Elie Wiesel, famed author and human rights activist, died July 2 at the age of 87. He lived an extraordinary life—but he also witnessed and suffered the worst time in human history. He was a survivor of Auschwitz, and although the war and death camps ended in 1945, it never really ended for Elie Wiesel. Perhaps now, after using the life that emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust to help the world, he finally has peace.

His greatest work, Night, was a firsthand account of the Holocaust seen through the eyes of a teenager. The small book became one of the pillars of Holocaust literature, one of its most widely read accounts. As painful as the recounting of their experiences was, many Holocaust survivors realized it was their duty to write down everything they saw, heard and lost so that the living never allow another Holocaust. “Never again,” was the mantra. Indeed, it was the duty of the generations after 1945 to mobilize the memories of victims like Elie Wiesel and ensure that “never again” became reality, not just words.

Yet, by all accounts, we have failed miserably.

Genocides have happened time and again, and today humanity marches once more toward another worldwide cataclysm.

In 1945, the Allies conquered the evil regime of Adolf Hitler, but we never conquered human nature. Elie Wiesel warned us in Night about how human nature ignores warnings and walks into mortal peril. All of us alive today should tremble at the repetition of that history.

Wiesel’s Testimony

Elie Wiesel and his family grew up in Romania, where the young Elie had taken an interest in the mystical writings of Judaism. The Jews had thrived in Eastern Europe and had become an important part of the societies in which they lived. All of this changed with the rise of Adolf Hitler. The Jews in Germany suffered first. But as the armies of the Third Reich spread their veil of death over the nations around them, more and more became victims of Hitler’s evil scheme. The death camps began to spew out the ashes of men, women and children from the chimneys of their crematoriums.

In 1940, the Nazis captured Romania. For years, the Jews were slowly and systematically persecuted. First, they were moved to ghettos—later to concentration camps. While Jews were being rounded up in Sighet, where the Wiesels lived, a man named Moshe the Beadle returned from Hungary. Moshe had been herded into a cattle car with many others Jews. He and the others had been forced to dig their own mass grave. But he had survived the mass execution. He had rushed back to warn as many as possible.

No one believed him. Even when the Wiesels were forced to move to a ghetto, they complied with the German demands. Elie’s father said he was too old to move and start over again in another country. At that time, no one knew of Hitler’s Final Solution or the death camps. Moshe had witnessed a massacre, but all dismissed his earnest warning. Many Jews believed such brutish behavior was impossible in the 20th century. Germany was the cultural heart of Europe—the fatherland of Bach, Beethoven, Kant, Goethe and Schiller. Surely civilization was beyond the point of cruelty.

Moshe disappeared. No one ever saw him again. The Wiesels were sent to the Jewish ghetto, and soon after loaded into the infamous cattle cars. Many worked painstakingly to bring all of their gold and valuables with them. Confusion and anxiety filled the cattle cars as the train clattered toward its destination. When the chimneys of Hitler’s death factories came into view, and the smell of burnt flesh and hair filled their nostrils, they finally knew Moshe had been right.

Accounts of Auschwitz, or any other death camp, are hard for us to believe and comprehend today. They were perfectly organized institutions of death—industrialized murder. But for Elie Wiesel and those few who survived, it was too real. For the 6 million who passed through the flames of the crematoriums, it was a sadistic nightmare.

Elie was separated from his mother and sisters immediately. He never saw them again. He and his father lied about their ages and were able to be transferred to one of the labor camps attached to Auschwitz. The Wiesels suffered tremendous cruelty and abuse. But not all were so lucky.

Dr. Miklos Nyiszli was a contemporary of the young Elie at Auschwitz, although they never crossed paths. Dr. Nyiszli was a Hungarian-Jew and a skilled doctor. Hungary’s Jewish population was removed from the ghettos in 1944, and Dr. Nyiszli survived by volunteering to be a main doctor for the sonderkommando for one of the crematoriums. The sonderkommandos were Jewish prisoners chosen for their expertise or strength, and were employed by the German SS to operate the machines of death. These 850 Jews were responsible for clearing out the dead bodies from the gas chambers, removing any gold dental work from their mouths, and then running the corpses through the massive ovens. Every four months the sonderkommandos were exterminated in order to keep the dark secrets of the crematoriums preserved.

In his book Auschwitz, Dr. Nyiszli recounts the first time he saw these crematoriums in action. It is a chilling account, but it is an uncomfortable truth that must be known.

Once the Jews arrived at Auschwitz, they went through a selection process. All of the old, feeble, women, and children under 14 were sent to be “disinfected.” They arrived by the thousands. When they jumped out of the train cars, they saw a well-landscaped courtyard with water sprinklers. As they wearily trudged toward the entrance, almost all of them would rush for the sprinklers, drinking as much water as possible. Most of them had not had water for days. The German troops allowed them to quench their thirst, and then ushered them toward the stairs descending into the brick building.

Above the entrance was a sign that read “Baths and Disinfecting Room” in four languages. Many breathed a sigh of relief, sure that nothing sinister awaited them. Once passed the threshold, they entered a room 200 yards long with columns in the middle. It was well lit with bright walls. Everywhere were hooks and benches, with a number associated with them. The German officers then ordered everyone to strip down naked. This shocked the prisoners, but they eventually did to great embarrassment. They were also instructed to neatly tie together their shoes and their other clothes and to carefully memorize the number above their bench so they would not lose track of their clothes.

All 300 prisoners were then marched through the next set of doors. The room was again well lit, but instead of columns were pipes with numerous holes, like wire lattice. Once all the Jews were in the room, all German soldiers and sonderkommandos left the room. The doors were closed and locked shut. Then the lights were extinguished. Three thousand men, women and children stood in complete darkness.

At about that time a car drove up in front of the crematorium. It was furnished by the International Red Cross. Out stepped the Deputy Health Officer carrying four green canisters. He put on a gas mask and placed the contents into four concrete tubes in the courtyard. This toxic substance filtered into the darkness beneath. In a matter of five minutes, 3,000 Jews were exterminated.

The room was quickly ventilated to remove the toxic gas. The neat piles of clothes and shoes were extracted to be sent to German people around the country. Once most of the fumes were removed, the doors of the death room were opened. The scene that follows can only be described by Dr. Nyiszli:

The bodies were not lying here and there throughout the room, but piled in mass to the ceiling. The reason for this was that the gas first inundated the lower layers of air and rose but slowly towards the ceiling. This forced the victims to trample one another in a frantic effort to escape the gas. Yet a few feet higher up the gas reached them. What a struggle for life there must have been! Nevertheless, it was only a matter of two or three minutes respite. If they had been able to think about what they were doing, they would have realized they were trampling their own children, their wives, their relatives. But they couldn’t think. Their gestures were no more than the reflexes of the instinct of self-preservation. I noticed that the bodies of the women, the children, and the aged were at the bottom of the pile; at the top, the strongest. Their bodies, which were covered with scratches and bruises from the struggle which had set them against each other, were often interlaced. Blood oozed from their noses and mouths; their faces, bloated and blue, were so deformed as to be almost unrecognizable. Nevertheless some of the sonderkommando often did recognize their kin. The encounter was not easy, and I dreaded it for myself. I had no reason to be here, and yet I had come among the dead. I felt it my duty to my people and to the entire world to be able to give an accurate account of what I had seen if ever, by some miraculous whim of fate, I should escape.

This history is not that easy to stomach, but it is essential to understanding what “never again” means. The Holocaust should burn into our memories not only because of the scale of suffering, but also for the manner in which it was done. The unspeakable evils perpetrated by one of the world’s most modern and accomplished nation states should galvanize us into action. The fact that a madman could lead a whole nation to commit the worst atrocities in human history should make us ever vigilant against evil.

One of the most traumatic experiences for the young Elie was witnessing the hanging of a child who took 30 minutes to die in the noose. Yet one of the most moving scenes from Night comes right at the end of the story. As the Soviets pushed further west, the Germans forced the prisoners to march away from freedom. At another camp Elie’s father became ill. Elie was forced to take care of him. After repeated beatings, no food, water or medicine, Elie’s father was removed from the barracks. He was not yet dead. Elie records that he felt no emotion when he saw his father for the last time. He only felt relieved that he no longer had that burden. After everything he had seen, he could feel no more. The Soviets liberated them days later.

Wiesel’s Warning

In the final years of his life, Elie Wiesel made one more warning to the world. He asserted that Iran should not be able to produce a nuclear weapon. He invited United States President Barack Obama to attend with him Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress. He knew that another catastrophe lay at the door if the Iranian regime acquired the weapons of mass destruction. President Obama ignored his warnings, despite the two being intimate personal friends.

After living through the years leading up to the Holocaust, and seeing how complacency and appeasement led to such horrific consequences, Elie Wiesel could see where the Iranian nuclear deal was leading. Perhaps Wiesel felt like Moshe, the man he and his family had ignored 70 years prior. They all paid a dear price for not waking up to a warning. Wiesel could see the same cycle playing out again. Only now, the stakes are much higher.

Today a madman would not need to build elaborate factories of death. Genocide and conquest now can be achieved by the use of a handful of nuclear weapons. The ashes of victims would not be limited to the crematorium, but would spread out for miles in the wake of a nuclear explosion. The machines of death would not be limited to the borders of the aggressor, but could be flung to any destination on Earth. Many more than just Jews would suffer at the hands of such an attack. The nuclear armageddon Iran would bring would cover the globe.

But there is a great difference between the 1930s and today. In our present situation, we are willingly handing over the instruments of our own destruction. Appeasement and complacency abounded during the rise of Adolf Hitler, just as they do today. However, Hitler had great success in hiding the intent and execution of genocide. Many knew he was racist, but no one could have conceived that the monster of the Holocaust was possible. Today, everything is transparent. Iran does not hide its intent to wipe out all Jews or to start a worldwide nuclear holocaust. Yet the West seems unwilling to confront Iran, and take the necessary steps to prevent disaster.

Elie Wiesel dedicated his life to the never-again cause. His death takes away a vital link to a troubled past that holds so many lessons for us. The history in Night and his other books holds a warning for the world today. In the age of nuclear weapons, the history of the Holocaust should constantly remind us of what is at stake. The ashes of 6 million Jews should stir us to action. It should also warn us of the pitfalls of human nature. We conquered the Nazis and stopped the death camps, but man has never conquered his own troubled heart. That is the source of all this trouble.

Bible prophecy shows that another holocaust is coming, but this one will be ended by a new world where “never again” will be an eternal promise.