Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel, born in 1928, Jewish novelist, journalist, and lecturer, the most eloquent spokesperson for the survivors of the Nazi (see National Socialism) genocide during World War II (1939-1945). Although his concern for human suffering began with the Holocaust, it later encompassed the plight of other oppressed or persecuted peoples. Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for his work in promoting human rights.

Wiesel was born in Sighet, Romania, on September 30, 1928. He received a Jewish religious education. In 1944 German Nazis deported Wiesel’s family and all other Jews in their community to concentration camps in Poland. Wiesel and his father went to Auschwitz. Both of Wiesel’s parents and his younger sister died in concentration camps during the war. After the war, Wiesel studied at the University of Paris and worked as a newspaper correspondent. He moved to the United States after a decade in France, and in 1957 became a staff member of the Yiddish-language newspaper Der Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward) in New York City. In 1963 he became a U.S. citizen. From 1972 to 1976 Wiesel taught Judaic studies at City College in New York. He was appointed a professor of humanities at Boston University in 1976. From 1980 to 1986, Wiesel served as chairman of the U.S. President’s Commission on the Holocaust. He received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1985 and established the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity in 1987.

On a writing assignment, Wiesel interviewed French novelist François Mauriac, who encouraged him to write about his experiences during the Holocaust. Wiesel’s first book, La Nuit (published in 1958; translated as Night, 1960), describes his experiences at Auschwitz, the inhumanity of the concentration camps, and the death both of his father and his God. Writing in French, Wiesel has also portrayed the Holocaust experience in fiction. Les Portes de la forêt (1964; The Gates of the Forest, 1966) depicts the extermination of Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary, the meaninglessness of this brutality, and the impossibility of understanding such events in religious terms. Yet if humanity is “hope turned to dust, … the opposite is equally true.”

Wiesel’s other novels also refer in some way to the horrors suffered by prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps. They include L’aube (1960; Dawn, 1961); Le jour (1961; The Accident, 1962); La ville de la chance: roman (1962; The Town Beyond the Wall, 1964); Le mendiant de Jérusalem (1968; A Beggar in Jerusalem, 1970); Le testament d'un poète juif assassiné (1980; The Testament: A Novel, 1981); L'oublié: roman (1989; The Forgotten, 1992); and Le Temps des déracinés (2003; The Time of the Uprooted, 2005). Wiesel’s wife, Marion, also a survivor of the Nazi camps, collaborates with her husband on English translations of his writings.

Wiesel’s first book of memoirs, Tous les fleuves vont à la mer (1994; All Rivers Run to the Sea, 1995), recounts his experiences from his childhood until the late 1960s. His second book of memoirs, Et la mer n’est pas remplie (1999; And the Sea Is Never Full, 1999), takes his life story into the late 1990s. In addition, Wiesel has written and lectured widely about the Jewish tradition and other Jewish issues, as well as on human rights in general.