Introduction to

Night
By: Elie Wiesel
About the Author
 Born September 30, 1928
in Sighet, Romania.
 Grew up in a small village
where his life revolved
around the following:
 Family
 Religious Study
 Community
 God
 He pursued Jewish
religious studies as a
young boy.
About the Author
 In 1940, the Wiesels were forced out of
their home and required to go with other
Jewish families to live in a ghetto.
About the Author
 In 1944, when Elie was 15, he was
deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau
concentration camp.
 When they arrived at the camp, he and his father
were warned to lie about their ages. Elie said he
was 18 and his father said he was 40 instead of
50.
 They were sent to be slave laborers.
 His mother and youngest sister were sent to the
gas chambers.
 About the Author
 Elie and his father
survived first Auschwitz
and then the Buna Werke
labor camp for eight
months.
 They endured deplorable,
inhumane conditions,
beatings, excessive work,
starvation, and other torture.
 About the Author

 In the winter of 1945,

Wiesel’s right foot became
badly swollen and a Jewish
doctor, who was also an
inmate, performed surgery
on it. He had no anesthesia.
About the Author
 Three days after his
surgery, the inmates
were forced to go on a
death march in the
snow.
 For ten days they were
forced to run, then
crammed into freight
cars, and sent to the
Buchenwald
concentration camp.
  Of the 20,000
About the Author prisoners who left
Buna, only 6,000
survived.
 When they arrived to
Buchenwald, Elie’s
father, Shlomo, died of
dysentary, starvation,
and exhaustion after
being beaten by a
German soldier just 3
months before the
camp was liberated.
About the Author
 After the death of his father, Elie was sent to join the
children’s block of Buchenwald.
 At the end of the war, April 6, 1945, the prisoners were told
they would no longer be fed.
 They began evacuating the camp killing 10,000 prisoners a
day.
About the Author
 After he was freed from the camp on April
11, Wiesel became sick with intestinal
problems.
 After several days in the hospital, Wiesel
wrote an outline for a book describing the
Holocaust.
 He wasn’t ready to publicize his experience, but
promised he would in ten years.
About the Author
 After Elie was released
from the hospital, he had
no family to return to.
 He went with 400 other
orphan children to France.
 From 1945-1947, he
moved from house to
house found for him by
Children’s Rescue Society.
About the Author
 By 1947, he was
reunited with both of
his surviving sisters,
Bea and Hilda.
 Hilda found his picture in
a newspaper.
 He found Bea in
Antwerp.
About the Author
 In 1948, Elie enrolled in the
Sorbonne where he studied
literature, philosophy, and
psychology.
 He was extremely poor and
very depressed.
 He considered suicide often.
About the Author
 Over time, he became involved with the Irgun, a Jewish
militant organization in Palestine, and translated materials
from Hebrew to Yiddish for the Irgun’s newspaper.
 He began working as a reporter, and in 1949, he traveled to
Israel as a correspondent for the French newspaper, L’Arche.
 In Israel, he found a job as a Paris correspondent for the
Israeli newspaper Yediot Achronot.
 He traveled the world in the 1950’s.
 He also became involved in the argument whether Israel should
accept reparations payments from West Germany.
Losing Faith
 In 1955, Wiesel moved to New York as
foreign correspondent for Yediot Ahronot.
 It was around this time that he decided to
stop attending synagogue, except on the
High Holidays, as a protest against what he
concluded was divine injustice.
Turning Point
 Wiesel’s turning point came when he interviewed
the Catholic novelist, Francois Mauriac.
 During the interview, everything was centered
around Jesus and Wiesel ended up saying the
following;
 "…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."
 Wiesel ran out of the room, but Mauriac followed and
advised Weisel to write down his experience.
The Novel
 Elie spent a year working on the 862 page
manuscript he called And the World Was Silent.
 He gave it to his publisher who returned it as a
258 page book.
 The book is a memoir and told of his
experiences during the Holocaust.
 It also is his personal account of his loss of
religious faith.
The Novel
 The book was published first in France in 1958 and then in the
U.S. in 1960.
 The memoir eventually
 became an acclaimed
 bestseller, translated
 into many languages,
 and is considered a
 seminal work on the
 terrors of the Holocaust.
Immigration & his Trilogy
 Wiesel moved to  He continued writing
and Night was
New York in followed by two
1955 and novels, Day (1962),
became a U.S. and Dawn (1961).
citizen in 1963.
The Accident
 Crossing the street
one night in July 1965,
Elie was hit by a taxi
and had to undergo a
ten hour surgery.
 After recovery, he
focused on his writing
and published numerous
books from then on out.
The Marriage
 In 1969, Elie married
Marion Rose, an Austrian
Holocaust survivor. They
married in Jerusalem.
 She translated all of Wiesel’s
subsequent books.
 In 1972, they had a son who
they named Shlomo Elisha
Wiesel, after Wiesel’s father.
Dedications
 Wiesel was outspoken about the suffering of all
people, not only Jews.
 In the 1970s, he protested against South African
apartheid.
 In 1980, he delivered food to starving Cambodians
 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. “That is why I swore never to be silent whenever
and wherever human beings endure suffering and
humiliation.”
Accomplishments
 From 1972 to 1978, Wiesel was a Distinguished
Professor of Judaic Studies at the City University
of New York.
 1978, he became a Professor of Humanities at
Boston University.
 In 1978, President Jimmy Carter asked him to
head the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, which
he did for six years.
 In 1985, Wiesel was awarded the Congressional
Gold Medal of Achievement.
Accomplishments
 In 1988, he established his own humanitarian
foundation, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for
Humanity, to explore the problems of hatred and
ethnic conflicts.
 In the early 1990s, he lobbied the U.S.
government on behalf of victims of ethnic
cleansing in Bosnia.
 Wiesel received numerous awards and
approximately 75 honorary doctorates.
Holocaust Museum
 In 1993, Wiesel spoke at
the dedication of the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington,
D.C.
 His words, which echo his
life’s work, are carved in
stone at the entrance to
the museum:
 “For the dead and the
living, we must bear
witness.”
Quotes to Remember
 “A destruction, an annihilation that only man can provoke,
only man can prevent.”

 “Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only

we can give one another.”

 “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human

beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always
take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.
Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
Quotes to Remember
 “I write to understand as much
as to be understood.”
 “No human race is superior;
no religious faith is inferior. All
collective judgments are
wrong. Only racists make
them.”
 “The opposite of love is not
hate, it's indifference.”
Elie and Oprah
 Wiesel died on July 2, 2016
at the age of 87. 
 He is remembered as an
author, teacher, and an
activist who spent his life
speaking out against
persecution and injustice
across the globe.
Resources

Biography.com Editors. “Elie Wiesel Biography.” Biography.com.14 May 2019

<https://www.biography.com/writer/elie-wiesel#:~:text=surviving%20the
%20Holocaust.-,Who%20Was%20Elie%20Wiesel%3F,the%20internationally
%20acclaimed%20memoir%20Night>.

“Elie Wiesel: A Life.” Yad Vashem. YouTube, 17 Nov. 2019,

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkKm5f_aRp4>.