Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel grew up in Sighet, a town in the Carpathian Mountains with a large Jewish community. As a boy he studied the Torah and Jewish mysticism. Hungary annexed the region in 1940, and in May 1944 the town's Jews were deported to Auschwitz. His mother and his younger sister were murdered there. He and his father were moved to Buchenwald, where his father died weeks before American troops freed the camp in April 1945.

After the war he lived in France, studied at the Sorbonne and worked as a journalist. For ten years he refused to write about the camps. Then he wrote a long account in Yiddish, published in Argentina in 1956. He cut it to a short French version, La Nuit (1958), which appeared in English as Night in 1960. Night tells of the first night in the camp, the loss of his faith, and a son's guilt over his father's death.

Wiesel moved to New York and became a US citizen. He taught at Boston University from 1976, wrote 57 books, and led the commission that created the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 and died in Manhattan in 2016.