Elie Wiesel, born Elise Wiesel, was brought into this world in Romania on September 30th, 1928 to parents Sarah Feig and Shlomo Wiesel. Later on in his life, he and his parents, along with his three sisters, were forced into the Jewish death camps during World War II. This horrible event, now known as the Holocaust, led to over six million lives being lost in an attempt to eliminate all Jews, along with other undesired minorities. His mother and the youngest of the three sisters died in Auschwitz, a concentration camp in Poland. While he and his father were later moved to another camp in Buchenwald, Germany. (History.com editors, 2011) ¨ During this time, he witnessed his father get brutally beaten by a German soldier, which resulted in his father dying. ¨He never saw his mother or youngest sister ever again and later found out they were killed in the gas chambers at the concentration camp they were forced to stay in.¨ His father tried to protect him during their time in Auschwitz by giving Elie his portions of food and standing in front of his son to guard him against the soldiers and the other people in Auschwitz.¨ Fortunately for Wiesel, him and two of his sisters, Beatrice and Hilda, survived this tragedy and this experience resulted in the story Night.
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. Early on in the 1950s, he vowed to himself to never speak about what he witnessed at the concentration camps and wrote the first version of Night. ̈At the encouragement of Nobel laureate and prominent French writer Francois Mauriac, Weisel reworked the manuscript in French. However, even with Maurivs help in trying to land a book deal, the manuscript was rejected by multiple publishers, who believed few people at the time were interested in reading about the Holocaust. ¨ (History.com editors, 2011) In addition to this story, he has written nearly thirty books in this lifetime and these include La Nuit (written in 1958 and the English translation, Night), Dawn (written in 1961), and A Beggar in Jerusalem (written in 1968). ¨Although initial sales were sluggish, ¨Night¨ was generally well-reviewed and over the decades gained an audience, eventually becoming a classic of Holocaust literature that has sold millions of copies and has been translated into more than thirty different languages. In addition to this, the famous Oprah Winfrey selected ¨Night¨ for her famed on-ait book club and traveled with Wiesel to Auschwitz for an episode of her show.¨ (History, com editors., 2011) His book represented the horrifying experiences he went through in the concentration camp in an attempt for Nazis to exterminate all Jews.
