How the World Transformed Elie Wiesel — and How He Transformed the World
By Simi Horwitz
ELIE WIESEL.
A Note from Arthur Schwartz: We live in an era of profound turmoil within the world’s Jewish population. Believe it or not, there are only 15.7 million Jews in the world, which is only 0.2% of the world population (2 per thousand). 7.4 million live in Israel and 7.5 million live in the U.S. (2.4% of the population). That’s pretty small; there are double the number of Sikhs, and Buddhists make up 4.1% of the world population. But the issues facing Jews, whether it be because of never ending antisemitism or the actions of Israel, are often at the top of the news. October 7, and the ensuing war in Gaza have caused fragmentation. In NYC, which is the second largest population of Jews of any city in the world, 30% of Jews voted for Mamdani, while 70% voted for Cuomo; this compares to an overall 50-40 ratio among all New Yorkers. I wanted to highlight this recent documentary about Eli Weisel because his life reflected both the most important fighter against antisemitism ever, who also supported the fight against all ethnic/religious oppression.
Elie Wiesel, having experienced one of the darkest periods in human history, dedicated his life to ensuring that the horror imposed upon Jews under the Nazi regime was never forgotten, and championed the cause of human dignity writ large. The following quotes illustrate his vision.
December 10, 1986, on the dangers of neutrality: “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 or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the center of the universe.”
December 11, 1986, on our duty to protest: “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”
May 24, 1992, on racism and collective judgment: “No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.”
This documentary should remind us, that despite having witnessed inconceivable horrors, Wiesel combined both a zeal to expose those horrors, matched with a zeal to prevent inhumane mistreatment and prejudice against others from happening again, including Palestinians.
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Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire traces its subject’s journey from Holocaust survivor to international hero and human rights leader
Perhaps the most torturous image in Oren Rudavsky’s searing documentary, Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire, is that of a child being hanged in Auschwitz. Dangling from the gallows, his legs twisting this way and that, the child took half an hour to die because his body was so light. It’s a scene of relentless anguish witnessed by hundreds of concentration camp inmates who were brought together to collectively observe the punishment for crimes unknown. “Behind me,” Wiesel recalls in voice-over, “I heard ‘Where is God now?’ And I heard a voice within me answer him, ‘He is hanging here on these gallows.’ ”
Living in a godless universe where all morality has ceased to exist, Wiesel is nonetheless a profoundly religious man, a complex, contradictory figure. He is the iconic Holocaust survivor, witness, and storyteller, the latter his self-defined role. The film, which depicts a philosophy, a sensibility, a life emerging from unfathomable Holocaust horror, is told through archival material and original interviews with historians, students and family members. The narrative is largely revealed through extraordinary expressionistic hand-painted animation by Joel Orloff. The black-and-white painted swirls start out as one picture, then merge and reappear as a second picture, and then morph into a third, and so on.
I’m generally not a fan of animation, especially in documentaries where its deployment can feel extraneous. But here, the animation is at once haunting and brutal and, most important, organic to the aesthetic, which subtly underscores the central themes. The evocative score by Osvaldo Golijov also works remarkably well.
Best known for the documentary A Life Apart: Hasidism in America, which he co-directed with Menachem Daum and was short-listed for the Academy Awards, Rudavsky has forged an intriguing and provocative fast paced flick that gives the viewer a glimpse into Wiesel’s private world. As Wiesel recounts, his childhood in Sighet, Romania, was almost Utopian: Jewish children singing optimistic songs about a future in Palestine and lovely Shabbat dinners awash in candle light and ritual. Only later does he question his elegiac memories in a place he called home. Indeed, much of the film is about the power of memory and sometimes its distortions.
By the time Wiesel was 15 in 1944, his life had turned upside-down as the Nazis advanced, rounding up and deporting the Jews while the family’s gentile neighbors, who had previously seemed companionable and welcoming, sneered or looked away. At Auschwitz, his family was torn apart. Ultimately, his mother, grandmother and sister were murdered, though two other sisters survived and were later reunited with him. Wiesel’s last image of his younger sister was the red coat she was wearing, a present for Passover.
His mother’s final words to him were to stay with his father no matter what, and he complied until his father succumbed from exhaustion and disease following their death march to Buchenwald. For the rest of his life, Wiesel was troubled by the voice of his dying father calling out to him, desperate to tell him something.
Reprinted from The Forward, with permission.
