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.
