Elie Wiesel Biography

Elie Wiesel was a Jewish Romanian-American writer, professor and the author of the bestselling book ‘Night’ as well as many other books dealing with Judaism, the Holocaust, and the moral responsibility of the people to fight hatred, racism and genocide. Born in Romania, he along with his family was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland in 1944 during the Holocaust. A teenager at that time, he became an eye witness to the atrocities meted out to Jews in the concentration camps where he lost both his parents. Along with the other prisoners of the camps, he was liberated following the ending of the World War II, but the memories of the war would haunt him forever. He then moved to France where he studied literature, philosophy and psychology at the Sorbonne and became a journalist. For years he refused to write about or discuss his experiences during the Holocaust but reconsidered his decision on the advice of the Catholic writer Francois Mauriac who encouraged him to write about his traumatic experiences. Wiesel thus wrote the memoir ‘Night’ which became a grim testimonial of the Holocaust. Eventually his career took him to the United States where he settled down for life. In his later life, he emerged as a political activist and humanitarian and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for voicing his concern about the “global crisis of humanity”.