Transcript
ELIE WIESEL: Mr. President, I cannot not tell you something! I have been in the former Yugoslavia last Fall! I cannot sleep since, what I have seen! We must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country!
COLIN POWELL: Elie became a great spokesman for all people who are persecuted and all people who are in desperate need. That's what made him such a great man, that's what made him so well-regarded. He was not constrained by politics, he was not constrained by any pressures. He was a free man. And he used that freedom to speak out wherever he thought his voice should be heard or his voice would be effective.
MARK PODWAL: Elie was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by President Reagan. And the week that he was going to be awarded the medal was the week the whole episode of Bitburg reached the newspapers. Reagan was going to go to Germany for a state visit, and he was asked by President Kohl to visit a cemetery of German soldiers. And it turns out that there were Waffen SS soldiers buried in that cemetery. There was so much publicity about the medal ceremony that NBC broadcast the Elie speech live at 11:30 that Friday morning. And Elie's famous words in that speech were, "Mr. President, that place is not your place."
ELIE WIESEL: Your place is with the victims of the SS. Oh, we know there are political and strategic reasons. But this issue, as all issues related to that awesome event transcends politics and diplomacy. The issue here is not politics, but good and evil!
Elie Wiesel spoke truth to power at moments when Holocaust memory was threatened and when people were at risk of genocide or mass violence.
During a speech at the White House when accepting the Congressional Gold Medal in 1985, Elie Wiesel implored President Ronald Reagan to cancel a planned visit to a German military cemetery in Bitburg. The visit was intended to symbolize normalization of relations between the United States and Germany on the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II. Visiting the cemetery, the site of graves of Waffen-SS members, was deeply offensive to many Holocaust survivors and their families. Ultimately, the president added a stop at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp before participating in a wreath-laying ceremony at the military cemetery as planned.
In 1993, at the dedication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, Wiesel called upon President Bill Clinton to intervene on behalf of Bosniak and Croatian civilians in the former Yugoslavia. They were bearing the brunt of Serbian assaults in what became known as “ethnic cleansing”: torture, rape, murder, robbery, and forced displacement. Two years later, in the summer of 1995, Bosnian Serb forces systematically executed as many as 8,000 Bosnian Muslim males in Srebrenica—the largest single massacre in Europe since the Holocaust.
Understanding that gestures sometimes speak louder than words, Wiesel in 2004 returned an award he had received from Romania. He did so because the Romanian president presented the same award, the country’s highest, to two men known to be antisemites and Holocaust deniers. Similarly in 2012, Wiesel returned an award he had received from Hungary. He did so in protest of the country’s rehabilitation of Nazi collaborators and misrepresentation of the Hungarian government’s role in deporting Jews during the Holocaust.
Wiesel explicitly linked his activism to his Jewish identity. In his 1993 remarks to President Clinton at this museum’s opening, he said about the former Yugoslavia, "As a Jew, I am saying that we must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country.” When he went to Cambodia, he explained that as a Jew, he could not stay away from the victims of genocide or the refugee camps. In Wiesel’s words, “How could a Jew like myself, with experiences and memories like mine, stay at home and not go to the aid of an entire people?”
He was a lifelong defender of the State of Israel and believed that Israel was essential to Jewish survival and continuity, so deeply wounded during the Holocaust.