Elie Wiesel Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Eliezer Wiesel (born September 30, 1928) is a Romanian Jew and Holocaust survivor who has written several books about his experiences. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He lives in the United States.
Wiesel was born in Sighet (now Sighetu Marmaţiei), Romania, to Shlomo and Sarah, Orthodox Jews of Hungarian descent who owned a grocery store. He had three sisters. Sighet became part of Hungary in 1940, and in 1944 the Nazis deported the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau. His mother and a sister were murdered there; he and his father were sent to the attached work camp Auschwitz III Monowitz. In January 1945, the two were marched to Buchenwald, where his father died.
After the war, he was placed in a French orphanage. In 1948 Wiesel began studying in the Sorbonne. He got involved with the French Newspaper, L'arche as a journalist. He became associated with the Nobel laureate François Mauriac, who eventually persuaded him to write about his Holocaust experiences in Night, which probably became his most famous work.
He later settled in the United States, becoming a citizen in 1963. He served as chairman for the Presidential Commission on the Holocaust (later renamed U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council) from 1978 to 1986 spearheading the building of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and is now a professor of humanities at Boston University.
He has now authored over 40 works of fiction and non-fiction. He received the Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement in 1985 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He published his memoirs in 1995.
In 1997, he received the Guardian of Sion Award.
Wiesel is an ardent Zionist and an open and strong supporter of the right of the State of Israel to exist.
Based on the idea that a "Holocaust industry" around the Holocaust has created to service Jewish needs, Noam Chomsky, a Jewish linguist and left wing critic, named him "a terrible fraud." To Chomsky, although Wiesel militated against the silence about the Holocaust and he decries Arab terrorism, he remains silent on Palestinian issues.
Elie Wiesel played an important role in Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird (novel) hoax.
The book describes Eastern European peasants engaging in incest, drowning, and meaningless violence - such as eyeballs being plucked out. Kosinski shows his deep hatred toward peasants and his complete ignorance about their life. He describes them using the same paint as Anti-Semitic books described Jews.
The real wartime experiences of Jerzy Kosinski were as follows: he survived under forged identity in the family of Catholic Poles in relatively safe and warm conditions. A Catholic priest had issued a forged baptism statement, that was the common practise in the Polish Catholic Church during the WW2. He was reunited with his parents after the war, but he has never showed any gratitude towards his rescuers. According to Kosinski's biographer, his family survived the war by pretending to be Christians, and this may have instilled in him a propensity to dissemble.
According to Janusz Glowacki, the idea to pretend that Painted Bird is based on his experience came to Kosinski, when Elie Wiesel informed him, that the review he wrote would not be very positive. During private meeting, Kosinski was able to convince Wiesel that his novel is one of the documentary about the horrors of Holocaust. Based on this assumption, Wiesel wrote enthusiastic review, that made Kosinski's novel famous. Painted Bird was even used during official lessons on Holocaust. This contributed to the false impression, that cruel peasants of Eastern Europe were one of the important actors of Holocaust. Reality was quite opposite: 98% of Jews were killed either in Gas chambers or killed by special squads of German police ("Einsatzgroupen") formed mostly by city dwellers from Germany.Early life and Holocaust
United States
Criticism
Kosinski's Hoax