A short life of the author
Elie Wiesel (30 September 1928 – 2 July 2016) was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate whose memoir Night (originally published in Yiddish as Un di velt hot geshvign in 1956, revised and translated into French as La Nuit in 1958, and into English in 1960) became the most widely read work of Holocaust testimony and one of the defining moral documents of the twentieth century. Over a career spanning six decades, Wiesel published more than sixty books — novels, memoirs, essays, plays, and biblical commentaries — and became the world’s most prominent voice for Holocaust remembrance and human rights.
Life
Wiesel was born in Sighet, a small town in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania (then Romania, now in northern Romania near the Ukrainian border). He grew up in a close-knit Orthodox Jewish community. His father, Shlomo, was a community leader and shopkeeper; his mother, Sarah, was the daughter of a Hasidic rabbi. Wiesel studied Talmud, Kabbalah, and Hasidic texts as a boy.
In May 1944, when Wiesel was fifteen, the Jews of Sighet were deported to Auschwitz. His mother and youngest sister were killed upon arrival. Wiesel and his father were sent to Buna, a sub-camp of Auschwitz, and later transferred to Buchenwald. His father died in Buchenwald in January 1945, weeks before the camp was liberated by American forces on 11 April 1945.
After the war, Wiesel was taken to France as part of a group of orphaned children. He studied at the Sorbonne, became a journalist — working for the French newspaper L’Arche and the Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth — and in 1955, at the urging of the Catholic writer François Mauriac, began to write about his experience in the camps. He imposed a ten-year vow of silence on himself before writing about the Holocaust.
Night
Night is a spare, devastating account — barely a hundred pages — of Wiesel’s deportation to Auschwitz, the death of his family, the disintegration of his faith in God, and the death of his father. The prose is stripped of ornamentation and literary effect, achieving its power through compression, understatement, and an unflinching refusal to look away.
The book’s central passages — the hanging of the child who was too light to die quickly on the gallows, Wiesel’s inability to give his dying father water — have become iconic moments in the literature of atrocity. The book’s theological dimension is equally important: Night is, among other things, a book about the death of God in the face of evil. “Where is God? Where is He?” a prisoner asks as the child hangs on the gallows. “Here He is — He is hanging here on this gallows.”
The book was initially rejected by multiple publishers and sold poorly in its first years. It became a bestseller only after Wiesel became famous as a public figure in the 1970s and 1980s, and particularly after Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book club in 2006. It has since sold over ten million copies and is assigned in schools worldwide.
The Trilogy and Other Fiction
Night is the first volume of an informal trilogy. Dawn (1961) tells the story of a Holocaust survivor who joins the Jewish underground in Palestine and is ordered to execute a British hostage. The Accident (1962, also published as Day) follows a survivor in New York who is hit by a car and, in the hospital, confronts his ambivalence about living.
Wiesel’s later novels include The Town Beyond the Wall (1964), The Gates of the Forest (1966), A Beggar in Jerusalem (1968) — which won the Prix Médicis — The Oath (1973), and The Trial of God (1979), a play set in a seventeenth-century Ukrainian village after a pogrom, in which three wandering actors put God on trial for abandoning the Jewish people.
The Witness
Wiesel became the world’s most prominent Holocaust witness and moral voice. He was appointed chairman of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust by Jimmy Carter (1978), which led to the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986; the Norwegian Nobel Committee called him “one of the most important spiritual leaders and guides in an age when violence, repression, and racism continue to characterize the world.” He taught at Boston University for decades and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Collecting Wiesel
La Nuit (1958, Éditions de Minuit, with a foreword by François Mauriac) in the French first edition brings $1,000–$5,000. The American first edition of Night (1960, Hill & Wang) brings $500–$3,000. Dawn (1961) and The Accident (1962) bring $100–$400 each. Signed copies are available; Wiesel signed at lectures and events throughout his life.