Elie Wiesel | Elie Wiesel was fifteen years old when the Nazis deported him and his family to the Auschwitz concentration camps. After the war was over, he was eventually persuaded to write about his Holocaust experiences, producing his internationally-acclaimed memoir, Night, which ranks among the definitive works of Holocaust literature. Appointed chairman of the U.S. President's Commission on the Holocaust in 1978, Wiesel became the Founding Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council in 1980. He is the founding president of the Paris-based Universal Academy of Cultures and the Chairman of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. He has held professorships at the City University of New York, Yale University, and Barnard College, and is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University. A lifelong human rights advocate, he has defended the cause of Soviet Jews, Nicaragua's Miskito Indians, Argentina's Desaparecidos, Cambodian refugees, the Kurds, victims of famine and genocide in Africa, of apartheid in South Africa, and victims of war in the former Yugoslavia. He has won numerous awards for his achievements in literature and human rights, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, the Medal of Liberty Award, election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the rank of Grand-Croix in the French Legion of Honor, an honorary knighthood in the United Kingdom, as well as more than a hundred honorary degrees from institutions of higher learning. In 1986, Mr. Wiesel won the Nobel Prize for Peace. He has published more than forty works of fiction and nonfiction.
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