Elie Wiesel

Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He was born on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, and died on July 2, 2016. His life was marked by the great violence of the 20th century, above all the Holocaust, and by his later insistence that memory be tied to moral responsibility.

Wiesel grew up in a Jewish family where several languages were spoken, mainly Yiddish, along with German, Hungarian, and Romanian. His father, Shlomo Wiesel, encouraged him to learn Hebrew and read literature, and gave him a strong sense of humanism. His mother, Sarah Feig, encouraged him to study the Torah. Wiesel later said his father represented reason, while his mother promoted faith. He had three sisters: Beatrice, Hilda, and Tzipora.

In March 1944, Germany occupied Hungary, extending the Holocaust into Northern Transylvania. Wiesel was 15 when he, his family, and the Jewish population of Sighet were forced into confinement ghettos. In May 1944, Hungarian authorities, under German pressure, began deporting the Jewish community to Auschwitz. His mother and younger sister were murdered in the gas chambers soon after arrival. Wiesel and his father were selected for labor and later sent to Buchenwald, where his father died before liberation. Wiesel was tattooed with inmate number A-7713 on his left arm. The U.S. Third Army liberated Buchenwald on April 11, 1945.

After the war, Wiesel joined a transport of 1,000 child survivors of Buchenwald to Ecouis, France, where a rehabilitation center had been set up. He became best known as the author of Night, based on his experiences as a Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Over his lifetime, he wrote 57 books, mostly in French and English. He also taught as a professor of the humanities at Boston University, which created the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies in his honor. In 1986, he received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Wiesel’s public work reached far beyond literature. He became a regular speaker on the Holocaust and a strong defender of human rights, speaking for causes including Soviet Jews and Ethiopian Jews, victims of South African apartheid, the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides, the War in Darfur, the Kurdish independence movement, the Armenian genocide, Argentina’s Desaparecidos, Nicaragua’s Miskito people, Sri Lankan Tamils, and the Cambodian genocide. He was also an outspoken advocate for Israel and took public positions during the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Iran-Israel proxy conflict. He was a founding board member of the Human Rights Foundation and was one of the main figures behind the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993.

Wiesel’s words still matter because they were rooted in what he had seen, lost, and survived. He served on the Presidium for the first March of the Living in 1988, returned in 1990, and attended again in 2005 for the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II. Speaking at Auschwitz in 1990, he warned that antisemitism had not died there, only its victims had. His writing and public voice kept asking readers to face suffering without looking away, and to connect memory with action.