Elie Wiesel Biography

Elie Wiesel was born Eliezer Wiesel on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, Transylvania, which, then a part of Hungary, now belongs to Romania. He lived with his parents Shlomo and Sarah Wiesel and grew up with three sisters. Wiesel pursued religious studies at a nearby yeshiva, which was influenced by the traditional spiritual beliefs of his grandfather and mother, as well as his father’s liberal expressions of Judaism.

In 1940, Hungary annexed Sighet, and the Wiesels along with other Jewish families were forced to live in ghettos. In May 1944, Nazi Germany, with Hungary’s agreement, forced Jews living in Sighet to be deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. At the age of 15, Wiesel and his entire family were sent to Auschwitz as part of the Holocaust, which took the lives of more than six million Jews. His father, mother, and younger sister perished in the camp, and along with Wiesel, only his elder sisters Hilda and Beatrice survived.

After World War II, Wiesel studied in Paris and became a journalist. In 1952, he met the renowned Nobel Laureate French writer Francois Mauriac during an interview, who persuaded him to chronicle his experiences at the concentration camps.

In 1955, Wiesel moved to New York and became a US citizen in 1963. He met Marion Rose, an Austrian Holocaust survivor, in New York, and they married in Jerusalem in 1969.

After Night, Wiesel authored numerous books, including the novels Town of Luck (1962), The Gates of the Forest (1966), and The Oath (1973), and such nonfiction works as Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters (1982) and the memoir All Rivers Run to the Sea (1995). He eventually became a revered international activist, orator, and figure of peace over the years and served as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University. A recipient of countless awards, honors, and distinctions, Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Prize for Peace for his campaigns against racism and bigotry in 1986. In 2006, he was knighted in London in recognition of his work toward raising Holocaust education in the United Kingdom.