The man who gave the word Holocaust its modern weight refused to speak of his experience for ten years. Elie Wiesel grew up in Sighet in the Carpathian Mountains, shaped by his mother's Hasidic faith and his father's secular reason. In 1944, at fifteen, he was deported to Auschwitz, tattooed as prisoner A-7713, and lost his mother and younger sister on arrival. His father died at Buchenwald days before liberation.

Rebuilding a life in Paris, he studied at the Sorbonne and worked as a journalist while walling off his trauma, until the writer Francois Mauriac urged him to bear witness. His memoir, first an 860-page Yiddish manuscript, was distilled into the sparse work known as Night. He became a global voice against indifference, won the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, and campaigned across many causes, including a principled opposition to the death ...