Elie Wiesel Biography

Elie Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, a small town in Transylvania that was then part of Romania but became part of Hungary in 1940. Wiesel’s Orthodox Jewish family was highly observant of Jewish tradition. His father, Shlomo, a shopkeeper, was very involved with the Jewish community, which was confined to the Jewish section of town, called the shtetl. As a child and teenager, Wiesel distinguished himself in the study of traditional Jewish texts: the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament), the Talmud (codified oral law), and even—unusual for someone so young—the mystical texts of the Kabbalah.

Until 1944, the Jews of Hungary were relatively sheltered from the catastrophe that was descimating the Jewish communities in other parts of Europe. Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, behind campaign rhetoric that blamed the Jews for Germany’s depression after World War I. Germany embraced Hitler’s argument for the superiority of the Germanic peoples, which he (mistakenly) called the Aryan race. The country soon implemented a set of laws—including the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935—designed to dehumanize German Jews and subject them to violence and prejudice.

As World War II progressed, Hitler and his counselors developed the “Final Solution” to the so-called Jewish Question—a program of systematic extermination of Europe’s Jews. By the time the Allies defeated Germany in 1945, the Final Solution had resulted in the largest act of genocide known to the world. Six million European Jews had been murdered, along with millions of Gypsies, homosexuals, and others whom the Nazis considered undesirable. The greatest numbers of victims were killed in concentration camps, in which Jews—and other enemies of Germany—were gathered, imprisoned, forced into labor, and, when they could no longer be of use to their captors, annihilated. In addition to the slaughter at the camps, millions of soldiers were killed in battle. By the end of World War II, more than thirty-five million people had died, over half of them civilians.

While anti-Jewish legislation was a common phenomenon in Hungary, the Holocaust itself did not reach Hungary until 1944. In March of 1944, however, the German army occupied Hungary, installing a puppet government (a regime that depends not on the support of its citizenry but on the support of a foreign government) under Nazi control. Adolf Eichmann, the executioner of the Final Solution, came to Hungary to oversee personally the destruction of Hungary’s Jews. The Nazis operated with remarkable speed: in the spring of 1944, the Hungarian Jewish community, the only remaining large Jewish community in continental Europe, was deported to concentration camps in Germany and Poland. Eventually, the Nazis murdered 560,000 Hungarian Jews, the overwhelming majority of the prewar Jewish population in Hungary. In Wiesel’s native Sighet, the disaster was even worse: of the 15,000 Jews in prewar Sighet, only about fifty families survived the Holocaust. In May of 1944, when Wiesel was fifteen, his family and many inhabitants of the Sighet shtetl were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. The largest and deadliest of the camps, Auschwitz was the site of more than 1,300,000 Jewish deaths. Wiesel’s father, mother, and little sister all died in the Holocaust. Wiesel himself survived and emigrated to France.

After observing a ten-year vow of silence about the Holocaust, in 1956 Wiesel published Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (Yiddish for And the World Remained Silent), an 800-page account of his life during the Holocaust. In 1958, he condensed his work and translated it from its original Yiddish into French, publishing it under the title La Nuit. The work was translated into English and published in 1960 as Night. Some scholars have argued that significant differences exist between Un di Velt Hot Geshvign and the subsequent French/English publications, chiefly that in the Yiddish text, Wiesel expressed more anger toward the Nazis and adopted a more vengeful tone.

Although publishers were initially hesitant to embrace Night, believing that audiences would not be interested in such pessimistic subject matter, the memoir now stands as one of the most widely read and taught accounts of the Holocaust. From a literary point of view, it paved the way for many other stories and memoirs published in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1963, Wiesel became an American citizen. With his wife, Marion Erster, Wiesel founded the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. In 1986, for his humanitarian work, Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He lived in New York City and Greenwich, Connecticut until his death in 2016.

Elie Wiesel Study Guides

Night

Published

Elie Wiesel Quotes

We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.

There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.

Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another.

I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I've been closer to him for that reason.

Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.

Elie Wiesel Memoir

And The World Remained Silent

Published 1956

Night

Published 1960

Elie Wiesel Nonfiction

One Generation After

Published 1970

A Jew Today

Published 1978

Against Silence: The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel

Published 1985

All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs, Vol. I, 1928–1969

Published 1995

And the Sea is Never Full: Memoirs Vol. II, 1969-

Published 1999

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