Marion Rose Wiesel (born Mary Renate Erster; January 27, 1931 – February 2, 2025) was an Austrian-American Holocaust survivor, humanitarian, and translator.

[1][2] She was married to author and fellow Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, 14 of whose books she translated into English.

[1][4] The family then escaped the internment camp and managed to flee to Marseille, France, where neighbors helped them avoid detection.

[4][10] Marion attended the University of Miami but primarily lived in New York City, where she worked at a bra factory and as a saleswoman at Russeks department store on Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan.

[4] In the late-1960s, when she was known as Marion Erster Rose, she met Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, and fellow Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel at a dinner party in Manhattan, in New York City.

[4] She also edited To Give Them Light (1993), a collection of Russian-American photographer Roman Vishniac's images of Eastern European Jewry before World War II.

[1][20][21] She also produced television programs, which included "The World of Elie Wiesel", "The Oslo Concert: A Tribute to Peace", and "A Passover Haggadah".

[20] The medal is awarded by a President of the United States in recognition of U.S. citizens who have performed exemplary deeds of service for the nation.

[28] As he handed her the medal, President Clinton said that he was awarding it to her for her "mission of hope against hate, of life against death, of good over evil", and noted that out of her experience of starvation, disease, and death, she "summoned the courage to commit her life to teaching others, especially children, about the human cost of hatred, intolerance, and racism.

[1][29] The award was presented to them by former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who said that the Wiesels "played a pivotal part in bringing the Shoah into public consciousness, and had "worked to overcome indifference toward the suffering of oppressed and marginalized populations around the world: Soviet Jews, Miskito Indians, refugees from Cambodia, prisoners from the former Yugoslavia, victims of the genocide in Darfur.