By Alan Zeitlin
Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize, was given a Congressional Medal of Honor, along with a slew of other awards, and his book Night has sold millions of copies that have been discussed by students across the globe.
Wiesel, who died in 2016 at the age of 87, will go down as one of the most famous Jews of all time, who encouraged other survivors to find their voice and speak out.
He represented a community that had to grapple with survivor’s guilt and went on to become the face of the post-Holocaust generation globally.
A new documentary, “Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire,” chronicles his journey from a boy in Sighet, Romania, where he talks of an idyllic life, to Auschwitz in March, 1944, where he described, as portrayed early in the film, live babies thrown into burning ditches.
He survived the camp and the death march to Buchenwald in January, 1945, where he was liberated three months later.
“Auschwitz became a center of Jewish history,” said Wiesel in the film. “Everything died in Auschwitz.”
He was resettled in an orphanage of child survivors in France, and reunited with his older sisters, Beatrice and Hilda, who survived as forced laborers at a French orphanage.
He worked as a journalist in Paris for Israeli newspapers and began his career as a novelist there, before leaving for the US in 1955.
Night, a little more than 100 pages, was originally published in Yiddish in 1956, then greatly shortened in French in 1958 and English in 1960. It has been translated into about 30 languages.
Much of the film, which incorporates dreams and emotional imagery, focuses on Wiesel and his family: his wife, Marion, who translated many of his books from French, and who died in February, 2025, at age 94; and his only child and son, Elisha, 52.
It also depicts the Elie Wiesel’s relationship with Israel. His son said his father traveled to Israel during every war through 2014, standing by the Jewish state.
One poignant moment shows Elisha reading a letter his father wrote to him in 1991 with final words in case he perished in the Israeli bomb shelter as Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles flew overhead.
“Remember my father, after whom you have been named,” Elisha Wiesel reads in the film. “Remember what you are, a Jew. That even within doubt, there is a G-d, the G-d of Israel. Take care of yourself. You have been and remain the center of my life.”
The documentary comes out at a time of growing anti-Semitism. “With Jewish people worldwide experiencing more hatred than I can remember in my lifetime, to have a documentary about a prominent American Jew, a beloved leader who was a prominent Zionist, is very important,” Elisha Wiesel says.
“My hope is that it could rekindle the love for Israel and inspire younger audiences who have not discovered him.”
‘He had a calling’
The film’s director, Oren Rudavsky, shows Wiesel, in a speech broadcast on NBC, telling US President Ronald Reagan in 1985 that it would be a mistake to visit the Bitburg cemetery in Germany. Reagan had agreed to visit, only to learn that more than 30 Waffen-SS graves were there.
Asked by a reporter if Wiesel was giving the president a moral lesson, he simply replied that he was a “storyteller.”
Why did he write? “What else could I do?” he stated, plaintively, in his own voice in the film. “I write to bear witness.”
Rudavsky says, “Jews in the world community from all sides need to find common ground; we are going through horrific times, and many want to divide the Jewish people. We need to find a way to speak for what is best not only for Judaism, but for humanity.”
The film, with its hand-painted animation, shows Wiesel speaking about the horror of war over the years, and the suffering of Israelis and Palestinians, while his wife notes that her husband was reluctant to criticize Israel.
Co-producer Annette Insdorf, a daughter of Holocaust survivors, has taught film at Columbia University since 1987. She has served as moderator of the 92 Street Y’s longest-running interview series, “Reel Pieces.”
Insdorf offered assistance to Elisha as a slew of requests were made for materials to make a documentary about his father.
She said points of animation help make the film poetic, rather than a series of talking heads. For someone so accomplished and well-known, Wiesel spoke in a soft voice. In that way, he had the capacity to cause others to listen.
“It had to do with his profound sense of gratitude and moral clarity,” Insdorf said. “I think he learned in his younger years not to sweat the small stuff. He had a calling. He never raised his voice when speaking to people. He was brilliantly poised in a way that was quite unusual.”
‘The legacy is huge’
It is a mystery how Wiesel was able to write so much (57 books, mostly in French) and so well, given the trauma of Auschwitz, which included the normalcy of waking up and going to sleep next to corpses.
His parents did not survive the Holocaust. His mother, Sarah, and seven-year-old younger sister, Tzipora, were both murdered in Auschwitz upon the family’s arrival in May, 1944; his father, Shlomo, died in Buchenwald of dysentery in January, 1945, following the death march from Auschwitz.
Wiesel has said that it was his father who kept him alive during that awful time: “We saw it together. I knew that if I died, he would die.”
“Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire” (the name of one of his books) doesn’t delve into the Holocaust survivor’s many writings or his work in attempting to free Soviet Jewry, which occupied decades of his life in the latter part of the 20th century.
“The legacy is huge, so that’s the challenge,” Rudavsky said. “You run the risk, if you tell everything, of telling nothing. My goal was to get to the heart of who this amazing man was.”
Elisha Wiesel said his father would not let Night be made into a film. The documentary shows students in Newark, NJ, discussing the book and its lessons.
What advice did he give his son when it came to a future occupation?
“My father gave me clear instructions at an early age when I was still trying to figure out my career,” Elisha Wiesel said.
“He said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t become a rabbi.’ He amended it and said not to get involved in Jewish communal leadership. He wanted me to flourish in whatever I gravitated to.”
The film also touches upon the generation of Germans beyond the Nazi period and associated guilt.
The guilt of the aggressor weighed on the guilt of the survivor. Wiesel said it stopped there; that there must be a way to live on, free to choose a better destiny for both.
According to Insdorf, Wiesel said children of Nazis should not feel guilt for the transgressions of their parents and grandparents.
She also said he loved teaching at Boston University and believed that there was great power in preparing the next generation.
“He taught that the opposite of love is not hate,” Insdorf said. “It’s indifference.”
