In the examination of the human rights atrocities committed during World War II, there are many pitfalls. Growing up, I witnessed practically all of them. I recall the woefully incomplete, out-of-context Holocaust literature unit in my 8th grade English class when a school full of young people who, except for me, had never known a Jew, were asked to process the articulated anguish of Anne Frank and Eli Wiesel. In the entire district we had maybe two Jewish teachers and they certainly weren't at my school. Given no means to comprehend those well-documented horrors, my classmates took nothing from the experience.
Later I attended a small liberal arts college for a brief time before finally ending up at Ohio State University. At that tiny school there was only one Jewish student's organization and the only thing they wanted to talk about was oppression. They were fixated on the victimization of Jews, so naturally they had nothing of value to say and nothing to offer the world in which we live.
Of all the voices in history, literary or otherwise, none have been more important to Holocaust education than Eliezer Wiesel. He endured the very worst of Nazi cruelty and survived to write the single most valuable memoir of the death camps ever written. That book is Night, first written in Yiddish in the mid-1950's, then translated into French and eventually into English by 1960. Few people read the book for more than a decade after its American release. By the 1980's Night found its place in the high regard it deserves, winning its author the Nobel Peace Prize. Today it is required reading in essentially every Holocaust education program in America.
Night chronicles Wiesel's life in the Romanian ghetto where his family was quarantined in the early 1940's, then his experience in several of the most brutal concentration camps of Europe. It is a disturbingly matter-of-fact recounting of the torture, starvation, murder and all manner of cruelty visited upon Jews, Roma and other minorities in the camps. Wiesel watched his father, Sholomo, die slowly of dysentery after years of imprisonment. Just shortly after the last death march to Buchenwald, Wiesel and the surviving prisoners were freed by American forces.
In the closing lines of Night, Wiesel describes the most complex emotions experienced by survivors. Where we readers expect cinematic jubilation, Wiesel only finds emptiness and faithlessness. He does not recognize himself in the mirror and he cannot yet comprehend his own torture now that he's ostensibly past it.
In took years before Eli Wiesel would write even a single word about his experience during the Holocaust. Such was the case for many survivors. In time, Wiesel came to be the most courageous orator of that nightmarish history we will ever see. His non-profit organization, The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, was at the forefront of the creation of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. and today is one of the leading voices raising awareness about current human rights atrocities. The foundation has called for action concerning such events as the systematic violence in Darfur, the South African apartheid and the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, among others.
This is the most important lesson of Holocaust education. While the horrors of the Second World War were some of the most widescale brutalities in history, they are by no means the last. This is where the Holocaust unit in my school and the Jewish student's group at my former college failed. Atrocities past have only one true lesson in them, and that is to prevent atrocities in the present and future. Such is the value of Elie Wiesel, one of the most important educators of our time.
Today, Elie Wiesel continues to lecture at several American universities and has taken an active role in modern politics. The future of the Wiesel Foundation is uncertain thanks to its loss of assets to the Bernard Madoff investment firm's crimes. With help, the Foundation can continue its humanitarian work. You can get more information about the Elie Wiesel Foundation, what their continued mission is and how you can support it at their website.