Elie Weisel was born on September 30, 1928 in Sighet, a small town in
Transylvanian Hungary. Weisel's family was Orthodox Jewish, highly observant
of Jewish tradition. His father, Shlomo, a shopkeeper, was very much involved
with the Jewish community, which was confined to the Jewish section of town,
called the shtetl. As a child and teenager, Weisel distinguished himself in the study
of traditional Jewish texts: the Torah (Bible) the Talmud (codified oral law) and
even--unusual for someone so young--the mystical texts of the Cabbala.
Until 1944, the Jews of Hungary were relatively unaffected by the
catastrophe that was destroying the Jewish communities of Europe. The leader of
the National Socialist (Nazi) party, Adolph Hitler, came to power in Germany in
1933, behind campaign rhetoric that blamed the Jews for Germany's post-World
War I depression. Germany embraced Hitler's argument for the superiority of the
Aryan race: soon, Germany implemented a set of laws--including the infamous
Nürnberg Laws of 1935--designed to dehumanize German Jews and subject them
to violence and prejudice. As the war progressed, Hitler and his counselors
developed the "Final Solution" to the so-called "Jewish Question": a program of
systematic extermination of Europe's Jews. By the time Germany was defeated
by the Allies in 1945, the Final Solution had resulted in the greatest act of
genocide known to the world: 6 million European Jews had been mass-murdered.
The greatest numbers of these were killed in Concentration Camps, in which
Jews--and other enemies of Germany--were gathered, imprisoned, forced into
labor, and, when they could no longer be of use to their captors, annihilated.
While anti-Jewish legislation was a common phenomenon in Hungary, the
Holocaust itself did not reach Hungary until 1944. In March of 1944, however,
the Germany army occupied Hungary, installing a puppet government under
Nazi control. Adolph Eichmann, the executioner of the Final Solution, came to
Hungary personally to oversee the destruction of Hungary's Jews. The Nazis
operated with remarkable speed: in the spring of 1944, the Hungarian Jewish
community, the only remaining large Jewish community in continental Europe,
was deported to concentration camps in Germany and Poland. Eventually, the
Nazis mass-murdered 560,000 Hungarian Jews, the overwhelming majority of the
prewar Jewish population in Hungary.
In Elie Weisel's native Sighet, the disaster was even worse: of the 15,000
Jews in prewar Sighet, only about 50 families survived the Holocaust. In May of
1944, when Weisel was 15, his family and much of the Signet shtetl were
deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, in Poland. The largest and
deadliest of the camps, Auschwitz was the site of more than 1.3 million Jewish
deaths. Weisel's father, mother and little sister all died in the Holocaust. Elie
survived, and emigrated to France. After observing a 10-year vow of silence
about the Holocaust, in 1956 Weisel published And the World Remained Silent,
an 800-page account of his life during the Holocaust. In 1958, he condensed his
work and translated it from its original Yiddish into French. It was published as
La Nuit; in English, Night.
--Sparknotes.com ("Context")
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