Marion Wiesel, translator, strategist, and wife of Elie Wiesel, dies at 94

Boston Globe

06-02-2025

Wiesel's Nobel Peace Prize and his numerous encounters with world leaders still lay decades away. Friends, relatives, and writers all attributed the moral stature he achieved partly to the quiet influence of Marion.
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'In the alignment of stars that helped make Wiesel the international icon he became, his marriage to Marion was among the most significant,' Joseph Berger wrote in 'Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence' (2023), a biography.
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By nature, Elie Wiesel was a reader of literature, a chess player, and an observer of Jewish rituals. Into his early 40s, he led the intense but unworldly life of a passionate intellectual. For days he might not sleep. He often forgot to eat meals. He abstained from alcohol. He took trips abroad without notice and could not be reached.
Marion Wiesel, too, was a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. Following their marriage, she changed the rhythm of Elie Wiesel's days and expanded his sense of possibility — without altering his moral temper.
Her most obvious impact on his career was through translation. He was an eloquent, powerful speaker of English, but he cherished his command of French, which dated from his days as a young refugee.
Marion Wiesel shared her husband's cosmopolitan knowledge of European culture and fluency in several languages. She quickly began translating his writing from French to English, ultimately working on 14 of his books. None was more important than her 2006 translation of 'Night.'
In his biography, Berger, a former reporter for The New York Times, reported that of the 10 million copies that the memoir had sold, 3 million came after her translation. It was heavily promoted by Oprah Winfrey and, in the following years, it became a widely assigned book in high schools, a concise literary work of moral instruction, akin to ''Animal Farm' and 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'
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Ms. Wiesel also advised and coached her husband as he made public appearances — including frequent TV interviews with Ted Koppel on ABC — and became a voice in world politics.
Using money from Elie Wiesel's 1986 Nobel Prize, the couple founded the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. Marion Wiesel took the lead in managing the Beit Tzipora Centers in Israel, which provide schooling and other support to Jewish children of Ethiopian origin, who have faced challenges integrating into Israeli society. The initiative reaches hundreds of children every year.
Former president Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia spoke with Nobel peace recipient Elie Wiesel and his wife, Marion, at a ceremony of the 10th Forum 2000 Conference in Prague in 2006. The forum aimed to identify the key issues facing civilization and to explore ways in which to prevent escalation of conflicts that have religion, culture, or ethnicity as their primary components.
MYSKOVA MARTA/Associated Press
Elie Wiesel's other public activities included serving as the founding chair of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He also was a member of the faculty in Boston University's Department of Philosophy and Department of Religion.
Perhaps no single moment of his political career is so vividly recalled as his plea to Ronald Reagan, issued in the White House alongside the president and in front of TV cameras, not to visit the Bitburg military cemetery, where members of the SS are buried in what was then West Germany.
'That place, Mr. President, is not your place,' Elie Wiesel said. 'Your place is with victims of the SS.'
Those remarks had an editor: Marion Wiesel.
'There would not have been a Bitburg speech without Marion's conviction,' the couple's editor, Ileene Smith, wrote in an email. She called Ms. Wiesel her husband's 'most trusted adviser,' adding: 'As his translator from the French, Marion pored over every sentence of Elie's work with astonishing insight into his interior world, his literary mind.'
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Mary Renate (also sometimes spelled Renata) Erster was born in Vienna on Jan. 27, 1931. Her father, Emil, owned a furniture store. He and Mary watched from a street corner as Nazi troops took over Vienna.
A long flight ensued. Her mother, Jetta (Hubel) Erster, carefully guarded jewelry and silver candlesticks that she would barter over years of repeated escapes.
During a brief period in Belgium, Mary attended school. She announced to her classmates that she had shed her first name — which was inspired by her mother's love of Americana — and that from then on she would be called Marion.
'It was an emotional turning point — my first step toward freedom,' she wrote in an unpublished reminiscence.
The family spent time at Gurs, a French concentration camp, then fled to Marseille, where they narrowly avoided detection thanks to the protection of neighbors. Jetta had a relative with Swiss citizenship, and the family managed to smuggle themselves into Switzerland in 1942.
The family arrived in the United States in 1949. Marion attended the University of Miami but mainly lived in New York City, where she worked at a bra factory and as a salesperson at a department store.
She wound up having a creative career of her own. She edited 'To Give Them Light' (1993), a collection of Roman Vishniac's photographs of Eastern European Jewry before World War II. She also wrote and narrated 'Children of the Night' (1999), a documentary about children killed during the Holocaust.
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She married F. Peter Rose in the late 1950s and had a daughter, Jennifer. While her marriage was falling apart, she met Wiesel. They discussed French literature on their first date. He quickly fell in love.
In addition to their son and her daughter, Ms. Wiesel leaves two grandchildren. Elie Wiesel died in 2016.
The Wiesels' relationship was not solely an experience of Holocaust remembrance. Marion Wiesel also had the ability to convince her philosophically inclined husband that he would, for example, enjoy going to a Broadway cast party at Sardi's restaurant.
Back when Elie Wiesel was single, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the revered Lubavitcher rabbi, wrote him a personal plea to marry and have children, suggesting that the propagation of the Wiesel line would be a repudiation of the Nazis. Wiesel was unconvinced: He did not want to bring more Jews into the world.
'I changed his mind,' Marion Wiesel told Berger. 'I told him he would be happy.'
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