Life After Night

With our event just one class period away, I realized I had little understanding of what happened to Elie Wiesel after the end of Night, or how he became such a renowned author.

After the war and his time in the concentration camps, he went to France. There he became a professional journalist, as well as teacher of Hebrew, and a choir master. It took him ten years before he was willing to write about his experiences during the war. He initially wrote a 900 page work in yiddish entitled And the world kept silent. This work was eventually narrowed down into a 127-page version written in French called La Nuit(Night). Several years later he found a publisher for his French and English version, yet it did not sell many copies at first. From there he became a human rights activist for oppressed peoples, and eventually received the Congressional Medal of Freedom, and the Nobel Prize for Peace. Since then, he has spoken on behalf of victims of genocide and oppression. He has also written several fictional novels in the past few years.

I find it very inspiring how Elie was able to live a successful life at such a young age without his parents. I could not imagine moving to France as a teenager just having survived the concentration camps.