Elie Wiesel – Peace
“Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant”
Born in Sighet, Romania in 1928, Elie Wiesel experience great trauma in his youth when he and his family were sent to the German concentration camp Buchenwald in World War II, where his parents and little sister died. After the camp was liberated by Allied troops in 1945 he was taken to an orphanage in Paris where he became a journalist.
After over ten years of refusing to talk or write about his experiences during the Holocaust, a meeting with the 1952 Nobel Laureate in Literature, François Mauriac, made him reconsider. In 1958 he published La Nuit (translated into English as ‘Night’ – excerpt below) which was a memoir of his experiences in the concentration camps. He then went on to write nearly forty books, mainly non-fiction Holocaust literature.
Wiesel was active in speaking out against the persecution of Jews and other groups who have suffered due to their religion, race or national origin.
He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for speaking out against violence, repression, and racism. He used the prize money to start the ‘Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity’ with his wife. He also served as the chairman of the Presidential Commission on the Holocaust (later renamed the US Holocaust Memorial Council) from 1978 to 1986. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. gives The Elie Wiesel Award to “internationally prominent individuals whose actions have advanced the Museum’s vision of a world where people confront hatred, prevent genocide, and promote human dignity”, thus preserving his legacy.
Excerpt from Night
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.
—Elie Wiesel, from Night
Herta Müller – Literature
Herta Müller was born in 1953 in Nitzkydorf, a German-speaking village in Romania. During the Second World War, her father volunteered for Hitler’s Waffen-SS. From 1973 to 1976, Herta Müller studied Romanian and German literature in Timişoara, where she joined a group of writers, called “Aktionsgruppe Banat”, who opposed to the Ceauşescu dictatorship and the official literature of the ruling socialist party. She was affected by her father’s service as an SS soldier which proved to her how individuals can be corrupted by ideology and opportunism which turned her against the communist ideology.
Herta Müller worked as a translator in a machine factory in Timişoara but was dismissed in 1979 after she refused to act as a spy for theRomanian secret police.
Her first book Niederungen (‘Nadirs’ in English), told from the perspective of a young girl, depicts the confinement, corruption, intolerance, and oppression of a Swabian village in the Banat. She was banned form publishing after openly criticising the communist dictatorship.
In 2009, Müller won the Nobel Prize in Literature which, symbolically, coincided with the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism.
Stefan Hell – Chemistry
Stefan Hell was born in Arad, Romania in 1962. He studied physics at the University of Heidelberg. From 1991 to 1993 Hell worked at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, where he demonstrated the principles of 4-Pi microscopy. From 1993 to 1996 he worked as a group leader at the University of Turku in Finland in the department for Medical Physics, where he developed the principle for stimulated emission depletion STED microscopy. In 2002 he became a director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen and he established the department of Nanobiophotonics and is also the leader of the department “Optical Nanoscopy division” at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg.
With the invention of Stimulated Emission Depletion microscopy and related microscopy methods, he was able to show that you can improve the resolving power of the fluorescence microscope which was previously limited to half the wavelength of the employed light. Hell was the first to demonstrate how it is possible to decouple the resolution of the fluorescence microscope from diffraction and increase it to a fraction of the wavelength of light.
He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2014, becoming the second Nobelist born in the Banat Swabian community (after Herta Müller).
George Emil Palade – Medicine
George E. Palade was born in 1912 in Iași, the eastern province of Romania. He studied at the School of Medicine at the University of Bucharest in the 1930s.
During the Second World War, he served in the medical corps of the Romanian Army then moved to the US to pursue a PHD.
Palade began working for Albert Claude at The Rockefeller Institute, working primarily on cell fractionation procedures, developed the “sucrose method” for the homogenization and fractionation of liver tissue. In 1970, he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University “for discoveries concerning the functional organisation of the cell that were seminal events in the development of modern cell biology”.
George Emil Palade was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1974 for his innovations in electron microscopy and cell fractionation which together laid the foundations of modern molecular cell biology.
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