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Eliezer Wiesel (commonly known as Elie) (born September 30, 1928) is a world-renowned American novelist, philosopher, humanitarian, political activist, and Holocaust survivor. He is the author of over forty books, the most famous of which, Night, is an autobiographical novella that describes his experiences during the Holocaust. Wiesel is of Jewish decent.

Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. The Norwegian Nobel Committee called him a "messenger to mankind", noting that through his struggle to come to terms with "his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler's death camps", as well as his "practical work in the cause of peace", Wiesel has delivered a powerful message "of peace, atonement and human dignity" to humanity.

Wiesel lives in the United States, where he teaches at Boston University and serves as the chairman of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.

Early life and experiences during the Holocaust

Wiesel was born in Sighet (now Sighetu Marmaţiei), Transylvania, to Shlomo Wiesel and his wife Sarah, the daughter of Dodye Feig, a Hasid and farmer from a nearby village. Shlomo was an Orthodox Jew of Hungarian descent, and a shopkeeper who ran his own grocery store. He was active and trusted within the community, and had spent a few months in jail for having helped Polish Jews who escaped to Hungary in the early years of the war. It was Shlomo who instilled a strong sense of humanism in his son, encouraging him to learn Modern Hebrew and to read literature, whereas his mother encouraged him to study Torah and Kabbalah. Wiesel has said his father represented reason, and his mother, faith (Fine 1982:4). He was the only son, and had three sisters, Hilda, Beatrice, and Tzipora.

The town of Sighet became part of the German ally Hungary in 1940, and in 1944 the Nazis deported the Jewish community in Sighet to Auschwitz–Birkenau. While at Auschwitz the number A-7713 was tattooed into his left arm. Wiesel was separated from his mother and younger sister, who are presumed to have been murdered at Auschwitz. Wiesel and his father were sent to the attached work camp Buna-Werke, a subcamp of Auschwitz III Monowitz. He managed to remain with his father for a year as they were forced to work under appalling conditions and shuffled between concentration camps in the closing days of the war. On January 28,1945, just a few weeks after the two were marched to Buchenwald and only months before the camp was liberated by the American Third Army, Wiesel's father died of dysentery, starvation, and exhaustion, after being beaten by a guard.

After the war

I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone–terribly alone in a world without God and without man.

After the war, Wiesel was placed in a French orphanage where he learned the French language and accidentally found two older sisters, Hilda and Bea, who had also survived the war. In 1948, Wiesel began studying philosophy at the Sorbonne. He taught Hebrew and worked as a choirmaster before becoming a professional journalist. As a journalist he wrote for Israeli and French newspapers, including Tsion in Kamf (in Yiddish) and the French newspaper, L'arche. However, for eleven years after the war, Wiesel refused to write about or discuss his experiences during the Holocaust. Like many survivors, Wiesel could not find the words to describe his experiences. However, a meeting with François Mauriac, the 1952 Nobel Laureate in Literature, who eventually became Wiesel's close friend, persuaded him to write about his Holocaust experiences.

Wiesel wrote an 800-page manuscript edited to a 253-page book on his experiences, Un di velt hot geshvign, in Yiddish, (although he usually writes in French). The work was originally published in Buenos Aires. Wiesel compressed and rewrote that book in French, and it was published as the 127-page novel La Nuit, published in English as Night. Even with Mauriac's support, Wiesel had trouble finding a publisher for his book, and initially it sold poorly.

Life in the United States

In 1955, Wiesel moved to New York, where he worked as a foreign correspondent for Yedioth Ahronoth. The next year he was struck by a taxi and was confined to a wheelchair for over a year. Classified as a stateless person, he applied for and became a naturalized citizen of the U.S. in 1963.

In the U.S., Wiesel wrote over forty books, both fiction and non-fiction, and won many literary prizes. Wiesel's writing is considered among the most important works in Holocaust literature. Some historians credit Wiesel with giving the term 'Holocaust' its present meaning, but he does not feel that the word adequately describes the event and wishes it were used less frequently to describe less significant occurrences such as everyday tragedies (Wiesel:1999, 18).

He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for speaking out against violence, repression and racism. He has received many other prizes and honors for his work, including the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor in 1985 and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996. Wiesel has published two volumes of his memoirs. The first, All Rivers Run to the Sea was published in 1994 and covered his life up to the year 1969 while the second, titled And the Sea is Never Full and published in 1999, covered the years from 1969 to 1999.

Wiesel and his wife, Marion, started the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. He served as chairman for the Presidential Commission on the Holocaust (later renamed U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council) from 1978 to 1986, spearheading the building of the Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

Wiesel is particularly fond of teaching and holds the position of Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Boston University. From 1972 to 1976, Wiesel was a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York. In 1982 he served as the first Henry Luce Visiting Scholar in Humanities and Social Thought at Yale University. He also co-instructs Winter Term (January) courses at Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Florida.

Wiesel has become a popular speaker on the subject of the Holocaust. As a political activist, he has advocated for many causes, including Israel, the plight of Soviet and Ethiopian Jews, the victims of apartheid in South Africa, Argentina's Desaparecidos, Bosnian victims of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, Nicaragua's Miskito Indians and the Kurds. He also led a commission organized by the Romanian government to research and write a report, released in 2004, on the true history of the Holocaust in Romania and the involvement of the Romanian wartime regime in attrocities against Jews and other groups, including the Roma. The Romanian government accepted the findings in the report and committed to implementing the commission's recommendations for educating the public on the history of the Holocaust in Romania. The commission, formally called the International Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, came to be called the Wiesel Commission in Elie Wiesel's honor and due to his leadership.

Criticism

• Noam Chomsky, the Jewish linguist and MIT Professor, has accused Wiesel of hypocrisy for failing to speak out on behalf of the Palestinians.
• Norman Finkelstein, author of The Holocaust Industry, has accused Wiesel of inappropriately turning his work on the Holocaust into a business and of charging excessive lecture fees. Finkelstein has also criticized Wiesel's support of the State of Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
• Christopher Hitchens has also lambasted Wiesel, calling him a "contemptible poseur and windbag." Writing in The Nation, Hitchens wrote that Wiesel was indifferent to the killing of Arabs at Sabra and Shatila, commenting that in "1982, after Gen. Ariel Sharon had treated the inhabitants of the Sabra and Shatila camps as target practice for his paid proxies, Wiesel favored us with another of his exercises in neutrality. Asked by the New York Times to comment on the incident, he was one of the few American Jews approached on the matter to express zero remorse. 'I don’t think we should even comment,' he said, proceeding to comment bleatingly that he felt 'sadness–with Israel, and not against Israel.' For the victims, not even a perfunctory word."
• Was criticised by Romanian intellectuals (including Eugene Ionesco and Paul Goma) for repeatedly and unjustly accusing the Romanian people and Romanian authorities of the deportation of the Jews from his native Northern Transylvania. The fact is that between 1940-1944 Northern Transylvania was under Hungarian rule, and the deportations were carried by Hungarian police officers under Hungarian jurisdiction.

Books

ISBN numbers maybe of reissues or reprints. Most are paperback. Un di velt hot geshvign (Tsentral-Farband fun Poylishe Yidn in Argentine, 1956)

• ISBN 0374521409 includes the following 3 books:
  • Night (Hill and Wang 1960; Bantam) ISBN 0553272535
  • Dawn (Hill and Wang 1961; Bantam) ISBN 0553225367
  • The Accident (Le Jour) (Hill and Wang 1962; Bantam) ISBN 0553581708
• The Town Beyond the Wall (Atheneum 1964)
• The Gates of the Forest (Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1966)
• The Jews of Silence (Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1966) ISBN 0935613013
• Legends of our Time (Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1968)
• A Beggar in Jerusalem (Random House 1970)
• One Generation After (Random House 1970)
• Souls on Fire (Random House 1972) ISBN 067144171X
• Night Trilogy (Hill and Wang 1972)
• The Oath (Random House 1973) ISBN 0935613110
• Ani Maamin (Random House 1973)
• Zalmen, or the Madness of God (Random House 1974)
• Messengers of God (Random House 1976) ISBN 067154134X
• A Jew Today (Random House 1978) ISBN 0935613153
• Four Hasidic Masters (University of Notre Dame Press 1978)
• Images from the Bible (The Overlook Press 1980)
• The Trial of God (Random House 1979)
• The Testament (Summit 1981)
• Five Biblical Portraits (University of Notre Dame Press 1981)
• Somewhere a Master (Summit 1982)
• The Golem (Summit 1983) ISBN 0671496247
• The Fifth Son (Summit 1985)
• Against Silence (Holocaust Library 1985)
• Twilight (Summit 1988)
• The Six Days of Destruction (Paulist Press 1988)
• A Journey of Faith (Donald I. Fine 1990)
• From the Kingdom of Memory (Summit 1990)
• Evil and Exile (University of Notre Dame Press 1990)
• Sages and Dreamers (Summit 1991)
• The Forgotten (Summit 1992) ISBN 0805210199
• A Passover Haggadah (Simon and Schuster 1993) ISBN 0671735411
• All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs, Vol. I, 1928-1969 (Knopf 1995) ISBN 0805210288
• Memoir in Two Voices, with François Mitterrand (Arcade 1996)
• And the Sea is Never Full: Memoirs Vol. II, 1969 (Knopf 1999) ISBN 0805210296
• King Solomon and his Magic (Greenwillow 1999)
• Conversations with Elie Wiesel (Schocken 2001)
• The Judges (Knopf 2002)
• Wise Men and Their Tales (Schocken 2003) ISBN 0805241736
• The Time of the Uprooted (Knopf 2005)

Notes

1. 1986 Nobel Peace Prize Press Release
2. The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity

References

• Elie Wiesel: First Person Singular PBS special on Elie Wiesel
• Academy of Achievement: Elie Wiesel (Profile, biography and interview)
• Text and audio of Elie Wiesel's famous speech on "The Perils of Indifference"
• 1988 Audio Interview with Elie Wiesel by Don Swaim of CBS Radio, RealAudio
• Christopher Hitchens criticizes Elie Wiesel in the Nation Magazine
• Fine, Ellen S. Legacy of Night: The Literary Universe of Elie Wiesel. State University of New York Press, 1982. ISBN 0873955900 (paperback)
• Wiesel, Elie. All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs. New York: Knopf, 1995.
• Wiesel, Elie. And the Sea is Never Full: Memoirs 1969-. New York: Schocken, 1999.

• 1928 births
• Living people
• Nobel Peace Prize winners
• Nazi concentration camp survivors
• Naturalized citizens of the United States
• Hungarian writers
• Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
• Members of The American Academy of Arts and Letters
• Formerly stateless people