Elie Wiesel was born on this day in 1928 in Sighet, Transylvania, now part of Romania. When he was a teenager in 1944, Nazis occupying Hungary deported Sighet’s Jewish population, including Wiesel’s family, to Auschwitz-Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp in occupied Poland. Wiesel’s mother and younger sister were killed upon arriving to the camp. Wiesel, his father, and two living sisters were forced to do hard labor. His father would die after being transferred to Buchenwald, another concentration camp where Wiesel would be liberated in 1945.
After being liberated, Wiesel went to Paris and studied at the Sorbonne before working as a journalist, author, and professor. He published a memoir, “Night,” in 1958; it remains a classic book studied in schools across the country. He would publish dozens more books through his lifetime and became a major human rights activist, including serving as a major proponent of the founding of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He died in 2016 at 87 years old.
To learn more about Wiesel, read this article from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
