The Oneida Daily Dispatch (Oneida, NY)
Elie Wiesel
Have you ever heard of Auschwitz (OWSHwitz)? It was a terrible place in Poland, one of the death camps (also known as concentration camps) where innocent people were killed by the German Nazis during World War II.
Elie Wiesel (EH-lee vee-SEL) was only 15 years old when he saw Nazi soldiers lead his mother and younger sister to their deaths in Auschwitz. Later, at another death camp called Buchenwald, he watched his father die of hunger and disease.
A survivor’s story
After the Nazis surrendered in 1945, 16-yearold Elie was taken to France. Try to imagine how he felt. He was an orphan. He had witnessed brutality and torture on a daily basis. He had been hungry, and he had been beaten when camp guards were mad at him. He had worked daily surrounded by fellow Jews who were sick and dying.
So many of the people who had been part of young Elie’s life were gone: his parents, his neighbors and friends from his small village of Sighet in Transylvania, Romania, his teachers who had praised his schoolwork, his rabbi. Elie Wiesel’s childhood had disappeared!
Starting over
Life had to begin anew for him. Miraculously, two of his sisters had also survived the death camps, and in France he was reunited with them. Strength came from having family back in his life.
Sharing his experience
More than 11 million blameless people, most of them Jewish and more than 1.5 million of them children, were murdered in the death camps. Wiesel had lived through a horrible nightmare that he called “hell on Earth.”
He knew that the world had to learn about and remember what had taken place there. And so he began to write and lecture about his experience as a survivor.
Through his work, Elie Wiesel became the voice for the Holocaust. In the Greek language, the word holocaust means “a sacrifice burned in its entirety.” Those 11 million men, women and children were all sacrificed, and Elie Wiesel wanted to prevent it from ever happening again.