Although Eli was often animated and brimming with stories, he also had revealed little of his experience during the war to his own family. While survivor guilt and shame were partly to blame for this, Eli, like many others, felt that people would not believe his story because it was so horrific. Also, at the time of Israel’s early nation building, the top priority was the need for the tiny new country to respond effectively to existential threats and multiple wars. In those years Israelis were necessarily looking forward, and many survivors, like Eli, changed their pre-war names, learned and adopted their new language of Hebrew and silently swept away the untold, and to most, inexplicable events of the past.

When I first met Eli on a mission to Israel in December 1991, I could sense he harbored secrets. The day our group arrived, we traveled with him as our guide to the newly opened Atlit Museum, near Haifa on the Mediterranean coast. When we arrived at this destination, Eli oddly walked off by himself, and we did not see him again until we boarded the bus for our next stop.

Others guided us through the exhibits that depict a tragic and bizarre chapter in Word War II and Jewish history. Many Jewish refugees, who had successfully escaped Nazi persecution, sailed to British-controlled Palestine only to find themselves imprisoned in Atlit detention camp, similar in appearance and form to Nazi concentration camps. From the time the war ended in May of 1945 until 1948, estimates of tens of thousands of “illegal” Jewish immigrants were detained there by the British as part of their policy of severely limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine.

In 1945 there was a shocking incident where orphaned Jewish refugee children who had been rescued by the Jewish Brigade, and granted special permission to enter Palestine legally, were required by the British Mandatory Authority to be housed at Atlit detention camp—albeit temporarily, for “disinfection.”

When Eli disappeared before our museum tour, I suspected there was a story he was not telling. Later my group woke up at 2:00 a.m. for an hour bus trip to the airport to greet a planeload of newly arriving immigrants from the former Soviet Union. I invited Eli to sit with me.

“Why did you go off when we arrived at Atlit, Eli?” I asked him. “I didn’t,” he insisted and added, “I just went to get a coffee.” I didn’t buy his explanation. “Come on Eli, you were gone for over an hour. What happened?”

And Eli’s story started to emerge—just like that while everyone slept except the two of us. Eli sat in the window seat of the bus, hands stuffed protectively into the pockets of his light gray bomber jacket. “I was a prisoner there,” he whispered, “and it hurts to see the place reconstructed. I cannot do it.”

I felt goose bumps. Eli’s emotions, even his words, were raw and unfiltered; his face downcast. He was describing experiences and feelings from long ago to another for the very first time:

And so I heard how it happened that in that November of 1945, after disembarking the Princess Kathleen ship that had transported Eli and the other children out of Europe, Eli entered Atlit where he and the children were astonished once again to be greeted with the horrors of barbed wire, manned guard towers, disinfection chambers, separation of boys from girls, cold wooden barracks, and roll calls.

But Eli also went back, way back. He talked and talked. In these early days of our writing collaboration, I heard just snippets—about broken legs, abscessed skin, ghettos, work details, mine explosions, a little about his mother. The snippets were enough to suck me in. I wanted to know more, and Eli wanted to tell me more. Others on the bus later admitted that they overheard portions of our conversation and were jealous that Eli was talking to me alone.

But how could he tell me more? I lived an ocean away. And why? After all these years, why was he telling me these stories, and why did I want to hear them? Well, the “how” we worked out. He would come to Baltimore, and I would travel to Jerusalem. We would also travel around the United States, and in Europe to visit archives, museums, and libraries holding important materials documenting the day-to-day life in the places figuring prominently in the book. We wanted to accurately reflect the names, places, and dates of his events. We would also visit or telephone individuals whose lives Eli touched along the way to cross-check their memories against Eli’s.

For Eli, it was time to open up after all those years. When he met Eli Wiesel, Mr. Wiesel had instructed Eli that as a survivor it was his duty to tell his story. Eli’s mother had imparted a similar message: that it was “meant to be” that Eli must survive the War in order to tell his story and keep the memory of his family alive. For Eli, the time had come because his children and grandchildren needed to know about their family.

And for me, the more I heard about Eli’s experience, the more I wanted to hear. As a mother of small children, I related to the boy whose story Eli was telling. I connected emotionally to his mother, too, especially after I saw her photograph, with those large and beautiful dark, proud eyes that appeared to look directly into mine, imploring me to help Eli. I was in awe how a mother, facing extraordinary circumstances, could muster the strength to urge her smallest child to set out alone into the uncertain world of German-occupied Poland while the rest of the family at least faced their uncertainty together. It was important for me to help accomplish her final wish for Eli: that he survive in order to tell the story of his family. And, of course, I wanted my children to hear the tale; I was certain they would benefit from seeing their mother in the process of uncovering it.

During the mission that December, Eli and I spent more and more time together discussing his childhood. After the mission returned to the United States, I stayed in Israel for an extra week, completely taken by Eli’s stories as we continued our sessions. After a while, we, along with our families, decided to pursue the project: I would write Eli’s biography.

This process kept expanding and Eli’s life-story started taking shape. I was happy because I felt I was opening up treasured memories and that this was important work. And so, for the next five or six years we carried on in this way, using old-fashioned PC computers with floppy discs and dot matrix printers. It was a life-changing collaboration for both Eli and me. I will never forget the day when we finished a first draft of the book. It was in 1993. The book would end up being changed significantly, with many stories added, but finally we had a beginning, middle, and end. We selected a title, calling it “Beshert,” or “Meant to Be.” My husband took the pages to a copier store and created bound copies. When Eli opened the box of the bound copies and saw his story in print, he started to cry. He felt that his life was finally validated. He was proud. He would never again feel the need to conceal his history.

And the publication of the book in 1999 changed Eli dramatically. Becoming a powerful, articulate, and charismatic public speaker, he suddenly felt liberated from his self-imposed silence, and found his calling. He began to speak to his tour participants about his experiences as a teenager in the Holocaust. He also started to lead international groups through the Holocaust History Museum at Yad Vashem as part of educational seminars and workshops, and as a lecturer with the Yad Vashem International School for Holocaust Studies. This led to invitations from around the world for Eli to share, in person, his powerful personal story.

Eli traveled throughout the United States visiting places that included Michigan, Arizona, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Florida, Texas, California, and Oklahoma, as well as Mexico, Costa Rica, and Europe. He lectured at conferences, schools, universities, and community centers.

As a witness to the events of the Holocaust, he led dozens of delegations to concentration camps and former Jewish communities in Poland. Relating to groups of all kinds was Eli’s gift. He was well received by Jewish and non-Jewish groups from many continents, including American Amish groups who eschewed their traditional restrictions on using modern technology by boarding planes and busses to visit the holy land. He related equally well to children and adults, men and women.

In 1998 he addressed a group of Native American tribal elders who were moved by their deep feelings about the similarities between their story and Eli’s. As Oklahoma City’s News9 recounted at the time, Shoshana Wasserman, public relations officer for the American Indian Cultural Center and Museum explained, “The process of moving to Israel and beginning a new life and defeating Hitler, by the very fact that he has started a family and a legacy. . . I think our native people feel very much the same way, that we were meant to be extinct, and yet, we’re here, we’re resilient.”

Speaking about the Holocaust became an obsession for Eli. He saw it as critical because the generation of Holocaust survivor witnesses was getting older. As Eli explained in 2011:

And Eli was very good at telling his life story. As Natalie Page from Yad Vashem explained when Eli spoke to a crowd there about his experiences, especially about the life-changing moment when he was separated from his mother, Eli’s “impact on audiences would be visible.” Crowds were mesmerized by Eli’s intensely personal and animated storytelling. When Eli narrated an event happening in a place long ago and far away, he brought you to that place and time. He made you feel what he felt; he painted scenes, acted out voices, and even sang songs that would vividly bring moments to life in your head. He used his hands, eyes, and facial expressions for emphasis. You would laugh and cry with him; it was so very powerfully intimate.

When he spoke with children, he would sing lullabies his mother used to sing to him to illustrate his loving home; he would talk about playing soccer with his friends in the street, watching cowboy movies at the Kino Apollo and sleeping on a straw mattress in a warm and comfortable one-room house, and then he would gently discuss how the Nazis took everything away from him simply because he was Jewish.

With adults, Eli was more graphic. As Allyson Rockwell captured on film in her documentary, Eli, Inspiring Future Generations, Eli would transport the listener into the past. Speaking at the site of the former Plaszow Concentration Camp, where Eli, while recuperating from a near-deadly left leg abscess in the sick-house, was forced to witness daily executions of women, children, older people, even whole families “like birds at a shooting range,” Eli described the experience to a group:

Detroiter Molly Chernow, also captured on film by Ms. Rockwell, said her first encounter with Eli in Poland when he led Ms. Chernow’s group through Holocaust sites, “was like meeting a rock star because his story really resonated with me and inspired me.” When she approached Auschwitz-Birkenau for the first time, Ms. Chernow was in a full-blown panic attack. Eli walked up to her and gently said, “Look at me, I’m not crying. This is a great day, I survived!” As Molly explained, there was something about Eli that was unusual for someone who had been through such horrors: “I would call it his zest for life.”

And this optimism and happiness following a childhood characterized by extreme adversity set Eli apart from others. As Eli explained in 2008:

Eli was also a visionary. He was certain that he could help change the world by reducing bigotry, genocide, and hate—if only his personal story, and those like his, could become known. That is why, after the initial publication of A Cup of Honey, he devoted his life to sharing his story with others and imploring the younger generation to help Eli improve the world. As Eli appealed to Tufts University students in 2010: “This is your responsibility now. Make sure that genocide never happens again. Speak out.”

And Eli’s life’s mission was a success: he did make a difference. He inspired many who read his book and heard him speak to turn their new awareness of the intimate horrors he and so many others suffered during the Holocaust into a calling to prevent it from happening again. After A Cup of Honey was published, I received telephone calls, letters, and emails from individuals I did not know who told me how Eli had inspired them to reduce hatred in their communities around the world. Googling Eli’s name over the years revealed page after page of commentary from individuals on blogs, news stories, and in other publications from all over the world chronicling the ways in which Eli touched people’s lives.

Tour participant Dr. Shari Rogers was so moved by how Eli, despite his losses and hardships, lost neither hope nor his humanity that she founded “Spill the Honey,” an organization made up of Jewish American and African American activists who believe that the experiences of both groups are connected and should be used to fight genocide. Stories about Eli’s extraordinary impact on those whom he reached can be seen in filmmaker Allyson Rockwell’s documentary, aired on Public Television, Eli’s Story: Inspiring Future Generations.

In 2005 Eli met Miami residents Rossana and Alberto Franco and Mexicans Simon and Michelle Galante in Poland, where he led their March of the Living trip to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. They called Eli a “true contemporary hero that touched the deepest membranes of our hearts,” and declared that he had changed them forever. “We came back to our homes as different people, our daily life problems put in perspective.” Determined to help Eli with the “important task of informing the world of what transpired,” the Francos and the Galantes decided that Spanish language speakers should have access to the story, and they spearheaded the Spanish translation and publication of A Cup of Honey.

After Eli’s story moved them to tears on their first visit to Israel and Yad Vashem in 2009, Boston philanthropists Bill and Joyce Cummings similarly felt their lives had been changed forever, in that they had “gained a new understanding of history and how injustice corrodes the most cherished values of society.” The non-Jewish couple first decided to channel their new insights into the development of educational programming to eliminate genocide. They donated one million dollars to Tufts University and founded the interfaith “Cummings/Hillel Program for Holocaust and Genocide Education at Tufts University,” which they conceived as a model program in Holocaust and genocide education, and which today supports visits of prominent speakers to the Medford, Massachusetts campus and an annual nonsectarian trip of 20 Tufts students to Rwanda. Later Bill and Joyce Cummings, “seeing the remarkable impact of genocide education on Tufts students,” were inspired to expand the program and founded the “Institute for World Justice,” which funds international programs to combat prejudice, hatred, racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, social inequality, and intolerance.

There is no doubt that anti-Semitism has not gone away—not just in far off countries, but here in the United States as well. Anti-Semitic incidents so far for the first half of 2015 alone are alarming. The Anti-Defamation League and the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in Britain provide lengthy detailed listings of all known incidents. Just to mention a few: On January 9, two days after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, four Jewish men were killed by a man who stormed a Kosher supermarket in Paris, took shoppers hostage, and held them there, terrified, while he uploaded gruesome video footage of his carnage onto the Internet to incite other attacks in Paris. In Brasilia, Brasil, on February 4, anti-Semitic posters hung in the city referred to Jews as murderers, thugs and criminals. On February 14, a gunman opened fire at the Great Synagogue in Copenhagen, Denmark, killing Dan Uzan, a Jewish community member who was a volunteer guard at a Bat Mitzvah party and injuring two police officers who prevented the gunman from entering the party.

On March 14, three swastikas were spray painted in a Jewish fraternity house at Vanderbilt University, and on April 25, swastikas, personal slurs, and insulting epithets were spray painted outside a Jewish fraternity house at Stanford University. On March 17, a Jewish man wearing a Star of David necklace was attacked in a St. Polten, Austria, shopping center by a group of men who taunted him with anti-Semitic insults and then attacked him. In Johannesburg, South Africa, on March 21, three Jewish teenagers wearing Kippot, or head coverings, were assaulted at a shopping mall by three men while one of the men shouted: “You f***ing Jew and your f***ing people are killing our innocent children.”

On April 5, at a soccer game in Amsterdam, Holland, soccer fans chanted anti-Semitic slogans such as “My father was in the commandos, my mother was in the SS, together they burned Jews, because Jews burn the best!” On June 24, the monument commemorating the more than 33,000 Jewish victims of the Babi Yar massacre in Kiev, Ukraine was desecrated with spray painted swastikas for the fifth time in about a year.

In France alone, anti-Semitism, having “metastasized via thousands of web sites and social media,” has become so rampant that many French Jews are leaving France. In 2014, 50,000 Jews made inquiries to the Jewish Agency for Israel about moving there, according to Marie Brenner’s recent Vanity Fair article in the August 1915 magazine edition titled “The Troubling Question in the French Jewish Community: Is It Time to Leave?” Efforts to stem the metastasis through Holocaust education are stymied—according to Ms. Brenner, when public schools in France make an attempt to teach about the Holocaust, “Jewish students are insulted, classrooms are vandalized, books are defaced and fights break out . . .”

Chillingly, anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial has become well organized. On April 18, 2015, the Daily Mail newspaper in the United Kingdom revealed that a secret meeting and rally, held at London’s Grosvenor Hotel, was attended by over 100 neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers from Europe, the United States, and Canada. The article quoted anti-fascism and anti-racism Searchlight Magazine’s editor/publisher Gerry Gable warning: “This is the biggest and most significant meeting of Holocaust deniers that Britain has ever seen. It is a very worrying development.”

Despite all the efforts at Holocaust education, worldwide Holocaust awareness and acceptance is minimal. In May 2014 the Anti-Defamation League released a global study of attitudes and opinions about Jews in more than 100 countries. The study, conducted by Anzalone Liszt Grove Research, one of the most respected opinion research firms in America, resulted in 53,100 interviews among individuals 18 years and over. The results? Only 54 percent of respondents had heard of the Holocaust, but only 33 percent had heard of it and believed it has been accurately described by history. Among those who had heard of the Holocaust, 32 percent believed that it is either a myth or that it has been greatly exaggerated. In the Middle East/North Africa, that figure is 63 percent. Age is an important factor in Holocaust awareness. Only 48 percent of individuals younger than age 35 were aware of the Holocaust, compared to 61 percent of individuals 50 years and older.

There is no doubt that many places in the world in 2015 are very dangerous, anti-Semitism aside, and that hatred, violence and, yes, genocide are all too real and present. Genocide, defined in 1948 by the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention), means the intentional destruction of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Familiar past genocides took place against Armenians (1915-1918) and in Bosnia (1992-95), Cambodia (1975-79), East Timor (1976-2000), Rwanda (1994), Sudan (Darfur) (2003-05) and Ukraine (1932-33). According to Genocide Watch, in 2014 eleven countries were in stage nine, the extermination stage, of what it has identified as the ten stages of genocide development. These include South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Burma/Myanmar, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Iraq. Minority Rights Group International, in a 2015 release, identified additional peoples under threat of genocide in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic and Yemen. Victims include ethnic and religious minorities (and, surprisingly, in some case majorities) as well as political opponents.

Even in the face of the continuing presence of vicious anti-Semitism and worldwide genocide, I believe Eli would be proud of his efforts to educate the world about injustice. And, 70 years after his liberation from Ebensee, he would recognize the world as a very different place. As historian Deborah Lipstadt wrote in her oped piece in the New York Times, on August 20, 2014, differences between then and now are “legion,” in that when there is an incident of anti-Semitism today, “. . . officials condemn it. This is light-years away from the 1930s, when governments were not only silent but complicit.”

And, contrary to 70 years ago, with the advent of the Internet and social media, even small-scale incidents are recorded and posted for dissemination throughout the world. Perpetrators can now be located and are brought to justice by governments, especially in the West, that strongly condemn and prosecute acts of anti-Semitism. Many governments sponsor education programs to teach the young about anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry and hatred. Also, as Dr. Lipstadt has pointed out, unlike the 1930s we know how incidents can escalate, and “Jews today are resolute in their determination of: ‘Never again.’”

Eli’s hard work has also helped in the largely successful worldwide effort to educate the public about genocide. Teaching about mass suffering did not even begin until after the Second World War, or, to be precise, after the Holocaust, because of the world’s horror at the attempt by the Nazis to completely destroy European Jewry. After the Holocaust, Universities and private organizations started programs in Holocaust Studies that have morphed into widespread Holocaust education programs that now are also included in primary and secondary school curricula across the United States. As the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance has pointed out, it is only due to the world’s investigation of the Holocaust, considered the world’s “paradigmatic” genocide, and the dedication of scholars to Holocaust studies and the personal stories of survivors, that the whole field of genocide studies has developed, and numerous past and current atrocities have been identified and continue to be documented.

As the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research has suggested, these studies are considered critical to exposing the dangers of abuses of government power; the ramifications of racism, bigotry, and stereotyping; the terrible consequences when modern governments use technology and bureaucracy to implement destructive policies against citizens; and the risk of remaining silent and indifferent in the face of oppression. For these reasons, organizations, educational programs, governments, think-tanks, conferences, and museums worldwide are dedicated to the study and eradication of genocide. And, unlike the 1930s and early 1940s, perpetrators of these atrocities may now be brought to justice, because in 1948 the act of genocide became an international crime under the Genocide Convention.

I ALSO AM CERTAIN THAT ELI would not want his death to mean the end of his story and its important message of survival and the resilience of humans in the face of evil. Eli spoke often about his fear that once survivors were no longer available to document their stories personally, the Holocaust deniers would become empowered. Clearly, survivors’ messages need a new outlet.