Elie Wiesel
1928 – 2016 · Romania
Known for: Holocaust survivor, author of Night and Nobel Peace laureate who made the world remember
“A witness who would not let the world forget.”
Biography
Elie Wiesel was born Eliezer Wiesel on 30 September 1928 in Sighet, a town in the Maramureș region of the Carpathian Mountains in northern Romania, the only son of Shlomo and Sarah Wiesel. At home the family spoke mainly Yiddish, alongside German, Hungarian and Romanian. His father, a shopkeeper trusted within the community, urged him toward Hebrew and literature, while his mother pressed him toward the Torah; the son later said that the one stood for reason and the other for faith. In March 1944 Germany occupied Hungary and the Holocaust reached northern Transylvania. Wiesel was fifteen when he, his parents and his sisters were confined with the rest of the town's Jews to a ghetto in the streets where they had always lived, and in May the deportations to Auschwitz began.
His mother, Sarah, and his youngest sister, Tzipora, were murdered in the gas chambers on arrival. Wiesel and his father were selected for labour, and the number A-7713 was tattooed on his left arm; the two were later moved to Buchenwald, where his father died shortly before the United States Third Army liberated the camp on 11 April 1945. Reunited in a French orphanage with his surviving sisters, Beatrice and Hilda, he studied in Paris and worked as a journalist, and let ten years pass before he wrote about the camps. What came of that silence was Night, the account of his imprisonment at Auschwitz and Buchenwald and the first of some fifty-seven books, written for the most part in French and English. From then on Wiesel spoke as a witness wherever he was asked: for Soviet and Ethiopian Jews, against apartheid in South Africa, for the victims of the genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur, and for the disappeared of Argentina.
Wiesel taught the humanities at Boston University and was among the figures who pressed hardest for a national Holocaust museum in Washington; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in 1993. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 and was a founding board member of the Human Rights Foundation. He sat on the presidium of the first March of the Living in 1988 and returned to Auschwitz with its participants, addressing more than eighteen thousand of them there in 2005, on the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the war. He died in New York on 2 July 2016, having spent seven decades making sure that the record of what he had seen could not be mislaid.