Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet, formerly Hungarian, then Romanian, Transylvania, in 1928. In 1944 he and his family were deported by the Nazis to extermination camps, where Wiesel's father, mother, and younger sister died. After the war Wiesel was taken with other survivors to refugee camps in France. In 1948 he began studying literature, philosophy, and psychology in Paris. He worked as a media correspondent for ten years before publishing Night, an account of his experience as a Jew during the war. The sequel, Dawn, followed two years later. Unlike Night, Dawn is not autobiographical. It is the story of a World War II Holocaust survivor who chose to join the fight for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.
Zionism. According to the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, Moses led the Jewish slaves out of Egypt to Canaan (later called Palestine), where Judaism had been bom. The Jews reestablished themselves in the territory conquered from the Canaanites (they called it the land of Israel), building in Jerusalem a temple that was destroyed by the Babylonians 586 years before the birth of Jesus Christ.
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