Introduction to Night

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Introduction to Night

• By Elie Wiesel

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About the Author

• Born September 30, 1928 in Sighet, Romania.
• Grew up in a small village where his life
  revolved around the following
• Family
• Religious Study
• Community
• God

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About the Author

• In 1944, when Elie was 15, he was deported to
  Auschwitz.
• When they arrived at the camp, he and his father
  were warned to lie about their ages. Elie said
  he was 18 and his father said he was 40 instead
  of 50.
• They were sent to be slave laborers.
• His mother and youngest sister were sent to the
  gas chambers.

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About the Author

• Elie and his father survived first Auschwitz and
  then the Buna labor camp for eight months.
• They endured beatings, excessive work,
  starvation, and other torture.

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About the Author

• In the winter 1944-45, Wiesels right knee
  swelled up and a doctor performed surgery on it.
• Two days later, the inmates were forced to go on
  a death march.
• For ten days they were forced to run, then
  crammed into freight cars, and sent to
  Buchenwald.

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About the Author

• Of the 20,000 prisoners who left Buna, only 6,000
  survived.
• When they arrived to Buchenwald, Elies father,
  Shlomo, died of dysentary, starvation, and
  exhaustion.

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About the Author

• After the death of his father, Elie was sent to
  join the childrens block of Buchenwald.
• At the end of the war, April 6, 1945, the
  prisoners were told they would no longer be fed.
• They began evacuating the camp killing 10,000
  prisoners a day.

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About the Author

• After he was freed from the camp on April 11,
  Wiesel became sick with intestinal problems.
• After several days in the hospital, Wiesel wrote
  an outline for a book describing the Holocaust.
• He wasnt ready to publicize his experience, but
  promised he would in ten years.

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About the Author

• After Elie was released from the hospital, he had
  no family to return to.
• He went with 400 other orphan children to France.
• From 1945-1947, he moved from house to house
  found for him by Childrens Rescue Society.

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About the Author

• By 1947, he was reunited with both of his
  surviving sisters, Bea and Hilda.
• Hilda found his picture in a newspaper.
• He found Bea in Antwerp.

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About the Author

• In 1948, Elie enrolled in the Sorbonne University
  where he studied literature, philosophy, and
  psychology.
• He was extremely poor and very depressed.
• He considered suicide often.

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About the Author

• Over time, he became involved with the Irgun, a
  Jewish militant organization in Palestine, and
  translated materials from Hebrew to Yiddish for
  the Irguns newspaper.
• He began working as a reporter, and in 1949, he
  traveled to Israel as a correspondent for the
  French newspaper, LArche.
• In Israel, he found a job as a Paris
  correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Yediot
  Achronot.
• He traveled the world in the 1950s.
• He also became involved in the argument whether
  Israel should accept reparations payments from
  West Germany.

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Turning Point

• Weisels turning point came when he interviewed
  the Catholic writer, Fancois Mauriac.
• During the interview, everything was centered
  around Jesus and Wiesel ended up saying the
  following
• "ten years ago, not very far from here, I knew
  Jewish children every one of whom suffered a
  thousand times more, six million times more, than
  Christ on the cross. And we dont speak about
  them."
• Wiesel ran out of the room, but Mauriac followed
  and advised Weisel to write down his experience.

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The Novel

• Elie spent a year working on the 862 page
  manuscript he called And the World Was Silent.
• He gave it to his publisher who returned it as a
  258 page book called Night.
• The book was published first in France in 1958
  and then in the U.S. in 1960.
• The book is autobiographical and told of his
  experiences during the Holocaust.
• It also is his personal account of his loss of
  religious faith.

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Elie and Oprah
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Losing Faith

• In 1955, Wiesel moved to New York as foreign
  correspondent for Yediot Ahronot.
• It was around this time that he decided to stop
  attending synagogue, except on the High Holidays,
  as a protest against what he concluded was divine
  injustice.

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The Accident

• Crossing the street one night in July 1965, Elie
  was hit by a taxi and had to undergo a ten hour
  surgery.
• After recovery, he focused on his writing and
  published numerous books from then on out.
• What books do you know?

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The Marriage

• In 1969, Elie married Marion Erster Rose, a
  divorced woman from Austria.
• She translated all of Wiesels subsequent books.
• In 1972, they had a son who they named Shlomo
  Elisha Wiesel, after Wiesels father.

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Dedication

• Wiesel was outspoken about the suffering of all
  people, not only Jews.
• In the 1970s, he protested against South African
  apartheid.
• In 1980, he delivered food to starving Cambodians
  
• In 1986, he received the Nobel Peace Prize as a
  messenger to mankind, and a human being
  dedicated to humanity.
• He explained his actions by saying the whole
  world knew what was happening in the
  concentration camps, but did nothing. That is
  why I swore never to be silent whenever and
  wherever human beings endure suffering and
  humiliation.

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Accomplishments

• From 1972 to 1978, Wiesel was a Distinguished
  Professor of Judaic Studies at the City
  University of New York.
• 1978, he became a Professor of Humanities at
  Boston University.
• In 1978, President Jimmy Carter asked him to
  head the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, which
  he did for six years.
• In 1985, Wiesel was awarded the Congressional
  Gold Medal of Achievement.

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Accomplishments

• In 1988, he established his own humanitarian
  foundation, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for
  Humanity, to explore the problems of hatred and
  ethnic conflicts.
• In the early 1990s, he lobbied the U.S.
  government on behalf of victims of ethnic
  cleansing in Bosnia.
• Wiesel has received numerous awards and
  approximately 75 honorary doctorates.

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Holocaust Museum

• In 1993, Wiesel spoke at the dedication of the
  U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington,
  D.C.
• His words, which echo his lifes work, are carved
  in stone at the entrance to the museum
• For the dead and the living, we must bear
  witness.

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Quotes to Remember

• A destruction, an annihilation that only man can
  provoke, only man can prevent.
• Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It
  is a gift only we can give one another.
• I decided to devote my life to telling the story
  because I felt that having survived I owe
  something to the dead. and anyone who does not
  remember betrays them again.
• I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever
  human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We
  must always take sides. Neutrality helps the
  oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages
  the tormentor, never the tormented.

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Quotes to Remember

• I write to understand as much as to be
  understood.
• No human race is superior no religious faith is
  inferior. All collective judgments are wrong.
  Only racists make them.
• The opposite of love is not hate, it's
  indifference.

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