Elie Wiesel (M / Romania, 1928-2016), Holocaust survivor
Elie Wiesel (M / Romania, 1928-2016), Holocaust survivor.
- KEYWORDS : <Auschwitz> <Death March> <Buchenwald> <Liberation of Buchenwald>
- MEMOIRS : The Night (1956).
Biography
Elie Wiesel was born September 30, 1928 in Sighet, Romania. He was 15 when in March 1944 his family, along with the rest of the town's Jewish population, was placed in one of the two confinement ghettos set up in Sighet. In May 1944, the Hungarian authorities, under German pressure, began to deport the Jewish community to the Auschwitz concentration camp. He lost his parents and his younger sister. Elie was eventually taken to Buchenwald, where he survived until liberation ... 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 set up a rehabilitation center. He was there reunited to his older sisters, who also had survived. Wiesel learned French and studied literature, philosophy and psychology at the Sorbonne. He began working as a journalist. At the invitation of the French author and Nobel Price François Mauriac, who had became a close friend of his, he wrote a 900-page memoir Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent) in Yiddish, which was published in abridged form in Buenos Aires in 1956. A shortened form (La nuit) appeared in French in 1958 ... In 1955, Wiesel moved to New York. The English version of his memoir was published in 1960 and became an international bestseller. From 1972 to 1976 Weisel was a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York and since 1976 a professor of the Humanities at Boston University, which created the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies in his honor. He was involved with Jewish causes and human rights causes and helped establish the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. In 1986 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize ... Died in 2016 in New York.
Book : The Night (1956)
- און די וועלט האָט געשוויגן / Un di Velt Hot Geshvign ["And the World Remained Silent"] <Yiddish> (Buenos Aires: Central Union of Polish Jews in Argentina, 1956). Revised French ed. La Nuit (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1960). English ed. The Night, trans. Stella Rodway (New York: Hill & Wang; and London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1960). International bestseller. Translated in more than 20 languages.
"Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author's original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man's capacity for inhumanity to man ... Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be."--Publisher description.