Elie Wiesel dies at 87 years

Activist and writer Elie Wiesel, the Second World War death camp survivor who won a Nobel Peace Prize for becoming the lifelong voice of millions of Holocaust victims, has died, Israel’s Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem said on Saturday. He was 87.

Wiesel was also a philosopher, speaker, playwright and professor who also campaigned for the tyrannized and forgotten around the world. The Romanian-born Wiesel lived by the credo expressed in Night, his landmark story of the Holocaust: “To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”

After the war Wiesel made his way to France, studied at the Sorbonne and by 19 had become a journalist. He pondered suicide and never wrote of or discussed his Holocaust experience until 10 years after the war as a part of a vow to himself. He was 27 in 1955 when Night was published in Yiddish and Wiesel would later rewrite it for a world audience.

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed …” Wiesel wrote. “Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live.”

Asked by an interviewer in 2000 why he did not go insane, Wiesel said: “To this day that is a mystery to me.”

By 2008, the New York Times said Night had sold an estimated 10 million copies, including 3 million after talk-show host Oprah Winfrey made it a spotlight selection for her book club in 2006.

I have read a few of Elie Wiesel’s books, and have found them at once despairing and hopeful, brilliant and tragic, prophetic and contemporary. As a Holocaust survivor, he fulfilled his purpose by being a spokeperson for the six million who perished, and a witness to the world, reminding everyone of the horrors of the Shoah.  May the life, legacy and memory of Elie Wiesel continue to be a blessing. May God grant him shalom-eternal.

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