, 87 professorships, 61–62, 90–91

N R
National Holocaust Museum, 87, 88, Reagan, Ronald, 69, 72–73, 74
90–91 Red Cross, 78
New York, move to, 51–54 Romania, 8, 11, 12–13
Nicaragua, 93 Rose, Jennifer (stepdaughter), 60

110
 Section
Index
Title

Rose, Marion Erster (wife). See Wie- United Nations Peacekeeping Force,
sel, Marion (wife) 79
Rosenbaum, Mordechai, 41, 44 United Nations press room, 52–54
United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum, 87, 88, 90–91
S U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, 7,
“Sacred Cannon, The,” 45
64, 88, 91
Schlomo, Ben, as pen name, 45
Schutzstaffel, 1
selections, 19–20, 28, 32 V
showers, 22–23 Un di velt hot geshvign, 49–50
Shushani, 41, 44 “Victors and Vanquished,” 45
Sighet
childhood in, 8–14 W
evacuation from, 1–2, 3–5 Walesa, Lech, 68, 82
Holocaust arrival in, 15–19 Wiesel, Bea (sister), 8, 40, 41–43, 46,
return to as adult, 15, 56–57 63
survivors from, 43–44 Wiesel, Eliezer (grandfather), 9
Sighetul Marmatiei. See Sighet Wiesel, Hilda (sister), 8, 39–40
Sorbonne, 44 Wiesel, Marion (wife), 60–61
Souls on Fire, 62 Wiesel, Sarah (mother), 8, 9–10
South Africa, 64–65 Wiesel, Schlomo Elisha (son), 61,
Soviet Union, Jews in, 58–59, 92 75–76
surgery, 30 Wiesel, Schlomo (father)
Sverdrup, Jakub, 73 in Auschwitz, 30, 32
death of, 32–34
T description of, 8–9
Talmud, 9, 39 Wiesel, Tzipora (sister), 11
tattoos, 26 Wizhnitz, Israel, 9–10
taxi accident, 52 World Economic Forum, 92
teaching, 61–62 World Series, 73, 74, 75
testimony, 46–50
Tho, Le Duc, 79 Y
Time of the Uprooted, The, 87 Yale University, 90
Town Beyond the Wall, The, 55–56, Yediot Ahronot, 58
57 Yugoslavia, 93
Transylvania. See Sighet

U
Un di velt hot geshvign, 49–50
UNICEF, 78

111
About the Author

Heather Lehr Wagner is a writer and an editor. She is the

author of more than 30 books exploring social and political
issues and focusing on the lives of prominent men and women.
She earned a B.A. in political science from Duke University,
and an M.A. in government from the College of William and
Mary. She lives with her husband and family in Pennsylva-
nia. She is also the author of Henry Kissenger in the modern
peacemakers series.

112