Across Connecticut, Friends Remember Elie Wiesel’s Spirit, Dedication
From Ashraf Fahim. Hartford Courant (Sunday, July 3, 2016)
Robert Fishman counts a framed letter from Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel winner, among his treasured possessions.
“I would say because of Elie Wiesel part of my work is deeply committed to Holocaust and genocide education,” Fishman, executive director of the Jewish Federation Association of Connecticut, said Saturday, reacting to Wiesel’s death at age 87. The letter came in 2008, marking the 30th year Fishman had played a hand in organizing the state’s annual Holocaust commemoration at the state Capitol.
Wiesel was best known for his gripping memoir “Night,” published in the United States in 1960, a first-person account of his time in Nazi concentration camps in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Fishman said some Holocaust survivors were reluctant to tell their stories.
“He was the opposite,” Fishman said. “He felt – as he put it – it was almost a mission because he survived and he had such a vivid recollection of what he witnessed that he was obligated to write about it.”
Wiesel was a powerful voice against injustice across the world in the decades that followed. In 2006 he spoke at the Beth El Temple in West Hartford, arriving from a rally in Washington, D.C., where he and thousands of others called for an end to the violence in Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region.
“Those of us who know what suffering means, we try to help others not to suffer,” he told an audience of about 1,100 people. “Suffering confers no privileges.”
Jerome Fischer, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Eastern Connecticut, got to know Wiesel through a mutual friend, Sigmund Strochlitz, a Holocaust survivor who ran a Ford dealership in New London.
“He loved to sing,” Fischer said, recalling how he visited Strochlitz’s house and Weisel would entertain his children. “He was very gentle, very humble.”
“I was a sort of hot-headed young college student organizing a Jewish student union and Elie Wiesel was a young writer becoming popular,” Fischer said. “When I remet him when I moved to New London he remembered me.”
Fischer said Wiesel played a key role in the Soviet Jewry movement in the mid 1980s, which advocated for Jews in the Soviet Union to be free to leave the country.
Avinoam Patt, a Holocaust scholar and professor at the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford, said “Night” was a turning point and reached an audience outside the Jewish community.
“The first couple of decades after the war it’s not so much that survivors didn’t want to talk it’s that the outside world wasn’t really prepared to hear about the atrocities they experienced,” he said.
When the Greenberg Center was established in the 1985-86 academic year, Wiesel visited and was given an honorary degree. Wiesel himself taught at Boston University for more than four decades.
Wiesel’s death is a reminder that each day more and more Holocaust survivors are dying and their stories are being lost, Fishman said. He’s started a program called “Voices of Hope” that encourages family members of survivors to record the experiences of their parents or grandparents to preserve them for future generations.
“When I heard the news today one of the first things that stood out to me is … every day the last living witnesses are passing away,” Patt said.
In an interview with The Courant in 1991, five years after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Wiesel said there were no words to describe the Holocaust, but at the same time acknowledged he had made that his life’s work.
“I say we cannot, but we must. I don’t feel we really can use words because there are no words. And yet. My favorite expression is ‘and yet.’ And yet. We cannot – and yet. There is no response – and yet I must find one. The attempt should be made.”