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 sometimes gestures speak louder than words, Wiesel returned the award he had received from Romania in 2004. He did so because Romania's president awarded the same award, the country's highest award, to two men known as anti-Semites 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 the misrepresentation of the Hungarian government's role in deporting Jews during the Holocaust.
Wiesel explicitly linked his activism to his Jewish identity. In a speech to President Clinton at the museum's opening ceremony in 1993, he said of the former Yugoslavia, “As Jews, we have to do something to stop the bloodshed in this country.'' “I'm doing it,” he said. When he went to Cambodia, he explained, in Wiesel's words, that as a Jew he could not leave the genocide victims and refugee camps. And won't he go and help all his people? ”
He was a lifelong defender of the state of Israel and believed that it was essential to the survival and survival of the Jewish people, who were deeply traumatized by the Holocaust.
