Elie Wiesel: Holocaust Survivor Of The Holocaust

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Imagine being in pain, exhausted, starving, humiliated. Imagine living to see the pure inhumanity humans can achieve if given a will and a way. Finally, imagine finding out, years later after managing to survive by some miracle, that strangers had known, that the world was aware millions were suffering but had been too indifferent to intervene; that they'd turned a blind eye to avoid responsibility. Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate of 1986, knew what all of these experiences felt like, as he was subjected to a concentration camp at the young age of fifteen and went on to lose half his family, witness atrocities too surreal to describe, and come out of the Holocaust to never forget and bear witness. Despite the odds being …show more content…
He lived with his mother, father, and three sisters in Sighet, Rumania, which is present-day Transylvania. Wiesel’s two older sisters were Hilda and Beatrice, and his younger sister was Tzipora. Sarah and Shlomo Wiesel were Elie’s parents, and together the family resided within a Jewish section of Sighet, where most were Hasidic Jews. Wiesel attended school at the young age of three, but preferred learning from his family, particularly his grandfather, Dodye Feig, or “Little David.” At ages twelve to thirteen, rumors of the persecution and murder of Jews in Europe were trickling through Sighet, and Gentile children in Sighet were picking on Jewish children for the mere fact of being Jewish. 1944 rolled around, and at only fifteen, Wiesel and his family, along with the rest of Sighet's confused Jewish residents, were herded onto a train for deportation; to where, the deportees could only wonder. Around midnight the train came to a halt outside a death camp called Birkenau, which rested on the same ground as Auschwitz in Poland. Sarah and Wiesel's three sisters were taken without goodbyes into the night as Shlomo and Wiesel were forced to march by the SS officers. Little did Elie know, this was the beginning of a long, horrid journey, one in which he'd lose his mother, father, little sister, and innocence; a journey in which he'd see the indifference of a vast world and the consequences that come with