Obituary

In Memoriam: Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel was a towering intellectual figure whose writings, thoughts, and actions fundamentally changed the mindset of his and following generations. Comparisons to philosophers Martin Buber and Jean Paul Sartre suggest themselves, or to human and political rights activists such as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Andrei Sakharov, and the Dalai Lama. Each represents historical and moral watersheds. Wiesel, who passed away on July 2, 2016 at age 87, was one of those transformative personalities. More than anyone else, he imposed an uncompromising yet comprehensible awareness of the Shoah and its moral implications onto a global society that had long avoided confronting it. President Obama observed that he was the “conscience of the world”;¹ he wrote and spoke in psalmic terminology, min hameitzar—out of the depths. When he admonished President Reagan that the Bitburg military cemetery, where members of Hitler’s Waffen-SS are buried “is not your place,”² Wiesel was speaking with the unquestioned moral authority of those who had experienced the brutality of the SS.

Wiesel safeguarded the authenticity of the memory of the Jews who underwent the horrors of “the Kingdom of Night,”³ both those who survived and those who failed to emerge from the inferno. He was their undisputed advocate, though not in a vacuum. Two symbiotic concepts defined his philosophy with respect to Holocaust remembrance: on the one hand, Wiesel insisted that the Jewish essence of the Shoah must never be diluted or trivialized; on the other, he adamantly maintained that the lessons of the Holocaust must be seen as universal.

By 1978, when President Jimmy Carter appointed him head of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, Wiesel was recognized not only as the most prominent survivor of the Shoah, but as one who infused remembrance with contemporary significance and relevance. The expectation was that the Commission would propose a memorial somewhere in Washington, DC, somber, dignified, commemorative, but yet also uncontroversial. Wiesel had other ideas. Under his leadership, the Commission’s members, my late mother among them, recommended a living educational institution that would more fundamentally affect its visitors. The result was the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, whose mission is encapsulated in Wiesel’s now famous phrase, “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”

As I write, one series of photographs returns to my mind: it is August 1979 and the Commission is visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau. Five survivors of the death camp hold on to one another, Elie in the middle, Dr. Hadassah Rosensaft—my mother—and Sigmund Strochlitz on either side of him, and Chris Lerman and Mannes Schwarz beside them. Elie is not there only as chairman of the Commission but as the linchpin of a close-knit group who had been there before; that they understand each other wordlessly gives them strength. Remembrance of the Shoah lay of course at the center of Elie’s writings, but primarily as an inspiration to the betterment of humankind. “I swore,” he said in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, “never to be silent whenever, wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must … become the center of the universe.”⁴ In May 1980, addressing the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, established by Congress to implement the Commission’s recommendations, Elie said:

In an age tainted by violence, we must teach this generation and those that follow the origins and consequences of violence. In a society of distrust, skepticism, and moral anguish, we must tell our contemporaries that whatever the answer it must grow out of human compassion and reflect man’s basic quest for justice. The Holocaust was possible because the law was violated by the state itself and its principles distorted by its leaders. From the Holocaust we have learned that we are responsible for one...