Life is only a sequence of events and accidents, often determined when and where you are born. When I was 15, as a young man in the 1980s in the Netherlands, my main interest was girls and trying to get beer. When Elie Wiesel was 15 and a young man in Romania (or then Hungary) in the 1940s, his interest was survival.
Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet (in Transylvania, now a part of Romania, but part of Hungary between 1940 and 1945) on 30 September 1928 and grew up in a Chassidic (an Orthodox Jewish) family.
In March 1944, Germany occupied Hungary (extending the Holocaust into Northern Transylvania). Elie Wiesel was 15, and he, with his family and the rest of the Jewish population, was placed in one of the two confinement ghettos set up in Máramarossziget (Sighet), where he had been born and raised. In May 1944, the Hungarian authorities, under German pressure, began to deport the Jewish community to Auschwitz, where 90 per cent of the people were murdered upon arrival.
When Elie Wiesel and his family arrived at the camp, he was separated from his mother and sisters when he heard eight quietly, emotionless spoken words, ”Men to the left! Women to the right!”
Elie Wiesel was 15 years old and was tattooed with inmate number A-7713 on his left arm. He had lied about his age, claiming to be 18, the advice he received from another inmate.
After being held at Auschwitz I, Wiesel and his father were transferred to Monowitz (Buna) Workcamp, part of the extensive Auschwitz camp complex. There, he was put to work as a slave labourer. The loss of his mother and sister and the daily brutality of the camp led Wiesel to question his faith. “My eyes had opened and I was alone—terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy, I was nothing but ashes now.”
Elie and his father were later transported from Auschwitz to Buchenwald. His father died while imprisoned at Buchenwald. His younger sister had been murdered together with his mother in Auschwitz. After the war, he was reunited with his older sister, Beatrice.
I could write more about Elie Wiesel—instead, I will finish with his own words.
“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.”
“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.”
“Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.”
“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the centre of the universe.”
“The survivors had every reason to despair of society; they did not.
They opted to work for humankind, not against it.”
“No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.”
“In any society, fanatics who hate don’t hate only me – they hate you, too. They hate everybody.”
“To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”
—Elie Wiesel’s speech, “The Perils of Indifference”
Recorded April 12, 1999
Elie Wiesel sadly passed away on 2 July 2016. He was 87 years old.
Sources
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/elie-wiesel
History of Sorts 
Leave a comment