Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald and spent the rest of his life insisting that the world remember what happened there. Born in Sighet in Transylvania in 1928 to a Hasidic Jewish family, he studied Torah and Kabbalah as a boy. In May 1944 the Hungarian authorities deported the town's Jews; he was fifteen. His mother and youngest sister were killed on arrival at Auschwitz. He and his father were kept together through forced labour and the death march to Buchenwald, where his father died of dysentery and beating weeks before liberation in April 1945. He was taken to France, learned French, and studied at the Sorbonne, working as a journalist. He kept silent about the camps for ten years, having vowed to wait. The novelist François Mauriac pressed him to write, and Night appeared in Yiddish in 1956 and in a compressed French version in 1958. It sold poorly for years and has since sold over ten million copies. Its power is its refusal to console. He settled in the United States in 1955 and became a citizen in 1963, teaching at Boston University for many years. He chaired the commission that led to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, opened in 1993. He campaigned beyond his own history — for Soviet Jews, and against atrocities in Cambodia, South Africa, Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur, arguing that neutrality helps the oppressor. In 1985 he publicly asked Ronald Reagan not to visit the Bitburg cemetery where SS men are buried, while accepting a medal from him. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He lost much of his foundation's assets to Bernard Madoff in 2008, and died in 2016.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history