Eliezer Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, Romania, a small town in the Carpathian Mountains. In 1944, when he was fifteen, his family was deported to Auschwitz. His mother and youngest sister were murdered on arrival. He and his father were sent to the labor camp at Buna, then force-marched to Buchenwald in the dead of winter. His father died there, of dysentery and exhaustion and a beating from a guard, while Elie lay on the bunk above him. He was liberated in April 1945. He was sixteen years old and weighed about eighty pounds.
He did not speak about what happened for ten years. Then he wrote "Night" — a book so spare, so unadorned, so precise in its horror that it became the single most important testimony of the Holocaust. It was rejected by every major publisher. It sold barely a thousand copies in its first printing. It has since been translated into thirty languages and read by millions. The book is only 115 pages. There is not an extra word in it.
Wiesel spent the rest of his life as a professor, an author, and a voice for human rights. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. The committee called him a "messenger to mankind." He intervened in Bosnia, in Darfur, in every place where the pattern he recognized began to repeat. He was criticized for some of his political positions. He was not a simple man and he did not offer simple answers. But he made one thing absolutely non-negotiable: you do not get to forget. The world will always look for permission to forget. Wiesel spent sixty years refusing to grant it.
"Perhaps the reason the Universe gave you a broken world is so that you could have a chance to fix it."