Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel (September 30, 1928 – July 2, 2016) was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He authored 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including Night, which is based on his experiences as a Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz and Buchenwald during the Holocaust.
As a political activist, Wiesel became a regular speaker on the subject of the Holocaust and advocated for justice in numerous causes around the globe, including that of Soviet Jews and Ethiopian Jews, South African apartheid, the Rwandan genocide, the Bosnian genocide, the War in Darfur, the Kurdish independence movement, the Armenian genocide, Argentina's Desaparecidos, Nicaragua's Miskito people, the Sri Lankan Tamils, and the Cambodian genocide. He was also an outspoken advocate for Israel and frequently weighed in to support the country during escalations of the Arab–Israeli conflict and throughout the Iran–Israel proxy conflict. He backed Netanyahu publicly, including his controversial 2015 Congress speech on Iran, and signed ads praising Jewish settlers. He said Jerusalem "belongs to the Jewish people" and opposed territorial compromise there. He also hosted direct talks to facilitate the Israeli–Palestinian peace process."Elie Wiesel was a witness to evil and a symbol of endurance" , US News & World Report, July 3, 2016"Remembering Elie Wiesel" , Jewish Standard, July 7, 2016
Wiesel was a professor of the humanities at Boston University, which created the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies in his honor. He received a number of awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He was a founding board member of the Human Rights Foundation and remained active in it throughout his life. Wiesel was one of the main figures who spearheaded the establishment of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993.
Early life and education
Eliezer Wiesel was born in Sighet (now Sighetu Marmației), Maramureș, in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania. His parents were Sarah Feig and Shlomo Wiesel. At home, the family spoke mainly Yiddish in addition to German, Hungarian, and Romanian. Wiesel's mother, Sarah, was the daughter of Dodye Feig, a Vizhnitz Hasid and farmer from the nearby village of Bocskó. Dodye was active and trusted within the community.
Wiesel's father, Shlomo, instilled a strong sense of humanism in his son, encouraging him to learn Hebrew and to read literature, whereas his mother encouraged him to study the Torah. Wiesel said his father represented reason, while his mother Sarah promoted faith.Fine 1982:4. Wiesel was instructed that his genealogy traced back to Rabbi Schlomo Yitzhaki (Rashi), and was a descendant of Rabbi Yeshayahu ben Abraham Horovitz ha-Levi.Wiesel, Elie, and Elie Wiesel Catherine Temerson (Translator). "Rashi (Jewish Encounters)". . Schocken, January 1, 1970. Web. October 27, 2016.
Wiesel had three siblings. His older sisters were Beatrice and Hilda, and a younger sister Tzipora. Beatrice and Hilda survived the war, and were reunited with Wiesel at a French orphanage. They eventually emigrated to North America, with Beatrice moving to Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Tzipora, Shlomo, and Sarah were murdered in the Holocaust.
Imprisonment during the Holocaust
In March 1944, Germany occupied Hungary, thus extending the Holocaust into Northern Transylvania as well. Wiesel was 15, and he, with his family, along with the rest of the town's Jewish population, was placed in one of the two confinement ghettos set up in Máramarossziget (Sighet), the town where he had been born and raised. In May 1944, the Hungarian authorities, under German pressure, began to deport the Jewish community to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where up to 90 percent of the people were murdered on arrival.
Immediately after they were sent to Auschwitz, his mother and his younger sister were murdered in the gas chambers. Wiesel and his father were selected to perform labor so long as they remained able-bodied, after which they were to be murdered in the gas chambers. Wiesel and his father were later deported to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. Until that transfer, he admitted to Oprah Winfrey, his primary motivation for trying to survive Auschwitz was knowing that his father was still alive: "I knew that if I died, he would die.""Inside Auschwitz" , Oprah Winfrey broadcast visit, January 2006 After they were taken to Buchenwald, his father died before the camp was liberated. In Night, Wiesel recalled the shame he felt when he heard his father being beaten and was unable to help.
Wiesel was tattooed with inmate number "A-7713" on his left arm. The camp was liberated by the U.S. Third Army on April 11, 1945, when they were just prepared to be evacuated from Buchenwald.See the film Elie Wiesel Goes Home, directed by Judit Elek, narrated by William Hurt.
Writing career France After World War II ended and Wiesel was freed, he joined a transport of 1,000 child survivors of Buchenwald to Ecouis, France, where the Œuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE) had established a rehabilitation center. Wiesel joined a smaller group of 90 to 100 boys from Orthodox homes who wanted kosher facilities and a higher level of religious observance; they were cared for in a home in Ambloy under the directorship of Judith Hemmendinger. This home was later moved to Taverny and operated until 1947.Schmidt, Shira, and Mantaka, Bracha. "A Prince in a Castle". Ami, September 21, 2014, pp. 136-143.
Afterwards, Wiesel traveled to Paris where he learned French and studied literature, philosophy and psychology at the Sorbonne. He heard lectures by philosopher Martin Buber and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre and he spent his evenings reading works by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka, and Thomas Mann.
By the time he was 19, he had begun working as a journalist, writing in French, while also teaching Hebrew and working as a choirmaster. He wrote for Israeli and French newspapers, including Tsien in Kamf (in Yiddish).Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Beating the Odds: A Teen Guide to 75 Superstars Who Overcame Adversity, ABC CLIO (2008) pp. 154–156
In 1946, after learning of the Irgun's bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, Wiesel made an unsuccessful attempt to join the underground Zionist movement. In 1948, he translated articles from Hebrew into Yiddish for Irgun periodicals, but never became a member of the organization. In 1949, he traveled to Israel as a correspondent for the French newspaper L'arche. He then was hired as Paris correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, subsequently becoming its roaming international correspondent.
For ten years after the war, Wiesel refused to write about or discuss his experiences during the Holocaust. He began to reconsider his decision after a meeting with the French author François Mauriac, the 1952 Nobel Laureate in Literature who eventually became Wiesel's close friend. Mauriac was a devout Christian who had fought in the French Resistance during the war. He compared Wiesel to "Lazarus rising from the dead", and saw from Wiesel's tormented eyes, "the death of God in the soul of a child".Fine, Ellen S. Legacy of Night: The Literary Universe of Elie Wiesel, State Univ. of New York Press (1982) p. 28Wiesel, Elie. Night, Hill and Wang (2006) p. ix Mauriac persuaded him to begin writing about his harrowing experiences.
Wiesel first wrote the 900-page memoir Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent) in Yiddish, which was published in abridged form in Buenos Aires. Wiesel rewrote a shortened version of the manuscript in French, La Nuit, in 1955. It was translated into English as Night in 1960. The book sold few copies after its initial publication, but still attracted interest from reviewers, leading to television interviews with Wiesel and meetings with writers such as Saul Bellow.
As its profile rose, Night was eventually translated into 30 languages with ten million copies sold in the United States. At one point film director Orson Welles wanted to make it into a feature film, but Wiesel refused, feeling that his memoir would lose its meaning if it were told without the silences in between his words. Oprah Winfrey made it a spotlight selection for her book club in 2006.
In 2025, a documentary by filmmaker Oren Rudavsky, Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire, examined the history behind the writing and publication of Night. According to The Times of Israel, the film traced Wiesel's postwar years in France, his work as a journalist in Paris, and his decision, about a decade after the Holocaust, to write about his experiences. The article noted that the earliest version of the memoir was an approximately 862-page Yiddish manuscript, Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent), which was published in Argentina before Wiesel later shortened and reshaped the work into the French-language La Nuit (1958) and, eventually, the English-language Night (1960). The documentary also discussed the book's initially limited sales and its later growth in prominence, particularly after increased public interest in Holocaust memory following the 1967 Six-Day War and Oprah Winfrey's 2006 selection of Night for her book club. The Documentary film premiered across in North America on PBS under their American Masters series on January 22, 2026.
United States In 1955, Wiesel moved to New York as foreign correspondent for the Israel daily, Yediot Ahronot. In 1969, he married Austrian Marion Erster Rose, who also translated many of his books. They had one son, Shlomo Elisha Wiesel, named after Wiesel's father.Telushkin, Joseph. "Rebbe", pp. 190–191. HarperCollins, 2014.
Wiesel developed a close relationship with Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, with whom he held extended private conversations and corresponded about faith after the Holocaust. Wiesel later said that Schneerson convinced him to marry and build a family, after Wiesel had struggled with the idea of rebuilding his personal life following the Holocaust.
In the U.S., he eventually wrote over 40 books, most of them non-fiction Holocaust literature, and novels. As an author, he was awarded a number of literary prizes and is considered among the most important in describing the Holocaust from a highly personal perspective. As a result, some historians credited Wiesel with giving the term Holocaust its present meaning, although he did not feel that the word adequately described that historical event.Wiesel:1999, 18. In 1975, he co-founded the magazine Moment with writer Leonard Fein.
The 1979 book and play The Trial of God are said to have been based on his real-life Auschwitz experience of witnessing three Jews who, close to death, conduct a trial against God, under the accusation that He has been oppressive towards the Jewish people.
Wiesel also played a role in the initial success of The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski by endorsing it before it became known the book was fiction and, in the sense that it was presented as all Kosinski's true experience, a hoax.
Wiesel published two volumes of memoirs. The first, All Rivers Run to the Sea, was published in 1994 and covered his life up to the year 1969. The second, titled And the Sea is Never Full and published in 1999, covered the years from 1969 to 1999.And the Sea Is Never Full , The New York Times book review, January 2, 2000
Academic career Wiesel held the position of Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Boston University from 1976,"Fond memories of Elie Wiesel in Boston" , The Boston Globe, July 2, 2016 teaching in both its religion and philosophy departments. He became a close friend of the president and chancellor John Silber. The university created the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies in his honor. From 1972 to 1976 Wiesel was a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York and member of the American Federation of Teachers.