Elie Wiesel Remembered by Illinois Holocaust Museum

Skokie, IL - A “loud silence” came over a crowd of more than 14,000 at the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie during a 2009 speech from Elie Wiesel marking the opening of the first museum dedicated to the victims on the Holocaust in the Midwest.

“There was a hush over the crowd as he spoke so softly,” remembers Kelley Szany, the director of education at the museum. “The audience was hanging on his every word. His words were so profound.”

The museum will host another ceremony on Thursday night, more than seven years after its opening. This one will be held specifically to remember Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, author and Nobel Laureate who died earlier this month at age 87.

The event will take place on Thursday, July 14 from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m., at the museum at 9603 Woods Drive. Several Holocaust survivors are expected to join members of the community for the memorial.

Fritzie Fritzshall, president of the Museum’s board of directors, says she never met Wiesel in person, but heard him speak several times and feels a close connection. Like Wiesel, Fritzshall was an Auschwitz survivor, enduring many of the same unspeakable hardship suffered by millions of Jewish people during the Holocaust.

“When I see pictures and what’s shown on television about him being stuffed in a bunk bed, I remember vividly that I was in one of those same bunk beds at the same time,” Fritzshall said. “We were both 13 and in the same camp, just different sections. I understand him because I went through the same thing.”

Fritzshall said Wiesel’s importance to the memory of the Holocaust cannot be overstated.

“He was one of the first to speak about the Holocaust when us survivors came to the Chicago area. Most of us were told to forget about our past and never speak about it. But Elie Wiesel had the capacity as a newspaper reporter to give the message of what happened to us during that time,” she said.

“Night” - Wiesel’s memoirs of Auschwitz which led to him receiving a Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 - are “second to the Diary of Anne Frank” when it comes to educating young people about the horrors of what went on during that dark time, said Szany.

“In the past couple of years there have been a lot of people growing up reading that book. It’s something that is really a canon of Holocaust literature,” she said.

In 2009, Wiesel discussed the importance of opening a memorial like the museum in the Midwest and the “special opportunity” people have today to lay their voices to the human rights violations that continue to exist in the 21st century.

Szany says Wiesel’s importance goes far beyond survivors of the Holocaust and Jewish people.

“He has an importance to the broader humanity,” she said. “He gave us all a moral challenge (during the 2009 speech), and has inspired others to carry on his message and be a reminder to be the voice of conscious for the world community.”

Fritzshall says Wiesel’s trip to Skokie then was “gracious” and “wonderful.”

“The day we don’t speak up and carry on his message will be a sad day in this world.”