Elie Wiesel

Confronting the Silence

By: Joseph Berger

Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross

As an orphaned survivor and witness to the horrors of Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) compelled the world to confront the Holocaust with his searing memoir Night.

How did this soft-spoken man from a small Carpathian town become such an influential figure on the world stage? Drawing on Wiesel’s prodigious literary output and interviews with his family, friends, scholars, and critics, Joseph Berger seeks to answer this question.

Berger explores Wiesel’s Hasidic childhood in Sighet, the loss of his parents and little sister in the death camps and his own extraordinary survival, the postwar years spent rebuilding his life from the ashes in France, his transformation into a Parisian intellectual, his failed attempts at romance, his years scraping together a living in America as a journalist, his decision to marry and have a child, his emergence as a spokesperson for Holocaust survivors and persecuted peoples throughout the world, his lifelong devotion to the state of Israel, and his difficult final years. Through this penetrating portrait we come to know intimately the man the Norwegian Nobel Committee called “a messenger to mankind.”

©2023 Joseph Berger (P)2023 Recorded Books

Worthwhile behind measure, moving beyond words

I am sorry I never took the opportunity to hear Mr Wiesel speak. His experiences have brought me to tears and given me chills numerous times while listening. As I also have the hardcover edition I will probably read it again, as well as many of the writings referred to in it.

Remarkably written

I commend the author for bringing together this story of a special person. I was especially impressed by the author’s ability to settle some of the idiosyncrasy in Wiesel’s portrayals. The author’s own experience as a Jewish immigrant, come out through his depiction of Wiesel’s encounters after the war. Wiesel’s struggle with God resonate with me, since my father had similar struggles , after encounters he had in the concentration camps. The author artfully describes how Wiesel settled the conflict with God . Leaving the questions of “why did he allow those atrocities to afflict his chosen people”, unanswered. He justified his following his religious rituals as following a tradition despite his struggles with God. I am particularly impressed with the author’s abilities to gloss over some of Wisel’s inconsistent adherence to principles when he explains how the various political elements took advantage of Wisell’s stature, exploiting his fame to serve their purposes. I guess there is not such thing as a perfect human being.
The writer is the author of “ The Orphans’ Father” an historical novel and a retired physician.

Very worthwhile

For a person familiar only with Night and news stories about Wiesel, I found this book compelling and worth my time.