Elie Wiesel was born in Hungarian Romania in 1928. When he was 15 he and his family were taken to Auschwitz, and then onto Buchenwald concentration camp, where his parents and 8-year-old sister were killed. Of the 750,000 Hungarian Jews deported to camps in the years 1944-5, only a few thousand survived to be liberated. Among them was Elie Wiesel. In this biography he gives an account of life in the camps: he tells of how he and his father struggled to keep each other alive, only for his father to die a few weeks before the end of the war; of his friendship with Primo Levi; of his encounters in the camps with Jewish relatives and friends. After the War Wiesel went to France where he wrote Night, his short account of his concentration camp experiences and began championing the rights of oppressed peoples.