Elie Wiesel Born: Holocaust's Defining Witness
He was 15 when the Germans came to his town in Romania. His mother and younger sister were killed at Auschwitz the day they arrived. His father died in the final weeks of the war, in Buchenwald, while Wiesel watched and couldn't help him. He didn't write about it for ten years. Night, published in 1960, is 120 pages. It took him that long to find words that didn't collapse under the weight of what he was describing. When he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 he said: We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. The book is still read in high school classrooms in forty countries.
September 30, 1928
98 years ago
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