Each era of turmoil tends to suffuse with truth a representative spokesperson, a survivor who is thrust into the light by the Zeitgeist, the metaphoric "spirit of the times." The looming evil of Hitler's Third Reich produced a slight, solitary, sad-eyed stoic with the number A-7713 tattooed on his left arm. He came of age after World War II among orphans belonging to no country. He learned the journalist's trade and delivered to an uncaring, bigoted, cyclically vicious world a denunciation of gratuitous murder: "Never again!"
Dr. Elie Wiesel (eh lee wee zehl), noted proponent of peace and reconciliation, pioneered single-author Holocaust literature based on eyewitness accounts. As a leading American advocate of memorials and reclamation of Holocaust memorabilia, he has published a forceful stream of speeches, polemics, autobiography, drama, fiction, documentary, and articles. Driven by an empathy that impels him to protest carnage and to impose humanitarian values on behalf of the world's oppressed, he has heeded an inner compulsion to serve humanity by illuminating the hate-darkened past.
Early Years. The world's most renowned writer of Holocaust literature, Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel seems forever on the cusp between devout Jew and agnostic existentialist. From his pen pour the repeated why's, a demand for response from the silent God whom Elie revered from childhood as the guiding figure of his being. The grandson of rabbis and only son and third of four children of grocers Shlomo (spelled "Chlomo" in Night) and Sarah Feig Wiesel, he was born September 30, 1928, in the shtetl, or village, of Sighet, Romania, in the Carpathian Mountains, a thriving Judaic cultural center for 15,000 Jews which was later absorbed by Hungary. Shy, somber-eyed, and introspective at age three, Elie attended classes under a revered rabbi and learned the Hebrew alphabet, recalling in later years the simple classroom repetition of aleph, beth, gimel (A, B, C). A scholarly child, he preferred chess to soccer and followed the orthodox Hasidic traditions by wearing peyes, or side curls, and donning tefillin, the traditional leather phylacteries that bound scripture to his forehead and arm before morning prayers; on Fridays, he honored the Sabbath with prayers, meditation, devotional readings, and chants. He picked apricots on his grandfather's farm, was blessed at age eight by the revered Rabbi Israel of Wizhnitz, challenged friend Itzu Goldblatt in a match of piety and self-discipline, and attended high school in Debrecen and Nagyvárad with the intention of becoming a writer.
Wiesel had superb role models. His maternal grandfather, Dodye Feig, a white-bearded farmer, told lively stories and shared the camaraderie of the family prodigy, who, in early childhood, was obviously preparing for a life of piety and scholarship. Elie's father, a shopkeeper and revered community leader and counselor, served the town as a mediator for Jews and a saintly humanitarian to the needy. Himself a victim of torture and jail for aiding Jews to escape persecution in Poland, Shlomo urged Elie to trust in human goodness and to study modern Hebrew, Freudian psychology, and astronomy. In contrast to Shlomo's aims for his contemplative son, Wiesel's mother, a high school graduate who was the voice of tradition throughout his childhood, quoted Goethe and Schiller and guided him toward traditional Judaism through study of the Torah, Talmud, and cabbala, the Hasidic mystical lore that he studied with Moshe the Beadle, a synogogue caretaker. While Elie entered his teens and studied for a life of orthodoxy, Nazi soldiers under the command of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler were introducing the deadly poisonous Zyklon B to death camps, where they efficiently gassed exiles from Russia, Silesia, Bohemia, and Moravia in large numbers before disposing of their remains in camp crematories.
The War Years. The German high command moved closer during the celebration of Purim on March 19, 1944, and put the Hungarian police in charge of the "Jewish problem," which included all people with Jewish surnames, even those who had converted to Christianity or who had never practiced the Jewish faith. By Passover, local police, goaded by the fascist Nyilas party, began imposing the Nuremberg Laws: closing Jewish-owned shops and offices; desecrating and looting synagogues; conducting raids and inspections of "sanitary measures"; outlawing marriage between Jews and Gentiles; imposing a three-day curfew; and posting warnings of potential execution for noncompliance.
The purported reason for mass anti-Semitism was to put down a "Jewish conspiracy," a nonexistent plot that Hitler claimed threatened all Europe. In May 1944, when Russian troops were twelve miles from Sighet, Adolf Hitler's master plan called for storm troopers to load convoys to hasten the removal and annihilation of Romania's "undesirables"—trade unionists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholics, Jews, Gypsies, retardates, homosexuals, the elderly, and the physically handicapped, blind, and deaf. Elie's father joined the council of elders and Gestapo officers in a discussion of the future for Jews of Sighet. As storm troopers began stringing barbed wire around the Jewish ghetto, local doctors learned of a village annihilation plot and several committed suicide before the massive assault left them no choice.
Elie's family had fleeting opportunities to escape deportation. A compassionate police officer tapped at their window to warn them of danger. On May 14, Elie's father refused an offer of safe refuge in a cabin in the mountains from Maria, his Christian housekeeper, who lived on the outskirts of town. Two days later, authorities resituated Elie's family in Uncle Mendel's house in the smaller of two ghettos, then later transported them aboard the last rail convoy. In a sealed cattle car they traveled to Birkenau, the SS sorting center for the infamous Auschwitz complex, where guards tossed babies into flaming ditches. During their banishment, Elie dreamed noble reveries of Jews in antiquity and contemplated the romance of exile. As he neared the burning ditch, however, he feared that his life was about to end in a burst of flame. By the end of the war, his romantic notions of martyrdom crumbled along with the remains of six million Jewish corpses. The Jewish population of his homeland had been reduced by half.
In Night (1960) and All Rivers Run to the Sea (1995), Wiesel details camp life and the caprices of fate that saved ten to fifteen percent for enforced labor and destroyed others, sometimes whole convoys. After a midnight arrival, he joined his father in the men's line; his mother and sisters followed the women to separate confines. Sarah Wiesel and her youngest, Tzipora, apparently died in the Birkenau ovens; his older sisters survived. (Note: Wiesel avoids describing the ordeals of his sisters, which he considers private matters.) During idle moments in camp, he prayed, performed daily rituals, and recited from the Torah and Talmud. Dressed in shapeless striped prison garb, cap, and clogs at Auschwitz II, he and his father endured hard labor, cold, malnutrition, and arbitrary lashings. Barracks conditions were primitive and provided only skimpy straw or excelsior bedding on wooden slats and a night bucket for a toilet. Poor sanitation and a lack of soap and pure water spread intestinal bacteria, vermin, typhus, and cholera.
Upon transfer to Auschwitz III, the electrical warehouse at Buna, south of the Vistula River, father and son sorted electrical parts until Elie entered a camp infirmary in January 1945 for surgery to relieve an inflamed foot. (In All Rivers Run to the Sea, Wiesel describes the infirmity as a swollen knee.) On January 18, the threat of Russian troops forced the Germans to mount a chaotic camp evacuation forty-two miles on foot to Gleiwitz, Poland, to board roofless cattle cars for a ten-day journey northwest to Buchenwald in central Germany. There, two and a half months before American forces liberated the camp, Shlomo Wiesel died of dysentery, malnutrition, and a blow to the head, leaving his son to doubt God's existence and to mourn with the little strength he had left.
