New York – His Foundation Plundered, Elie Wiesel Again Rebuilds on Ruins

New York – The Elie Wiesel Foundation has reported that it is among “the victims” of Bernard Madoff, having lost nearly all its assets in what may be the largest investment fraud in history.

But “victim” is not a word that Wiesel, the 80-year-old writer and humanitarian, likes to apply to himself.

A survivor of the Nazi death camps and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Wiesel vows that his foundation, which deals with questions of global ethics, will survive.

“All my life has been about learning and teaching and building on ruins,” he says. “That will not change.”

In his book-lined office in Manhattan, Wiesel, whose latest novel, A Mad Desire to Dance, arrives today, avoids naming Madoff, who’s accused of a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. Madoff, who faces criminal charges, has promised not to contest civil claims that his investment firm was a fraud.

“I don’t want my name linked with that crook,” Wiesel says, as soft-spoken as ever. “I don’t want to be known as one of his victims. I want my name linked to peace and literature and human rights.”

Wiesel would rather discuss his new novel, part psychological mystery, part love story. Its main character, the son of a Jewish Resistance fighter from France, asks, “In a mad world, isn’t the madman who is aware of his madness the only sane person?”

But it’s hard to avoid Madoff’s financial madness and its link to Wiesel.

‘It’s not about me’

Wiesel and his wife, Marion, started the foundation in 1986 with a portion of his Nobel award. In December, it reported it had $15.2 million, “substantially” all its assets, invested with Madoff.

Authorities have identified 13,000 of Madoff’s investors, including Wiesel’s foundation, which sponsors conferences of Nobel laureates and centers in Israel for refugees from Ethiopia and Darfur.

The irony has been noted: “It takes an extraordinarily heartless conman to swindle a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Nobel Peace Prize winner out of all of his charitable funds,” wrote James Bone in The Times of London.

Wiesel shrugs and says, “People ask, ‘How could he do it to you?’ To me! As if I’m the only one. It’s not about me.”

Nor, he says, is it a particularly Jewish question, despite the fact that Madoff is an Orthodox Jew and that most of his investors were Jewish.

Wiesel says that in the past 20 years, he met Madoff only twice and briefly. “I was introduced by friends — friends that he also betrayed. It’s repulsive.”

He answers most questions about Madoff with his own questions that are left unanswered: “Was he a crook because he was a Jew? Was Ponzi a crook because he was a Christian?”

Since the foundation’s financial loss was reported, Wiesel says, it has been flooded by unsolicited contributions — “big and small, from young and old, Jew and non-Jew. It’s an expression of their outrage.”

He says the foundation has received about $200,000 in such contributions — enough to keep its programs going. Among those who have offered to help, he says, is “my good friend Oprah Winfrey.”

In 2006, Winfrey’s book club chose Night, Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir. In his office is a small photograph of him and Winfrey, huddled against the cold in the ruins of Auschwitz, which they visited for her show. In 2007, the Wiesel Foundation awarded its annual Humanitarian Award to Winfrey.

“The question is how she’ll help,” Wiesel says. “Should I go on her program? Or should we do something else? But when she says she’ll do something, she means it. She’s a great lady.” (Winfrey, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment.)

Moments of redemption

As an author, Wiesel is best known for Night, published in French in 1958 and English in 1960. It recounts how at 15, he was packed in a cattle car and sent to a series of concentration camps, where his parents and younger sister died, and how he struggled with survivor’s guilt.

In it, he writes, “Never shall I forget that night, the first in a camp, which has turned my life into one long night.”

Asked about his hometown in Transylvania, Wiesel offers a lesson in European history: “When my father was born, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When I was born, it was Romania. And when I was deported, it was Hungary.”

Behind his desk is a photo of the farmhouse in Sighet where he was raised. It’s now a museum. He likes the photo because “it reminds me of where I came from, not to be taken in by all this fame.”

After the war, Wiesel was placed in a French orphanage and, although he speaks fluent English, he continues to write in French (“it’s my language”) and rely on translators.

He moved to New York in 1956 as a correspondent for an Israeli newspaper and was advised to see the rest of the country. He was shocked and shamed by the segregation he saw in the South.

“For the first time in my life, I felt shame — not because I was a Jew, but because I was white.”

He thought of that last month at President Obama’s inauguration: “In my own lifetime, I’ve seen history trying to redeem itself. What a beautiful gesture America has given to itself.”

The first black president could pave the way to another first, he says: “My son or grandson will live to see the first Jewish president. It’s harder now for anyone to say, ‘It can’t happen.’ ”

Wiesel became a U.S. citizen in 1963. “It was the first time I had a passport. Before then, I was stateless. I was unwanted, even as a journalist. I still carry my passport, even though I don’t travel much anymore. I’m proud to have it.”

He has written more than 50 books, fiction and non-fiction, but says only about five deal predominantly with the Holocaust, although the horrors of his childhood hang over most of what he writes.

His new novel features a 60-year-old scholarly European Jew living in New York, who seems incapable of relationships with others, especially women.

Doriel Waldman is haunted by the memory of his parents, who died in a car accident shortly after World War II. His mother joined the Resistance; his father did not. In the novel, he explains, “she was blond and attractive. She could easily pass for Aryan, whereas he, with his brown hair and sad brown eyes, looked more Jewish.”

In desperation, Waldman goes to a therapist. He mostly argues with her, much as he has argued with God. At one point, the therapist, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, questions whether Waldman’s memory is lying to him.

“This can happen even to people who are healthy psychologically,” she tells him. “With the years, the past becomes blurred. We forget real events and ‘remember’ dreams or imaginary episodes.”

One of the last survivors

That prompts a question for Wiesel about whether recent cases of Holocaust memoirs that were falsified are examples of just that.

“I don’t know. I don’t understand that,” he says. “If you want to write a novel, then write a novel.” But, he adds, “I favor survivors.”

In 1997, he wrote a glowing blurb for Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years by Misha Defonseca, who vividly described fleeing the Nazis and eluding capture by hiding with friendly wolves.

It turned out that the part about the wolves and other dramatic elements in the memoir were a hoax.

Wiesel asks: “Who am I to question and interrogate survivors? It’s an act of faith. They deserve it. Haven’t they suffered enough?” But he also fears that when any Holocaust survivor exaggerates or lies, then “someone can say that all of us are liars.”

Wiesel, who teaches religion and philosophy part time at Boston University, is among a dwindling number of concentration camp survivors: “We’re an endangered species. Someday, there will be just one left. I don’t want to be that person. It would be too heavy a burden to have the last word, the last memory.”

But, he says, “I tell my students and my readers that whoever reads or listens to a witness becomes a witness.”