Elie Wiesel

Eli Wiesel is a Holocaust survivor, human rights activist, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, an American professor and the author of 57 books. He is the author of the internationally acclaimed novel Night, an autobiography of his experiences in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945. Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, present-day Romania, to an Orthodox Jewish family. His family was deported to Auschwitz when he was 15-year-old. His parents and younger sister perished in the Holocaust; he and his two older sisters survived. After the war, studied in Paris and went on to work as a journalist. In 1969, Wiesel married Marion Erster Rose. They had a son a 1972, who they named Shlomo Elisha Wiesel, after Wiesel’s father. In 1978, US President Jimmy Carter asked Wiesel to head the President's Commission on the Holocaust. In 1980, he became Founding Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. For his human rights activism, Weisel has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States Congressional Gold Medal and the Medal of Liberty Award, the rank of Grand-Croix in the French Legion of Honor. After he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, his wife established The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.