Elie Wiesel, Author; Nobel Peace Prize Winner; Founder, The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, New York, NY

When Elie Wiesel was 15 years old he and his family were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz from Romania. His mother and younger sister perished, his two older sisters survived. His father died shortly before the camp was liberated in April 1945. After the war, Professor Wiesel studied in Paris and later became a journalist. During an interview with Francois Mauriac, he was persuaded to write about his experiences. The result was La Nuit or Night, his internationally acclaimed memoir, which has since been translated into more than thirty languages.

In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed him as Chairman of the President's Commission on the Holocaust. In 1980, he became the Founding Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. He is also Chairman of The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, an organization he and his wife created to fight indifference, intolerance and injustice. Since 1976, he has been the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at Boston University. Professor Wiesel is the author of more than forty books of fiction and non-fiction. For his literary and human rights activities, he has received numerous awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal and the Medal of Liberty Award, and the rank of Grand-Croix in the French Legion of Honor. In 1986, Professor Wiesel won the Nobel Prize for Peace.