Deb Aronson

Elie Wiesel: Indifference is Not an Option

First appeared in NCTE’s Council Chronicle in June 2007 under Profiles

For more than half a century, Nobel Prize-winner and concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel (pronounced EH-lee vee-ZEL), has used his voice and his influence to make sure the world never forgets the atrocities committed by the Nazis during World War II.

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest,” he said in his 1986 Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Wiesel, despite his numerous other accomplishments and commitments, is, first and foremost, a teacher. He has been the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University since 1976 and is a member also of the departments of religion and philosophy.

“I’m not sure I’m a good teacher; I’m a good student,” says Wiesel. “I have always learned. I believe in learning. My passion is to learn, to study. My passion is writing and teaching. The teacher in me is a writer and the writer in me is a teacher.”

For example, though Wiesel never teaches his own books, one year a contingent of students came to him and said everyone else taught his books and they wanted Wiesel to teach them. In that class, while reading Night, Wiesel’s powerful account of his experiences in the concentration camps, one student said, “What would this book have been if it had been written, not by the son, but by the father?”

Wiesel quotes an ancient Talmudic saying: “More than I learned from my teachers I learned from my friends and more than I have learned from my friends I have learned from my students,” to explain why he loves being in the classroom.

Wiesel is often asked by both teachers and students, “What can we do to stop these atrocities around the world?” His answer is deceptively simple.

“My answer is always ‘Be sensitive,’” he says “What is the goal of a writer or a teacher but to sensitize the student or the reader to make them more sensitive? Once you become sensitive to one family you become sensitive to all families. One people, all people. Sensitivity is as contagious as insensitivity.”

Night recounts Wiesels’ experiences from the day he and his family were taken by the Nazis from Sighet, their village in Transylvania — and put into several concentration camps— until the day the Allies liberated the survivors. The book was first published in 1958 and was also chosen this year for Oprah’s book club, gaining Wiesel an even broader audience for that work.

Wiesel has made it his life’s work to speak out against hatred, fear and indifference to human brutality around the world, but he was not born a fighter. A quiet, bookish boy, Wiesel grew up surrounded by a strong Jewish community. His maternal grandfather was a devout Hasidic Jew and Wiesel dreamed of following in his footsteps.

“When I was young, my idea was to become a teacher and a writer, strangely enough,” Wiesel says. “But then I wanted to be a teacher of Talmud and a writer of commentaries on the Bible.”

Instead, Wiesel’s life was forever changed when the Nazis came to his village in 1944. Wiesel, 15 at the time, was separated from his mother and three sisters, but managed to stay together with his father. Wiesel’s father died, of dysentery, abuse and malnutrition less than three months before the concentration camp was liberated.

“I was not very strong or very committed,” says Wiesel. “It would be nice to say I wanted to survive to bear witness, but nonsense. As long as my father was alive I wanted to be alive because I knew if I died he would die. But after he died my life was not life any longer. I was dead. I did nothing to survive, nothing at all. It was just by sheer luck.”

Upon his release, Wiesel found that his mother and youngest sister had also perished in the camps and his two older sisters had survived. After the war, Wiesel promised himself that he would write about his experience, but he found there were no words to describe the horrors he witnessed.

Language fails him when speaking of the concentration camps, says Wiesel. He has said that even the term Holocaust, which comes from the Greek “holos” (completely) and “kaustos” (burned sacrificial offering) is not strong enough. He prefers the term Shoah, a Hebrew word which means “catastrophe” or “destruction.”

Wiesel settled for a time in France and, though he learned French at a relatively late age, it remains the language he is most comfortable writing in.

“I learned French in France and I acquired it and it acquired me and I felt it like a skin, like a refuge,” says Wiesel. “It is the best language which I have today. I can teach in English, I can speak English but real writing is only in French.”

Still, when he lectures in English, Wiesel does not bring a prepared text, unless it is a scholarly meeting.

“I receive from the audience, mystically almost, what I am going to say. I absorb the quest which is there which I share and then I try to share it aloud with them,” he says.

Today, Wiesel has written more than 40 books and novels. His most recent in English is titled The Time of the Uprooted. Wiesel’s wife, Marion, translates his books from the French, a process that takes about two years. Wiesel’s most recent novel, which came out in France this year, is A Mad Desire to Dance.

Wiesel has made the United States his home since the 1950s and lives in Manhattan with his wife. His son and grandson also live in Manhattan, and family clearly overshadows any achievement or honor Wiesel has ever received. None of his honors or degrees, not even the Nobel Prize, is visible in Wiesel’s office or home, he says.

“I just want to be a proud father and grandfather,” says Wiesel, whose first grandchild, Elijah David, was born in 2005.

To further combat fanaticism and hatred in the world, Wiesel and his wife have established The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. The foundation, among other things, helps educate 1,000 Ethiopian-Jewish children in Israel, and organizes an annual conference of Nobel Laureates and world leaders to focus on world problems and how to solve them.

Wiesel organized the first of these conferences in 1988, with the help and support of President Francois Mitterrand of France. Seventy-nine Nobel Laureates attended.

“Look,” says Wiesel, “this is a group of select people and we received the highest honor the world can bestow and we have to give back with our knowledge, with our status, with our influence, and,” he laughs, “occasionally with our intelligence.”

Despite the rise of hatred and violence in the world, Wiesel, 78, shows no signs of giving up. In addition to his teaching schedule, he travels extensively. He writes fiction every morning, beginning at 5 a.m., and the afternoon is used for meetings, non-fiction writing and teaching.

“To give in is so easy and I don’t like the easy path,” he says. “Indifference is never an option. It is not the beginning of a process; it is the end of a process. My mantra has been: The opposite of love is not hate but indifference, the opposite of education is not ignorance but indifference; the opposite of beauty is not ugliness but indifference; the opposite of life is not death but indifference to life and death. I don’t think I could ever become numb.”