The Life of

Elie Wiesel

Author of “Night”

Early Life

• Born in Sighet, Romania on September 30, 1928.

• Lived with his family– Father

• Schlomo

– Mother• Feig

– 3 sisters• Hilda• Bea• Tzipora

Sighet

Early Life

• Began religious Hebrew studies at an early age

• Also encouraged to concentrate on secular studies by his father

• Grew up speaking Yiddish at home, Hungarian, Romanian, and

German in the community

After the War

• Lived in an orphanage until 1948

• Faced with a pivotal choice

• Studied at preparatory schools for a few years in France

• Studied literature, philosophy, and psychology at the Sorbonne in Paris.

After the War

• Author of more than forty books– Night– A Beggar in Jerusalem

• Winner of the Prix Médicis

– Dawn– The Accident– All Rivers Run to the Sea

After the War

• 1976– Appointed Chairman of the United States

Holocaust Memorial Council

• 1985– Congressional Medal of Freedom

• 1986– Nobel Peace Prize

• Professor of Huanities at Boston University since 1976

1944-1945

• Family removed from Sighet in 1944

– Deported by Nazis

– Elie was 15

• Shoved like “cattle’ into a train

Auschwitz-Birkenau

• First camp the Wiezel’s were moved to• Feig and Tzipora gassed on the first night• At least 1,200,000-4,000,000 executed from 1940-

1945• Up to 20,000 gassed and cremated each day

Auschwitz-Birkenau

• Survivors in 1945

• One of the mass graves at Auschwitz

Buchenwald

• Elie and his father moved there in 1945

• Father died days before liberation

• Liberated April 11, 1945

• 904 children rescued including Elie

• 56,545 dead

Buchenwald

Holocaust

• Concentration, Labor, and Extermination camps set up by the Nazis

• Deaths of Jews, Roma and Sinti, Soviet prisoners of war, along with slave laborers, gay men, Jehovah's Witnesses, the disabled, and political opponents

• 9,000,000 – 11,000,000 dead

Holocaust