On Rosh Hashanah, Elie Wiesel, the writer and campaigner to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive, turns 80. Wiesel survived Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where his father, mother and little sister died. "Those who deign to let their memory of the victims dim, kill them a second time," Wiesel said in a speech delivered to the German parliament in 2000. His most important literary work is 'Night', published in 1958. In it, Wiesel - who considers the book a memoir - gives an incisive and haunting account of his experiences in Auschwitz. The book was translated into 30 languages and is still one of the most-read books about the Holocaust. In 1986, Elie Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Born on 30 September 1928, to a Jewish shopkeeper and a farmer's daughter in Sighet (now Sighetu Marmatiei), Romania, Wiesel was supposed to become a rabbi. However, his sheltered religious education in the small Carpathian mountains was interrupted when the family was deported in 1944 to Auschwitz.
After the war, he was placed in a French orphanage where he continued his Talmudic studies and later studied philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. For years, he worked as a journalist and foreign correspondent, refusing to discuss his experiences during the Holocaust. This changed when he met Francois Mauriac, winner of the 1952 Nobel Prize for Literature, who encouraged him to remember the "unutterable."
After writing 'Night', Wiesel published nearly 50 more books and essays, novels and plays. A US citizen since 1963, he became an advocate for persecuted minorities worldwide. "I have never believed in collective guilt," Wiesel said last year at Auschwitz. "The children of the killers are not killers. They are children." Wiesel is a humanities professors at Boston University.
