Night Elie Wiesel Notes
Author:
Born September 30, 1928 in Sighet, ______________.
 Grew up in a small village where his life revolved around the following:
 Family
 ____________ ___________
 Community
 God
 In 1944, when Elie was _____, he was deported to Auschwitz.
 When they arrived at the camp, he and his father were warned to lie about their ages.
Elie said he was 18 and his father said he was 40 instead of 50.
 They were sent to be _____________ _______________.
 His mother and youngest sister were sent to the _______ __________.
 Elie and his father survived first _____________ and then the _______ labor camp for eight
months.
 They endured beatings, excessive work, _____________, and other torture.
 In the winter 19___ -____, Wiesel’s right knee swelled up and a doctor performed surgery on it.
 Two days later, the inmates were forced to go on a ____________ _______________.
 For ten days they were forced to run, then crammed into freight cars, and sent to
___________.
 Of the _______________ prisoners who left Buna, only 6,000 survived.
 When they arrived to Buchenwald, Elie’s father _____________, died of ___________,
starvation, and exhaustion.
 After the death of his father, Elie was sent to join the children’s block of Buchenwald.
 At the end of the war, April 6, 19___, the prisoners were told they would no longer be fed.
 They began evacuating the camp killing ____________ prisoners a day.
 After he was freed from the camp on April 11, Wiesel became sick with intestinal problems.
 After several days in the hospital, Wiesel wrote an outline for a book describing the Holocaust.
He wasn’t ready to publicize his experience, but promised he would in ten years
 After Elie was released from the hospital, he had no ____________ to return to.
 He went with 400 other orphan children to ____________.
 From 1945-1947, he moved from house to house found for him by Children’s Rescue Society.
 By 1947, he was reunited with both of his surviving ______________, Bea and Hilda.
 Hilda found his picture in a newspaper.
 He found Bea in _____________.
 In 1948, Elie enrolled in the Sorbonne University where he studied literature, philosophy, and
psychology.
 He was extremely poor and very _________________.
 He considered _____________ often.
 Over time, he became involved with the ____________, a Jewish militant organization in
Palestine, and translated materials from Hebrew to ___________ for the Irgun’s newspaper.
 He began working as a reporter, and in 1949, he traveled to ________________as a
correspondent for the French newspaper, L’Arche.
 In Israel, he found a job as a Paris correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Yediot Achronot.
 He traveled the world in the 1950’s.
 He also became involved in the argument whether Israel should accept ______________
payments from West Germany.
 Weisel’s turning point came when he interviewed the Catholic writer, Fancois Mauriac.
 During the interview, everything was centered around Jesus and Wiesel ended up saying the
following;
 "…ten years ago, not very far from here, I knew Jewish children every one of whom
suffered a thousand times more, ___________ _____________ _______________
________, than Christ on the cross. And we don’t speak about them."
 Wiesel ran out of the room, but Mauriac followed and advised Weisel to write
down his experience.
 Elie spent a year working on the 862 page manuscript he called _______________________.
 He gave it to his publisher who returned it as a 258 page book called Night.
 The book was published first in ____________ in 1958 and then in the U.S. in 1960.
 The book is _______________ and told of his experiences during the
______________.
 It also is his personal account of his loss of _________________ faith.
 In 1955, Wiesel moved to New York as foreign correspondent for Yediot Ahronot.
 It was around this time that he decided to stop attending synagogue, except on the High Holidays,
as a protest against what he concluded was divine injustice.
 Crossing the street one night in July 1965, Elie was hit by a __________ and had to undergo a ten
hour surgery.
 After recovery, he focused on his writing and published numerous books from then on
out.
 What books do you know?
 In 1969, Elie married Marion Erster Rose, a divorced woman from Austria.

She translated all of Wiesel’s subsequent books.
 In 1972, they had a son who they named ______________ Elisha Wiesel, after Wiesel’s
father.
 Wiesel was outspoken about the suffering of all people, not only Jews.
 In the 1970s, he protested against South African ___________________.
 In 1980, he delivered food to starving _____________________.
 In 1986, he received the _____________Peace Prize as “a messenger to
_____________,” and “a human being dedicated to humanity.”
 He explained his actions by saying the whole world knew what was happening in
the concentration camps, but did nothing. “That is why I swore never to be
__________ whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and
humiliation.”
 From 1972 to 1978, Wiesel was a Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at the City
University of New York.
 1978, he became a Professor of Humanities at Boston University.

In 1978, President Jimmy ______________ asked him to head the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Council, which he did for six years.
 In 1985, Wiesel was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement.
 In 1988, he established his own humanitarian foundation, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for
Humanity, to explore the problems of hatred and ethnic conflicts.
 In the early 1990s, he lobbied the U.S. government on behalf of victims of ethnic cleansing in
__________.
 Wiesel has received numerous awards and approximately 75 honorary doctorates.
 In 1993, Wiesel spoke at the dedication of the U.S. ______________ Memorial Museum in
Washington, D.C.
 His words, which echo his life’s work, are carved in stone at the entrance to the museum:
 “For the dead and the living, we must bear ____________.”
 A destruction, an annihilation that only man can provoke, only man can prevent.
 Hope is like _____________. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another.
 I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something
to the dead. and anyone who does not remember ___________ them again.
 I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and
humiliation. We must always take sides. ____________ helps the oppressor, never the victim.
Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
 I write to understand as much as to be understood.
 No human race is _____________; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are
wrong. Only racists make them.
 The opposite of love is not hate, it's _____________________.