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Introduction to Night

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Title: Introduction to Night


1
Introduction to Night
  • By Elie Wiesel

2
About the Author
  • Born September 30, 1928 in Sighet, Romania.
  • Grew up in a small village where his life
    revolved around the following
  • Family
  • Religious Study
  • Community
  • God

3
About the Author
  • In 1944, when Elie was 15, he was deported to
    Auschwitz.
  • When they arrived at the camp, he and his father
    were warned to lie about their ages. Elie said
    he was 18 and his father said he was 40 instead
    of 50.
  • They were sent to be slave laborers.
  • His mother and youngest sister were sent to the
    gas chambers.

4
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5
About the Author
  • Elie and his father survived first Auschwitz and
    then the Buna labor camp for eight months.
  • They endured beatings, excessive work,
    starvation, and other torture.

6
About the Author
  • In the winter 1944-45, Wiesels right knee
    swelled up and a doctor performed surgery on it.
  • Two days later, the inmates were forced to go on
    a death march.
  • For ten days they were forced to run, then
    crammed into freight cars, and sent to
    Buchenwald.

7
About the Author
  • Of the 20,000 prisoners who left Buna, only 6,000
    survived.
  • When they arrived to Buchenwald, Elies father,
    Shlomo, died of dysentary, starvation, and
    exhaustion.

8
About the Author
  • After the death of his father, Elie was sent to
    join the childrens block of Buchenwald.
  • At the end of the war, April 6, 1945, the
    prisoners were told they would no longer be fed.
  • They began evacuating the camp killing 10,000
    prisoners a day.

9
About the Author
  • After he was freed from the camp on April 11,
    Wiesel became sick with intestinal problems.
  • After several days in the hospital, Wiesel wrote
    an outline for a book describing the Holocaust.
  • He wasnt ready to publicize his experience, but
    promised he would in ten years.

10
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11
About the Author
  • After Elie was released from the hospital, he had
    no family to return to.
  • He went with 400 other orphan children to France.
  • From 1945-1947, he moved from house to house
    found for him by Childrens Rescue Society.

12
About the Author
  • By 1947, he was reunited with both of his
    surviving sisters, Bea and Hilda.
  • Hilda found his picture in a newspaper.
  • He found Bea in Antwerp.

13
About the Author
  • In 1948, Elie enrolled in the Sorbonne University
    where he studied literature, philosophy, and
    psychology.
  • He was extremely poor and very depressed.
  • He considered suicide often.

14
About the Author
  • Over time, he became involved with the Irgun, a
    Jewish militant organization in Palestine, and
    translated materials from Hebrew to Yiddish for
    the Irguns newspaper.
  • He began working as a reporter, and in 1949, he
    traveled to Israel as a correspondent for the
    French newspaper, LArche.
  • In Israel, he found a job as a Paris
    correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Yediot
    Achronot.
  • He traveled the world in the 1950s.
  • He also became involved in the argument whether
    Israel should accept reparations payments from
    West Germany.

15
Turning Point
  • Weisels turning point came when he interviewed
    the Catholic writer, Fancois Mauriac.
  • During the interview, everything was centered
    around Jesus and Wiesel ended up saying the
    following
  • "ten years ago, not very far from here, I knew
    Jewish children every one of whom suffered a
    thousand times more, six million times more, than
    Christ on the cross. And we dont speak about
    them."
  • Wiesel ran out of the room, but Mauriac followed
    and advised Weisel to write down his experience.

16
The Novel
  • Elie spent a year working on the 862 page
    manuscript he called And the World Was Silent.
  • He gave it to his publisher who returned it as a
    258 page book called Night.
  • The book was published first in France in 1958
    and then in the U.S. in 1960.
  • The book is autobiographical and told of his
    experiences during the Holocaust.
  • It also is his personal account of his loss of
    religious faith.

17
Elie and Oprah
18
Losing Faith
  • In 1955, Wiesel moved to New York as foreign
    correspondent for Yediot Ahronot.
  • It was around this time that he decided to stop
    attending synagogue, except on the High Holidays,
    as a protest against what he concluded was divine
    injustice.

19
The Accident
  • Crossing the street one night in July 1965, Elie
    was hit by a taxi and had to undergo a ten hour
    surgery.
  • After recovery, he focused on his writing and
    published numerous books from then on out.
  • What books do you know?

20
The Marriage
  • In 1969, Elie married Marion Erster Rose, a
    divorced woman from Austria.
  • She translated all of Wiesels subsequent books.
  • In 1972, they had a son who they named Shlomo
    Elisha Wiesel, after Wiesels father.

21
Dedication
  • Wiesel was outspoken about the suffering of all
    people, not only Jews.
  • In the 1970s, he protested against South African
    apartheid.
  • In 1980, he delivered food to starving Cambodians
  • In 1986, he received the Nobel Peace Prize as a
    messenger to mankind, and a human being
    dedicated to humanity.
  • He explained his actions by saying the whole
    world knew what was happening in the
    concentration camps, but did nothing. That is
    why I swore never to be silent whenever and
    wherever human beings endure suffering and
    humiliation.

22
Accomplishments
  • From 1972 to 1978, Wiesel was a Distinguished
    Professor of Judaic Studies at the City
    University of New York.
  • 1978, he became a Professor of Humanities at
    Boston University.
  • In 1978, President Jimmy Carter asked him to
    head the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, which
    he did for six years.
  • In 1985, Wiesel was awarded the Congressional
    Gold Medal of Achievement.

23
Accomplishments
  • In 1988, he established his own humanitarian
    foundation, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for
    Humanity, to explore the problems of hatred and
    ethnic conflicts.
  • In the early 1990s, he lobbied the U.S.
    government on behalf of victims of ethnic
    cleansing in Bosnia.
  • Wiesel has received numerous awards and
    approximately 75 honorary doctorates.

24
Holocaust Museum
  • In 1993, Wiesel spoke at the dedication of the
    U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington,
    D.C.
  • His words, which echo his lifes work, are carved
    in stone at the entrance to the museum
  • For the dead and the living, we must bear
    witness.

25
Quotes to Remember
  • A destruction, an annihilation that only man can
    provoke, only man can prevent.
  • Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It
    is a gift only we can give one another.
  • I decided to devote my life to telling the story
    because I felt that having survived I owe
    something to the dead. and anyone who does not
    remember betrays them again.
  • I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever
    human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We
    must always take sides. Neutrality helps the
    oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages
    the tormentor, never the tormented.

26
Quotes to Remember
  • I write to understand as much as to be
    understood.
  • No human race is superior no religious faith is
    inferior. All collective judgments are wrong.
    Only racists make them.
  • The opposite of love is not hate, it's
    indifference.

27
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