Marion Wiesel, the wife and primary translator of Elie Wiesel, died on Sunday at the age of ninety-four. Alex Traub writes of her life:

Mary Renate (also sometimes spelled Renata) Erster was born in Vienna on Jan. 27, 1931. Her father, Emil, owned a furniture store. He and Mary watched from a street corner as Nazi troops took over Vienna. A long flight ensued. . . . During a brief period in Belgium, Mary attended school. She announced to her classmates that she had shed her first name—which was inspired by her mother’s love of Americana—and that from then on she would be called Marion.

The family spent time at Gurs, a French concentration camp, then fled to Marseille, where they narrowly avoided detection thanks to the protection of neighbors.

Besides encouraging her husband in his public career, and helping him compose some of his most notable speeches, Marion also helped immortalize the photographs of Roman Vishniac, which famously captured the lives of traditional Jews in pre-World War II Europe. Seth Mandel describes how she put her “artistic eye” to publishing his work.

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.

Traub also takes note of her philanthropic activities:

Using money from Mr. Wiesel’s 1986 Nobel Prize, the couple founded the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. Mrs. Wiesel took the lead in managing the Beit Tzipora Centers in Israel, which provide schooling and other support to Jewish children of Ethiopian origin, who have faced challenges integrating into Israeli society. The initiative is ongoing and reaches hundreds of children every year,

Reacting to the White House’s proposal for Gaza, John Podhoretz asks the question on everyone’s mind:

Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?

A Palestinian state in the wake of October 7—and in the wake of the scenes of Gazans mobbing the Jewish hostages with bloodlust in their eyes as they were being led to the vehicles to take them back into the bosom of their people? Biden foreign-policy domos Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken were still talking about this in the wake of their defeat in ludicrous lunchtime discussions with the Financial Times, thus reminding the world of what it means when fundamentally silly, unserious, and embarrassingly incompetent people are given the levers of power for a while. For they should know what I know and what I suspect you know too: there will be no Palestinian state if these residents of Gaza are the people who will form the political nucleus of such a state.

Some form of UN management/leadership in the wake of the hostilities? Well, that might sound good to people who have been paying no attention to the fact that United Nations officials have been, at the very best, complicit in hostage-taking and torture in facilities run by UNRWA, the agency responsible for administering Gaza.

And blubber not to me about the displacement of Gazans from their home. We’ve been told not that Gaza is their home but that it is a prison. Trump is offering Gazans a way out of prison; do they really want to stay in prison? Or does this mean it never really was a prison in the first place?