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Background

Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928 in Sighet, a village in the Carpathian mountains in northern Transylvania, which was annexed by Hungary in 1940. With his father Shlomo, his mother Sarah, and his three sisters—Hilda, Beatrice, and seven-year-old Tzipora—he lived as part of a close-knit community of between 10,000 and 20,000 mostly Orthodox Jews.

When Germany invaded Hungary at midnight on March 18, 1944, few believed they were in danger. Night opens with Moshe the Beadle, the caretaker in Wiesel's synagogue and the town's humblest resident—"awkward as a clown" but much loved—warning his neighbors in vain to save themselves.^[8] As the Allies prepared for the liberation of Europe in May and June that year, Wiesel and his family, along with 15,000 other Jews from Sighet, and 18,000 from neighboring villages, were being deported by the Germans to Auschwitz.^[9] His mother and Tzipora were immediately sent to the gas chamber. Hilda and Beatrice survived, separated from the rest of the family. Wiesel and his father managed to stay together, surviving hard labor and a death march to Buchenwald, where Wiesel watched his father die, just weeks before the Sixth Armored Division of the U.S. Third Army arrived to liberate them.