Elie Wiesel: The Holocaust Survivor and Fighter for Human Rights

New York is considered a melting pot because of its unique diversity of nationalities, cultures, and ethnicities, thanks to a large number of immigrants that come from all over the world. These different cultures and ethnicities that exist in New York can be seen through food, religion, music, clothes, and art. Ellis Island served as the main immigration station for those coming into the country and has processed over 12 million immigrants since 1892. The island is located right near the Statue of Liberty, which allowed new immigrants to be welcomed by a statue representing their newfound freedom. Not only did these people struggle to get to Ellis Island from their homelands, but when they got there they were not guaranteed passage, were faced with long lines lasting up to several days and endured medical examinations that were a crucial part of gaining access to the United States. It was seen as a great victory to people that made it through Ellis Island, ready to start their new lives of freedom. Out of the millions of immigrants to come to New York over the years, one of the most influential people in my eyes was Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, and Nobel-Prize winning author. Although Wiesel did not pass through Ellis Island, he was later awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor due to his achievements as an immigrant. Wiesel went through many obstacles from enduring the unthinkable under the Nazi ruling, losing his mother, father, and younger sister, and later the struggle of establishing his new life after liberation. Elie Wiesel persevered through these tragic events and came out as a survivor, award-winning writer, activist and inspiration to all who know his name.

It all started on September 30th, 1928 in Sighet, a small village in northern Transylvania, Romania when Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel was born by his parents Shlomo and Sarah Weisel. Wiesel grew up with two older sisters named Hilda and Beatrice, and a younger sister named Tzipora. Elie’s father was an Orthodox Jew and encouraged him to learn modern Hebrew literature while his mother was Hasidic and influenced him to study the sacred, original Jewish texts. At three years old Elie’s religious education started when he enrolled in a Jewish school where he learned the Hebrew language, read the Bible, and Talmud. Wiesel grew up extremely religious because of his parents and devoted his time to studying the Torah, the Talmud and the teachings of Hasidism and the Cabala. Besides his parents, the root of his religious beliefs came from his grandfather who was a distinguished Hasid. He also learned about the Messiah and other Judaism stories from Moshe, a mentor in his synagogue. In 1942, after the Nazis turned Sighet over to Hungary, Moshe and other Jews that could not prove Hungarian citizenship were sent to Poland to be murdered. Fortunately, for Moshe, he was the only person from Sighet to escape and return from Poland. Moshe told the people of Sighet stories about others getting murdered, but the town regretfully neglected to believe him and saw him as crazy. Two years later the tales Moshe told started to turn into reality for the town of Sighet.

In March 1944, German soldiers inhabited Sighet, forcing the Wiesel family into a ghetto. The Nazi soldiers closed all Jewish stores, including their family-owned grocery store, and raided all Jewish homes. Jewish people were no longer allowed to go to restaurants, travel by rail, be on the streets after 6 o’clock, or attend synagogue. They enforced all Jews to wear yellow stars on their clothing so that they could tell them apart from the Non-Jewish Hungarians. In May 1944, the plan to deport all of the Jews to concentration camps began. The Wiesel family had an offer from their Christian maid to hide in her hut out of town but they rejected her invitation because they wanted to stick with their Jewish community. The family was so adamant in their faith and beliefs that they turned down what could have been a chance at freedom. In June of that year, the Wiesel family was put onto a cattle car with 80 other Jews headed to Auschwitz concentration camp. After four days of travel, the family arrived at Auschwitz and Elie and his father were immediately separated from his mother and three sisters. Elie, who was 15 at the time, was prompted by a fellow prisoner to lie about his age being 18 to an officer, which saved him from being immediately killed because he was at good use to work for the Nazis at the camp. Elie and his father were sent together to be slave laborers while his mother and younger sister were taken directly to the gas chambers to never be seen again.

After surviving Auschwitz with the help of his father sharing his food and protecting him as much as he could, the two were sent to Buna labor camp for eight months. There Elie, his father, and all the other prisoners endured violent abuse, vigorous labor, and starvation. At this time, Elie’s childhood and identity were ripped away from him and was now known only by his number: A-7713. In the winter of 1945, Elie had to go to a camp doctor for surgery on a foot injury. Two days after the operation the prisoners of Buna, including injured Wiesel, were forced on a death march where the inmates were obliged to run for ten days. At the end of the death march, the 6,000 out of 20,000 who survived were sent to Buchenwald. When they arrived at Buchenwald, Elie’s father passed away from starvation and exhaustion. At Buchenwald on April 6th, 1945, the guards started evacuating the camp by killing 10,000 prisoners a day and starving the others. Just days later on April 11th, prisoners fought back against the guards with the little strength they had, seizing control of Buchenwald. Later that day, soldiers from the 6th Armored Division of the American military liberated the camp of more than 21,000 prisoners.

Upon Elie Wiesel’s liberation from Buchenwald, he spent time in the hospital due to intestinal problems. During his time at the hospital after just being freed, Elie started writing an outline for a book describing his cruel and inhumane experiences in the concentration camps. After leaving the hospital, Elie was placed in a French orphanage among 400 other orphan holocaust survivors. Wiesel later discovered that his two oldest sisters also survived the Holocaust after Hilda found his picture in a newspaper and reached out to him. Eventually, Elie reunited with both of his older sisters, Beatrice and Hilda. In 1948 Wiesel enrolled in Sorbonne University where he learned French and studied literature, philosophy, and psychology. During this time Elie was poor and depressed with no hope of getting better, leading him to think about suicide. Soon, Elie’s life hit a positive turn when he became involved with a Jewish militant organization in Palestine called Irgun, where he was tasked with translating texts from Hebrew to Yiddish for the organization’s newspaper. With this experience, he became a reporter and was able to travel around the world for the Israeli paper, Yediot Achronot. When working in 1954, Wiesel came across a Catholic writer named Francois Mauriac during an interview. Mauriac talked mostly about Jesus’ sacrifices and struggles to which Wiesel explained, “Ten years ago, not very far from here, I knew Jewish children every one of whom suffered a thousand times more, six million times more than Christ on the cross. And we don’t speak about them” Before this time, Wiesel was very hesitant to explain what he went through at the concentration camps because it was such a terrible and depressing part of his life that he wanted to keep inside. After hearing his story, Mauriac, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, encouraged Elie to write a book about those years of his life and explain the hardships he endured. After meeting Mauriac, Wiesel spent a year adding on to the outline he started in the hospital after his liberation 10 years prior and constructed an 862-page draft he called “And the World Was Silent”. He then gave this draft to a publisher who consolidated the manuscript into a 245-page book he titled, “Night”. This book explained, in detail, Wiesel’s experiences from his childhood in Sighet through his liberation.

As a foreign correspondent for the Israel daily newspaper, Yediot Achronot, Wiesel came to New York in 1955. At this time his book, “Night”, was still in the works and had not yet been published. Shortly after arriving in New York City in July 1956, Wiesel was struck by a taxicab while crossing a city street. Following the accident, Wiesel underwent a 10-hour operation, which left him confined to a wheelchair for a year. After a year of recovery, Elie applied for American citizenship and continued to live in New York as a writer for Yediot Achronot. While working for the paper, Elie continued to write his book, “Night”, and devoted every morning before work to writing. At this time, Elie was also drafting his second book, “Dawn”, which is about a concentration camp survivor. “La Nuit”, which was translated in 1960 to English as “Night”, was published in 1958 and has since been translated into over 30 different languages. Over 1,000 copies of the book were sold after the first year and eventually became a bestseller, selling over 300,000 copies annually. In 1963, two years after his second book, “Dawn”, was published, Elie Wiesel became a United States citizen. The trilogy of Wiesel’s Holocaust experience was completed in 1962 with his third book, “Day”. Wiesel went on to write more books about Jewish hardships during and after the Holocaust including “The Accident”, “The Town Beyond the Wall”, “The Gates of the Forest”, and “Legends of Our Time”.

On April 12th, 1969 Elie Wiesel married Marion Rose, a divorced immigrant from Austria. Marion was also a holocaust survivor so the two were brought closer together through similar horrifying experiences in the concentration camps. Marion was responsible for translating all of Wiesel’s books following their marriage. A few years later, in 1972 Marion and Elie had a son together named Elisha Shlomo, after Elie’s father. That same year while the family lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, Wiesel started working as a notable professor at the City University of New York, teaching Judaic studies until 1978. Wiesel took a new position that year teaching in the Humanities department at Boston University as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor, while he also held the title of University Professor, and was a member of the faculty in the Religion and Philosophy departments. Following his career as a professor at Boston University, Wiesel became the first Henry Luce Visiting Scholar in the Humanities and Social Thought at Yale University for a year in 1982. He went on to co-instruct courses at Eckerd College and from 1997 to 1999 he was the Ingeborg Rennert Visiting Professor of Judaic Studies at Barnard College of Columbia University. Wiesel, a member of the American Federation of Teachers, considered educating as his purpose in life and felt inspired by all of the teachers he had throughout his education which is why he had multiple teaching jobs over the years.

After Elie Wiesel’s “Night” gained popularity, he started to gain recognition for all of his accomplishments, receiving various awards and honors. In 1975, Wiesel was granted the Jewish Heritage Award at Haifa University, which was well deserved because even through all the discrimination against his religion, Wiesel still maintained a strong Jewish faith. A few years later, in 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed Wiesel as Chairman of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust. The commission consisted of 34 members including Holocaust survivors like Wiesel, religious leaders, historians, scholars, and members of congress. This committee of leaders had the responsibility of orchestrating the building of a Holocaust memorial that would appropriately commemorate those who passed away during the Holocaust. Wiesel became the Founding Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council in 1980. His honor continued that year when Wiesel received the Prix Liber Inter which is a prize for best French novel of the year, the S.Y. Agnon Medal, and the Jabotinsky Medal, a medal awarded by the state of Israel for outstanding accomplishments in the field of literature and research. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan granted Wiesel the United States Congressional Gold Medal, which is the highest expression of national appreciation for accomplishments and contributions. A year later in 1986, Elie Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for his exceptional work of speaking out against racism, discrimination, violence, and genocide.

Soon after winning the Nobel Prize, Elie and his wife Marion started The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. Wiesel was president of this organization that was created to fight against injustice. The foundation’s mission, rooted in the remembrance of the Holocaust, is to battle indifference, intolerance, and injustice through youth-based programs that stand for acceptance, compassion, and equality. The organization hosts international conferences that bring together world leaders to focus on developing suggestions for change on peace, education, health, the environment, and terrorism. The organization’s inaugural conference in 1988, Facing the 21st Century: Threats and Promises, brought together 79 Nobel Prize winners in Paris. Others including The Anatomy of Hate, Tomorrow’s Leaders, The Future of Hope, and The Petra Conferences of Nobel Laureates followed this conference. In the 1990s, after thousands of Ethiopian-Jews were liberated from persecution in Africa, the organization opened two Beit Tzipora centers in Israel for tutoring and enrichment. Named after Elie’s younger sister who died in Auschwitz, these centers, located in Ashkelon and Kiryat Malachi, educate over 1,000 Ethiopian-Jewish students in their after-school programs and allow them the opportunity to learn and grow. Elie and his wife devoted over fifteen years to help the cause of Ethiopian-born Israeli youth through the Beit Tzipora centers, improving the quality of life for the children by giving them the chance to excel. The foundation also offers an Ethics Essay Contest with a cash prize for college juniors and seniors in the United States, which prompts contestants to write about ethical issues that affect them in today’s society. This allows college students the opportunity to compete for money that could go towards their tuition while also getting to research and learn more about ethical problems that are going on in the world.

Not only was Wiesel a loyal supporter of Israel but also defended the cause of Soviet Jews, Nicaragua’s Miskito Indians, the Kurds, Cambodian refugees, Argentina’s Desaparecidos, victims of genocide starvation in Africa, apartheid in South Africa, and victims of war in Yugoslavia. He gave many public speeches internationally, expressing the importance of human rights for the world. Wiesel was exceptionally outspoken and spent his life fighting for what he knew was right, devoting his time to supporting and helping various causes for people of all different races, cultures, and religions in suffering. In 1993, Wiesel gave an address at the grand opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in which he was chairman. Accompanied by President Bill Clinton and Harvey Meyerhoff, the three lit the eternal flame during the dedication ceremony on April 22nd. In 2011, Wiesel received the inaugural United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Award and the award was then renamed in his honor due to his prominent role in the cause of Holocaust remembrance.

Over the years, Elie Weisel has been granted around 30 awards and has received more than 90 honorary degrees from colleges around the world. He wrote over 40 books, most of them describing the Holocaust, which earned him a number of literary awards. As a result of his unique books that shared Holocaust stories, Wiesel was credited by historians to giving the term Holocaust its true meaning. Elie Wiesel passed away at the age of 87, on July 2nd, 1928, at his home in Manhattan. After his death, Marion Wiesel explained, “My husband was a fighter. He fought for the memory of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, and he fought for Israel. He waged countless battles for innocent victims regardless of ethnicity or creed. But what was most meaningful to him was teaching the innumerable students who attended his university classes.” Wiesel was a fighter his whole life from fighting to survive the concentration camps to becoming an activist for human rights for people of all races, religions, and ethnicities. He used his terrible past experiences to tell stories in his books that will help people never forget the genocide that was the Holocaust.