Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel (30 September 1928 – 2 July 2016) was a Romanian-born American Jewish writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He authored 57 books (mostly written in French and English), including Night, a work based on his experience incarcerated in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.
We cannot indefinitely avoid depressing subject matter, particularly it it is true, and in the subsequent quarter century the world has had to hear a story it would have preferred not to hear - the story of how a cultured people turned to genocide, and how the rest of the world, also composed of cultured people, remained silent in the face of genocide. (v)
In those dark times, one rose to the very heights of humanity by simply remaining human.
Waking among the dead, one wondered if one was still alive. And yet real despair only seized us later. Afterwards. As we emerged from the nightmare and began to search for meaning.
