Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel witnessed the unimaginable when he was only 15. And what he saw has defined his life ever since.
Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, Transylvania (now Romania). His father was a community leader and a Zionist. His mother espoused the religious beliefs of her father, a Hasidic farmer. The young Wiesel studied Judaic texts, sang, played violin and dreamed of conducting an orchestra. Then in 1944, Hitler’s Final Solution reached his remote town. Wiesel’s family and neighbors were herded into cattle cars destined for concentration camps. Wiesel never saw his mother and one of his sisters again.
A young Elie Wiesel. (Courtesy Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity)
A young Elie Wiesel. (Courtesy Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity)
“In those places, in one night one becomes old,” Wiesel said during a recent interview in New York. “What one saw in one night, generations of men and women had not seen in their own entire lives.”
One night, Wiesel’s father, ill with dysentery, was swept away to the crematorium while his son slept in the bunk above. When he was liberated from the Buchenwald camp in 1945, Wiesel made a vow of silence not to speak or write about his experiences for 10 years.
“I wanted to be sure to find the words, the right words," Wiesel said. "I'm not sure I did. I have doubts. To this day I have doubts, because there are no words.”
