There was no one to whom the label “translator” better applied than Marion Wiesel, who died yesterday at the age of 94. To give one example: When she met her late husband Elie Wiesel, his book Night had already been published and translated into English. It wasn’t until 2006 that Marion’s own translation of the book would be published, yet that version would become an instant bestseller. “The slim volume gradually became, like Animal Farm or To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the most popular books of all time,” notes his biographer Joseph Berger.
Marion was born in Vienna. When the Nazis took the city, her family fled to Belgium, France, Switzerland and ultimately the United States, where she would eventually meet and marry Elie after the dissolution of her first marriage.
Marion was a writer and producer and documentarian as well, with a similar focus on the Holocaust and Jewish history. But her artistic eye resulted in a creative partnership of immense historical value when she began working with the famed trailblazing Jewish photographer Roman Vishniac.
The St. Petersburg-born, Moscow-raised Vishniac was obsessed from a young age with documenting the world around him, whether with a microscope (he would become a respected biologist) or a camera—sometimes combining the two to take pictures of life as seen through the microscope. In the mid- and late-1930s, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee sent Vishniac to photograph Eastern European Jewish life in the shtetls as a means of raising funds for poor Jews and raising awareness of the looming threat of annihilation they faced.
Vishniac’s most famous work, aside from his portraits of figures like Albert Einstein, is A Vanished World, a collection of his shtetl photography first published in 1947 and then reworked into a definitive 1983 version. That latter version included an introduction by Vishniac’s friend Elie Wiesel.
Throughout the next decade, Vishniac worked with Marion Wiesel on a follow-up collection. He would not live to see its completion and publication, but Marion would. The result, To Give Them Light, is a haunting masterpiece. “I promised to help him sift through the thousands of photographs stored helter-skelter in his apartment on New York’s West Side, a place crammed with rare books and Far Eastern art,” Marion writes in an editor’s note. “I promised to help him ready the photographs for publication. But, in the end, he became too ill to continue to work on this project that we both knew would be his last. Then one day he was gone. And the promise had to be kept.”
Elie Wiesel wrote a striking preface as well: In the book of photographs, he writes, “we meet Jews in those last minutes before they were torn from history by a tempest of fire and ashes; when their lives still coursed with energy and creativity.” Wiesel wrote of these Jews having cheated the executioner in their own way, thanks to Vishniac.
Ultimately, there are two lines in Wiesel’s preface that strike at the heart. “Thanks to [Vishniac], we now know that a world that has been shattered can survive its own death,” he writes. Later, he writes of the necessary ingredient in the survival of the Jewish people: “You loved them, these Jews whom nobody loved.”
As did Marion and Elie Wiesel. Marion’s editing of the photograph book is masterful. At the beginning of each geographic section, Marion magnifies the power of the book by including, in an overview of Jewish life in each region, how long Jews had lived there. This gives the reader a sense of the incomprehensible tragedy that unfolded soon after the photos were taken. Jews first settled in Carpathian Ruthenia, Marion writes, in the early 17th century. In Warsaw, Jewish life goes back to the 14th century; in Slonim, the 16th century; Krakow’s first synagogue—Poland’s first, in fact—was built in 1356.
The poverty one sees is shocking, eclipsed only perhaps by the piety in the photos.
My favorite of the Vishniac photographs that Marion decided to include and annotate was of “Carpathian geese.” Fifteen of the birds marching along a footpath in front of a cottage, some of them literally goose-stepping. I grew up in Lakewood, New Jersey, the yeshiva capital of America (and maybe the world). On the holiday of Rosh Hashana, thousands and thousands of religious Jews would descend on the titular lake for the Tashlich service, in which we “toss” our sins to the fish. Because there are practically no cars on the road in Lakewood on the High Holidays, the geese lay claim to every square inch of walkable land around the lake. And so, once a year, more geese than you’ve ever seen march stubbornly at more black-suited Jews than you’ve ever seen, like the Greeks and the Romans at Heraclea. There is no battle, however; a cold peace prevails.
Vishniac’s photos are of the Jewish past—but somehow, they are also photos of the Jewish future. Marion and Elie Wiesel spent their lives preserving the former for the benefit of the latter.