Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel, human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize-winning author of more than 50 books, including “Night,” an internationally acclaimed memoir based on his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, is born in Sighet, Transylvania (present-day Romania). In May 1944, the Nazis deported the then 15-year-old Wiesel and his family to Auschwitz. Wiesel’s mother and the youngest of his three sisters died at Auschwitz, while he and his father were later moved to another camp, Buchenwald where Wiesel’s father perished just months before it was liberated by Allied troops in April 1945. Following the war, Wiesel spent time in a French orphanage, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and went on to work as a journalist in France. In the early 1950s, he broke a self-imposed vow not to speak about the atrocities he witnessed at the concentration camps and penned the first version of “Night.” The author passed away in 2016.
