Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate and memory keeper of the Holocaust, dies at 87

Decades before a Holocaust museum stood in downtown Washington and before 'Schindler’s List' Mr Wiesel helped force the public to confront the Holocaust

Wiesel said that he hoped not to live long enough to be the last survivor because the burden would be too great (GETTY)

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 on Saturday at his home in New York. He was 87.

His death was confirmed in a statement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

By the time of Mr. 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, Mr 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.”

“Elie Wiesel was one of the great moral voices of our time, and in many ways, the conscience of the world,” President Obama said in a statement, describing Mr Wiesel as “a dear friend.”

“After we walked together among the barbed wire and guard towers of Buchenwald where he was held as a teenager and where his father perished,” the president continued, “Elie spoke words I’ve never forgotten — ‘Memory has become a sacred duty of all people of goodwill.’ ”

Mr Wiesel was in his 20s when he wrote the first draft of “Night” after 10 years of silence about the war. It puts readers in Auschwitz within the first 30 pages.

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. The book also contains one of the most famous images in the vast theological debates surrounding the slaughter: the vision of God with a noose around his neck.

“‘For God’s sake, where is God?’” Mr. Wiesel hears a man ask as they watch a boy hanged at Auschwitz.

“And from within me, I heard a voice answer,” he writes. “‘This is where — hanging here from this gallows.’”

To forget the Holocaust, he always said, would be to kill the victims a second time.

Eliezer Wiesel was born 30 September 1928, in Sighet, a town in modern-day Romania that he would later describe as a “Chagall-style Jewish city” in the Carpathian Mountains.

He grew up in a tightknit Jewish family, the only son of a grocer, Shlomo, and his wife, Sarah. So great was the boy’s religious fervour, instilled in him by his Hasidic grandfather, that he wept in prayer at the synagogue. Mr Wiesel was 15 years old, a new arrival to Block 17 at Auschwitz after being swept up in the last transport from the Sighet ghetto, when the number A-7713 was tattooed on his left arm. He said that when he turned 18, he wasn’t really 18, the camps having turned him prematurely into an old man.

According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, SS units evacuated Auschwitz in January 1945. Mr. Wiesel and his father were transferred to Buchenwald, near Weimar, Germany. His father would die in January, and Mr. Wiesel was liberated upon the arrival of US troops in April.

Mr. Wiesel taught for more than 30 years at Boston University, where his classes were blockbusters. 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.

His son Shlomo Elisha Wiesel survives him, as does his wife, the former Marion Erster Rose, a Holocaust survivor whom he married in 1969.

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,” Mr. 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.”

Washington Post