Elie Wiesel

Origins and early life

Eliezer Wiesel was born in Sighet, in Romania, on 30 September 1928, the son of Shlomo and Sarah Wiesel, who kept a grocery, and the brother of Hilda, Bea and little Tsiporah. The Nobel Prize site calls him a Jewish author, philosopher and humanist: he grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family, learned Hebrew and the Bible from the age of three and then the Talmud, and was shaped by a maternal grandfather who was a Hasid.

Work and career

In 1944, at fifteen, he was deported with his family to Auschwitz, where his mother and his younger sister were murdered on arrival, while he and his father were put to forced labour; he was given the number A-7713. Early in 1945 they were driven on a death march to Buchenwald, where his father died on 29 January, and Elie was still alive when American troops liberated the camp on 11 April 1945. Taken to France with other orphaned children, he studied at the Sorbonne and became a journalist, and after ten years of silence, urged on by François Mauriac, he wrote the testimony published in French as La Nuit in 1958 and in English as Night in 1960.

He moved to New York in 1955, became an American citizen, wrote fifty-seven books, mostly in French and English, and from 1976 taught at Boston University as Andrew Mellon Professor in the Humanities. On 1 November 1978 President Jimmy Carter created the President's Commission on the Holocaust with Wiesel as chairman, a body whose work led to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, and he chaired the council that succeeded it from 1980 to 1986.

Recognition

He alone received the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, for being a messenger to mankind whose message is one of peace, atonement and dignity, and that year he and his wife Marion founded the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. He died at his home in Manhattan on 2 July 2016, aged eighty-seven, and was buried the next day at Valhalla, New York.