High above the honks and sirens of New York streets, Elie Wiesel leans back and speaks quietly from the comfort of his library couch. "What makes me unhappy is simple," he says softly, dark eyes brooding. "Civilization today has not absorbed the lessons from the past."
With disheveled hair and bushy eyebrows splayed out in all directions, he sits and shares his concerns over massacres in Bosnia, revenge in the Middle East, the slaughters in Africa, and churches burning in the United States. And hatred."What is there in hatred to appeal to people?" he asks, with the impatience of a man who has seen how systematic persecution and hatred can destroy. "I don't understand it," he says. "It is always grotesque. Hatred distorts everything. There is no beauty when there is hatred; there is no truth when there is hatred. Don't they know that?"
The uncomfortable answer, as Wiesel knows, is yes, "they" do not know that yet. As we approach the year 2000, hostility and revenge continue to grip many nations and cultures. Violence and fear is all too common in American society.
As a Jew and a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps in World War II, Wiesel has written many autobiographical novels since then - on spiritual and moral conflicts - and his pleas for sanity and reason in international affairs have lifted him to a position of almost singular moral authority in political and cultural arenas in the world.
In l986 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, his son and wife standing nearby at the award ceremony in Oslo, Norway. The Nobel Committee cited him as "one of the most important spiritual leaders and guides in an age characterized by violence, repression and racism."
He is now so central to the Holocaust that some critics, such as Cambridge University Press author Kali Tal, charge that Wiesel has become "a professional Holocaust survivor who thinks survivor witnesses are the only ones who really know about the experiences."
Certainly Wiesel has become the best-known voice of the Holocaust, and also a soft growl on behalf of all Jewish survivors who grieve for the millions who perished. "Always zachor (remember)," he says.
Hardly shy, Wiesel accepts criticism as inevitable. He draws the line, though, at the anti-Semitic letters he receives, and asks before an interview that his home location not be made public.
Despite his fame and the horrors he has known, he remains a warm, plaintive, attentive man working within a simple lifestyle. No fashionable wardrobe, no business cards; no beepers; no alcohol; a simple watch is on his wrist. He has no collection of favorite objects or celebrated art in his library jammed with books.
"My favorite object is a pen," he says, smiling and holding one in the air. "For each book I buy a new pen and start writing, and I keep all the pens." He says that the reason he does not wear gold or own it is the memory of seeing mountains of gold at Auschwitz that was forcibly taken from the Jews.
It is the tenacity of evil, "the Kingdom of Night" as Wiesel describes it, that he has passionately worked against for the past three decades.
He has won more than a dozen literary awards in several countries, counseled the leaders of many nations (flying with President Clinton to Yitzhak Rabin's funeral in Israel), and been involved with innumerable projects and causes on behalf of the Holocaust and survivors. Since 1976 he has also been the Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities at Boston University.
With his Nobel Peace Prize money, Wiesel launched the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, with many programs and conferences emphasizing efforts to bring youths of the world together.
Never a Nazi-hunter seeking personal accountability, Wiesel's philosophic nature continues to embrace the better possibilities of humanity and God.
And yet, as a survivor who now serves life, Wiesel knows that memories of terrible events can vanish in comfort, and be sanitized in history. Thus his unflagging action on behalf of human rights is a consequence of his experience. Forgetting the meaning of the Holocaust to him is to "kill twice," he says.
"We must always take sides," he told the audience in Oslo when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. "Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."
It was in silence that the devout 15-year-old Wiesel, his family and the entire village of Sighet in Romania, were herded into cattle cars by the German Gestapo and taken to Auschwitz in 1944.
Wiesel wrote about this searing experience in "Night," a slim, unforgettable book first published in 1960, and now into its 25th edition.
Literary critic Alfred Kazin was rough on Wiesel, suggesting in a review of "Night" that parts of it may have been embellished. Wie-sel told Bill Marx, a columnist for the Boston Phoenix, that Kazin "is a man who has the arrogance to doubt the words of the victims. He has committed a mortal sin in the historical sense."
At Auschwitz, Wiesel says the number A-7713 was tattooed on left arm. His mother and younger sister died in the gas chambers there, and eventually Wiesel and his father, Shlomo, a former shopkeeper, were taken to Buna together, then to Buchenwald.
Shlomo died from starvation and freezing temperatures at night, one of thousands who perished as the sum of brutality overwhelmed them. Wiesel survived, saying he was by then "too numb to weep" over his father's death. Five weeks later he saw American tanks arrive at Buchenwald's front gate, the beginning of liberation.
After his physical recovery, Wiesel became a student in Paris and later a journalist for Jewish newspapers. His passion for learning was almost insatiable. "From morning to evening, learning, learning," he says, "and I became terribly religious again."
Slowly he realized that as a survivor of the Holocaust, the issues of forgiveness, power, and the nature of God would forever have extraordinary meaning to him. And he would not always find answers to the crisis of faith he had known. "I only have questions," he says often, meaning that questions can be shared but answers are individual.
In the camps, Wiesel says, the God of his youth was destroyed. Instead of a loving, omnipotent God, Wiesel found a God of cruelty or indifference. "What had I to thank him for?" he asks in "Night" as the Nazi barbarity increased and so many died around him.
Today Wiesel still sees God as the great puzzle. "But I do it from inside faith," he says. "If I have no faith, there is no problem with God. Why should I call him God if he doesn't exist? Because God exists I have problems with God. . . . But in our tradition, it's certainly possible, it's also commendable, to argue with God. Read the Bible; it's an argument with God."
Does he forgive those who tried to decimate the Jewish culture?
"If somebody came to me saying, `I was in the camps, and I hit you,' and then says, `Forgive me,' I can (forgive) if I want to," he explains. "But how can I forgive things that were done to others? I have never condemned the German people. I don't believe in collective guilt. The German nation has never asked the Jewish nation to forgive them. Never."
Wiesel, for years a stateless person, became a U.S. citizen in 1961. "We are the great power now," he says, "and power is not great because it has better armies or more money. Power is great because of moral strength, and moral message, and that is still what we have to live."