Elie Wiesel

Professor, Author

1928 –

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Who is Elie Wiesel?

Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel KBE is a Romanian-born Jewish-American professor and political activist. He is the author of 57 books, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald concentration camps. Wiesel is also the Advisory Board chairman of the newspaper Algemeiner Journal.

When Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, the Norwegian Nobel Committee called him a "messenger to mankind," stating that through his struggle to come to terms with "his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler's death camps", as well as his "practical work in the cause of peace", Wiesel had delivered a powerful message "of peace, atonement and human dignity" to humanity.

Famous Quotes:

  • I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.
  • That is my major preoccupation --memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.
  • Nobody is stronger, nobody is weaker than someone who came back. There is nothing you can do to such a person because whatever you could do is less than what has already been done to him. We have already paid the price.
  • Peace is our gift to each other.
  • I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.
  • Only one enemy is worse than despair: indifference. In every area of human creativity, indifference is the enemy; indifference of evil is worse than evil, because it is also sterile.
  • The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
  • I rarely speak about God. To God, yes. I protest against Him. I shout at Him. But to open a discourse about the qualities of God, about the problems that God imposes, theodicy, no. And yet He is there, in silence, in filigree.
  • There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them.
  • Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world.

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Born
Sep 30, 1928
Sighetu Marmației
Also known as
  • Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel
  • Eliezer Wiesel
Parents
Siblings
Spouses
Children
Religion
  • Judaism
Ethnicity
  • Jewish people
  • Hungarian people
Nationality
  • Romania
  • United States of America
Profession
Education
  • University of Paris
Employment
  • Boston University
Lived in
  • Sighetu Marmației

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

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"Elie Wiesel." Biographies.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Mar. 2024. <https://www.biographies.net/people/en/elie_wiesel>.

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