Elie Weisel

Elie Wiesel (born Eliezer Wiesel on September 30, 1928)^[1] is a Jewish writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor. He is the author of over 40 books, the best known of which is Night, a memoir that describes his experiences during the Holocaust and his imprisonment in several concentration camps.

Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. The Norwegian Nobel Committee called him a "messenger to mankind," noting that through his struggle to come to terms with "his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler's death camps," as well as his "practical work in the cause of peace," Wiesel has delivered a powerful message "of peace, atonement and human dignity" to humanity.^[2]

Early life

Wiesel was born in Sighet, (now Sighetu Marmaţiei), Maramureş, Kingdom of Romania, to Shlomo and Sarah Wiesel. Sarah was the daughter of Dodye Feig, a Hasid and farmer from a nearby village. Shlomo was an Orthodox Jew of Hungarian descent, and a shopkeeper who ran his own grocery store. He was active and trusted within the community, and had spent a few months in jail for having helped Polish Jews who escaped, and was hungry in the early years of his life. It was Shlomo who instilled a strong sense of humanism in his son, encouraging him to learn Modern Hebrew and to read literature, whereas his mother encouraged him to study Torah and Kabbalah. Wiesel has said his father represented reason, and his mother, faith (Fine 1982:4). Elie Wiesel had three sisters: Hilda and Beatrice (Bea), who were older than he, and Tzipora, who was the youngest in the family. Bea and Hilda also survived the war and eventually emigrated to North America; in Bea's case, to Montréal, Canada.

World War II

The town of Sighet was re-annexed to Hungary. In 1944 Elie, his family and the rest of the town were placed in one of the two ghettos in Sighet. Elie and his family lived in the larger of the two, on Serpent Street. On May 16, 1944, the Hungarian authorities deported the Jewish community in Sighet to Auschwitz – Birkenau. While at Auschwitz, the number A-7713 was tattooed onto his left arm. Wiesel was separated from his mother and sister Tzipora, who are presumed to have been murdered at Auschwitz. Wiesel and his father were sent to the attached work camp Buna-Werke, a subcamp of Auschwitz III Monowitz. He managed to remain with his father for a year as they were forced to work under appalling conditions and shuffled between concentration camps in the closing days of the war. On January 29, 1945, just a few weeks after the two were marched to Buchenwald, Wiesel's father suffered from dysentery, starvation, and exhaustion, and was later sent to the crematory, only months before the camp was liberated by the American Third Army on April 11.^[3]

After the war

After the war, Wiesel was placed in a French orphanage, where he learned the French language and was reunited with both his older sisters, Hilda and Bea, who had also survived the war. In 1948 he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne.

He taught Hebrew and worked as a choirmaster before becoming a professional journalist. He wrote for Israeli and French newspapers, including Tsien in Kamf (in Yiddish) and the French Jewish Magazine, L'arche. However, for 10 years after the war, Wiesel refused to write about or discuss his experiences during the Holocaust. Like many survivors, Wiesel could not find the words to describe his experiences. However, a meeting with François Mauriac, the 1952 Nobel Laureate in Literature, who eventually became Wiesel's close friend, persuaded him to write about his Holocaust experiences.

Wiesel first wrote the 900-page tome Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent), in Yiddish, which was published in abridged form in Buenos Aires. Wiesel rewrote a shortened version of the manuscript in French, and it was published as the 127-page autobiography La Nuit, and later translated into English as Night. Even with Mauriac's support, Wiesel had trouble finding a publisher for his book, and initially it sold few copies.

In 1960, Arthur Wang of Hill & Wang agreed to pay a $100 pro-forma advance, and published it in the U.S. in September that year as Night. It sold just 1,046 copies over the next 18 months, but attracted interest from reviewers, leading to television interviews with Wiesel and meetings with literary figures like Saul Bellow. "The English translation came out in 1960, and the first printing was 3,000 copies," Wiesel said in an interview. "And it took three years to sell them. Now, I get 100 letters a month from children about the book. And there are many, many million copies in print."

By 1997, Night was selling 300,000 copies annually in the United States; by March 2006, it had sold six million copies there, and had been translated into 30 languages. On January 16, 2006, Oprah Winfrey chose the novel for her book club. One million extra paperback and 150,000 hardcover copies were printed carrying the "Oprah's Book Club" logo, with a new translation by Wiesel's wife, Marion, and a new preface by Wiesel. As of February 13, 2006, Night was no. 1 in The New York Times bestseller list for paperback non-fiction.

Life in the United States

In 1955, Wiesel moved to New York City, having become a U.S. citizen: due to injuries suffered in a traffic accident, he was forced to stay in New York past his visa's expiration and was offered citizenship to resolve his status. In the U.S., Wiesel wrote over 40 books, both fiction and non-fiction, and won many literary prizes. Wiesel's writing is considered among the most important in Holocaust literature. Some historians credit Wiesel with giving the term 'Holocaust' its present meaning, but he does not feel that the word adequately describes the event and wishes it were used less frequently to describe significant occurrences as everyday tragedies (Wiesel:1999, 18).

He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for speaking out against violence, repression, and racism. He has received many other prizes and honors for his work, including the Congressional Gold Medal in 1985, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996. He is also the recipient of The International Center in New York's Award of Excellence. Wiesel has published two volumes of his memoirs. The first, All Rivers Run to the Sea, was published in 1994 and covered his life up to the year 1969 while the second, titled And the Sea is Never Full and published in 1999, covered 1969 to 1999.

Wiesel has become a popular speaker on the subject of the Holocaust. As a political activist, he has advocated for many causes, including Israel, the plight of Soviet and Ethiopian Jews, the victims of apartheid in South Africa, Argentina's Desaparecidos, Bosnian victims of genocide in the former Yugoslavia, Nicaragua's Miskito Indians, and the Kurds. He recently voiced support for intervention in Darfur, Sudan.^[4] He also led a commission organized by the Romanian government to research and write a report, released in 2004, on the true history of the Holocaust in Romania and the involvement of the Romanian wartime regime in atrocities against Jews and other groups, including the Roma. The Romanian government accepted the findings in the report and committed to implementing the commission's recommendations for educating the public on the history of the Holocaust in Romania. The commission, formally called the International Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, came to be called the Wiesel Commission in honor of his leadership.

Wiesel is the honorary chair of the Habonim Dror Camp Miriam Campership and Building Fund, and a member of the International Council of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation.

On March 27, 2001, Wiesel appeared at the University of Florida for Jewish Awareness Month and was presented with an honorary doctor of humane letters degree from the University of Florida by Dr. Charles Young.^[5]

In 2002^[6], he inaugurated the Elie Wiesel Memorial House in Sighet in his childhood home.

Recent years

In 2008 Wiesel gave the convocation speech at Appalachian State University. The money paid for his appearance covered costs of travel and the rest went to his various charitable institutions.

On November 30, 2006 Wiesel received an honorary knighthood in London in recognition of his work toward raising Holocaust education in the United Kingdom.^[8]

On February 1, 2007, Wiesel was attacked in a San Francisco hotel by a twenty-two year old holocaust denier named Eric Hunt.^[9]^[10] Hunt was convicted in July 2008;^[10]^[11] he was sentenced to two years but was given credit for time served and good behavior and was released.^[12]

During the early 2007 selection process for the Kadima candidate for President of Israel, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reportedly offered Wiesel the nomination (and, as the ruling-party candidate and an apolitical figure, likely the Presidency), but Wiesel "was not very interested".^[13] Shimon Peres was chosen as the Kadima candidate (and later President) instead.

On April 9, 2008, Wiesel was presented with an Honorary Degree, Doctor of Letters at the City College of New York.

Criticism

Critics of Israel have sharply disagreed with the manner in which Weisel exhibits moral support for the existence of the state of Israel and defends this position. The voluble American television personality Christopher Hitchens had called him a "contemptible poseur and windbag".^[15] Hitchens implied that Wiesel had an association of some kind with the militant Palestinian Jewish organization Irgun in the 1940s, an organization which Hitchens characterizes as having "employed extreme violence against Arab civilians".^[15] Hitchens also has attacked Wiesel for allegedly failing to condemn to Hitchens' satisfaction the Sabra and Shatila massacre because Wiesel was allegedly reluctant to criticize Israel.^[15]

Noam Chomsky also criticized Wiesel's response to the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Muslims by Christian forces loyal to assassinated Lebanese president Bashir Gemayel. Chomsky accuses Wiesel of attempting to excuse alleged Israeli responsibility for the massacre by having stated that "after all the Israeli soldiers did not kill"; Chomsky implies that Wiesel's real concern in regards to the Sabra and Shatila massacre is that it reflects badly on Israel.^[16] Chomsky also alleges that Israeli troops participated in much killing in their own right, reasoning that therefore Wiesel must view Israel as "basically exempt from criticism".^[16]

In a radio interview several years prior to his well-publicized tenure-denial case, controversial former DePaul University professor Norman Finkelstein accused Wiesel of cheapening the significance of the Nazi Holocaust by asserting its uniqueness. Finkelstein complained that Wiesel had allegedly earned speaking fees of as high as $25,000 yet impeded learning by allegedly not comparing the Holocaust to other massacres and, furthermore, traveling in a wheelchair and having the eyes of a movie star:

Finkelstein's book The Holocaust Industry has a section attacking what he calls the "uniqueness doctrine," which he attributes to Wiesel and to a putative "Holocaust Industry." Finkelstein alleges that Wiesel is a leader of the "Holocaust Industry" as he has allegedly refused to satisfactorily criticize Israel for the Sabra and Shatila Massacre and, according to Finkelstein, is plotting to diminish the importance of the genocides of communists, non-National socialists, the Roma people, homosexuals and the handicapped by the National Socialists and the Turks genocide of the Armenians (Finkelstein^[18]) as well as other genocides^[19] and allegedly deploring African-American "ingratitude" to Jews; in Against Silence, Wiesel wrote: "We helped the blacks; we always helped them. ... I feel sorry for blacks. There is one thing they should learn from us and that is gratitude. No people in the world knows gratitude as we do; we are forever grateful."^[20]

Books

Contents

Early life

World War II

After the war

Life in the United States

Recent years

Criticism

Books

See also

Notes

References

External links