Elie Wiesel:  Israel advocate 1928 – 2016

"I wanted my language to be a monument to my people -- especially those who died."

"I wrote it [And the World Remained Silent ... Night] -- for the other survivors, who found it difficult to speak and I wanted to tell them, Really ... you must speak."

"I have tried to fight those who would forget."

"Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices."

"We must always take sides Neutrality helps the oppressed, never the victim." 

Elie Wiesel, Holocaust Survivor 

 

"My father clearly articulated that the antisemite will always hate, even if they mask that hate as anti-Zionism -- as though it were something separable from antisemitism."

"Our object as Jews is to keep embracing our Jewish faith and heritage and our connection to our over seven million Jewish brothers and sisters in Israel."

Elisha Wiesel, businessman, activist, philanthropist

Jewish survivors in Buchenwald concentration camp, after the liberation of the camp in 1945  AFP/Getty 

 

Holocaust Remembrance Day is held each year on January 27. This year, Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire, premieres at the Montreal Holocaust Museum. Elisha Wiesel, 53, will speak of his father and his mission to ensure the world 'never forgets'. Elisha Wiesel is chair of the board of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. Along with his mother, Marion Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, the Foundation was launched after the death in 2016 of father-and-husband, to continue the work Elie Wiesel dedicated his life to.

 

Directed and written by Oren Rudavsky the 90-minute film addresses the personal story and legacy of a man known as one of the world's most respected Holocaust survivors, known as well as a prolific author, humanitarian, passionate educator and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

 

Eliezer Wiesel was a boy of 15 when he was deported from Sighet, Romania with his parents and three sisters in May of 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau where his mother and younger sister Tzipora were killed on their arrival at the death-and slave labour camp. Elie and his father were selected to go to the slave labour component of the notorious death camp. 

 

By early 1945, as Germany was losing the war and emptying the camps by forcing starving, skeletal inmates on death marches, Elie and his father were sent on a march to the Buchenwald concentration camp where his father later died. In April of that year the camp was liberated by American soldiers. The Jewish orphans in the camp, Elie among them, were transported to France, where his sister Hilda recognized him in a French newspaper photograph.

 

The siblings reunited, along with their sister Beatrice who moved eventually to Montreal. Working as a journalist in France, Wiesel studied at the Sorbonne. "He overcame trauma by becoming a witness", noted a family friend. His memoir of a young boy's reaction to Auschwitz, originally published in Yiddish in 1945 was a 846-page recollection of pain, loss and suffering. Abridged and translated to French, it was published as La Nuit in 1958, and in 1960 as Night, in English.    

 

Night sold over six million copies in 30 languages, and he went on to write many more books. Moving to New York in 1956, Wiesel became a writer, teacher and academic, teaching at City College of New York, then at Boston University in 1976, as Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities. "Your suffering is not what defines you, but it can inform you. It shapes you and then it is your job to make it the best tool you can", a former student added of her own mental journey under his tutelage.

 

Having suffered the most inhumane circumstances and losses in his young life, Elie Wiesel matured a determined human rights upholder, refusing to stand silent in the face of immoral human rights abuses, speaking up and bringing attention to some of the modern world's most shameful human rights atrocities. His trauma led him to undertake action of moral outrage against wrongs committed against the vulnerable. Human rights violations that took place in Rwanda, Cambodia, the Sudan and the former Yugoslavia engaged his moral outrage and his propensity to speak loudly, publicly, determined to move others to do the same.  

"[My father] never failed to stand up for Israel, asserting that only Israelis can best decide how to reach their goals of living in peace and security in an extremely hostile neighbourhood."

"And lastly, he insisted that we never relinquish our desire to have a positive impact on the world as a whole."

"He strongly resisted isolationism as a principle."

Elisha Wiesel