Encyclopedia of World Biography on Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel (born 1928), a survivor of the
Holocaust, is a writer, orator, teacher and
chairman of the United States Holocaust
Memorial Council.
Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet, Transylvania, on September
30, 1928. The third of four children and the only son, Wiesel
was educated in sacred Jewish texts. When he was 15,
Wiesel was taken off with his family to the concentration
camps at Birkenau and Auschwitz, where he remained until
January 1945 when, along with thousands of other Jewish
prisoners, he was moved to Buchenwald in a forced death
march. Buchenwald was liberated on April 11, 1945, by the
United States army, but neither Wiesel's parents nor his
younger sister survived. After the war Wiesel went to
France where he completed secondary school, studied at the
Sorbonne, and began working as a journalist for an Israeli
newspaper. In 1956 he moved to New York to cover the
United Nations and became a U.S. citizen in 1963.
Wiesel's writings bear witness to his year-long ordeal and to
the Jewish tragedy. In 1956 Wiesel's first book, a Yiddish
memoir entitled And the World Was Silent, was published in
Argentina. Two years later a much abbreviated version of the
work was published in France as La Nuit. After the 1960
English language publication of Night, Wiesel wrote more
than 35 books: novels, collections of short stories and
essays, plays, and a cantata. His works established him as the
most widely known and admired Holocaust writer.
Only in Night does Wiesel speak about the Holocaust
directly. Throughout his other works, the Holocaust looms as
the shadow, the central but unspoken mystery in the life of
his protagonists. Even pre-Holocaust events are seen as
warnings of impending doom. In Night he narrates his own
experience as a young boy transported to Auschwitz where
suffering and death shattered his faith in both God and
humanity. Night is widely considered a classic of Holocaust
literature.
Wiesel was the recipient of numerous awards throughout his
career, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.
Speaking in 1984 at the White House, where President
Reagan presented him with the Congressional Gold Medal,
Wiesel summarized his career, "I have learned that suffering
confers no privileges: it depends on what one does with it.
This is why survivors have tried to teach their
contemporaries how to build on ruins; how to invent hope in a
world that offers none; how to proclaim faith to a generation
that has seen it shamed and mutilated."