Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, the memory keeper for victims of Nazi persecution, and a Nobel laureate who used his moral authority to force attention on atrocities around the world, died Saturday at his home in New York. He was 87.
His death was confirmed in a statement from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Other details were not immediately available.
By the time of Wiesel’s death, millions had read Night, his account of the concentration camps where he watched his father die and where his mother and younger sister were gassed. Presidents summoned him to the White House to discuss human rights abuses in Bosnia, Iraq and elsewhere, and the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee called him a “messenger to mankind.”
But when he emerged, gaunt and near death, from Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945, there was little indication that he would have such a presence in the world.
“The voice of the person who can speak in the first-person singular – ‘This is my story; I was there’ – it will be gone when the last survivor dies,” Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt said in an interview with the Washington Post. “But in Elie Wiesel, we had that voice with a megaphone that wasn’t matched by anyone else.”
Wiesel was in his 20s when he wrote the first draft of Night after ten years of silence about the war. Today, perhaps the only volume in Holocaust literature that eclipses the book in its popular reach is Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl.While the diary ends days before Nazis arrest Anne and her family, Night puts readers in Auschwitz within the first 30 pages.
Short enough to be read in a single sitting, the volume captures all of the most salient images of the Holocaust: the teeming ghettos where many struggled to believe that the worst was yet to come, the cattle cars, the barracks, the smokestacks.
Wiesel, whose speeches routinely drew sell-out crowds, would remain highly sought-after as a lecturer for the rest of his life.
In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed Wiesel chairman of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, which would call for the creation of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. It was an important recognition of his role in the Holocaust community.
Another turning point came in 1985, when Wiesel publicly confronted President Ronald Reagan about a coming trip to Germany, where the president planned to visit the Bitburg military cemetery. Wiesel and others opposed the trip after learning that the cemetery included the graves of several dozen members of the S.S., the elite Nazi force.
“That place, Mr. President, is not your place,” Wiesel said. “Your place is with the victims of the S.S.”
To forget the Holocaust, he always said, would be to kill the victims a second time.
Eliezer Wiesel was born Sept. 30, 1928, in Sighet, a town in modern-day Romania. Wiesel grew up in a tightknit, observantly Jewish family. Wiesel taught for more than 30 years at Boston University, where his classes were blockbusters. At Yale University, where he was a visiting professor in 1982, 350 students signed up for 65 spots in his course on literature and memory.
He wrote more than 40 works of literature, including novels, plays, memoirs and essays that were rooted in the Jewish thought he learned first from his grandfather and rabbis in Sighet.
Toward the end of his life, Wiesel was among the victims of investor Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and reportedly lost tens of millions of dollars from his personal assets and those of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, which he and his wife founded after he won the Nobel Prize.
“I have seen in my lifetime the problem is when the imagination of the criminal precedes that of the innocent,” Wiesel said in a public panel discussion.
In his lectures, he often looked small and fragile behind the heavy lectern. He commented that he hoped not to live long enough to be the last survivor because the burden would be too great.
“Wise men remember best,” Wiesel said in his Nobel lecture. “And yet it is surely human to forget, even to want to forget. . . . Only God and God alone can and must remember everything.”