Night. Night - Oncourse

Kaczur 14
Grandfather
Reb Dodye Feig
Life for Wiesel and his extended family changed tragically in 1943 and 1944, when Nazi
Germany decided that the Jews living in the Axis nations of Eastern Europe — Romania,
Hungary, and Bulgaria — should share the fate of the rest of European Jewry and be
transported to the death camps of Poland. Grandfather Dodye went first, when he and his
three sons and their children where taken away in 1943. The following year, Wiesel's entire
family, his mother, father and his three sisters, were transported with him to Poland. Only
Wiesel and his two older sisters survived.
Liberated from Auschwitz - Buchenwald by the American Third Army in 1945, he was sent to
France to study as part of a group of Jewish children orphaned by the Holocaust. There he
was given a choice — secular studies, or religious studies. Wiesel's faith had been severely
wounded by his experiences in Auschwitz and three other concentration camps. He felt God had turned his
back on the Jews. But, despite his bitterness, he chose to return to religious studies:
"My only experience in the secular world," he explains, "was Auschwitz."
Sent to Paris to study at the Sorbonne after several years of preparatory schools,
he became a journalist for a small French newspaper, and supplemented his
meager income as a translator and Hebrew teacher. Persuaded by the
distinguished French Catholic writer Francois Mauriac, he finally put down on
paper the experiences he had vowed to recount only after ten years of silence.
The result was "Night", an internationally acclaimed memoir that has been
translated into 30 languages and has sold more than seven million copies, the
income from which goes to support a yeshiva in Israel established by Wiesel in
memory of his father.
Wiesel's entry card to Paris
Wiesel has, since then, dedicated his life to ensuring that the murder of six million Jews would never be
forgotten, and that other human beings would never be subjected to genocidal homicide.
Most of the 40 books he has written since — novels, collections of essay, plays — explore the subject that
haunts him, the events that he describes as "history's worst crime." Speaking, writing, traveling incessantly,
he has become a spokesman for human rights wherever they are threatened — in the former Soviet Union,
Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo — and with the Nobel Peace Prize award established the Elie Wiesel Foundation for
Humanity.
Assigned to New York in 1956 as a correspondent for an Israeli newspaper, Wiesel was struck by a taxi while
crossing the street and was hospitalized for months. Still a stateless person at the time, unable to travel to
France to renew his identity card and unable to receive a US visa without it, he found that he was eligible to
become a legal resident. Five years later, he received an American passport, the first passport he had ever
had. Years later, when his then close friend Francois Mitterand became President of France, he was offered
French nationality.
"Though I thanked him," he writes in his memoirs, "and not without some emotion, I declined the offer.
When I had needed a passport, it was America that had given me one."
In 1978 President Carter named Wiesel to chair the President's Commission on the
Holocaust, which recommended the creation of a national day of remembrance and the
US Holocaust Memorial Museum, both subsequently created by acts of Congress.
He has been Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at the City University of New York
(1972-76), Henry Luce Visiting Scholar in Humanities and Social Thought at Yale
University (1982-83), and since 1976 has occupied the Mellon Chair in the Humanities at
Boston University.
Wiesel on a boat
to Israel in 1949
Along with the Nobel Peace Prize, he has been awarded the Presidential Medal of
Freedom, the United States Congressional Gold Medal, and the Grand Croix of the French
Legion of Honor.
http://www.pbs.org/eliewiesel/life/index.html