Listening to Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel was born in a small village in Romania on September 30, 1928. He had the traditional upbringing of an Eastern European Jew in pre-World War II Europe. His Jewish faith and his family were at the center of young Wiesel's life. This life was lost forever in 1944, when 15-year old Wiesel and his family were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz in Poland. His mother and a sister were gassed to death and his father died of starvation in detention. Wiesel was transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp where, on April 11, 1945, he was finally liberated by American troops.
For years he dealt with the trauma of this experience by maintaining a silence. After studying at the Sorbonne and working as a journalist, Wiesel broke this silence with the haunting book, The Night. Wiesel's prose is poetic in describing he jolting experience of his brutal detention.
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
...
Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself.
Never.
Since then, Wiesel has acted as a moral sentry guarding the memory of those years. He has used his influence on behalf of Jews persecuted in the former Soviet Union and oppressed peoples elsewhere. He has always made clear that the victims of the Holocaust will win an ultimate victory only if we the living never forget the horrors of those years; if we never forget the depravity and evil to which a modern civilized nation can fall; and if we never forget that "...to remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all..." For his work, Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.
Wiesel is not the typical self-congratulatory moral nag à la Jimmy Carter, rather he is a quiet moral conscience. He is confident that if good people are presented directly with the proper moral choice, they will generally choose to do the right thing. This makes his moral authority that much more compelling. Unfortunately, this quiet moral force did not work in 1985, in what in retrospect remains a clear mistake by Ronald Reagan.
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