After the war — I was 15 when I entered the camp, I was 16 when I left it, and all of a sudden you become an orphan and you have no one. I had a little sister and I knew, with my mother the first night, that they were swept away by fire. My older sisters I discovered by accident after the war in Paris, where I was in an orphanage. But to be an orphan — you can become an orphan at 50, you are still an orphan. Very often I think of my father and my mother. At any important moment in my life, they are there, thinking, “What an injustice.”
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Elie Wiesel
Writer and human rights advocate; Nobel Peace Prize laureate, 1986
United States · 1928–2016
Politics and public life
About
Elie Wiesel was a Romanian-born American writer, professor and political activist who survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a teenager. He wrote fifty-seven books, including the memoir Night, and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.
5 answers
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