Elie Wiesel was fifteen years old when he was deported with his family from the small town of Sighet in Transylvania to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944. His mother and his younger sister Tzipora were sent to the gas chambers on arrival. He was tattooed A-7713 and assigned to slave labour at Auschwitz III Monowitz with his father. They were marched to Buchenwald in January 1945 in the death-march evacuation of Auschwitz. His father died at Buchenwald on 28 January 1945, weeks before the camp was liberated by American forces on 11 April. Wiesel was sixteen.
He did not write about the experience for ten years. After the war he was placed in a French children’s home with around four hundred other Jewish orphans, learned French, and worked as a journalist in Paris. The Yiddish first version of what became Night, titled Un di velt hot geshvign, And the World Remained Silent, was published in Buenos Aires in 1956 in nine hundred pages. Wiesel cut it to its essential one hundred and twenty in French as La Nuit, published by Éditions de Minuit in 1958 with a preface by François Mauriac. The English translation, Night, came out in 1960. It sold modestly for years. By the time Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 it had become the standard introductory text on the Holocaust in American high schools and remains so.
Night is short. It does what longer books cannot. The famous passages, the arrival at Birkenau, the hanging of the boy with the angelic face, the moment in the snow where the son hears his dying father call out and does not go to him, are written in a Hebrew-inflected French that the English translation by Wiesel’s wife Marion has preserved. The book has been the subject of denialist attack and minor textual criticism. The textual variants between the Yiddish and the French are real and discussed in the scholarly literature. They do not affect the substance of what the book records.
After Night, Wiesel wrote more than fifty books, most of them novels and essays in French. He moved to the United States in 1955 and taught at Boston University from 1976 until his death. He chaired the President’s Commission on the Holocaust under Carter, which led to the establishment of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the National Mall in Washington, opened in 1993. He spoke publicly against the Cambodian killings, the Bosnian war, the Rwandan genocide and the Sudanese killings of the 2000s. The Nobel committee awarded him the Peace Prize in 1986 with the citation that he was a messenger to mankind.
He died in New York on 2 July 2016 at the age of eighty seven. His position as the public conscience of Holocaust memory in the English-speaking world for the second half of the twentieth century is not in serious dispute. Night is read by people who read no other book on the subject. That is its job.
See also
- Yiddish Culture and Language
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Night by Elie Wiesel
- Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
- Primo Levi
- Raphael Lemkin
- Viktor Frankl
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards