Elie Wiesel
1 book analyzed
Biography
Eliezer 'Elie' Wiesel was born September 30, 1928, in Sighet, Transylvania (then part of Romania, now part of Romania again after being annexed by Hungary during WWII). He was the only son among four children; his sisters were Hilda, Bea, and Tzipora. His father Shlomo was a shopkeeper respected in the community. His mother Sarah was the daughter of a Hasidic rabbi. Wiesel was deeply devout from childhood, studying Talmud and beginning the study of Kabbalah — the Jewish mystical tradition — in his early teens. He was fifteen when the Germans occupied Hungary in 1944. He was deported with his family to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May of that year. His mother and youngest sister Tzipora were killed in the gas chambers on arrival. He and his father were sent to the labor camp at Buna. His father Shlomo died at Buchenwald on January 29, 1945. Elie was liberated by American forces on April 11, 1945. He weighed approximately 65 pounds. He spent a year in a French children's home, then studied at the Sorbonne, then worked as a journalist. He spent ten years in deliberate silence before writing Un di velt hot geshvign in Yiddish (1956), which became Night in French (1958) and English (1960). He became an American citizen in 1963, a professor at Boston University, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He married Marion Erster Rose, herself a Holocaust survivor, in 1969. He died July 2, 2016, in New York City.