W. was born Eliezer Wiesel in Sighet, (now Sighetu Marmaţiei), Maramureş, Kingdom of Romania, to Shlomo and Sarah Wiesel. W. had three sisters: Hilda and Bea, who were older than he, and Tzipora, who was the youngest in the family. Shlomo was an Orthodox Jew of Hungarian descent, and a shopkeeper who ran his own grocery store. 

The town of Sighet was re-annexed to Hungary. In early 1944 Elie and his family were placed in a ghetto in Sighet. On May 16, 1944, the Hungarian authorities deported the Jewish community in Sighet to Auschwitz–Birkenau, where the number A-7713 was branded onto his left arm. He was separated from his mother and sister Tzipora, and was sent with his father to work at the Buna-Werke at Auschwitz Monowitz. In January 1945, the two marched to Buchenwald, where W.'s father died from dysentery and exhaustion. 
 
After the war, W. was placed in a French orphanage, where he was reunited with both his older sisters. In 1948 he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, taught Hebrew and worked as a choirmaster before becoming a professional journalist, writing in Yiddish and French. François Mauriac, the 1952 Nobel Laureate in Literature, who eventually became W.'s close friend, persuaded him in 1954 to write about his Holocaust experiences. W. first wrote à 900-page book 'Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent), in Yiddish. Lateron, a shortened version " La Nuit" was published in French and translated into English as "Night".  

In 1955, W. moved to New York City, having become a U.S. citizen. In the U.S., W. wrote over 40 books, both fiction and non-fiction, and won many literary prizes. W.'s writings are considered among the most important in Holocaust literature. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 and many other prizes. W. served as chairman for the Presidential Commission on the Holocaust (later renamed U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council) from 1978 to 1986, spearheading the building of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. He  led a commission organized by the Romanian government to write a report, released in 2004, on the true history of the Holocaust in Romania. In early 2006, W. traveled to Auschwitz with Oprah Winfrey, a visit which was broadcast as part of 'The Oprah Winfrey Show'.  

W. was frequently criticized, e. g. by Christopher Hitchens who qualified him as a "contemptible poseur and windbag". Some 'Holocaust' experts as Raul Hilberg even considered that Elie Wiesel dumped truth in favor of fiction . The central, most crucial scenes of Wiesel's 'holocaust' report "Night" are not historically true. The book that became "Night" was originally a much longer account, published in Yiddish in 1956, under the title "Un di Velt Hot Geshvign" (And the World Remained Silent). By 1958 Wiesel had translated his book from Yiddish into French, publishing it in that year under the title "La Nuit". In 1960 came the English translation "Night". The 2006 edition of "Night" is translated from the 1958 French version by Wiesel's wife, Marion, and in the introduction Wiesel says he has "been able to correct and revise a number of important details". The new edition within hours had reached number 3 on Amazon's bestseller list. 

In an "Jewish Forward" article titled "Six Million Little Pieces?", Joshua Cohen reminded "Forward" readers that in 1996, Naomi Seidman, a Jewish Studies professor at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, had compared the original 1956 Yiddish version of the book with the subsequent, drastically edited translation. According to Seidman's account, Cohen wrote that Wiesel substantially rewrote the work between editions - suggesting that the strident and vengeful tone of the Yiddish original was converted into a form more fitting to Wiesel's emerging role as an ambassador of culture and conscience. Wiesel declared to the New York Times that "Night" was not a novel at all. "All the people I describe were with me there." Wiesel further wrote that at the age of 18, recently liberated from Auschwitz, he read Kant's "The Critique of Pure Reason" in Yiddish. However, the "Critique of Pure Reason" was never translated into Yiddish. On the other hand, one learns with a certain surprise that though Wiesel's sister Tzipora died in the camps, two other sisters and two brothers survived. In the new edition, Wiesel doesn't mention them. When the U.S. Third Army arrived April 11, 1945 at Buchenwald, more than 900 children and youth, including Wiesel, were found among 21,000 prisoners. A photograph shows the young Wiesel, like the others, in the heroic role of Communists, contrary to the role of a 'peace missionary' (Nobel Peace Prize awarded 1986) which Wiesel was adopting in rewriting in French from the Yiddish volume. 

A number of episodes make a convincing case that Wiesel dumped truth in favor of fiction, among these:

A) During the death march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald in January of 1945, the columns of inmates arrived in Gleiwitz, after having dragged themselves through the snow - swept roads in freezing temperatures for about fifty kilometers. Immediately upon arrival, they were herded into barns. Drained, they dropped to the floor - the dead, the dying and the partially living piled one on the other. "Under this heap of crushed humanity laid Juliek, playing Beethoven on a violin, which he has carried all the way from Auschwitz to Gleiwitz." 

B) A major scene in "Night", one that contributed hugely to the book's success, was the execution of three inmates in the Buna work camp. In the incident, two adults and a little boy are being led to the gallows. The little boy refused to betray fellow inmates who have been involved in an act of sabotage; to protect his fellow inmates, the boy is willing to pay with his life. Each one climbs to his chair and his neck is slipped into the rope's noose. The scene continues as follows in the 1960 English version of "Night": "The three victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses. 'Long live Liberty!' cried the adults. But the child was silent. 'Where is God? Where is He?' someone behind me asked. At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over. Total silence throughout the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting. 'Bare your heads!' yelled the head of the camp. His voice was raucous. We were weeping. 'Cover your heads!' Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive. Their tongues hung swollen, blue tinged. But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive.... For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet glazed. Behind me, I heard the same man asking: 'Where is God now?' And I heard a voice within me answer him: 'Where is He? Here He is - He is hanging here on this gallows'". 

Not surprisingly, the graphically described hanging scene has been etched into the imagination of the Christian theologians because of the numerous parallels to the Crucifixion of Jesus. In the year 1960, François Mauriac ( 1885 – 1970), a French Roman Catholic writer, published a biography of Christ entitled "The Son of Man" dedicated to 'E.W. who was a crucified Jewish child, who stands for many others.'

Holocaust expert Raul Hilberg (1926 - 2007), below right, wrote: "I have a version of the hanging from an old survivor with the names of all three adults." That survivor had said that there was no boy among the three." Hilberg went on, "From the record I have, some witnesses have questioned whether this scene took place at all. I have a long statement by an older man, a man whom I judge to be quite trustworthy, a survivor of that section of the camp, who said it [the hanging of the three] didn't take place, but maybe it took place earlier. Buna was a work camp, so this other survivor, a PhD in history and a very intelligent man, didn't believe it." Hilberg continues, "If counterfactual stories are frequent enough, kitsch is truly rampant. The manipulation of history is a kind of spoilage and kitsch is debasement."

In December 2008, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity lost nearly all of the foundation's assets (approximately $15.2 million USD) through Bernard Madoff's investment firm. Wiesel and his wife Marion lost all of their life savings as well.

Letzte Änderung / Last update: 02.03.2010 

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