Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel, who made Holocaust education his mission in life after surviving the Auschwitz and Buchenwald death camps, died Saturday, according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Nobel Peace Prize winner and author of Night was 87.

"Whoever listens to a witness, becomes a witness," Wiesel once said.
Bebeto Matthews, AP
"In the darkness of the Holocaust when our brothers and sisters perished — the six million — Elie Wiesel served as a ray of light and an example of humanity that believes in the goodness of man," Netanyahu said in a statement.
He was joined by two of his country's presidents. "The Jewish people and the world lost a larger than life individual," former Israeli president Shimon Peres said via Twitter. His successor, Reuven Rivlin, echoed those sentiments, writing, "Tonight, we bid farewell to a hero of the Jewish people, and a giant of all humanity."
President Obama called Wiesel "one of the great moral voices of our time, and in many ways, the conscience of the world," in a statement Saturday. Obama remembered a 2009 visit with Wiesel to Buchenwald where the pair walked among the barbed wire and guard towers of the concentration camp.
"His life, and the power of his example, urges us to be better," Obama said. "In the face of evil, we must summon our capacity for good. In the face of hate, we must love. In the face of cruelty, we must live with empathy and compassion."
The only boy among four children born to Shlomo and Sarah Wiesel, Elie (born Eliezer) was raised in the northern Transylvanian village of Sighet, Romania. His parents encouraged him to study philosophy, literature, Hebrew and the Torah.
In 1940, Northern Transylvania was ceded to Hungary, whose leaders allowed the Germans to force the region's Jewish populations into ghettos. Four years later, the Wiesel family was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the 15-year-old boy was separated from his mother and sisters.
He managed to stay with his father for most of the war as they worked at an Auschwitz sub-camp and were transferred to the Buchenwald camp in Germany in early 1945. But Shlomo was beaten by a guard and died from his injuries, just weeks short of that camp's liberation.
His mother and younger sister Tzipora also did not survive.
Following the war, he moved to Paris, where he was reunited with his elder sisters, Beatrice and Hilda, and began pursuing a career in journalism. However, he avoided writing or discussing the central event in his life: the Holocaust.
Some 11 years after leaving Buchenwald, he wrote Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (And the World Remained Silent), a Yiddish memoir that would become known as Night and be translated into 30 languages. He opted not to let Hollywood touch his book.
In it, he wrote, "The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”
He moved to the United States in the mid-1950s and in 1969, he had married Marion Erster Rose, who would translate his books. In 1972, they had a son, Shlomo Elisha, named for Wiesel's late father.
In 1978, Jimmy Carter selected Wiesel to lead the President's Commission on the Holocaust, followed two years later by his appointment as chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. The resulting museum In Washington, which bears an inscribed quote from Night about Wiesel's first evening in the camps, opened in April 1993 and has welcomed over 38 million visitors and 96 heads of state.
His work earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. Soon afterward, he and Marion established a foundation in his name to "combat indifference, intolerance and injustice through international dialogue and youth-focused programs that promote acceptance, understanding and equality."
“Elie Wiesel was more than a revered writer,” Ronald S. Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress said in a statement Saturday. “He was also a teacher for many of us. He taught us about the horrors of Auschwitz. He taught us about Judaism, about Israel, and about not being silent in the face of injustice."