The civilised world yesterday commemorated the Holocaust Day. Romanians also remembered the victims of the 1941 Jewish victims murdered by the Iron Guard.
Elie Wiesel recollections on the death camps he survived should be carefully studied again and again. A week ago, the Romanian Ministry of Culture and Religious Affairs hosted, in Bucharest, a conference entitled “Violence and terror in the recent history of Romania” organised by the “Elie Wiesel” National Institute for the study of the Holocaust and the Federation of the Jewish Communities and dedicated to the commemoration of 65 years since the Bucharest pogrom perpetrated during the Iron Guard rebellion.
"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky." This haunting and powerful passage is from Elie Wiesel's renowned first book, "Night" — his autobiographical account of the experience of the Jews.
Since that first novel, Wiesel has published dozens of semi-autobiographical novels, plays and essays — dealing with the Holocaust, with Judaism and the moral responsibility of all people to fight hatred, racism and genocide.
Wiesel, born in Sighet, NW of Romania in 1928 (nota bene: the Northern region of Transylvania was under Hungarian occupation during the WWII) , was the only son of four children to Shlomo and Sarah Wiesel, Hasidic Jews. As a child, his world revolved around his family, religious study, community and God. His life as a writer, educator and Holocaust survivor seeks to confront the despair and meaninglessness of the experience of Auschwitz and to conquer that despair.
Wiesel's works draw on the particularities of the Jewish Holocaust experience and illuminate the plight of the persecuted everywhere. Night begins in 1941, when the narrator of the story, Elie, is 12 years old. Having grown up in the little town of Sighet (under Hungarian rule at that time), Elie is a studious and deeply religious boy who has a loving family consisting of his parents and three sisters. One day, someone in the town, who was deported but has now returned, warns the town of the impending dangers of the German army. No one listens and then years pass by. But by 1944, Germans are already in the town and have set up ghettos for the Jews. After a while, the deportation of the Jews to the concentration camp in Auschwitz begins. And so it was that Wiesel and his family was transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
As Soviet troops approached the camp in January 1945, the inmates were forced to march to another camp at Buchenwald, in Germany, where, weakened by the march, dysentery and starvation, Wiesel's father died. Wiesel's mother and younger sister died in the gas chambers and he did not discover that his elder sisters had survived until the war was over. Following the liberation of Buchenwald, Wiesel was free. He moved to France and lived there the next 12 years where he studied in Paris at the Sorbonne University, devoting himself to literature, philosophy and psychology while earning his living as choir director, summer camp counselor and teacher of Hebrew and the Bible. He also worked as a journalist. In 1954, at the urging of his friend, French writer Francois Mauriac, Wiesel broke his silence and began to write of his experience in the concentration camps and his own survival.
Two years later, his first book, "Un di Velt Hot Geshvign," ("And the World Remained Silent"), appeared in Yiddish. In 1958, it was published in French as the novel "La Nuit" and in 1960 it appeared in the United States as "Night." In 1985, members of the West German Bundestag recommended Wiesel for the Nobel Peace Prize, which he was awarded the following year. The same year he was also awarded the Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement, one of the highest honors conferred by the United States. Wiesel's words, "... to remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all ..." clearly stand as a summary of his views on life and serve as the driving force of his work.
Romania Report & sources
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