Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel (September 30, 1928 – July 2, 2016) was a Romanian-born American author, academic, and advocate whose memoir Night detailed his survival of Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. Born in Sighet, Transylvania (then part of Romania), Wiesel was deported with his family to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 at age 15; his mother and younger sister perished there, while he and his father were transferred to Buchenwald, where his father died shortly before liberation by American forces in April 1945.

Eliezer Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, a town in the Transylvanian region of Romania (now Sighetu Marmației). The area featured a close-knit Jewish community where Yiddish was the primary language spoken at home, supplemented by German, Hungarian, and Romanian for broader interactions.

The family's life in Sighet revolved around Jewish traditions, with Wiesel's early years shaped by the town's Hasidic influences and communal religious practices prior to the disruptions of World War II.

Elie Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, a town in the Transylvanian region of Romania characterized by a close-knit Yiddish-speaking Hasidic Jewish community. His family adhered to Orthodox Jewish practices, with his father Shlomo managing a local grocery store and his mother Sarah overseeing a traditional household. Shlomo instilled values of humanism and civic engagement, serving on the town council and reading newspapers in multiple languages including Hungarian, Romanian, and German, while Sarah emphasized religious devotion and scholarship.