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Elie Wiesel (Magill’s Choice: American Ethnic Writers)

Author Profile

Elie Wiesel’s sheltered, bookish adolescence was forever shattered in 1944, when the Nazis invaded Hungary and rounded up all its Jews, including the Wiesel family. The fifteen-year-old Elie was deported to Auschwitz and Buchenwald, from which he was liberated in April, 1945. The horrors he saw there, the despair he felt, the anger he directed at God were later themes in his literary and nonfiction writings.

Shortly after the war, Elie went to France, where he learned the language and developed a lifelong passion for philosophy and literature. When, in...

[The entire page is 1174 words long]

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