~a column by Colleen O’Brien
“We have the far-right gaining in popularity across Europe, fascism on the ascendance in the U.S., Islamic extremism tearing through nearly every country on earth. Now more than ever we must listen to Elie Wiesel.” Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, 2016
Activist, humanitarian, journalist, teacher, columnist, lecturer, author Elie Wiesel died last week at the age of 87. He was the Holocaust survivor who taught the world: Never forget. Always forgive.
Wiesel was 15 in 1944 when all the Jews in his Romanian village ghetto were transported to Auschwitz, a Nazi death camp in Poland. He watched his mother and youngest sister led away, never to be seen again; by the time he was 16, he lay in a barracks by his father who was dying from a beating — it was three months before the war ended. In April of 1945 the concentration camp where he himself was dying was liberated by American soldiers. Elie could think only of food, not freedom.
He wound up in France reunited with his two sisters, also camp survivors, and began work as a translator. He attended classes at the Sorbonne and soon got work as a freelance journalist. He began writing about his life, and from this eventually gained renown in Europe, America and around the world.
He wrote 60 books, gave hundreds of lectures, taught classes, advised presidents. Despite the horror and despair of a year of his youth spent in a place where people were sent to die of torment and starvation, he lived his adult life with a learned compassion, telling the world that there is more to celebrate in humans than not. He taught respect of all others as well as respect for diversity of belief, opinion, language and background. His life became a testimony and an example of what it means to be a survivor, for he showed the world the moral path — how to get on with living the best life you can and never giving up on humanity, never becoming cynical, reminding us that silence in the face of cruelty helps the oppressor, the tormentor.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.
In 1999, I heard Elie Wiesel speak at a Jewish center in Charleston, South Carolina. I’d read his classic book, Night, a slim first volume of a trilogy telling of the things he had seen by the time he was 16 and the resulting loss of a belief in God and finally his “coming back to the light.” Night eventually sold millions, still sells in the hundreds of thousands each year, and brought to Wiesel and his fellow Jews an opening to talk about something that most of the world had shoved under the rug after World War Two.
Even the Jews who survived murderous intent could not talk about it. Allied soldiers who walked into death camps at the end of the war disbelieving the horror they saw could not bear to pass on what they witnessed. The Nuremberg trials in 1945-46 that indicted and prosecuted Nazis in charge of the Final Solution — Hitler’s written-out plan for the extermination of an entire race — were in the news and avidly followed, but even then, there was a reluctance to talk about man’s inhumanity. It was finally Wiesel’s book, published in 1960 in the U.S., which gradually took hold and began to be read and talked about that led to public discussion about human laws that he believed can be transgressed only to our moral peril.
At the Charleston lecture, Wiesel told funny Jewish stories and horrific Holocaust stories. He was lively, eloquent and adamant about watching for and stopping torture, killing, displacing of any peoples –Jews, South Africans, Serbs, Bosnians, Rhwandans, Cambodians. It doesn’t matter, he said, who is being treated badly, the rest of us are obliged to interfere, to speak up. He told us that hate was absurd, but that we can never condone injustice, that “there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”
It hasn’t really happened that way in the world we live in, although there are plenty of folks who speak out against the myriad forms of injustice we humans can come up with. But Elie Wiesel helped us along, encouraging us toward our own humanity to one another. “Be sensitive to the other,” he said. “Live good, creative, honorable existences. And remember that the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”
