Hope, Despair and Memory

Born in 1928 to a shopkeeper in Transylvania, Romania, Wiesel lived a relatively peaceful life until adolescence. When he was 15, he and his family were sent to the death camps of Auschwitz, where his father, mother, and sister all died. Wiesel began writing soon after the Holocaust, working as a journalist in France. He wrote Night, his memoir about the Holocaust, in Yiddish, but it was published in a French translation in 1958 and has since become his most widely read work. The original manuscript was over 800 pages; however, in the spirit of the era’s existentialist writing, he reduced it by nearly 90%. He continued to tell the story of his life in two later books: Dawn and Day. Dawn focuses on a Holocaust survivor who becomes enmeshed in the violent circumstances of Israel’s founding. Day describes a Holocaust survivor who is struck by a taxicab in New York—something that had happened to Wiesel. While in a wheelchair, the protagonist must confront his past and the many people he lost in the Holocaust.

Wiesel frequently described himself as a writer of testimony—that is, someone who bears witness to a significant event and then communicates its importance. As this speech explains, Wiesel felt that part of the Holocaust’s importance lay in its potential to avert future crimes against humanity. Wiesel thus became an outspoken advocate for global human rights, publicly condemning the apartheid in South Africa, the treatment of the Kurdish in the Middle East, the ethnic cleansing of Bosnians, the treatment of the Murle people in Southern Sudan, and other groups mentioned in this speech. The Nobel Committee gave Wiesel the prize for both his writing and for this activism.