His life was a constant struggle against forgetting: “Whoever conspires to wipe out the memory of the victims, which they kill a second time,” said Elie Wiesel in 2000 before German Parliament. The Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel died now aged 87 years at his home in Manhattan, like the “New York Times” reported. Earlier Israeli media and the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem had reported on Saturday night Wiesel death.
His father Shlomo, his mother Sarah, and the smallest of his three sisters died in the extermination machinery of the Nazis. Born in Romania in 1928 Wiesel survived the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. as a lesson for all future
autobiographical work “The Night” introduces him
– Since then, the New York-based writer and Nobel Peace committed to keeping alive the memory of the six million victims of the Holocaust.
his 1958 published and translated into 30 languages work “the night”, in which he concisely and incisively describes his experiences at Auschwitz, is still one of the most widely read books on the Holocaust. Especially in the United States Wiesel was thus a cult figure and was considered one of the leaders of American Jewry.
1928 as the son of a Jewish businessman in Transylvania, Wiesel was expected to become a rabbi. But his sheltered religious upbringing in the small Carpathian town Sighet breaks off abruptly in 1944, when the family was deported to Auschwitz. “We said the name nothing,” Wiesel said later in an interview. “It took only a few minutes, and all the families were already torn apart, men and women were separated.”
memories of Buchenwald
His mother would never see Wiesel. With his father, he came as a prisoner number A-7713 initially to the main camp, later to Buchenwald, where his father died shortly before the liberation of the concentration camp. “On the day on which he died, was one of the darkest days of my life,” Wiesel 2009 reported on a visit by US President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Buchenwald. “He called me and I was too afraid to move. We all were too scared to move. And then he died. I was there when he died, but I was not there just. “
The experiences characterize Wiesel life , The guilt of the survivors who doubt the existence of God in such horror and the questions of Jewish identity – all these issues were determining factors behind his thinking and writing
After the war Wiesel came to an orphanage in France.. He later studied in Paris philosophy and literature and then worked as a journalist and foreign correspondent, to the French Nobel Francois Mauriac (1885-1970) encouraged him “to remember the unspeakable”. Wiesel wrote nearly 50 books, essays, novels and plays, where he campaigns for persecuted minorities in the world. In 1986 he received for his efforts the Nobel Peace Prize.
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