Eliezer ‘Elie’ Wiesel

‘The survivors had every reason to despair of society; they did not. They
opted to work for humankind, not against it.’
• As a boy, Elie Wiesel survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald camps. As
an adult, he dedicated himself to commemorating the Holocaust and
to ensuring its lessons were learnt. He was an acclaimed author and
recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He died on 2 July 2016, aged 87.
• Born in 1928 in the small Romanian town of Sighet.
• The third of four children and the only son.
• He was 15 when, in spring 1944, German troops occupied Sighet.
Soon after, he was moved with the rest of his family into one of the
two ghettos created in the town. When both ghettos were liquidated
the entire Jewish population of Sighet was deported to Auschwitz
Birkenau.
Decades later, Wiesel recorded his feelings during his first hours in
Auschwitz: ‘Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp,
that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed…Never shall I
forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed
into smoke under a silent sky.’
For a decade after the Holocaust, he kept silent about his experiences,
until a French journalist, François Mauriac, persuaded him to write. The
result was Night, his acclaimed memoir, published for the first time in
French in 1958. The book has been translated into over 30 languages
and Wiesel went on to write over 60 books, fiction and non-fiction.
He moved to the US in the 1950s and married in 1969. He had a son,
Shlomo, in 1972. Appointed as the first Chair of the President’s
Commission on the Holocaust in 1976, Wiesel initiated Days of
Remembrance, the United States’ annual commemoration of the
Holocaust. At the Day of Remembrance ceremony in 2003, he spoke of
the importance of commemoration: ‘All the rivers run to the sea, days
come and go, generations vanish, others are born...What does one do
with the memory of agony and suffering?…To remember means to lend
an ethical dimension to all endeavors and aspirations.’
 Alongside his work on Holocaust commemoration, Wiesel spoke
out on behalf of Soviet Jews, vicTIMS of genocide in Cambodia, victims
of apartheid, victims of famine in Africa and victims of Bosnia and
Darfur, amongst others. He was a Professor at Boston University and
with his wife he established the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.
Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. The citation for the
award said: ‘His message is one of peace and atonement and human
dignity. The message is in the form of a testimony, repeated and
deepened through the works of a great author.’
Holocaust
• Hebrew Shoʾah (“Catastrophe”), Yiddish and Hebrew Ḥurban
(“Destruction”), the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million
Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by Nazi
Germany and its collaborators during World War II.
• The word Holocaust is derived from the Greek holokauston, a
translation of the Hebrew word ʿolah, meaning a burnt sacrifice
offered whole to God.
Einsatzgruppen[a] (German: [ˈaɪnzatsˌɡʁʊpn̩], lit. 'deployment groups';[1]
also 'task forces')[2] were Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary death squads
of Nazi Germany that were responsible for mass killings, primarily by
shooting, during World War II (1939–1945) in German-occupied Europe
• The Kashariyot
• The kashariyot (couriers) were a group of young women who disguised
themselves as non-Jews and travelled between Jewish communities and ghettos
in Poland smuggling messages, documents, money and weapons to incarcerated
Jews. Their efforts were documented by Emanuel Ringelblum in the Oneg Shabbat
archives, where he praised their bravery and ingenuity:
• ‘Boldly they travel back and forth through the cities and towns of Poland. […] They
are in mortal danger every day. They rely entirely on their ‘Aryan’ faces and on the
peasant kerchiefs that cover their heads.’
• The word kashariyot comes from the Hebrew kesher, meaning connection,
acknowledging that these women provided hope and a link to the outside world,
as well as the information they brought with them.
Night

• “ When Elie Wiesel, the author of the Night, was liberated from
Buchenwald in 1945 he imposed a ten-year vow of silence upon
himself before trying to describe what had happened to him and over
six million other Jews. When he finally broke the silence, he had
trouble finding a publisher. When Night was finally published, over
twenty-five years ago, few people wanted to read about the
Holocaust. But avoiding depressing subject matter is indefinite. In the
subsequent quarter century the world has had to hear a story it
would have preferred not to hear
— the story of how a cultured people turned to
genocide, and how the rest of the world, also
composed of cultured people, remained silent in
the face of genocide.”
Wiesel’s Nightmarish Journey
• The Wiesel family was transported by train to Auschwitz, a large complex of
concentration camps in southern art of Poland. About 800,000 Jews died there,
including Elie Wiesel’s mother and sister. Wiesel and his father were chosen to
work as slave labourers. Later they were transported to Buchenwald, a camp
within Germany that sent prisoners to work in nearby weapons plants.

• Unlike Auschwitz, Buchenwald did not have gas chambers for killing prisoners.
However, many of the prisoners at Buchenwald died from disease, exhaustion,
beatings, and executions. As the United States army neared Buchenwald in April
1945, the prisoners rose up in revolt and liberated the camp. Wiesel said in
Night that when he first had a chance to look at himself in a mirror, he was
shocked to see a corpse gazing back at him.
• Wiesel waited ten years to write about the Holocaust because
he felt that words could not describe such an event. His first
book, Night, is considered one of the most powerful works of
Holocaust Literature.

• In recognition of his commitment to speak out against

violence and oppression, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Peace in 1986.