Elie Wiesel. Photo: David Shankbone.

Elie Wiesel

Author/Humanitarian

There are few more appropriate occasions to reflect on the career of Elie Wiesel than the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, which fell in January 2015. Wiesel, of course, was an inmate of that hell on earth, and his famous account, Night, recalls his incarceration there, as well as in Buchenwald concentration camp. In a distinguished career as a writer, educator and human rights activist, Wiesel has won many awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize and the Congressional Gold Medal. Now an elder statesman in the worlds of politics and ideas, Wiesel’s passionate belief in the potential for human beings to do better remains undiminished. “I speak or I write about things that matter to me and that are therefore essential to me,” he said in a recent interview. “If they pleased some people, and displeased others, too bad, or too good.”