Author Wiesel Named Nobel Peace Laureate

Elie Wiesel, the concentration camp survivor who became the literary conscience of the Holocaust, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Tuesday for his continuing message to mankind of “peace, atonement and human dignity.”

The Norwegian Nobel Committee cited the 58-year-old author and professor, whose parents and younger sister were exterminated during World War II, as “a messenger to mankind” committed to the philosophy that “the forces fighting evil in the world can be victorious.”

“Wiesel’s commitment, which originated in the sufferings of the Jewish people, has been widened to embrace all repressed peoples and races,” the committee said in naming him to receive the $280,000 prize.

Honors Fellow Survivors

Wiesel dedicated his Nobel Prize to all those who survived the Nazi horrors.

“It belongs to all the survivors who have tried to do something with their pain, with their memory, with their silence, with their life,” he told an emotional news conference in Manhattan. “I believe that we survivors have given an example to humankind how not to succumb to despair, although despair often was justified. They (the survivors) and I . . . have tried to use sorrow in order to prevent further suffering.”

The Nobel Committee described Wiesel, the author of 26 books and professor of humanities at Boston University, as “one of the most important spiritual leaders and guides in an age when violence, repression and racism continue to characterize the world.”

A slim figure with a sad voice and a shock of hair falling over his forehead, Wiesel told how he decided to dedicate his life to keeping alive the horror of places such as Auschwitz and Buchenwald:

“I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I feel that having survived, I owe something to the dead. They left me behind. And I owe something to most of them, if not all of them. That was their obsession, to be remembered. Anyone who does not remember betrays them again.

“I believe that in telling their story, we are helping the living,” he added. “That is why I devote my life to tell their story.”

Wiesel coupled his gratitude to the Nobel Committee with a plea to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev that he free human rights activists such as Vladimir Slepak, Ida Nudel and Andrei D. Sakharov--whom he called “my great hero.”

“I would like to tell him (Gorbachev) it would be so easy for him to open the doors of certain jails, certain camps, and allow some people to leave and be together with their families,” Wiesel said. “It would give him so much in the world if he were to do that.”

The Nobel Prize was not Wiesel’s first major honor. In April, 1985, President Reagan presented him with the Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement. Wiesel used that occasion to urge in vain that the President not visit a cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany, where members of the German elite SS troops are buried.

“That place, Mr. President, is not your place,” Wiesel told the chief executive. “Your place is with the victims of the SS.”

Past Prize Winners

The Nobel Committee chairman, Egil Aarvik, compared Wiesel’s selection to their choice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964 and of South Africa’s Bishop Desmond Tutu in 1984.

“A man who has gone through so much and who still rises from the ashes and becomes a spokesman for peace and conciliation--that is impressing,” Aarvik said.

Wiesel, a naturalized American citizen who lives in New York, is credited with the first use of the term Holocaust, in a book review 25 years ago, to describe the mass killings of Jews during World War II.

His first book, “Night,” written in 1956, described in sorrowful and shocking prose his family’s experiences at Auschwitz and later in Buchenwald. In 1944, Wiesel, with other Jews in his hometown of Sighet, Romania, were sent by train to the concentration camp.

Wiesel’s mother and youngest sister died in the gas chambers. In 1945, Wiesel and his father were transferred to Buchenwald, where his father died of starvation and dysentery before the camp’s liberation.

‘Words Mean Responsibility’

At the news conference Tuesday, Wiesel said: “I have always felt that words mean responsibility. I try to use them not against the human condition but for humankind, never to create anger but to attenuate anger, not to separate people but to bring them together.”

Wiesel was awakened before dawn by the phone call notifying him of the award. He described himself as “flabbergasted.”

“It happened to me after Yom Kippur, which means that some friends and myself have prayed well,” Wiesel said of the Jewish holy day that was observed Monday.

As he arrived at the press conference with his wife, Marion, and son, Shlomo-Elisha, Wiesel was met by a crowd of reporters and photographers. As he walked down the red carpet to the stage of the auditorium, well-wishers besieged him.

“ Mazel tov (congratulations), Elie!” shouted a friend.

“Thank you,” Wiesel replied, smiling.

Boston University’s president, John R. Silber, introduced Wiesel as “the greatest moral witness of our time.”

‘Profoundly Grateful’ for Honor

The Nobel laureate said he was “profoundly grateful” for the peace prize.

He said that he still does not understand why God allowed the Holocaust to occur.

“I have not resolved that question, but I have never lost faith in God,” he said. “I had moments of anger, of protest, which I expressed in my first book ‘Night,’ but as a Jew who comes from such a profoundly religious family and my background--my passion for study--I never left God, although he may have left me.

” . . . As for the question, I have no answer. I still don’t know why it happened. I still don’t know how people could have allowed this to happen to other people. Nor can I understand . . . the silence of the eclipse of God in years when we needed him most, but that does not push me farther away from him. I would even say that sometimes, I have been closer to him for that reason.”

Wiesel said he now regrets using the word Holocaust to describe the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews.

“I wanted some word that was beyond pogrom, massacre,” he explained. . . . It (Holocaust) deals with fire. It means burned offering . . . so I used the word and I regretted it, because it was so misused in so many places, so cheapened, trivialized, commercialized, that now I can hardly pronounce it.”

Studied in France, India

Wiesel has had a long and varied career since he was freed from the concentration camp on April 11, 1945. He settled in France, studied at the Sorbonne and traveled to India, where he studied comparative asceticism. In Palestine in 1948, he reported as a journalist on the struggle for Israeli statehood.