Elie Wiesel
Never Will I Forget
24 x 18 inches • oil on wood panel • artist Steve Simon
Biography
About the Painting
Selected Quote
Overview
Elie Wiesel was born into a Jewish family on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, Romania. During World War II, he and his entire family were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Wiesel’s mother and younger sister perished in the camp. Wiesel and his father were sent to two other camps. The father died three months prior to the liberation of the camp. Wiesel was then taken to France where he studied at Sorbonne in Paris. He went on to author the internationally acclaimed Night about his experiences in the camps. He became a professor, and activist, and wrote 57 books in all, condemning persecution and injustice across the globe. Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He died on July 2, 2016.
Elie Wiesel Biography
Eliezer (Elie) Wiesel was born into a Jewish family on September 30, 1928 in Sighet, Romania. When he was 12 years old, Hungary annexed parts of Romania including Sighet in an agreement arbitrated by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
In April 1944, the Wiesels, along with the rest of Sighet’s Jewish population, were forced to live in ghettos before being deported the following month. They were transported by cattle car to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland. Elie was fifteen. Upon arrival at the camp, males and females were separated. Elie’s mother and younger sister were killed shortly after arrival. His other two sisters would eventually survive the war. Elie and his father, Shlomo, were sent to an attached slave labor camp, enduring brutally inhumane conditions.
They were transported by cattle car to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland. Elie was fifteen.
As Russian troops neared Auschwitz in January 1945, the Nazis were forced to abandon the camp. All of the 56,000 prisoners were evacuated to other camps. Elie and Shlomo were then forced on the “death march” to Buchenwald, over 500 miles to the west within the German homeland.
“Gate of Death” Entrance to Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp.
Photo by Dieglop
Father and son survived the harrowing march, but in Buchenwald, Shlomo developed dysentery. Elie painfully witnessed his father’s decline and the barbaric beating his father received in this weakened state. Shlomo died less than three months before Buchenwald was liberated. Elie, then a 16-year-old orphan, would survive to witness the U.S. Army liberate the camp on April 11, 1945.
After the war, Elie was taken to France with 1,000 other child survivors from Buchenwald. He later studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and began writing as a journalist at the age of 19. For ten years, he refused to write or speak about his Holocaust experiences until he met a French author who would become a close friend. François Mauriac, the 1952 Nobel Laureate in Literature, was a devout Christian who had fought in the French Resistance during the war. It was Mauriac who convinced Wiesel that it was important for him to begin writing about his experiences, however painful.
Wiesel acquiesced and began writing a 900-page memoir. He later shortened it and published it in French as La Nuit, or Night in English. It was slow to gain notoriety, but it eventually became a critically acclaimed, seminal account of the horrors of the Holocaust. It was translated into 30 languages, selling six million copies in the U.S. alone.
In 1955, Wiesel moved to the U.S., later receiving professorships at City University of New York and Boston University while furthering his role as a promoter of peace and a defender of human rights. He focused on these themes through domestic and international activism, the creation of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, spearheading the effort to build the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and writing novels and non-fiction, authoring 59 books in all. Wiesel’s efforts earned him numerous honors and rewards including receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.
He died on July 2, 2016 at the age of 87 and was buried at Sharon Gardens Cemetery in Valhalla, New York.
About the Painting
The painting was inspired by a powerful excerpt from Night, Elie Wiesel’s famous narrative of his Holocaust experiences. In this particularly poignant passage, Wiesel laments a god who would allow such suffering.
“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed, and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”
Over Wiesel’s shoulder are four children gathered before the silhouetted background of the Auschwitz gatehouse. One child reaches for a scroll. His “curse” of not having passed through the seven gates of the spiritual path renders the knowledge of the scroll with seven seals inaccessible. Next to him, another child gazes trancelike into the fire that consumes his faith. Smoke rises from the flame in the shape of the Star of David. The other two children notice with foreboding the wreaths of smoke morphing into the likeness of a child’s face. The face appears powerless, looking heavenward for answers, but receiving none.
Night was the first in a trilogy that later included Dawn and Day. The series followed Wiesel’s own transformative arc from darkness to light. Reflecting on this journey, Wiesel remarked, “In Night, I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end—man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left. And yet we begin again with night.”
Selected Elie Wiesel Quote
“Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.”
