Elie Wiesel Born: Holocaust's Defining Witness

He was fifteen when the Germans came to his town in Romania. His mother and younger sister were killed at Auschwitz the day they arrived. His father died in the final weeks of the war, in Buchenwald, while Elie Wiesel watched and could not help him. He did not write about it for ten years. Night, published in 1960, is 120 pages. He needed that long to find words that did not collapse under the weight of what he was describing. The original manuscript, written in Yiddish and titled And the World Remained Silent, ran to over 800 pages. His editor at Editions de Minuit, Jerome Lindon, helped him cut it to a fraction of its original length, and the compression gave the final text its devastating power. The book was rejected by multiple publishers before finding a home, and initial sales were modest. It took decades for Night to become the most widely read Holocaust memoir in the world, eventually selling over ten million copies in thirty languages. Wiesel settled in the United States, became a professor at Boston University, and spent his career testifying to what he had witnessed. He testified at the trial of Klaus Barbie. He confronted President Reagan about visiting a cemetery where SS soldiers were buried. He spoke at the dedication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. When he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, he said: "We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." He died on July 2, 2016, at eighty-seven. The book is still read in high school classrooms in over forty countries, and it remains the single most assigned text about the Holocaust in American education.