Elie Wiesel - born September 30, 1928

Wiesel's early life, spent in a small Hasidic community in the Romanian town of Sighet, was a rather hermetic existence of prayer and contemplation. In 1940 Sighet was annexed by Hungary, and, though the Hungarians were allied with Nazi Germany, it was not until the Germans invaded in March 1944 that the town was brought into the Holocaust.
Within days, Jews were “defined” and their property confiscated. By April they were ghettoized, and on May 15 the deportations to Auschwitz began. Wiesel, his parents, and three sisters were deported to Auschwitz, where his mother and a sister were killed.
He and his father were sent to Buna-Monowitz, the slave labour component of the Auschwitz camp. In January 1945 they were part of a death march to Buchenwald, where his father died on January 28 and from which Wiesel was liberated in April.

After the war Wiesel settled in France, studied at the Sorbonne (1948–51), and wrote for French and Israeli newspapers.
During his time as a journalist in France, Wiesel was urged by the novelist François Mauriac to bear witness to what he had experienced in the concentration camps. The outcome was Wiesel's first book, in Yiddish, Un Di Velt Hot Geshvign (1956; “And the World Has Remained Silent”), abridged as La Nuit (1958; Night), a memoir of a young boy's spiritual reaction to Auschwitz. It is considered by some critics to be the most powerful literary expression of the Holocaust.

Wiesel went to the United States in 1956 and was naturalized in 1963. He was a professor at City College of New York (1972–76), and from 1976 he taught at Boston University, where he became Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities.

All of Wiesel's works reflect, in some manner, his experiences as a survivor of the Holocaust and his attempt to resolve the ethical torment of why the Holocaust happened and what it revealed about human nature.
He became a noted lecturer on the sufferings experienced by Jews and others during the Holocaust, and his ability to transform this personal concern into a universal condemnation of all violence, hatred, and oppression was largely responsible for his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.
In 1978 U.S. President Jimmy Carter named Wiesel chairman of the President's Commission on the Holocaust, which recommended the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Wiesel also served as the first chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.

Source
Encyclopedia Britannica

Wiesel has become a popular speaker on the subject of the Holocaust. As a political activist, he has advocated for many causes, including Israel, the plight of Soviet and Ethiopian Jews, the victims of apartheid in South Africa, Argentina's Desaparecidos, Bosnian victims of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, Nicaragua's Miskito Indians, and the Kurds. In 2003, on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he met with President George W. Bush and called toppling Saddam Hussein a moral obligation. He recently voiced support for intervention in Darfur, Sudan.

On June 11, 2006, Wiesel delivered the Commencement ceremony main address at Dartmouth College's 236th Commencement Exercises.

Recently, he traveled to Auschwitz with Oprah Winfrey, and said that this would most likely be his last trip there.

On September 14, 2006, Wiesel appeared before the UN Security Council with actor George Clooney to call attention to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.

Source
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elie_Wiesel