Biography of Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928 in the town of Sighet in Transylvania, which is located in Romania. His parents, Shlomo Wiesel and Sarah Feig had three other children not including Elie. The three other siblings were his sisters Hilda, Bea, Tsiporah. Wiesel and his family primarily were an Orthodox Jewish family. When he was very young he started to study Hebrew and the Bible. He mostly focused on his religious studies. According to the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, “He was fifteen years old when he and his family were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz.” During the time they spent at Auschwitz, Elie’s mother and younger sister didn’t make it, but his two older sisters were fortunate enough to survive. “Elie and his father were later transported to Buchenwald, where his father died shortly before the camp was liberated in April 1945” (The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity).

After surviving all the hardships he endured, Elie found himself in France and from then on studying philosophy at Sorbonne. Since he was a refugee to France and had little to come there on he supported himself by being a choir master and teaching Hebrew. “He became a professional journalist, writing for newspapers in both France and Israel” (Holocaust Survivor’s Storyteller). Over the course of time Wiesel became quite popular with many of his stories he shared with his experience while being in the different concentration camps he was held in. Before he published these stories he just remained silent until “During an interview with the French writer Francois Mauriac, Wiesel was persuaded to end the silence” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). That French writer persuading him to break his silence is one of the best things that c...

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... huge impact on the whole entire world and almost every human being.

What I learned most from Elie Wiesel is that you can't take life for granted because when he was my age (15 years old) he had to go through the worst thing anyone could experience, and that is the Holocaust. Even though that most likely won't happen again there is still a possibility something like that could happen and you wouldn't even see it coming at first. I also learned that you can't stay silent forever because being silent doesn't make a change it just stays inside, but with breaking that silence a change is made and the end results are overwhelming. Yes, Elie Wiesel inspired me because he started from the bottom and worked his way to the top with at first being a refugee to France and then along the way there he supported himself while he was getting an education also.