Elie Wiesel
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00:00Each of these numbers represents a Jewish person killed during the Holocaust.
00:21Dear Tim and Moby,
00:23Can you please make a movie about our grandfather, Elie Wiesel, from Elijah and Shira?
00:29Thanks for the suggestion, guys.
00:31Everyone could learn from your grandfather's story.
00:34Elie Wiesel was an author, educator, and humanitarian.
00:38He's most well-known for writing about the horrors of the Holocaust,
00:43the systematic murder of millions of people during World War II.
00:47Adolf Hitler directed the extermination of those he considered undesirable.
00:52He was the dictator of Germany during the 1930s and World War II.
00:57Hitler's political party, the Nazis, rose to power by turning people against certain minority groups.
01:03The Nazis' main targets were Jewish people, like Wiesel.
01:07Hitler claimed they were destroying Germany.
01:11But his real motivation was simple anti-Semitism, hatred of Jews.
01:17Jews and other undesirables were sent to huge outdoor prisons.
01:22Inmates of these concentration camps lived in brutal conditions.
01:27They spent their days doing hard labor,
01:30and their nights crammed inside unheated sheds.
01:34They were kept on a starvation diet,
01:37and lived under constant threat of violence from armed guards.
01:42Prisoners were routinely humiliated, beaten, and killed for no reason at all.
01:48Those who could no longer work were sent to death camps, where they were executed.
01:54Only one out of three European Jews made it to the end of the war.
01:59That's when the world learned how six million Jews had died in the camps.
02:04A new word entered the language, genocide, the extermination of an entire group of people.
02:10As a survivor, Wiesel knew that facts and figures didn't communicate the horror of what had happened.
02:16The Wiesels were captured in Romania in 1944.
02:20Elie spent a year of his youth in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald camps.
02:24American troops liberated Buchenwald in 1945, when Elie was 16.
02:29His father had died in the camp just a few weeks before.
02:33For years, Wiesel struggled with his feelings about the experience.
02:38Why had he survived, while so many others had been erased?
02:47The memories of what he'd endured haunted him,
02:50but he couldn't find the words to speak or write of his experience.
02:55Like so many other survivors, Wiesel tried to focus on his day-to-day life.
03:00He lived in France after the war, working as a journalist.
03:04Finally, a friend convinced him that his story needed to be told.
03:08Wiesel's first attempt was an 800-page memoir, or personal account.
03:14It was written in Yiddish, a language spoken pretty much only by European Jews.
03:19That, plus its length, kept it from making an impact beyond the Jewish community.
03:25So he pared it down to 120 pages, and he wrote it in French.
03:31Unlike his original book, Night wasn't a step-by-step account.
03:36Instead, it focuses on a handful of powerful experiences.
03:42They're told from the point of view of the teenage Wiesel, known as Eliezer, to his family.
03:48The first-person account lets you see the camp from a prisoner's perspective.
03:54You experience its horrors as if living them yourself,
03:58and feel the victim's sense of helpless suffering.
04:04As its title suggests, Night is about an unstoppable darkness.
04:10Through Eliezer, we watch as it blots out the joys of normal life.
04:14Social ties between prisoners quickly dissolve.
04:18Packed on a train heading to the camps, they're warned by a guard.
04:22If anyone escapes, the entire group will be executed.
04:26In this way, the prisoners become their own guards.
04:32Even family connections come under assault.
04:34Men and women are separated and sent into different camps.
04:38That's the last time Eliezer ever sees his mother and younger sister.
04:43He lies about his age so he can stay with his father in the men's camp.
04:48But their connection starts to fray under the constant stress of fear and hunger.
04:53Eliezer witnesses fathers and sons fighting over scraps of food.
04:59And he himself fails to do anything when a guard attacks his own father.
05:04The constant brutality isolates Eliezer and changes him at a basic level.
05:10Once deeply religious, he begins to question his faith.
05:14At first, he feels anger toward God.
05:17Why was he letting this suffering continue?
05:24He hears another prisoner ask,
05:26Where is God now?
05:29Eventually, Eliezer comes to believe that the Nazis weren't just killing Jews.
05:33They were killing Judaism and God himself.
05:37God had been central to Eliezer's identity.
05:41Before his capture, he says praying is as important as breathing.
05:46Inside the camps, that reason to breathe is nearly destroyed.
05:51Even with nothing left to live for, Eliezer perseveres.
05:56How or why is something he doesn't understand at the time.
06:00But over the years, Wiesel began to see that he had survived for a reason.
06:05To preserve the memory of the Holocaust in all its painful detail.
06:10He went on to write dozens of books and essays,
06:12many of them wrestling with the themes he first explored in night.
06:16He helped establish the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
06:20And he inspired other survivors to record their stories for future generations.
06:25Perhaps most importantly, Wiesel dedicated himself to stopping new genocides.
06:31From Southeast Asia to Europe and Africa,
06:34he refused to let the world look away, or to forget.
06:38His tireless work won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.
06:43In his acceptance speech, he said,
06:45I swore never to be silent whenever, wherever,
06:48human beings endure suffering and humiliation.
06:52Elie Wiesel kept that pledge for the rest of his life.
06:55He died in 2016.
06:59Well, we can all do our part in small ways, even us kids.
07:03Speak up for someone getting bullied, or reach out to someone who's alone.
07:07Simple acts of kindness can change the world,
07:11if enough of us step forward to help.