A teenage camp survivor turned memory into fifty-seven books
Elie Wiesel survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, then spent a lifetime turning witness into literature and advocacy. Night retold the ordeal; fifty-seven books, a Boston University chair, and the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize followed. He helped found the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Born 30 September 1928 in Sighet, Romania, to Sarah and Shlomo Wiesel, he grew up speaking Yiddish plus German, Hungarian, and Romanian. His father pushed Hebrew and literature; his mother pushed Torah study. He was taught that his line descended from the medieval sage Rashi, and his maternal grandfather Dodye Feig was a Vizhnitz Hasid farming a nearby village. Older sisters Beatrice and Hilda survived, found him again at a French orphanage, and settled in North America; younger sister Tzipora and both parents were murdered.
After Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944, Sighet’s Jews were ghettoized, then deported in May to Auschwitz. Wiesel, fifteen, was tattooed A-7713. He and his father were selected for labor, later moved to Buchenwald; the U.S. Third Army liberated the camp on 11 April 1945. Night, drawn from those camp years, became his signature testimony; most of his books were written in French or English. At Auschwitz up to 90 percent of arrivals were killed at once, his mother and little sister among them.
As an activist he spoke for Soviet and Ethiopian Jews and against atrocities from Rwanda to Darfur. Boston University created the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies. He served on the first March of the Living presidium in 1988 and later told marchers at Auschwitz that antisemitism’s victims died there, not the hatred itself. He died 2 July 2016; his son Elisha continues foundation work. He helped launch the Human Rights Foundation, sitting on its first board, and his advocacy extended to apartheid South Africa, Bosnia, Cambodia and Argentina's disappeared.
Source: Elie Wiesel
