Paste your essay in here… Ms. Tempest
Honors American Literature
2 March 2017
The Night of Elie Wiesel
The life of Elie, or properly, Eliezer Wiesel, is not one easily forgotten. Elie Wiesel was a victim of the Nazi concentration camps who survived and went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize. Wiesel was known as a survivor, an activist, and an educator. He fought for the six million Jewish who perished in the Holocaust and dedicated the better part of his life to humanitarian efforts across the globe. He fought for Israel and defended countless innocent victims regardless of their ethnicity or religious beliefs. Wiesel became a well-respected international activist, orator, and figure of peace for many years. The legacy of his humanitarian efforts and seminal novel Night will continue to improve the lives of generations to come.
By pleading for the oppressed and rejecting all fanaticism, Wiesel spoke out against injustices across nations, including South Africa, Bosnia, Cambodia, and Rwanda. For more than fifteen years, Elie and his wife Marion dedicated their humanitarian work to the Ethiopian-born Israeli youth. After surviving the dehumanizing horrors of the Holocaust, his memoir Night became an acclaimed bestseller, translated into dozens of languages (Kahn).
Wiesel was born in the small town of Sighet, Transylvania to Shlomo and Sarah Wiesel on September 30th, 1928. The town of Sighet is located in present-day Romania, although historically the area has been claimed by the people of both Hungary and Romania. Elie grew up speaking Yiddish at home, and Hungarian, Romanian, and German in public. During his youth, Elie devoted years of his life to religious studies. His father encouraged him to study modern Hebrew and secular subjects as well (“The Life and Work of Wiesel”).
In May of 1944, Nazi Germany, with Hungary's agreement, forced the Jewish, including Elie and his family, to relocate to the concentration camp known as Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland (which was, at the time, occupied by the Nazis). Wiesel was only fifteen years old when this happened. Elie would later recall the first night in the concentration camp as, "… that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed" (Wiesel 32). This horrific, dehumanizing first night in the Nazi concentration camp was the first of many experiences that would later motivate Wiesel to write. After his grueling time within Auschwitz-Birkenau, Wiesel and his father were sent to Buna Werke labor camp, a sub-camp of Auschwitz III-Monowitz. There, they were “forced to work under deplorable, inhumane conditions” (Walker). They were then transferred to other Nazi camps such as Buchenwald.
To reach Buchenwald, the prisoners of the concentration camp were forced to run ten kilometers in the snow after being starved for months. When arriving at Buchenwald, Wiesel’s father, Shlomo died by physical violence by a German soldier. The tragic irony was that three months later the camp was liberated in 1945, and Elie had survived. After Buchenwald was liberated and Wiesel was free, he was made aware that his mother and younger sister had died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and that his two older sisters had survived.
Post-liberation Weisel took refuge in a French orphanage for a short period of time following his internment and near-death experience. Wiesel studied literature, philosophy, and psychology at the Sorbonne University in Paris from 1948 to 1951. It was at the Sorbonne University that he took an interest in journalism, and wrote for French and Israeli publications. Elie vowed to himself while in the concentration camps to never write about his experiences because they were too gruesome. But in 1955, after meeting with Francois Mauriac (a renowned French Catholic novelist and Nobel laureate), he changed his mind and wrote a 900-page book in his native language, Yiddish. Wiesel’s novel was first titled: And the World Remained Silent. This work of Wiesel’s was first published in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Two years later, it was rewritten in a compacted, 127-page French edition with a different title: La Nuit (translated to "Night" in English). After its publication, translated into English, Night would be referred to as "a slim volume of terrifying power" by the New York Times. After the publication of his first work, Wiesel’s career in writing took off and he wrote an additional 35 works in French. These novels dealt primarily with Judaism and the Holocaust. Some French prevalent novels of his include L'Aube (Dawn) and Le Jour (The Accident). These are semi-autobiographical novels involving Holocaust survivors (Wolpe).
In arguably his most well-known work, Night, Wiesel shares his suffering that he experienced and witnessed in the concentration camps. In Night he narrates his personal experiences from the deaths of his family members, to the death of his adolescence and innocence, and to the death of his naïve faith in the goodness of mankind (Wolpe). When asked why he hesitated to write about his experiences in the Holocaust Wiesel stated, “I wanted to be sure to find the words, the right words. I'm not sure I did. I have doubts. To this day I have doubts, because there are no words” (Khan).
Throughout Night, Wiesel uses the power of the genre of a memoir to capture his horrific experiences and influence its readers with them. Wiesel introduces his novel with the quote "To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time" (Wiesel 15).
Ultimately, Wiesel insists that forgetting about such crimes like the Holocaust against humanity is not an option, neither for himself or for the reader. This idea of remembrance is present within the first few pages of Night and remains a prevalent concept throughout the brief novel.
Wiesel moved to New York in 1955 and became a U.S. citizen in 1963. Upon arriving to New York, Wiesel met an Austrian Holocaust survivor named Marion Rose. In 1969 they became married in Jerusalem. Wiesel and his wife had one son, Elisha Wiesel. It was when Wiesel became to know of the persecution Soviet Jews were facing in the USSR that Wiesel became politically involved. In 1965 he traveled to the USSR to see for himself. In his novel The Jews of Silence he described his observations of the situation. He later pleaded for the oppressed citizens in the Soviet Union, South Africa, Vietnam, Biafra, and Bangladesh. He was recognized and honored throughout nations with a myriad of international awards that included the “U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom and the French Legion of Honor's Grand-Croix” (Kahn).
Teaching was another of Wiesel's passions. In the 1970s he was appointed as Boston University's Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities department. In addition to being a professor at Boston he taught Judaic studies at the City University of New York and was an occasional visiting scholar at Yale. He founded the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity with his wife Marion to "combat indifference, intolerance and injustice" throughout the world. In 1986 Wiesel received the Nobel Prize for Peace. In 1978, Wiesel was announced Chair of the President's Commission on the Holocaust by President Jimmy Carter (“The Life and Work of Wiesel”).
From surviving one of the most horrific events of all time, to defending the rights of the innocent, to leaving the legacy of The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, it is evident that Wiesel lived an influential and inspiring life. Wiesel made it his life’s work to spread remembrance throughout society. He was never one to turn a blind eye to the oppressed, as many did during the Holocaust. He was never one to allow the innocent to suffer, their lives to be taken and forgotten. Wiesel was never a bystander. He was the one who stood up for those who couldn’t stand up for themselves. He was the one who told the oblivious world about the true horrors he had first-hand experienced in the Holocaust. Wiesel’s memory and life’s work has given hope to the hopeless, inspired generations to speak up, and given a voice to the oppressed. His work will continue to do the same for years to come.