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Wiesel's 30 books have ranged from biblical studies to an examination of the plight of Soviet Jews. Indeed, last week he exhorted Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev to allow five Soviet Jews, as well as Dissident Physicist Andrei Sakharov, to emigrate, and this week he is traveling to Moscow to help organize a conference on non-Jewish victims of Nazism. Wiesel has also worked to help Cambodian refugees, the Miskito Indians in Nicaragua and starving children in Africa.
( His most dramatic appeal came in April 1985, on the eve of President Reagan's controversial trip to the Bitburg military cemetery in West Germany, where members of Hitler's SS are buried. At a ceremony to receive the Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement, Wiesel, standing on the same podium as the President, implored him to call off the visit. "That place, Mr. President, is not your place," he said. "Your place is with the victims of the SS." Reagan went to Bitburg despite the protests, but Wiesel's plea had a lasting resonance.
Wiesel has been a Nobel contender for several years, for both the peace and literature prizes. (In a departure from custom, the Nobel Committee cited Bob Geldof, organizer of Live Aid and other fund-raising rock concerts, as runner- up for this year's peace prize.) Wiesel regards his award with an amalgam of gratitude and caution. "I don't think that prizes validate work," he says. "They give stature, texture, the possibility to reach more people. There's a mystique about the Nobel. It gives you a better loudspeaker."
That loudspeaker will amplify his thoughts on a range of issues, including the nuclear arms race. Reagan and Gorbachev ought to meet for a summit in Hiroshima, he suggests: "That would be a poetic way of dealing with politics." Uppermost, however, is Wiesel's role as a witness to the century's central catastrophe. "I'm afraid that the horror of that period is so dark, people are incapable of understanding, incapable of listening," he says. The Nobel Prize is a sign, perhaps, that people are at least trying to comprehend.