THE GREAT HUMANITARIAN, ELIE WEISEL

THERE IS RIGHT AND THERE IS WRONG.
WE MUST ALWAYS SPEAK OUT FOR WHAT IS RIGHT.

Phyllis Carter

Elie Wiesel in his office in 2012. Bebeto Matthews / AP

 

·    MATT FORD

 

Elie Wiesel, the American Jewish writer and activist whose haunting accounts of survival in the death camps of Nazi Germany became the foremost narratives of the Holocaust, died on Saturday. He was 87 years old.

His death was announced by Yad Vashem, Israel's museum of the Holocaust, on Twitter

 

Wiesel, born in Romania in 1928, was among the millions of European Jews rounded up and sent to concentration camps by Nazi Germany and its allies during World War II. Only a teenager at the time, he and his family were first deported to Auschwitz, where he was assigned to a labor camp, and then to Buchenwald shortly before its liberation by the U.S. Army in April 1945.

Ten years after the war ended, Wiesel wrote Night, his first written work on his experiences within the camps. The searing account of his and his father's struggle to survive amid genocide and inhumanity became a touchstone of Holocaust literature and a staple of public-school curricula in the United States. It was the first of over fifty books he wrote over the following decades.

Wiesel also became an activist against racism and discrimination, eventually earning him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. In his acceptance speech, he spoke of the need to keep the Holocaust's memory alive to prevent future genocides.

"We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.

Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere," he said. "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."