Marion Wiesel, a Shoah survivor, humanitarian and translator of many of her extolled husband Elie Wiesel’s pivotal works, passed away on February 2 at her home in Greenwich, Connecticut. She was 94.
Born Mary Renate Erster on January 27, 1931, in Vienna, Austria, she fled with her mother, and was imprisoned at the Gurs concentration camp. She escaped to Switzerland in 1942 and ultimately immigrated to the U.S. in 1949.
In the late 1950s, Marion married F. Peter Rose and had a daughter, Jennifer. As her marriage was ending, she met Elie Wiesel, who had come to New York in the late 1960s when he was the foreign correspondent with Yedioth Ahronoth. They got married in 1969, and had a son, Elisha.
Raya Kalenova, the executive vice president and CEO of the European Jewish Congress, had not met Marion Wiesel but recalled meeting her husband several times at World Holocaust Forum events throughout the years. At an anniversary event in Auschwitz, Kalenova recalled the Nobel Prize laureate saying, “I did not believe when I heard other prisoners talking about murdering hundreds of thousands of Jews in gas chambers that the world would be silent—but the world was silent.”
