Elie, Elie
LaSalle Collegian, 1973ish
Elie Wiesel (1928−2016) changed many lives; mine, too. Writer, professor, political activist, Wiesel was a Holocaust survivor. His first book, Night, harrowingly describes his survival of the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, which his parents did not survive. My thanks to The LaSalle Collegian staff in native Philadelphia for finding this story in the newspaper archives, or morgue, as we once macabrely called it. This is an early piece written while I was the features editor and trying assiduously not to write for a career. The opportunity to interview a surviving child of the Nazi horror came about. Hearing him speak in such soft tones about the hardness of those years piqued this reaction, which earned a first prize the next year from Pennsylvania Collegiate Press Association. Wiesel went on to accept the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, and, despite my efforts, I succumbed to the passion of a career in writing. Thanks, Elie, for being a witness to history and watching over my history, too.
View the whole story
(1.4 MB PDF document opens in new tab)