Elie Wiesel, 87, has died.
With his death, the world has lost a tremendous ray of light, a testament to the good that can outlast pure evil. Those aren't trite words; Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, spent his life advocating human decency.
At age 15, Nazis forced the Transylvanian-born Jew and his family to Auschwitz. In the concentration camp, Nazis killed his mother and sister. Wiesel and two of his sisters survived. His father also died at Buchenwald.
"Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have a duty to reject despair." — Elie Wiesel
Wiesel wrote a memoir, La Nuit (Night), about his experience, along with about 50 other books.
He took his survivorship seriously and spent his life advocating for people to stop being assholes to one another, taking up not only causes supporting Israel, but any genocide and man's inhumanity to man. He also fought to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive, lest people repeat its atrocities. A Holocaust denier attacked him in 2007. Wiesel won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. You can read his acceptance speech here.
"Wiesel is a messenger to mankind; his message is one of peace, atonement and human dignity. His belief that the forces fighting evil in the world can be victorious is a hard-won belief. His message is based on his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler’s death camps," the committee said as it made the award.
"That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life – that is what is abnormal." — Elie Wiesel
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I heard Wiesel speak at Eckerd College in the early nineties. He was a vibrant, dynamic speaker. I didn't really understand the breadth of his work, only that he had survived Auschwitz. He spoke of the need for memory, for a moral compass, to not let the world change you.
Although not there for a school assignment, I brought a notebook to take notes, as did many others in the packed auditorium. This was, remember, in the time of the Operation Desert Storm, the Gulf War, and while a patriotic fever swept our nation, I didn't like that we had gone to war. I didn't understand the need. Perhaps that's why one parable Wiesel shared — he clearly stated it wasn't his — stuck with me. I scribbled it in my notebook, and the next day typed it on my Commodore Amiga and printed it out. It stayed on my bulletin board above my desk for years, until the ink finally faded to nothing.
I called it "Yell the Truth" and it went something like this:
A man, every day, stood on a street corner and yelled out what he believed.
Every day, people ignored him.
Every day, he returned to yell out what he believed again.
One day, a young boy approached him.
"Old man," he said. "Why do you yell? You are not changing anyone."
"I do not yell to change others," the man told the boy. "I yell to keep them from changing me."
I yell to keep them from changing me.
Rest in the way you lived, Dr. Wiesel: In peace.
This article appears in Jun 30 – Jul 7, 2016.