‘Elie Wiesel’ Review: Voice in the Wilderness

‘Suffering, in Jewish tradition, confers no privileges. It all depends on what one makes of that suffering.” So wrote Elie Wiesel in one of the most compelling of his nearly 50 books, “Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits & Legends” (1976). The ethic embodied in this passage mirrors Wiesel’s own stance toward the shattering he endured in Hitler’s death camps. Afterward, he took it upon himself to never allow the world to forget. “Night,” his searing 1958 memoir of life and death in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, seethes with controlled rage at the Holocaust’s perpetrators and swells with dismay at those who stood by and did little or nothing to stop them. It was against this amoral combination of unending slaughter and callous indifference that he devoted his life’s work, through his double role as eyewitness to the Holocaust and international voice of conscience.