Writer’s Desk: Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel, the concentration-camp survivor and immortal author who passed away this past week at 87 years old, was a writer for many reasons. Firstly, after being liberated from Buchenwald as a teenager and having no family left, Wiesel needed to do something to survive.

In the postwar years, he started working as a journalist when only 19 years old. His searing account of his concentration-camp experiences,Night, was first published in Yiddish in 1955 and later translated into multiple lan...