Nobel Peace Prize Recipient. He received international recognition for being awarded the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, according to the Nobel Prize committee, for "being a messenger to mankind: his message is one of peace, atonement and dignity." He was a Romanian-born American Jewish author, political activist, Holocaust survivor, as well as a college-level educator. He authored 57 books, fiction and non-fiction, mostly written in French and English. His most recognized piece is his autobiography entitled, "Night," which tells his story of being a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald during World War II. Born Eliezer Wiesel the only son of four children of Jewish parents Sarah Feig and Shlomo Wiesel in Sighetu Marmației, in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvanian Romania, Wiesel has said his father represented reason and encouraged literature, while his mother Sarah promoted faith, encouraging Torah study. At age 15, the entire Jewish population of his hometown was taken from their homes and placed in two ghettos as part of the antisemitic agenda of Nazi Germany. In March of 1944 his family was eventually deported to the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau where his inmate number, "A-7713," was tattooed onto his left arm. He and a sister managed to endure the appalling inhumanity of the work camps, though his parents and younger sister perished before their camp was liberated on April 11, 1945 by the United States Third Army. Later, he would learn that 90% of those who were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau were exterminated. Following World War II, he was transported as a refugee to France, hospitalized for a short time and after learning to speak French, he studied at the University of Paris. He would reunite with his two sisters. He found employment as a choirmaster and a Hebrew teacher before becoming a professional Israeli journalist. For a decade after the war, he refused to discuss or write about his experiences during the Holocaust. Before immigrating to the United States in 1956, he met and became close friends with French author François Mauriac, the 1952 Nobel Prize in Literature recipient. After Mauriac persuaded him to write about his harrowing Holocaust experiences, he published in Yiddish the 900-page memoir, "And the World Remained Silent". Wiesel rewrote a condensed version in French, as the 127-page manuscript "La Nuit," later translated into English in 1956 as "Night." The first of a trilogy, his book, "Night," was translated into 30 languages with over 10 million copies sold in the United States alone. As an educator, Wiesel was the Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Boston University in Massachusetts. From 1972 to 1976, he taught at City University of New York. In 1982 he was the first visiting Scholar in Humanities and Social Thought at Yale University. He held a five-year appointment as a Distinguished Presidential Fellow at Chapman University in California, along with teaching at Eckard College in St. Petersburg, Florida and Columbia University in New York City. Beside the Nobel Prize, he received a host of accolades and honors including the French Legion of Honor in 1990, United States Congressional Gold Medal in 1984, Medal of Liberty, Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1992, and at least 90 honorary Doctorate degrees from facilities around the world. After United States President Jimmy Carter established on November 1, 1972 the President's Commission on the Holocaust, Wiesel was appointed as the chairman of the 34-member commission, which led to building the United States Holocaust Museum. On November 30, 2006, he received a Knighthood in London for his work towards raising Holocaust education in Great Britain. In 2021 a bust of him was unveiled at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. In 1986 he and his wife established the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity to "combat indifference, intolerance and injustice through international dialogue and youth-focused programs that promote acceptance, understanding and equality." In 2022 the Foundation launched grants to reach this goal. According to his Nobel biography, his goal was not for the world to remember and learn from the Holocaust but to learn about indifference and the attitude that "it's no concern of mine". With actually being a witness to the Holocaust happening as the world watched and did nothing, he stated "The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference".