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 – or any survivor – would have such a presence in the world. Few survivors spoke openly about the war. Those who did often felt ignored. Decades before a Holocaust museum stood in downtown Washington and moviegoers watched Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List,” Wiesel helped force the public to confront the Holocaust.
“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 10 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.
Wiesel was less than nine months older than the aspiring writer who chronicled her existence in an Amsterdam hideaway, but Night is rarely characterized as the narrative of a young boy. 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.
At the encouragement of the French writer François Mauriac, whom he interviewed as a journalist in the 1950s, Wiesel submitted the manuscript for publication in France. Publisher after publisher turned him away. Les Éditions de Minuit published the manuscript in 1958, but the book found little commercial success.
Initially, it fared no better in the United States. One rejection note, from Scribner’s, called the work a “horrifying and extremely moving document” but cited “certain misgivings as to the size of the American market” for it, according to a New York Times account of the book’s publication. Critics wrote admiring reviews when Hill & Wang published it in 1960, but few people in the general public knew that Night existed.
As time passed, more survivors began to open up about the war. Among the most prominent of them was Wiesel, who in the 1960s, by then living in the United States, began a celebrated lecture series at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.
Wiesel, whose speeches routinely drew sell-out crowds, would remain highly sought-after as a lecturer for the rest of his life. More than lecture, he told stories, one flowing into the next in a way that recalled a passage from Ecclesiastes, the one that inspired the titles of his two-volume memoir: All Rivers Run to the Sea and And the Sea Is Never Full.
With those stories he revived the old world of the shtetl and glorified the Hasidic masters he so loved. He was somber in the company of fellow survivors but hopeful, even funny, before students. At times, his style left the impression of a davening rabbi.
Wiesel often said that he found hope in the young, in both his students and his own child.
“When Marion, my wife, told me she was pregnant, my first feeling was fear,” he told the Times. “The world is not worthy of children. I was frantic. But the next wave was joy. Will it be a boy or a girl? Whose name will it have – my mother’s or my father’s?”
His son Shlomo Elisha Wiesel survives him, as does his wife, the former Marion Erster Rose, a Holocaust survivor whom he married in 1969. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.
Eliezer Wiesel was born Sept. 30, 1928, in Sighet, a town in modern-day Romania that he would later describe as a “Chagall-style Jewish city” in the Carpathian Mountains.
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.
