Elie Wiesel dead at 87

The Nobel Prize-winning Holocaust survivor made millions aware of the the horrors Jews suffered in Germany.

Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928 in the Romanian town of Sighet, to Sarah and Shlomo Wiesel. His maternal grandfather, Dodye Feig, was a member of the Vishnitz Hasidic sect; his strong influence over Wiesel was seen later in some of his writings. Wiesel received a traditional religious education while growing up in Sighet; many years later, in 2002, he returned to his hometown to dedicate the Elie Weisel Memorial House at the site of his childhood home.

The Wiesel family’s lives were seriously disrupted in 1940, when Hungary annexed Sighet and all the Jews in town were forced to move into one of two ghettoes. In May 1944, the Nazis, with Hungary’s agreement, deported the Jewish community of Sighet to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The teenage Wiesel was sent with his father Shlomo to the Buna Werke labor camp, a sub-camp of Auschwitz III-Monowitz, where they were forced to work for eight months before being transferred to a series of other concentration camps near the war’s end…

In 2006, popular talk-show host Oprah Winfrey selected a new translation of “Night” by Wiesel’s wife Marion for her book club, helping to push the book to a top spot on The New York Times’ best-seller list for nonfiction paperbacks. The book now appears in 30 languages.

“Night” would form the first part of Holocaust memoir trilogy that would include “Dawn” and “Day.” All told Wiesel wrote more than 40 works of nonfiction and fiction, including “A Passover Haggadah” and “Wise Men and Their Tales: Portraits of Biblical, Talmudic, and Hasidic Masters.”

 

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.