In this first volume of his two-volume autobiography, Wiesel takes us from his childhood memories of a traditional and loving Jewish family in the Romanian village of Sighet through the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and the years of spiritual struggle, to his emergence as a witness for the Holocaust's martyrs and survivors and for the State of Israel, and as a spokesman for humanity. With 16 pages of black-and-white photographs.

In this "powerful" (New York Times Book review) collection of personal essays and landmark speeches by "one of the great writers of our generation" (New Republic), Elie Wiesel weaves together reminiscences of his life before the Holocaust, his struggle to find meaning afterward, and the actions he has taken on behalf of others that have defined him as a leading advocate of humanity and have earned him the Nobel Peace Prize. Here, too, as a tribute to the dead and an exhortation to the living are landmark speeches, among them his powerful testimony at the Klaus Barbie trial, his impassioned plea to President Reagan not to visit a German S.S. cemetery, and the speech he gave in Oslo in acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, in which he voices his hope that "the memory of evil will serve as a shield against evil."

A powerful and wide-ranging collection of essays, letters, and diary entries that weave together all the periods of the author's life from his childhood in Transylvania to Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Paris, and New York. • "One of the great writers of our generation addresses himself to the question of what it means to be a Jew." — The New Republic Elie Wiesel, acclaimed as one of the most gifted and sensitive writers of our time, probes, from the particular point of view of his Jewishness, such central moral and political issues as Zionism and the Middle East conflict, Solzhenitsyn and Soviet anti-Semitism, the obligations of American Jews toward Israel, the Holocaust and its cheapening in the media. "Rich in autobiographical, philosophical, moral and historical implications." — Chicago Tribune