Elie Wiesel's legacy

In the New York Times' obituary of Elie Wiesel, Joseph Berger wrote: "No single figure was able to combine Mr. Wiesel's moral integrity with his magnetism, which emanated from his deeply lined face and eyes as unrelievable melancholy."

The melancholy came from Mr. Wiesel's own experience with the Holocaust as a teenager, surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald, being liberated from the Buchenwald death camp when he was sixteen.

Wiesel became a powerful, consistent, relentless witness to this horror. He felt it was the reason that he had survived.

"I believe, profoundly that anyone who listens to a witness becomes a witness," he once said.

"Never shall I forget," he said. "Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices."

Later in his life Mr. Wiesel helped to found the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

"He brought a kind of moral and intellectual leadership and eloquence, not only in the memory of the Holocaust, but to the lessons of the Holocaust," said Sara Bloomfield, the current Holocaust Memorial Museum director.

Over five decades, Mr. Wiesel was a living touchstone for generations across the world, serving as a reminder of the horrors of intolerance and apathy.

President Obama in eulogizing Mr. Wiesel, said, "He raised his voice not just against antisemitism, but against hatred, bigotry and intolerance."

"All collective judgments are wrong," Mr. Wiesel said. "Only racists make them."

But as important as functioning as a witness was to Mr. Wiesel, part of that witness was to prod us to act. "Action is the only remedy to indifference, the most insidious danger of all. Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil," he said in his Nobel Peace Prize speech.

"Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

Mr. Wiesel strongly desired to impress this message among the millions who read his books or heard him speak.

"The opposite of beauty isn't ugliness, it is indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, but indifference between life and death."

And perhaps speaking prophetically, in what could be seen as the summation of his life's work, he said: "The opposite of love isn't hate. It is indifference."

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