Elie Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928 in Sighet, a small town in Transylvania which was then part of Romania and became part of Hungary in 1940. Wiesel's Orthodox Jewish family was highly observant of Jewish tradition. As a child and teenager, Wiesel distinguished himself in the study of traditional Jewish texts: the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament), the Talmud (oral law), and even the mystical texts of the Kabbalah (traditional stories that probe the mysteries of the universe).
Until 1944, the Jews of Hungary were relatively unaffected by the catastrophe that was destroying the Jewish communities of Europe. As the leader of the German National Socialist (Nazi) Party, Adolf Hitler built a campaign that blamed the Jews for Germany's depression following World War I. As World War II progressed, Hitler developed the Final Solution- a program of systematic extermination of Europe's Jews. By the time Germany was defeated in 1945, the Final Solution had resulted in the greatest act of genocide known to the world. Six million European Jews had been murdered, along with millions of Gypsies, homosexuals, and others whom the Nazis considered undesirable. The greatest numbers of victims were killed in concentration camps, in which Jews were fathered, imprisoned, forced into labour, and, when they could no longer be used by their captors, annihilated.
The Nazis operated with remarkable speed. In the spring of 1944, the Hungarian Jewish community, the only remaining large Jewish community in continental Europe, was deported to concentration camps in Germany and Poland. In May of 1944, when Wiesel was fifteen, his family and many inhabitants of the Sighet shtetl (Jewish section of town) were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. The largest and deadliest of the camps, Auschwitz was the site of more than 1, 300, 000 Jewish deaths. It is here that Wiesel's life was forever transformed.
After observing a ten year vow of silence about the Holocaust, in 1956 Wiesel published Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (Yiddish for And the World Remained Silent), an 800 page account of his life during the Holocaust. In 1958, he condensed his work and translated it from Yiddish to French, publishing it under the title La Nuit. The work was translated in English and published in 1960 as Night. Although publishers were initially hesitant to embrace Night, believing that audiences would not be interested in such pessimistic subject matter, the memoir now stands as one of the most widely read and taught accounts of the Holocaust. From a literary point of view, it opened the way for many other stories and memoirs published in the second half of the twentieth century.
Elie Wiesel describes himself primarily as a storyteller rather than a philosopher, existentialist, moralist, or Jewish theologian. He says of his career, "I write in order to understand as much as to be understood."