Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel married Marion Erster Rose in 1969. His wife, who hailed from Austria, translated many of his books. They had one son, Shlomo Elisha Wiesel, named after Wiesel’s father.

He suffered from health problems in his later years and died on July 2, 2016, at the age of 87.

Elie Wiesel was born on 30 September 1928 in the town of Sighet, Transylvania, now a part of Romania. His father, Shlomo Wiesel, was an orthodox Jew and had a grocery store while Sarah, his mother, was a daughter of a farmer. He had three sisters.

Growing up in a small village in Romania, Elie’s world revolved around family, religious study, community and God. Shlomo 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. Elie grew up speaking Yiddish at home, and was also fluent in Hungarian, Romanian, and German.

In 1944, while the World War II was ravaging much of Europe, the Nazis marched into Wiesel’s city, ending his idyllic life. He, along with his family and other Jewish residents of his town were taken prisoners and placed in confinement ghettos.

A few weeks later, the Wiesel family was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland where his mother and one of his sisters were killed. Separated from his two other sisters, Wiesel and his father were later deported to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. His father died at this camp, leaving Elie an orphan at 16.

The war finally ended in 1945 and the camp was liberated by the U.S. Third Army on April 11, 1945.

Following the liberation the teenager was placed on a train with 400 other orphans and sent to France where he was assigned to a home in Normandy under the care of a Jewish organization. There he enrolled in the Sorbonne and studied literature, philosophy and psychology.

While in his late teens, he started working as a journalist and began writing for the French newspaper ‘L’Arche.’ He was sent to Israel in 1949 as a correspondent. While in Israel he was also hired as a Paris correspondent for the Israeli newspaper ‘Yedioth Ahronoth.’

Over the course of his journalistic career he met the French author, François Mauriac, the 1952 Nobel Laureate in Literature, who eventually became Wiesel's close friend. Till then Wiesel had refused to write about or discuss his experiences during the Holocaust. However, he reconsidered his decision after being advised by Mauriac to begin writing about his harrowing experiences.

He first wrote and published his memoir ‘Un di velt hot geshvign’ (And the World Remained Silent) in Yiddish. In 1955 he rewrote a shortened version of the manuscript in French, ‘La Nuit.’

In 1955, Wiesel moved to New York as foreign correspondent for the Israel daily, ‘Yediot Ahronot.’ He published the English version of his memoir, ‘Night’ in 1960. Initially the book sold just a few copies but gained much in popularity after some favorable reviews which led to television interviews with Wiesel. Over the following years it was translated into 30 languages with ten million copies sold in the United States.