Elie Wiesel: Human Rights Activist and Nobel Peace Prize Winner
By Jason Sibert
Elie Wiesel lived a life defined by the idea of human rights.
He spent a lifetime working for Jewish causes and for human rights. He also helped establish the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. A prolific writer, he authored 57 books, including “Night,” based on his experience in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps in World War II.
Wiesel was born in Romania. His father, Shiomo, instilled a sense of humanism in him and encouraged him to learn Hebrew and read literature. In March 1944, Germany occupied Hungary, thus extending the Holocaust into Northern Transylvania. Wiesel was 15, and he, with his family, along with the rest of the town’s Jewish population, was placed in one of the two confinement ghettos set up in Máramarossziget (Sighet), the town where he had been born and raised. In May 1944, the Hungarian authorities, under German pressure, began to deport the Jewish community to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where up to 90 percent of the people were killed on arrival. Immediately after they were sent to Auschwitz, his mother and his younger sister were murdered. Wiesel and his father were selected to perform labor so long as they remained able-bodied, after which they were to be killed in the gas chambers. Wiesel and his father were later deported to the concentration camp at Buchenwald.
After World War II, he moved to France where he worked as a journalist. In Paris, he studied literature, philosophy, and psychology at Sorbonne. For ten years after the war, Wiesel refused to write about or discuss his experiences during the Holocaust. He began to reconsider his decision after a meeting with the French author Francois Mauriac, the 1952 Nobel Laureate in Literature who eventually became Wiesel’s close friend.
In 1955, Wiesel moved to New York as foreign correspondent for the Israel daily, Yediot Ahronot. In the U.S., he eventually wrote over 40 books, most of them non-fiction Holocaust literature, and novels. As an author, he was awarded several literary prizes and is considered among the most important in describing the Holocaust from a highly personal perspective.
Wiesel and his wife, Marion, started the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity in 1986. He served as chairman of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust (later renamed the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council) from 1978 to 1986, spearheading the building of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.
Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for speaking out against violence, repression, and racism. He was one of 21 Americans who have received the award. The Norwegian Nobel Committee described Wiesel as “one of the most important spiritual leaders and guides in an age when violence, repression, and racism continue to characterize the world”. Wiesel explained his feelings during his acceptance speech:
“Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented,” he said. “Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. “
Wiesel held the position of Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Boston University, teaching in both its religion and philosophy departments. He also campaigned for victims of oppression in places like South Africa, Nicaragua, Kosovo, and Sudan. Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. The Norwegian Nobel Committee called him a “messenger to mankind”, stating that through his struggle to come to terms with “his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler’s death camps”, as well as his “practical work in the cause of peace”, Wiesel has delivered a message “of peace, atonement, and human dignity” to humanity. The Nobel Committee also stressed that Wiesel’s commitment originated in the sufferings of the Jewish people but that he expanded it to embrace all repressed peoples and races.
Jason Sibert is Executive Director of the Peace Economy Project.
