Comprehensive information and links about Elie Wiesel

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

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. span

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

Wiesel was born in Sighet (now Sighetu Marmaţiei), Romania, to Shlomo and Sarah Wiesel, Orthodox Jews of Hungarian descent who owned a grocery store. He had three sisters. He was devoutly religious as a child and spent much of his young life studying religious texts. He was particularly interested in the traditions and folklore of Hasidic Judaism, but he also studied secular topics.

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. In January 1945, just a few weeks after the two were marched to Buchenwald, Wiesel's father died of dysentery, starvation, exhaustion, and exposure.

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 . However, for ten 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 manu, 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 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 . 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 was 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, 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.

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 , Bosnian victims of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, Nicaragua's Miskito Indians and the Kurds.

Noam Chomsky, the Jewish linguist and radical leftist, has accused Wiesel of hypocrisy for failing to speak out on behalf of the Palestinians., 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 , 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 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."[3]