Elie Wiesel

Eliezer Wiesel was born in Romania on September 30, 1928, and was deported as a teenager to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. After liberation, he wrote Night, a spare account of those years that became one of the defining texts of Holocaust literature. He went on to write 56 more books, mostly in French and English, and became a professor of humanities at Boston University, where the university later founded a center for Jewish studies in his name. His activism stretched across decades and continents: he spoke for Soviet Jews, against apartheid in South Africa, and against genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia…