Last week, the world lost arguably its most impactful witness of the depravities and horrors of the Holocaust — a man who at one time in his life was identified simply as A-7713. Elie Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor who passed away Saturday at the age of 87, used the power of his words to speak not only for himself, but also as a witness for the more than 6 million Jews whose voices were silenced in those dark times.
“If I survived, it must be for some reason,” Wiesel told The New York Times in 1981. “In my place, someone else could have been saved. And so I speak for that person. On the other hand, I know I cannot.”
Wiesel’s tireless efforts to “speak for that person” — starting with “Night,” his autobiographical account of the awful scenes he witnessed at Auschwitz — made him, as noted in his Nobel Peace Prize citation, “a messenger to mankind.”
And as a messenger for peace, Wiesel lived up to the stirring words in his Nobel acceptance speech when he said, “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. … Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, political views, that place must — at that moment — become the center of the universe.”
Wiesel's vow never to be silent led him to write "Night," in which he describes his vivid and haunting memories of being rounded up, loaded into a cattle car, his separation from his mother and sisters, the starvation and slow languishing he felt in Auschwitz and the labor camp Buna and watching the suffering and death of the other victims around him, including his own father.
Wiesel will be remembered as someone who worked his whole adult life to “fight those who would forget” about the horrors and tragedies of the Holocaust. “Because if we forget," he said, "we are guilty, we are accomplices.”
Elie Wiesel is no longer with us, so it is up to each and every one of us “to keep memory alive."