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.
