The Cosmos Club is honored to present The 2006 Cosmos Club Award to Elie Wiesel.
As writer, teacher and humanitarian, through the testimony of his own life, Dr. Wiesel has borne witness to injustice in all its forms and elucidated in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, the vast panorama of the human condition. An exemplar of extraordinary courage and elemental integrity, he has spent his life urging us to remember and acknowledge the past, knowing that without the understanding that comes through memory and acknowledgement there can be no acceptance of truth, and mankind will be condemned to repeat the horrors of the Holocaust that defined his own formative years. As he stated in the original Yiddish version of his first book, Night, “Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow.”
That Dr. Wiesel is a literary artist of the first order is confirmed by his numerous books, plays, articles, speeches and lectures. That he is a champion of humanity and tireless advocate in the struggle for individual rights and dignity is attested to by the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States Congressional Gold Medal, the Grand Croix in the French Legion of Honor, and hundreds of other awards. Throughout his career, he has continued to write and speak out against man’s inhumanity to man, believing that the most insidious danger to freedom is in- difference, and that one person of integrity can change the world for the better. Widely considered a messenger to mankind, Elie Wiesel eloquently reminds us that our lives do not belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.
