Elie Wiesel

He was born in 1928 in Sighet, Transylvania. During the World War II, his family and he were sent to the German concentration camps where his parents and little sister died.
In his childhood, he spent a lot of time talking with Moshe in the synagogue.
In 1942, Elie hade his bar mitzvah and he continued studying the Bible and other Jewish books, he felt really attracted to Kabbalah. He learned a little bit about astrology, parapsychology, hypnotism and magic.
He and his two older sisters survived, they were freed from Buchenwald in 1945. He got in touch with them in 1947.
He was taken to Paris, he studied at the Sorbonne and he became a journalist, he is also a novelist and a Nobel Prize winner.
He lives in New York City, and he is a United States citizen.
A turning point in Wiesel’s life came when he interviewed the Catholic writer Fancois Mauriac. During the interview, everything Mauriac said seemed to relate to Jesus. Finally, Wiesel burst out that while Christians love to talk about the suffering of Jesus, "…ten years ago, not very far from here, I knew Jewish children every one of whom suffered a thousand times more, six million times more, than Christ on the cross. And we don’t speak about them."2 Wiesel ran from the room, but Mauriac followed him, asked Wiesel about his experiences and advised him to write them down.
In 1958, he published his first book “La Nuit”, a literary work about his experience in the concentration camps and how he lost everything, even the innocence. He was not ready to publicize his experiences, however, and promised himself to wait 10 years before writing them down in detail. He has written around thirty books, in many of his lectures he has concerned himself with the situation of the Jews and other groups who have suffered as him.
In 1986, he received the Nobel Peace Prize as “a messenger to mankind,” and “a human being dedicated to humanity.” He explained his actions by saying the whole world knew what was happening in the concentration camps, but did nothing.

He has dedicated his life to help persons who have suffered of racism and the ones who survived the Holocaust.In 1969, Wiesel married Marion Erster Rose, a divorced woman from Austria. In 1972, they had a son who they named Shlomo Elisha Wiesel, after Wiesel’s father.


nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1986/wiesel-bio.html