Elie Wiesel Biography

Eliezer (Elie) Wiesel was born into a Jewish family on September 30, 1928 in Sighet, Romania. When he was 12 years old, Hungary annexed parts of Romania including Sighet in an agreement arbitrated by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.  Thus began a systematic persecution and deportation of the substantial Jewish population of Sighet. 
 
In April 1944, the Wiesels, along with the rest of Sighet’s Jewish population, were forced to live in ghettos.  In May 1944, Nazi Germany, with Hungary’s consent, deported the nearly 14,000 Jews living in the ghettos.  They were transported by cattle car to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.  Elie was fifteen. Upon arrival at the camp, males and females were separated.  Elie’s mother and younger sister were killed shortly after arrival.  His other two sisters would eventually survive the war.  Elie and his father, Shlomo, were sent to an attached slave labor camp, enduring brutally inhumane conditions.
 
As Russian troops neared Auschwitz in January 1945, the Nazis were forced to abandon the camp.  All of the 56,000 prisoners were evacuated to other camps.  Elie and Shlomo were forced on the “death march” to Buchenwald, over 500 miles to the west within the German homeland. 
 
In the despair of the unbearable physical and emotional suffering, Elie pondered the choice of death as a welcomed relief, but it was his commitment to his father that kept him going.  “I knew if I died, he would die,” remarked the humanitarian years later. 
 
Elie and Shlomo survived the march, but it was in Buchenwald that Shlomo developed dysentery.  Elie painfully witnessed his father’s decline and the barbaric beating his father received in this weakened state.  Shlomo died less than three months before Buchenwald was liberated.  Elie, then a 16 year-old orphan, would survive to witness the US Army liberate the camp on April 11, 1945.
 
After the war, Elie was taken to France with 1,000 other child survivors from Buchenwald.  He stayed in France, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and began writing as a journalist at the age of 19.  For ten years, he refused to write or speak about his Holocaust experiences until he met a French author who would become a close friend.  François Mauriac, the 1952 Nobel Laureate in Literature, was a devout Christian who had fought in the French Resistance during the war.  It was Mauriac who convinced Wiesel that it was important for him begin writing about his experiences, however painful.
 
Wiesel acquiesced and began writing a 900-page memoir.  He later shortened it and published it in French as La Nuit, or Night in English.  It was slow to gain notoriety, but it eventually became a critically acclaimed account of the horrors of the Holocaust.  It was translated into 30 languages, selling 10 million copies in the U.S. alone. 
 
In 1955, Wiesel moved to the U.S., later receiving professorships at City University of New York and Boston University while furthering his role as a promoter of peace and defender of human rights.   He focused on these themes through:  domestic and international activism; the creation of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity; spearheading the effort to build the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; and writing novels and non-fiction, authoring 57 books in all. Wiesel’s extraordinary efforts earned him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States Congressional Gold Medal, the Medal of Liberty, the rank of Grand-Croix in the French Legion of Honor, and in 1986, the Nobel Peace Prize.
 
He died on July 2, 2016 at the age of 87.