‘ELIE WIESEL: SOUL ON FIRE’ ON PBS
Fittingly timed with International Holocaust Remembrance Day, PBS, through its “American Masters” documentary platform, releases the film “Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire,” recounting the life of an author, educator, activist, and humanitarian committed to fighting antisemitism and injustice.
Famously saying, “For the opposite of love, I have learned, is not hate, but indifference,” Wiesel’s sentiment in this statement underscored his commitment to recollecting his own experience as a survivor of the Holocaust.
With a devotion to justice that ran deep, Wiesel was one of the key figures who spearheaded the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which is dedicated to ensuring that “Never Again” is more than a slogan that the horrors of the Holocaust should never occur once more.
It’s illuminating that the museum’s website contains a statement condemning the misuse of the Holocaust in public discourse, recognizing how comparing contemporary situations to Nazism is not only offensive to its victims, but also inaccurate and misrepresenting Holocaust history and the present.
“Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire” begins with his early life in Romania and his family members' tragic murders in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz, followed by Wiesel’s liberation from Buchenwald by American soldiers and his migration to France.
Born in 1928, Wiesel was raised in a Jewish family with three sisters. In 1944, shortly following German occupation, his life irrevocably changed after he and his family were deported to Auschwitz.
His mother and younger sister Tzipora were killed almost immediately, while Wiesel and his father were eventually forced to march to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. After the death of his father, Wiesel was liberated on April 11, 1945.
Wiesel was subsequently transported to France with other orphaned survivors known as the Buchenwald Boys. His sister Hilda discovered him through a photo in a French newspaper, and he eventually reunited with his sisters Beatrice and Hilda.
As a young man, Wiesel began his journalism career in Paris, where he used his writing talents to report on political and foreign affairs. During this time, he also led a children’s choir and studied at the Sorbonne.
His writing of the memoir “Night,” along with “Jews of Silence” and “Four Hasidic Masters,” would be the foundation for his career as a speaker, writer and university professor, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s.
Although he frequently wrote about global events as a journalist, he was initially hesitant to recount his own experiences as a Holocaust survivor, which is easy to understand when one must relive unimaginable horrors.
It wasn’t until he began writing the book “Night,” first in Yiddish as “And the World Remained Silent,” then in a shortened version in French titled “La Nuit” and finally in the English translation, that he was able to speak candidly about the horrors endured during the Holocaust.
In 1985, accepting a Congressional Medal of Honor from President Ronald Reagan, Wiesel expressed his gratitude as to how the American liberators “gave us back our lives, and what I felt for them then nourishes me to the end of my days.”
In his career, Wiesel penned 57 books and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. As a professor at Boston University for over 30 years, he influenced thousands of students, and his memoir “Night” is still read in schools around the world.
Wiesel died in 2016 at the age of 87 in New York City and is remembered as one of the most prominent Jewish writers, activists and educators of the last 60 years. Every Holocaust Remembrance Day should include a memory of his life.
The Holocaust Museum features on its website oral testimonies of survivors, and what it was like to live through the horror, the actions they had to take to survive, and the choices they had to make.
For example, the story of Martin Weiss who at the age of 15 was deported with his family from Hungary and loaded onto cramped boxcars for a grueling journey to Auschwitz, a place they had never heard of before.
In his own words, Weiss recalled as they disembarked from the train, that “if you ever saw bedlam, or if you could imagine hell, that must have been it.” And this was happening as “everybody was trying to hold on to their children.”
It seemed almost incongruous to Weiss that once at the camp, the prisoners were surrounded by German police dogs, and this made no sense because “it was enclosed in a yard with electrified fences, and nobody could run any place.”
Men were soon separated from women, and then everyone had to go through a line, and an officer would direct you to go left or right. “If you went to left, you went to your death. If you went to right, you went to work. This was our initiation or our first experience with Auschwitz.”
“Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire” adds authenticity to the documentary with interviews of the subject himself and family members.
Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.