“Some students ask me, ‘What will happen when all the survivors will be gone?’
The teacher in me says to my student, ‘Just think: Perhaps you are the only hope I have.
Fulfill it.’”
Elie Wiesel survived the Holocaust and dedicated his life to educating the world about this
history so that it would never be forgotten.
This is his story:
In 1933, four-year-old Elie Wiesel lived in his hometown of Sighet, Romania.
700 miles away, Adolf Hitler became the leader of Germany.
Over the next several years, as Elie was growing up, Hitler’s Nazi government passed laws
targeting Jews.
Jewish people living in Germany lost their citizenship.
They often had to give up their jobs and property.
Many tried to emigrate but emigration was difficult.
But these laws didn’t affect Elie and his family yet.
Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939 starting World War II, just before Elie’s 11th birthday.
The war was the context in which the Holocaust took place.
The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six
million European Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.
As Germany took over more territory, millions of Jews came under its control.
And the Nazi borders crept closer to Elie and his family.
Many Jews were forced to live in small crowded areas set apart from the rest of the community.
There they were often forced to work and given little food.
These areas were called “ghettos,” sections of cities and towns where targeted groups
were forced to live.Though they don’t know it yet, Elie and the entire Jewish community
in Sighet would also someday be forced into a ghetto.
During the Holocaust, Nazi Germany and its collaborators deported more than two and a
half million Jews from ghettos or from their homes, to killing centers, where they were
murdered immediately.
Hundreds of thousands more were imprisoned in concentration camps, forced to work until
they died of starvation, disease, or violence.
In addition, special squads organized mass shootings, murdering as many as two million
Jews.
Where Elie and his family were living had a big impact on their experiences during the
Holocaust.
When Elie was 11, in 1940, the territory surrounding his hometown of Sighet, Romania, was taken
over by Hungary.
Hungary started deporting foreign Jews, people who had not been born in Hungary or Romania.
Elie’s mentor, a man with the nickname Moshe the Beadle, was deported along with thousands
of other foreign Jews in the summer of 1941.
The Nazis murdered almost all of them in mass shootings, but Moshe the Beadle somehow escaped
and returned to Sighet.
He tried to warn people of the Nazis’ plans, but many people didn’t believe him.
What Elie and his family didn’t know was that by 1944, the Nazis and their collaborators
had already killed approximately five million Jews from all across Europe.
At the time, to Elie and his community it seemed that Germany would lose the war and
they might be safe.
But then in March 1944, the leaders of Hungary secretly began to negotiate to break the country’s
pact with Germany and surrender.
When Hitler learned about this, he ordered German forces to invade Hungary.
German troops arrived in Sighet in April 1944.
The Holocaust unfolded in Sighet as it had in many other cities throughout Europe–
but much faster.
The Germans and their Hungarian collaborators arrested Jewish leaders and forced the Jews
of Sighet to wear yellow stars, like the ones that other European Jews had been forced to
wear.
The Germans created ghettos in Sighet.
These ghettos existed for a very short time, unlike ghettos in other parts of Nazi-controlled
Europe.
In the ghetto, the Wiesels had very little to eat, and only a small space in which to
live.
In May 1944, Elie and his family, along with more than ten thousand other Jews from Sighet,
were forced into rail cars and deported in just a few days.
In total, the Germans and their Hungarian collaborators deported approximately 440,000
Jews from Hungary in less than three months.
Most were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and killing center in German-controlled
Poland.
It was the largest Nazi camp.
In total, more than one million Jews from all across Europe were deported to Auschwitz,
and most of them, like the Jews sent from Hungary, were killed in gas chambers immediately
after they arrived.
Elie’s mother, Sarah, and younger sister, Tzipora, were sent to be killed.
Fifteen-year-old Elie and his father were among those selected for forced labor.
Elie’s head was shaved and his prisoner number was tattooed on his arm.
Auschwitz was the only camp where the Nazis tattooed prison numbers on the bodies of the
inmates.
It was another way the Germans tried to take away people’s individual identities and
treat them as less than human.
The Nazi camp staff sent Elie and his father to the Buna camp, part of the larger Auschwitz
complex.
There, prisoners were forced to work to benefit German companies and the German war effort.
The work was exhausting.
Those who were too weak to work were often sent to the gas chambers to be killed.
People who refused or rebelled were killed publicly as a warning to other prisoners.
Elie and his father survived for 8 months in Auschwitz.
Then, due to rumors of Russian soldiers coming, the Nazis evacuated the camp on January 18,
1945.
The Nazis forced Elie and his father, along with thousands of Jews from Auschwitz, to
march, and to crowd into open train cars.
It was freezing cold and many people died.
They were taken to Buchenwald, another concentration camp, where Elie’s father died from illness
and exhaustion.
Elie was 16 years old when he was liberated by the United States Army on April 11, 1945.
Less than a month later, Germany surrendered and World War II ended in Europe.
Throughout Europe, Jews who survived the Holocaust tried to find family members who might have survived.
Elie was able to reunite with his older sisters.
Later in life, Elie Wiesel became a writer and a world renowned human rights activist,
and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
He shared his Holocaust experiences with the world, through his memoir Night, which has
been read by millions.
“I believe firmly and profoundly that anyone who listens to a witness becomes a witness, so
those who hear us, those who read us, those who learn something from us,
they will continue to bear witness for us.
Until now, they’re doing it with us.
At a certain point in time, they will do it for all of us.”