Remembering Elie Wiesel, Michael Herr, Alvin Toffler, Mack Rice

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• published: 19 Jul 2016
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The Survivor Who Became The Conscience of The Holocaust THE MAN WHO URGED US TO NEVER FORGET, THE VIETNAM AUTHOR, THE FUTURE, AND RIDE, SALLY, RIDE Elie Wiesel was sent to Auschwitz as a teenager/ He survived the experience and became a writer and lecturer about the horrors of the Holocaust. His 1960 book Night, describing his experiences is considered a 20th Century classic. He won the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize with a goal that man should never forget what others are capable of. Michael Herr wrote once of the best books about the American experience in Vietnam, Dispatches (1977). He was also involved in the writing of two definitive Vietnam movies, Apocalypse Now (1979) and Full Metal Jacket (1987). Alvin Toffler was the author who wrote about the Information Age and how society would change in the future. His 1970 book, Future Shock, was an international best-seller and sold over 15 million copies. Mack Rice was the songwriter for Stax Records who wrote one of the great rock-soul songs of our generation, Mustang Sally (1965). Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel KBE (/ˈɛli viˈzɛl/, Yiddish: אליעזר וויזל‎, Elyezer Vizel;[2][3] September 30, 1928 – July 2, 2016) was a Romanian-born American Jewish writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor. He was the author of 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps Along with writing, he was a professor of the humanities at Boston University, which created the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies in his honor. He was involved with Jewish causes, and helped establish the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In his political activities he also campaigned for victims of oppression in places like South Africa and Nicaragua and genocide in Sudan. He publicly condemned the 1915 Armenian genocide and remained a strong defender of human rights during his lifetime. He had been described as "the most important Jew in America" by the Los Angeles Times. Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, at which time the Norwegian Nobel Committee called him a "messenger to mankind," stating that through his struggle to come to terms with "his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler's death camps", as well as his "practical work in the cause of peace", Wiesel had delivered a message "of peace, atonement and human dignity" to humanity.[6] He was a founding board member of the New York Human Rights Foundation and remained active throughout his life. In March 1944, Germany occupied Hungary which extended the Holocaust into that country.[a] Wiesel was 15, and he with his family, along with the rest of the town's Jewish population, were placed in one of the two confinement ghettos set up in Máramarossziget (Sighet), the town where he had been born and raised. In May 1944, the Hungarian authorities, under German pressure, began to deport the Jewish community to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where up to 90% of the people were exterminated on arrival. After they were sent to Auschwitz, his mother and his younger sister were killed.[14] Wiesel and his father were later deported to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. Until that transfer, he admitted to Oprah Winfrey, his primary motivation for trying to survive Auschwitz was knowing that his father was still alive: "I knew that if I died, he would die."[15] After they were taken to Buchenwald, however, his father only survived for eight months, dying just a few weeks before the camp was liberated.[14] In Night, Wiesel recalled the shame he felt when he heard his father being beaten and was unable to help. Michael David Herr[1] (April 13, 1940 – June 23, 2016) was an American writer and war correspondent, known as the author of Dispatches (1977), a memoir of his time as a correspondent for Esquire magazine (1967–1969) during the Vietnam War. The book was called the best "to have been written about the Vietnam War" by The New York Times Book Review; novelist John le Carré called it "the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time." Herr later was credited with pioneering[dubious – discuss] the literary genre of the nonfiction novel, along with authors such as Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe. Alvin Toffler (October 4, 1928 – June 27, 2016) was an American writer and futurist, known for his works discussing modern technologies, including the digital revolution and the communication revolution, with emphasis on their effects on cultures worldwide. Toffler was an associate editor of Fortune magazine. In his early works he focused on technology and its impact, which he termed "information overload." In 1970 his first major book about the future, Future Shock, became a worldwide best-seller and has sold over 6 million copies.