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  

 

The Deadly Flood of Hamas Terror

 Burnt Vehicles Compound  YNet News

In southern Israel, in close proximity to the site of the Nova music festival where an  unspeakable massacre took place on October 7, a monument has been arranged  known as the Burnt Vehicles Compound. Over 800 vehicles were hauled to the field that now holds them all. These were the hundreds of vehicle blocking roads into areas of southern Israel that had been destroyed by the terrorist Hamas invaders when their drivers and passengers were confronted by terrorists who shot them to death, leaving the vehicles as a barrier. One that prevented other victims from escaping, and served as well to hinder the entry of rescuers whose arrival was geared to saving lives and rescuing survivors.

"It's actually designed to turn the human body into ash. We actually pulled out of here more than 300 bags, big bags, of ash."

"Human ash. Our brothers and sisters."

"We find ourselves, 78 years after the Holocaust, collecting ash of Jews once again."

Captain Adam Ittah, spokesman, Southern District, IDF Home Front Command

(Photo: Yaron Sharon)

The cars were meticulously searched and examined, human remains collected to enable the victims of the October 7 carnage to be buried in accord with Jewish funeral tradition. The vehicles, all 800 of them, have been arranged into a wall that forms a semicircle around a temporary memorial. Captain Ittah explained that a chemical compound was brought along by the terrorists in their dreadful invasion, enabling them to quickly set the vehicles on fire, and everything within them turned into ash.

Not far from the memorial is Kfar Aza, a hard-hit community that sits a mere eight hundred metres from the Gaza border, where less than 15 seconds is all the leeway given to access bomb shelter when air raid sirens sound, even yet, with rockets sent into Israel from Gaza. The community of Kfar Aza is gated. On that fateful day, terrorists hid in foliage close to the Kibbutz gate to ambush vehicles that pulled in. Drivers and passengers gunned down, then terrorists entered to flood the kibbutz, shooting wildly at anything that moved.

 

Members of ZAKA identification, extraction and rescue team search through the destruction in a Gaza Envelope community following the Oct. 7 attacks. (photo from ZAKA)

It is where babies were murdered while in their beds, where parents were tortured and murdered, their children forced to witness the atrocities before they too were slaughtered. It's where those members of the kibbutz who rushed to come to the aid of others who were wounded and crying out for help, were picked off by sharpshooters. And where families of kibbutz members sheltering in their safe rooms, were burned to death when the terrorists set fire to their homes.

These are not only narrations of witnesses who survived the massacres, but actual live video footage that the terrorist horde were proud to record as great achievements to be posted on social media as victory trophies, along with private security footage of the kibbutz. In Kfar Aza today, the kibbutz and its burnt-out homes sit frozen in time as a record of that horrible day in southern Israel; a deliberate effort to preserve the evidence of Hamas atrocities.

The body of a Hamas fighter lies on the ground outside a burned home in Kfar Aza, a kibbutz near the border with Gaza.  Photograph by Peter van Agtmael / Magnum 

The Liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau -- Never Again

"[The Russian military has committed war crimes in Bucha and Mariupol comparable to Nazi crimes; inspired by a] similar sick megalomania [free people must not remain indifferent]."

"Being silent means giving voice to the perpetrators."

"Remaining indifferent is tantamount to condoning murder."

Piotr Cywinski, state museum director, Auschwitz

 

"Standing here today at this place of remembrance, Birkenau [Auschwitz-Birkenau], I follow with  horror the news from the east that the Russian army which liberated us here, is waging a war there in Ukraine."\

"Why? Why?"

Survivor Zdzislawa Wlodarezyk

Zvika Karavany, 72, a Yemeni-born Israeli, wipes his tears in front of the Death Wall in the former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz during ceremonies marking the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the camp in Oswiecim, Poland, Friday, Jan. 27, 2023. (AP Photo/Michal Dyjuk)

"So I was hiding out in the heap of dead bodies because in the last week when the crematoria didn’t function at all, the bodies were just building up higher and higher."

"So there I was at nighttime, in the daytime I was roaming around in the camp, and this is where I actually survived, January 27, I was one of the very first, Birkenau was one of the very first camps being liberated."

"This was my, my survival chance."

Bart Stern, Voices From Auschwitz,  United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The Liberation of Auschwitz, USHMM

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a horror, a dreadful example of a state under the control of a tyrannical aggressor hungry for power and prestige, willing to sacrifice Ukrainian and Russian lives to achieve his goal of the re-domination of Ukraine. The Russian military, under orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is committing war crimes. The indiscriminate bombing of civilian enclaves, hospitals, apartment blocks, theatres, shopping malls -- in the process killing civilian populations and destroying civil infrastructure, depriving millions of heat, light and water in the dead of winter, annexing territory and obliterating historical landmarks -- criminal acts of war.

Yet to compare the Holocaust, the systematic state annihilation through organized mass butchery of an ethnic-religious population is unparalled in the annals of modern history. What is happening to Ukraine is tragic, immoral and disgusting beyond words, but it is not a genocide, even while the nation's culture, tradition and heritage sites are threatened. Murder on a mass scale, the scheduled obliteration of a people, sparing none, remains unique to the German Nazi plans of the Final Solution.

Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff, left, visits the former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp KL Auschwitz during ceremonies marking the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the camp in Oswiecim, Poland, Friday, Jan. 27, 2023. (AP Photo/Michal Dyjuk)

The emotionally passionate recall of the genocide has no equal in Ukraine. Ukraine is a state, it is a vast country, it has a military which nations surrounding it and others from the Western world of democracy have trained and armed, in the process supporting an effective fighting force determined to save their nation, their heritage and their population from Russian vandals. Jews had no nation, they were a diaspora, a nation in ancient historical exile yearning to return to their ancestral lands. No military supported their right to live, no mass outrage rang through the corridors of power among the Allied nations.

And now that the Jewish nation has been restored to its legendary homeland by an act of universal remorse it remains continually challenged by the vicious intransigence of neighbours who violently dissented against the presence of a Jewish state and in the lifetime that followed Israel's return, deadly assaults have never ceased, and the international community's post-war sympathy has evaporated, left a cynical, critical, jaundiced eye unmoved by the ongoing plight of a tiny nation struggling to contain the hatred and violence still threatening its survival.

People place candles at the former crematorium as they attend a ceremony in the former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz during ceremonies marking the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the camp in Brzezinka, Poland, Friday, Jan. 27, 2023. (AP Photo/MiBchal Dyjuk)

Remembering and recalling the dread fate in numbers too steep for the human mind to cope with -- the death of Jews, Roma, Homosexuals, Mentally and Physically handicapped, political dissenters, Jehovah's Witnesses in staggering numbers, as fascist Germany focused on disinheriting the lives of those considered to be enemies of the Third Reich and unsuitable to live among Aryans -- still reels the mind. The vast complex of annihilation  took the lives of 1.1 million people, young and old, mostly Jews, during World War II.

The complex stands in ruins, a mute and grisly symbol of the most degraded stage of humanity's fall from grace, reeking of evil in the horrors that were perpetrated there. At the commemoration of the78th anniversary of its liberation, when the world could no longer avert its eyes to the mass tragedy, and was faced with the reality of living corpses in striped garb shuffling to meet their liberators, it represents the supreme irony that the very army that liberated the camps was that of the Soviet Union, once part of the Axis, then with the Allies when Germany turned on Russia, marking the turn of its fortunes.

The very country whose troops liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau was persona non grata at the memorial to the liberation it had achieved. Unlike previous years when a Russian delegation was present and honoured to pay its respects to the innumerable victims of Nazi ideology, the successor to the Soviet Union and its current president whose actions mirror in many respects that of the Nazis, received no invitation to attend. Russia's reputation is now as black in most people's estimation as their recall of Nazi Germany.

What is happening in Ukraine struck Bogdan Bartnikowski, a 91-year-old Pole, as he saw news coverage of Ukrainian refugees fleeing Russian troops invading their country, among them a small girl in a crowd of refugees, her mother holding her hand and the child holding her teddy bear, "It was literally a blow to the head for me because I suddenly saw, after almost 80 years, what I had seen in a freight car when I was being transported (at age 12) to Auschwitz. A little girl was sitting next to me, hugging a doll to her chest". 

People walk next to the ''Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Sets You Free) gate at the former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oswiecim, Poland, Thursday, Jan. 26, 2023. Survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau are gathering to commemorate the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi German death camp in the final months of World War II, amid horror that yet another war has shattered the peace in Europe. The camp was liberated by Soviet troops on Jan. 27, 1945. (AP Photo/Michal Dyjuk)

The Martyr's Revenge

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi delivers a speech during a ceremony in the capital Tehran, on January 3, 2022, commemorating the second anniversary of the US drone strike in Iraq that killed Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. (Atta Kenare/AFP)

"If Trump and [former Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo are not tried in a fair court for the criminal act of assassinating General Soleimani, Muslims will take our martyr's revenge."

"The aggressor, murderer and main culprit -- the then-president of the United States -- must be tried and judged under the [Islamic] law of retribution, and God's ruling must be carried out against him."

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi

 

 Revolutionary Guard General Qassem Soleimani AP

The death of General Qassem Soleimani by missile strike in 2020 relieved the world of yet another psychopathic monster entitled to slaughter those whom the Islamic Republic of Iran viewed as an enemy of its theocratic rule and its plans to subject the Middle East, its Arab Muslim Sunni majority countries to the inevitable conquest that the Shiite Persian state was carefully crafting in its annexation of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen as independent countries becoming vassals of Iran, under the stewardship of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

 

As head of the al-Quds branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Soleimani was the influential mastermind of all the activities of  his segment of the corps assigned to perform the training and supply of weaponry for terrorist groups loyal to Iran, including Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, as well as tribal Shiite militias under Iran's thumb. Their commander's death was a tragedy for their cohesive purpose in spreading violence and terror in the region and abroad, but a relief for those countries and governments his command targeted.

At the second-year anniversary of Soleimani's assassination by order of then-U.S.President Donald Trump, the Iranian Republic and its allies in other countries have held memorial events in honour of the late commander of the Quds Force representing the overseas arm of the elite Revolutionary Guards. In the immediate aftermath of Soleimani's death, Iran ordered its IRGC command to avenge his death, and rockets were dispatched into Iraq to hit two U.S. bases there. Anticipating a U.S. response, Iran was on high alert.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards shot down a Ukraine International Airlines plane near Tehran, evidently mistaking it for a possible U.S. rocket attack. All aboard the airliner, 175 people, died, on Flight 752. Many of those who died were Iranian Canadians, many more Iranian students heading to Canadian universities on study visas. At first denying it shot down the plane, when evidence indicated otherwise, Iran finally admitted the airliner was shot down through a "disastrous mistake" by forces on high alert during confrontation with the U.S.

 

Iranians lift national flags during a ceremony in the capital Tehran, on January 3, 2022, commemorating the second anniversary of the killing in Iraq of top Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani (portrait) and Iraqi commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in a US raid. (Atta Kenare/AFP)

 

Now, while negotiating in Geneva with the United States over the resumption of the 2015 Nuclear Agreement, Iran threatens repercussions against the U.S. unless it brings the former president to trial as an assassin. In that case, a clear-eyed assessment of a man in military authority of a country guilty of terrorism on its own account who authorized the obliteration of a state assassin. Under the new U.S. administration, Iran has become bolder and more arrogant, prepared to risk another encounter with the U.S. which it doesn't believe will materialize.

But it does believe that in issuing a threat of this magnitude that it has given fair warning that it has the will, the intention and the capacity to launch strikes against the U.S., likely  by one of its proxies to avenge the death of its elite commander, depriving the country of a merciless, brilliant tactician whose thirst for provoking fear in the nation's adversaries, and in ordering death and destruction to those same adversaries could be slaked only by incapacitating him permanently.

 

As a warm up to vengeance implied, Monday saw an opening salvo: two armed drones targeted a Baghdad airport site used by the US-led coalition against the Islamic State group. "Two fixed-wing suicide drones, or improvised cruise missiles, attempted to attack Baghdad Airport this morning at approximately 4:30 a.m." A counter-rocket, artillery and mortar, or C-RAM, system “engaged them and they were shot down without incident", stated a coalition official. 

Israel, of course, is held by Iran to be equally guilty in the death of Soleimani, against whom the Ayatollahs have issued threats of annihilation as the 'little Satan' to the U.S.'s 'big Satan'. Iran has been dabbling in cyber warfare, just as China and Russia have been. It frequently issues threats to Israel, to wipe it from the face of the Middle East. Monday came another threat proposing to destroy its Dimona nuclear reactor. The Jerusalem Post website was hacked with a contrived photograph of the reactor being hit by a stylized missile, with a very special message of destruction.

An image showing a missile being fired from the ring of Qassem Soleimani toward Israel's nuclear reactor in Dimona is used to hack the Jerusalem Post website on January 3, 2022, the 2nd anniversary of Soleimani's killing (Screenshot/ The Jerusalem Post)