Elie Wiesel אלי ויזל
writer, witness of the Holocaust, Nobel Peace Prize laureate
Eliezer Wiesel was born in 5689 in Sighet, Transylvania, into a Hasidic family; he studied Talmud and was drawn to Kabbalah. In the spring of 5704 the whole community was deported to Auschwitz. His mother and younger sister were murdered on arrival; his father died in Buchenwald weeks before liberation. He was sixteen.
He went to France, studied at the Sorbonne, worked as a journalist — and for ten years wrote nothing about the camps, having vowed silence. François Mauriac persuaded him to break it. In 5716 the book appeared in Yiddish and then, reworked in French, as «Night». Translated into dozens of languages, it became one of the most widely read testimonies of the twentieth century.
Wiesel wrote some sixty more books — novels, essays, retellings of Hasidic tales — and became the principal voice of Holocaust memory. He taught at Boston University and chaired the commission that created the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In 5746 he received the Nobel Peace Prize, saying what became his formula: neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim; silence encourages the tormentor.