Ladies and Gentlemen,
Your Excellencies,

I am very pleased and honored to offer, in my position of President of the Romanian Academy,  the signs of  honorary member to professor, writer, philosopher, a true scholar and a man of action, Elie Wiesel, born on September 30, 1928 at Sighetul Marmaţiei, today citizen of  the United States of America… It is a great satisfaction, for all of us, to have him here, to welcome him in the Romanian academic community, and naturally to hear him out. Elie Wiesel is not unknown in the Romanian world, as he is not unknown worldwide in the latest half of the century. I should have started these sentences like this: Elie Wiesel is such a well known name, that introducing him is not necessary. The legend comes before his name and work… I will try, nevertheless, to say a few words about the biography of this scholar, who, the way Marlaux put it, has managed to turn his life, into a destiny, or, more precisely, has made his life a destiny…..

I was saying that Elie Wiesel was born in Maramureş, at Sighet, in a small town with a well established Jewish community at the time. In Sighet and around it there were handicraftsmen, merchants, farmers, Rabbis, moralists, teachers, “private” philosophers, with their traditions, yearnings and aspirations… A community that generally lived in peace with the Romanian, Ukrainian or Hungarian peasants and townspeople, the descendants of an empire that had just collapsed…Teenager Elie Wiesel was dedicated to his studies; he was a religious spirit, went to religious services, loved his parents and sisters, had friends and was about to start a life, as they say. A wise man of the community had predicted to his mother, Sara, that her son was bound to become a glorious and respected name in the world of Israel, but neither she nor the wise man would be present to rejoice. When his mother heard the wise man’s prediction got frightened and burst into tears… The life of the Jewish community in Sighet changed all of a sudden when the World War II broke out. What followed is well known. It is well known among others from Elie Wiesel’s writings. In 1940 Northern Transylvania (Maramures included) was subdued to the authority of the Fascist regime already introduced in Hungary. On March 19, 1944 the family of Shlomo and Sara Wiesel, alongside with the whole Jewish community in Sighet, was deported to the extermination camps at Auschwitz, Bruno, Buchenwald… Elie was not yet 16 years old, and against his will, he became part of an abominable tragedy. He and the whole world of his childhood… His mother and his younger sister, the merry Tipuca, disappeared in the concentration camps, Elie himself witnessed his father’s death, the wise and just Shlomo Wiesel, who, out of loyalty to his fellow men did not accept to save only himself and his family. All these tragedies were later described in his books by Elie Wiesel, “the man who prays”, the man who passed through hell, and, thanks to his God, survived. He survived in order to testify and make sure that the present and later generations will remember…  

Ladies and Gentlemen,  

Liberated from hell, young Elie Wiesel tried to adjust himself to the afterwar life. In other words, he learnt to live again… He got to Paris and became a journalist. He studied at the Sorbonne and heard the great professors of that time. France was then at the moment of existentialism, which already had a few young “popes” who deserved attention: Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir… Young Elie Wiesel read them but, my impresion is that he did not follow them.  His existential experience had for himself a different dimension and resonance. He did see death very close, he did not discuss it. Or he discussed it after having lived in its proximity. He was still a man of faith, a man who kept asking his God questions in order to keep up his hopes. One of them never left him. Let me summarize it: Can you believe in God after Auschwitz?- But can you not believe in God after Auschwitz? - one of his friends and mentor seems to have replied to the troubled writer and moralist, Elie Wiesel… In the beginning he met François Mauriac, the great Catholic prose writer, who urged him to write. He wrote the preface of Wiesel’s first book Night (1958) and, later, he said that Elie Wiesel’s literature was always about a child’s return from a journey to the uttermost of horror. An excellent remark, indeed. It was the same Mauriac that called Elie Wiesel the writer a spirit “ from John the Baptizer’s race”, a formula I noticed the writer did not accept… Elie Wiesel later settled down in the United States, continued as a journalist and as a writer; the main theme with him is that of the holocaust (if my information is precise he used for the first time the old biblical term in the modern sense), he was never interested in politics, but did interfere whenever he found it necessary in public life. He went to the Soviet Union to save the refuseniks, to the Cambodgian border to save 8 (eight) people who were threatened, he has passionately fought against the cynical and indifferent world of modernism and post-modernism in order not to forge history and forget the horrors of holocaust… We can say that he has succeeded. He has given a meaning to his own life  and has placed the sense of his experience in a major work. In 1986 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. He initiated and led the Holocaust Memorial, he has taught at the great American Universities, he has written excellent essays on various themes, from the suffering of Job to the matter of forgiveness; finally, in the 90’s, after the communism collapsed, he published his memoirs. I have read the with great attention and I can say they are outstanding… One finds there a world, an inexpressible tragedy, a destiny, some morals, an existential philosophy, a first-rank writer in all.

For all these gifts, and for the general significance of his work and public activity in favor of man and contemporary humanism, the Romanian Academy has elected Mr. Elie Wiesel, born Romanian citizen, scholar of international reputation, among its honorary members. I congratulate him and offer him the documents that attest to his entering an intellectual community that also includes other Nobel Prize Winners, such as Ilya Prigojine, Cristian De Duve, George Emil Palade…