Noted Holocaust survivor and novelist, winner in 1986 of the Nobel Peace Prize. A leading representative of survivors of Nazi concentration camps and a champion in the fight against oppression and racism. Wiesel has spent his life describing the horrors of World War II and struggling with the human and religious issues that the Holocaust raises.
Born in Sighet, Romania, during World War II, Wiesel was held in the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, where his parents and a sister died. After the war, he studied philosophy at the University of Paris, became a journalist, and moved to the United States where, since 1976, he has been a professor of humanities at Boston University.
Wiesel’s first and perhaps most famous book, Night (1958), is a memoir of his experiences in the concentration camps. It forms a trilogy with Dawn (1960) and The Accident (1961), which concern the lives of survivors. Rather than a positive theological response to the horror of the Holocaust—an affirmation of God in the face of evil—in these works Wiesel portrays the evolution of his despair, beginning, in Night, with his transition from youthful belief to disillusionment and erosion of faith. Wiesel’s point is not that there is no God, or even that God has abandoned His people (though this theme does appear). Rather, Wiesel focuses upon God’s apparent complicity in the horrors. The Holocaust can happen only because God wills it, even if that “will” is recognized only in God’s silence. Contrary to the classical Jewish perspective, in Wiesel’s view, God is indifferent to suffering and human history. Wiesel thus paints a tragic vision of a void in which God is absent.
Wiesel’s attitude means that there should come an end to prayer and thanksgiving, there apparently being nothing for which to thank God. In Wiesel’s thought, though, the rejection of religion runs alongside a desire to continue in belief and practice, to return to the age of innocent faith and sense of God’s protection. Two important themes emerge from this dichotomy. One is the concept of struggle with God and the appropriateness of humankind’s crying out to God for explanations. The other is the obligation for people themselves to take responsibility for the world in which they live, to fight, as Wiesel himself has, for what is right and proper.
Wiesel’s other books include The Jews of Silence, A Beggar in Jerusalem, The Testament, Town Beyond the Wall, The Gates of the Forest, The Oath, and All Rivers run to the Sea: Memoirs.
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