Charlotte Observer

Elie Wiesel, a real Hatemonger The Documents on Elie Wiesel your Eichmann index your Heydrich index your Eberhard Jäckel index the Wannsee conference [All pictures added by this website] Elie Wiesel, survivor; author of book: “Night”, about his horrible sufferings at the hands of the Nazis.

Speaking fee: $25,000 per lecture plus chauffeur-driven car The Charlotte Observer Charlotte, North Carolina, Sunday, March 25, 2007 The witness who can’t stay silent by Tim Funk ELIE Wiesel has decided to walk the nine blocks to his 10 a.m. TV interview at Rockefeller Center even though it’s 36 degrees. He’s given up on the car that was expected 10 minutes ago and is now striding down Madison Avenue, his wild, wispy gray hair dancing in the cold wind.

For Wiesel, 78, the world’s most famous Holocaust survivor, the time he has left in this world is too precious to be spent waiting. The person who knows him best, his wife, Marion , says Wiesel is speeding up at a time in life when most people are slowing down. “As he gets older, he has an even greater sense of urgency,” she says. “He wants to finish what he started.”

Trying to keep up with Wiesel this morning as he hurries past slo-mo pedestrians are a balding bodyguard and Stephanie Ansaldo , president of Charlotte’s Echo Foundation. Ansaldo’s group was born 10 years ago, when Wiesel, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, last visited Charlotte. Its mission: to launch projects that echo Wiesel’s message to guard against indifference in a still-suffering world.

After years of invitations to come back, Wiesel has finally agreed to speak — on Tuesday — with students, educators, community leaders, clergy and a paying crowd of 2,000 at the Blumenthal Performing Arts Center. Like everything else he does — speaking to the U.N. Security Council about genocide in Darfur, bringing together top Israeli and Palestinian leaders at a conference, helping to launch the U.S.

Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington — the trip to Charlotte will be Wiesel’s way of keeping two promises. He made them to himself when he was a skinny teenager in the Nazi death camps, prisoner A-7713. That number is still tattooed on his arm. He swore, first, that he would never let the world forget the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis — a pledge that led to “Night,” his 1958 memoir.

And because Wiesel was devastated by the world’s indifference to the genocide of Jews during World War II, he also promised himself that as an adult, he would never be silent “whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.” Hence his drive to get the United Nations, the United States and Israel to do more to stop the slaughter and help the refugees in Sudan’s Darfur region — the world’s new “capital of human suffering,” Wiesel says.

The fact that Wiesel — 5 feet 7 with a slight frame — is traveling this morning with a bodyguard is yet another sign to him that hate and violence are still at large 62 years after he and others were liberated at the Buchenwald death camp. Wiesel added security after a peace forum Feb. 1 in San Francisco. A man dragged Wiesel from an elevator for an “interview” in his sixth-floor hotel room. Wiesel started yelling, and the man walked away.

A man identifying himself as Eric Hunt , 22, later said on an anti-Semitic Web site that he’d been trailing Wiesel for weeks. His plan: Videotape “the cornered Wiesel” while forcing him to admit that “Night” — a book that’s read in high schools all over the world — is fiction. After the Web posting, police arrested Hunt in New Jersey. Lately, Wiesel has been plagued by nightmares. He gets by on four hours of sleep a night and dreams about the death camps where his family was taken in 1944.

He never saw his mother and little sister again. And he watched his father slowly die. Instead of fading away, the terror of his youth has grown more vivid in his old age. Today, he got up at 5 a.m., to work on his latest novel. “I don’t like to sleep,” Wiesel says. “It’s a waste of time.” A sly sense of humor Rockefeller Center is in sight.Wiesel breezes by shivering fans of NBC’s “Today” show who are waiting outside for a brush with Matt, Meredith, Ann or Al.

On the long walk, Wiesel is stopped by only one fan — a young man who simply bows, shakes his hand and moves on. “Most of the time, they say, `You look like somebody famous. Who are you?’ ” Wiesel says. “I just laugh.” This figure so identified with serious causes has a sly sense of humor. His most revealing comic comeback during the hike is about his hectic pace of living. His schedule today is packed: two dinners, his 10 a.m.

WNBC interview, a meeting with one of his students from Boston University, and a sit-down with ABC’s “20/20” for a show on people who have lived through — and survived — hell on earth. He seems to have the schedule of a 25-year-old. “No,” Wiesel says, “an 18-year-old.” Battling indifference “Very light, please,” Wiesel tells the TV makeup artist before closing his eyes. “Very, very.”

Minutes later, he’s in the studio, sitting opposite Gabe Pressman , host of WNBC’s “News Forum” and an old friend. The two men banter as “Brownie,” the stage director, runs off to get Wiesel a coffee with milk and five sugars. “My throat doesn’t work today,” Wiesel says, coughing. “When I write a lot, it affects my voice.”

Pressman leans in, but is having trouble hearing Wiesel’s whisper, which comes with a heavy accent that’s a blend of Yiddish, French and Romanian.

“5 4 3 ,” Brownie counts down, then gives way to Pressman’s pre-taped intro, which sounds like a promo for a moral boxing match: “Twenty-one years after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Elie Wiesel — a survivor of the Nazi death camps — is fighting an unusual battle: He’s taking on the Holocaust deniers ” The first of the deniers: Wiesel’s would-be kidnapper. “I have never felt such fear ,” Wiesel says. “I felt my very being threatened. That’s why I began to shout, `Help!

Help!’ ” What happened next troubled Wiesel just as much. “Many people heard my screams,” he tells Pressman. “When I ran down to security, they told me that three people called.

But not one door opened.” “Interesting,” Pressman responds, “in view of the fact that you devoted a big part of your life to writing against the `sin’ — as you put it — of indifference.” “Exactly, exactly,” Wiesel says, like a teacher happy that his student has grasped the larger lesson. “There must have been at least 20 or 30 people who heard my screams. I have never screamed as loudly as that. And not one door opened.”

Pressman then asks about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad , the Iranian president who staged a two-day conference in Tehran last December that questioned whether the Holocaust happened. Every country should declare him persona non grata , Wiesel says, and indict him for attempted crimes against humanity.

When Pressman mentions Ahmadinejad’s threat to wipe out Israel , Wiesel again sees an opportunity to teach and to be a witness: “We have learned from history — and especially we Jews, and not only Jews — we have learned that when the enemy of humankind threatens, we should take his threats seriously.” A man in motion This time, the car is waiting, ready to take Wiesel