Liberation. On April 11, Allied liberators arrived to feed and tend the starving survivors. Elie was so ill that he collapsed and was treated at the former SS hospital. No list of survivors named his parents or sisters. At the invitation of Charles de Gaulle, the Oeuvre au Secours aux Enfants (Children's Rescue Service) shuttled Elie by train along with four hundred fellow orphans to Belgium, then to a chateau at Écouis, Normandy, for recuperation. Because he misunderstood a border guard's spoken offer of French citizenship, he remained stateless. In June, he began a journal in Yiddish, his native language. He reunited with his older sister Hilda and learned that Beatrice had returned to Sighet; the three later met at Antwerp. In 1948, because he had no kinship ties with citizens of the new state of Israel, a rejection for a visa to Palestine ended his ambition of becoming a freedom fighter for Haganah, the Zionist underground.
Without making a clear choice of careers, in 1948 Wiesel enrolled in literature and philosophy courses at the Sorbonne in Paris and heard lectures by novelist Jean-Paul Sartre and philosopher Martin Buber. To better interpret wartime trauma and SS evil, he studied asceticism with the mystic specialist Shushani but vowed not to write about his experiences. Often suicidal and hungry on the meager stipend of $16 per month, he lingered at the orphanage and contemplated alternatives while healing his spirit from the aftereffects of rootlessness and trauma. He worked part-time as tutor, director of a choir of displaced persons, movie subtitler, camp counselor, and translator for the militant Yiddish weekly Zion in Kamf before accepting a post as a multilingual journalist for the Yiddish weekly Yedioth Ahronoth.
Wiesel the Writer. On May 14, 1955, François Mauriac, Nobel-prize winning French novelist and biographer of General Charles de Gaulle, encouraged Wiesel to speak for the survivors of the Holocaust. Mauriac advised Wiesel on the publication of Night, a humanistic documentary which the author and his publisher pared down from a more than 800-page Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (And the World Remained Silent) to a manuscript one-eighth of the original, a spare, intense first-person account of his incarceration by the Nazi SS. The book was translated from Yiddish into French, retitled La Nuit, and dedicated to his parents and his little sister. It garnered weak response from potential publishers, who doubted that so pessimistic a story would find a ready audience. Meanwhile, Wiesel's journalistic career took him to Spain, Tangiers, Morocco, eastern Europe, Canada, Brazil, India, and Israel, where he observed the early years of Jewish statehood. While translating for the World Jewish Conference in Geneva, he followed the emergence of David Ben-Gurion, the bold Israeli leader, and met the great political, philosophical, and military figures of the era: General Moshe Dayan, Hannah Arendt, Pierre Mendès-France, Golda Meir, Nikita Khrushchev, Sir Anthony Eden, General Dwight Eisenhower, and Marshal Georgy Zhukov.
After moving to the United States in 1956, Wiesel lived alone at a hotel and wrote a spy novel under the pseudonym Elisha Carmeli while he reported U. N. activities for the Morgen Journal, a popular newspaper for immigrant Jews. In July of that year, he was hit by a speeding taxi in the heart of New York City. The first hospital where he was taken rejected him because he was considered too poor and not likely to recover. His injuries put him in a full-body cast and confined him to a wheelchair for a year. During his lengthy recuperation, he applied for United States citizenship, which he finally received in 1963.
On April 2, 1969, in the Ramban synagogue in the old sector of Jerusalem, Wiesel married Austrian-born writer and editor Marion Erster Rose, a survivor of the Holocaust and mother of a daughter named Jennifer. Wiesel lives in New York with his wife and their son, Shlomo Elisha, born in 1972, a Yale graduate specializing in computer science. Currently, Marion oversees the translation of her husband's works and joins with him in overseeing work of the Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, a consortium that studies the source and impetus of hate groups.
Wiesel the Humanitarian. A prolific writer and speaker, Wiesel appeals to a wide audience of young Jews who, in the 1960s, felt cut off from their traditions and their ancestors' struggles. The receipts from his lectures he gives to a yeshiva, an Orthodox Jewish school; his book royalties he donates to a fund for a synagogue to honor his father, whose death so near liberation continues to haunt Wiesel. He supports Holocaust survivors, lectures, publishes, and comments on the subjects of world indifference to suffering, Cambodian refugees, the Vietnamese "boat people," the "disappeared" of Argentina, Arab refugees in Palestine, and nuclear proliferation. He attended the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961 and the Jewish liberation of Jerusalem, filmed a visit to Sighet for NBC twenty years after his deportation, and in 1965 risked arrest in a Moscow airport while visiting Russian Jewish "refuseniks." He sympathized with Martin Luther King's civil rights efforts, rebuked former President Reagan in 1985 for honoring the Bitburg Cemetery for SS corpsmen, and bolsters humanitarian efforts in Biafra, Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia, and Bosnia. In 1987, he testified about his experiences at Auschwitz during the trial of war criminal Klaus Barbie in Lyons, France.
A classroom influence for human rights, Wiesel, formerly Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at Manhattan's City College of New York, has served Yale and Florida International universities as a visiting scholar. He has remained at Boston University since 1976 as the Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities. Named chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council by President Jimmy Carter, Wiesel is often called upon as a consultant and receives continual publicity and acclaim for his insistent illumination of the Holocaust, which be considers a holy event, and his denunciation of the bystanders who witnessed the loading of cattle cars and made no outcry. His honors include the American Liberties Medallion, Prix Médicis, Prix Rivarol, Prix de l'Universalité, Joseph Prize for Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial, Martin Luther King, Jr. Medallion, Raoul Wallenberg Medal, and, in 1985, the Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement. His honorary degrees derive from a broad span of colleges and universities: Jewish Theological Seminary, Hebrew Union, Manhattanville, Yeshiva, Boston, Spertus College of Judaica, Wesleyan, Notre Dame, Anna Maria, Brandeis, Bar-Ilan, Hofstra, Talmudic, Marquette, Simmons, St. Scholastica, Tufts, Moravian, Loyola, Emory, and Yale. On December 10, 1986, his sister Hilda attended the Nobel ceremonies at the University of Oslo, Norway, and heard her brother's acceptance of the Peace Prize, an award to a beloved freedom fighter which carried a stipend of $287,769.78 along with the admiration of the civilized world. In 1995, he wrote again of his family's catastrophe and cited events leading up to his marriage in All Rivers Run to the Sea, the first volume of a two-part autobiography.
