NIght
Meet Elie Wiesel
Look, it’s important to bear witness. Important to tell your story. . . . You cannot imagine what it meant spending a night of death among death.
—Elie Wiesel
The obligation Elie Wiesel feels to justify his survival of a Nazi concentration camp has shaped his destiny. It has guided his work as a writer, teacher, and humanitarian activist; influ- enced his interaction with his Jewish faith; and affected his family and personal choices. Since World War II, Wiesel has borne witness to perse- cution past and present. He has sought to under- stand humankind’s capacity for evil, halt its progress, and heal the wounds it has caused.
Wiesel did not expect to be a novelist and journalist when he grew up. His early writings focused on the Bible and spiritual issues. The studious and deeply religious only son of a Jewish family in the village of Sighet, Romania, Wiesel spent his childhood days of the 1930s and 1940s studying sacred Jewish texts. Wiesel’s mother, an educated woman for her time, encouraged her son’s intense interest in Judaism. Wiesel’s early love of stories, especially those told by his grandfather, may explain why he became a storyteller himself.
In 1944 during World War II, Wiesel’s life took a profoundly unexpected turn when
Germany’s armies invaded Sighet. He and his fam- ily were sent to concentration camps at Auschwitz and at Buna, both in Poland. His imprisonment, which he describes in horrifying detail in Night, forever changed Wiesel as a man and as a Jew.
Wiesel was freed in April 1945, when he was sixteen years old. He went to a French orphanage and was later reunited with his older sisters. Wiesel completed his education, working as a tutor and translator to fund his schooling. Before long, Wiesel was writing for both French and Jewish publications. Still, he did not—and vowed he would not—write about the Holocaust, saying years later, “You must speak, but how can you, when the full story is beyond language.” He did
Look, it’s important to bear witness. Important to tell your story. . . . You cannot imagine what it meant spending a night of death among death.
—Elie Wiesel
The obligation Elie Wiesel feels to justify his survival of a Nazi concentration camp has shaped his destiny. It has guided his work as a writer, teacher, and humanitarian activist; influ- enced his interaction with his Jewish faith; and affected his family and personal choices. Since World War II, Wiesel has borne witness to perse- cution past and present. He has sought to under- stand humankind’s capacity for evil, halt its progress, and heal the wounds it has caused.
Wiesel did not expect to be a novelist and journalist when he grew up. His early writings focused on the Bible and spiritual issues. The studious and deeply religious only son of a Jewish family in the village of Sighet, Romania, Wiesel spent his childhood days of the 1930s and 1940s studying sacred Jewish texts. Wiesel’s mother, an educated woman for her time, encouraged her son’s intense interest in Judaism. Wiesel’s early love of stories, especially those told by his grandfather, may explain why he became a storyteller himself.
In 1944 during World War II, Wiesel’s life took a profoundly unexpected turn when
Germany’s armies invaded Sighet. He and his fam- ily were sent to concentration camps at Auschwitz and at Buna, both in Poland. His imprisonment, which he describes in horrifying detail in Night, forever changed Wiesel as a man and as a Jew.
Wiesel was freed in April 1945, when he was sixteen years old. He went to a French orphanage and was later reunited with his older sisters. Wiesel completed his education, working as a tutor and translator to fund his schooling. Before long, Wiesel was writing for both French and Jewish publications. Still, he did not—and vowed he would not—write about the Holocaust, saying years later, “You must speak, but how can you, when the full story is beyond language.” He did