by Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet in 1928. In 1944 he was deported with his family to a Nazi extermination camp whose purpose was to obliterate Europe's Jewish population. After the Allied victory in 1945, he lived in France with other young survivors of the camps. Wiesel studied psychology, literature, and philosophy at the Sorbonne University in Paris before beginning his career as a journalist in 1948. In 1958 Wiesel published Night, a vivid and chilling novelistic account of his experiences in the war.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The Final Solution. When the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, its leader Adolf Hitler pledged to create a German state in which Jews lived segregated from other Germans. The Nazis at first encouraged Jews to emigrate, but as the Nazis annexed or invaded other territories, they adopted more drastic solutions to what they called "the...