Posted on 07/05/2016 4:46:30 AM PDT by Kaslin
Elie Wiesel was Jewish to his core, and in the Jewish state he was revered as a hero — so much so that two Israeli prime ministers offered to nominate him to be the country's president. Yet Wiesel didn't make Israel his home. Though he was a frequent visitor and a passionate advocate, though he felt "attached to the destiny of Israel with all the fiber of his being," as he once put it, he never became an Israeli citizen.
Why not? He himself didn't know, or so he said. But perhaps the explanation was as simple as this: He was in love with the United States.
"The day I received American citizenship was a turning point in my life," Wiesel wrote ina 2004 essay in Parade magazine. "From that day on, I felt privileged to belong to a country which, for two centuries, has stood as a living symbol of all that is charitable and decent to victims of injustice everywhere — a country in which every person is entitled to dream of happiness, peace, and liberty; where those who have are taught to give back."
Like so many others who survived the 20th century's terrible wars and tyrannies, Wiesel had good reason to associate American might with salvation. He was a teenager, emaciated from hunger and shattered by loss, when a detachment of troops from the US 9th Armored Infantry Battalion liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany. "I remember them well," Wiesel later wrote. "Bewildered, disbelieving, they walked around the place, hell on earth. . . . The American soldiers wept and wept with rage and sadness. And we received their tears as if they were heartrending offerings from a wounded and generous humanity."
Wiesel's death has brought forth an international flood of tributes. Understandably, they have focused on the Nobel laureate's singular status as a witness of the Holocaust and on his lifelong mission to arouse awareness and moral outrage in response to the world's evils. Nearly every obituary has recalled the extraordinary moment in 1985 when Wiesel publicly challenged President Ronald Reagan — during a White House ceremony in his own honor, no less — over a forthcoming trip to the Bitburg military cemetery in West Germany, where members of the Nazi SS were buried.
"That place, Mr. President, is not your place," Wiesel bluntly admonished the leader of the free world. "Your place is with the victims of the SS."
Not many have remembered, however, that Wiesel used the same memorable occasion to reiterate his undying affection for his adopted country. What he has felt for America since his liberation in 1945 "nourishes me to the end of my days," he told Reagan. "Mr. President, we are grateful to this country — the greatest democracy in the world, the freest nation in the world, the moral nation."
Wiesel wrote dozens of books, delivered thousands of lectures, touched millions of people. He considered himself first and foremost a teacher, and if a single theme runs through all his teachings, it is the obligation of men and women not to look away, not to be indifferent, when cruelty and horror are being inflicted on the innocent and helpless. Part of what he loved about the United States was its innate concern for the downtrodden — not merely cherishing its own freedom, but taking up arms to restore the freedom of others.
There is a bittersweet poignancy to the timing of Wiesel's death just as Americans were embarking on the Independence Day holiday. "I cannot repress my emotion before the flag and the uniform — anything that represents American heroism in battle," he wrote. His feelings were especially fervent on the Fourth of July. "I reread the Declaration of Independence," said the Nobel laureate, and take heart from its eloquent and moral message: "Opposition to oppression in all its forms, defense of all human liberties, celebration of what is right in social intercourse."
Wiesel, indelibly shaped by the lethal silence of the Holocaust, spent seven decades raising his voice on behalf of the voiceless. Few people, having survived such darkness, have used the experience to shed so much light. And it was American men in arms, entering Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, who made it possible.
Elie Wiesel, the great apostle of memory, never forgot his American liberators, and never stopped loving the country that gave him a second lease on life.
It’s sad to think that he’s watched as the mighty have fallen over the last 8 years. ISIS is an international terror conglomerate that will likely put the Nazis to shame in the coming years without the steely resolve America showed 75 years ago. Yet our feckless imposter of a president continues to insist that they’re “on the run.”
My grandfather used to say that our heroes die when they no longer have a taste for the world.
When I was younger I always believed when someone preached doom and gloom from the pulpit that they are the devil's messenger. Later I came to realize that those like that make claims like that arrogant pos occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave is the devil's messenger if not Satan himself
In his autobiography, Elie bragged about raping German noncombatant girls and women.
However, later editions were edited to state he and his friends merely went out at night and “got” German girls.
He does not hold moral high ground.
If you'd like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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Did he actually say he participated? I’ve only found what appears to be a quote from “Night”.
“”Early the next day Jewish boys ran off to Weimar to steal clothing and potatoes. And to rape German girls”
I also read that he, at one point after his Holocaust experience, laughed at rape but later felt differently about the revenge that some were taking.
sorry, but in the heat of war, people let off steam. It’s wrong, but the heat of war does things to people. Plenty of people claimed the Allied soldiers were responsible for war crimes during WWII, and yea some may have done things that would not be considered couth; however, given that it was a war of good (America, et al) vs. evil (Nazi Germany, et al), who effin cares about a few of the enemies civilians, honestly.
If we had gone to war against the Bolsheviks, ditto.
Elie Wiesel is a hero loved by supporters of the last two great nations out there, America and Israel, and reviled by Islam and far-left Jew haters. I could care less if he took part in letting off steam in WWII.
Our feckless imposter of a President said that ISIS is the “JV team” .... although by now he may regret that imbecilic statement. He tried to ignore bad news from the jihadist catastrophes he had created until the entire world could ignore it no longer.
source??? I have read a variety of sources about this and none ever suggested that Elie Wiesel participated in any rapes. He referred to “Jewish boys” in the 3rd person and gave no indication that he took part.
Liar.
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