The Elie Wiesel House in Sighet: Where Night Began

In a low corner house on Strada Tudor Vladimirescu in Sighet, Eliezer (Elie) Wiesel was born on 30 September 1928, and from here he and his family were deported to Auschwitz in May 1944. Since 2002 the house has been a memorial and a museum of Maramureș Jewish culture, one of the few places in town where the voice of the vanished community can still be heard.

A Child in a Hasidic Town

Wiesel was born into an Orthodox family: his father Shlomo and his mother Sarah, née Feig, kept a grocery store. He had two older sisters, Hilda and Bea, and a younger sister, Tzipora. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, he began heder at three, celebrated his bar mitzvah in 1942 and was already drawn to Kabbalah, which he studied with a local kabbalist. The Sighet he grew up in was a town almost 40 per cent Jewish, whose synagogues, kloyzn and yeshivas stood in the shadow of great Hasidic courts.

The house itself is modest. According to the museum, the front room was once a small shop, and some windows were later turned into doors onto the street. Wiesel lived here until he was fifteen.

Night: Moshe the Beadle, the Ghetto and the Trains

In Night Wiesel describes his childhood teacher, Moshe the Beadle, identified by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum as Moshe Lieberman. In the summer of 1941 Moshe was deported with other “alien” Jews from Hungary to occupied Galicia, escaped the massacre at Kamenets-Podolsk, returned to Sighet and tried to warn its people. Nobody believed him.

Hungary annexed Sighet in 1940. After Germany occupied Hungary on 19 March 1944, two ghettos were set up in the town on 20 April, and according to Night the Wiesel house fell within them. The first train left for Auschwitz-Birkenau on 16 May and the last on 22 May. Night describes cattle cars packed with about eighty people each. On arrival Wiesel’s mother and his sister Tzipora were murdered. He and his father were selected for labour, and in January 1945 they were driven on a death march to Buchenwald, where Shlomo Wiesel died on 29 January 1945. Elie was liberated at Buchenwald on 11 April 1945. Hilda and Bea survived, and he was reunited with them after the war.

He first wrote his testimony in Yiddish, Un di velt hot geshvign (“And the World Was Silent”), published in Argentina in 1956. The abridged French version, La Nuit, appeared in 1958 and the English translation in 1960. In 1986 Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize. He died in New York on 2 July 2016.

Return to an Empty House

According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s timeline, Wiesel first returned to Sighet in 1964 and visited his childhood home. After 1989 he came back to the region several times. Under communism the house was nationalised and divided between two families, each with its own entrance. According to the museum, it had already been looted in 1945, after the Hungarian administration left and before the Romanian one returned, and none of the original furniture survives.

On 29 July 2002 Wiesel himself opened the memorial house, on a visit on which he was accompanied by Romania’s President Ion Iliescu. The Associated Press reported thousands lining the streets and some 5,000 people gathered outside the town hall. “I am always sad,” Wiesel said, “because I see those who are not there anymore.”

The Museum Today

The house belongs to the Maramureș Museum (Muzeul Maramureșului), which runs it and is answerable to the Maramureș County Council. Its official name in the national museum guide is the “Elie Wiesel” Memorial House – Museum of Jewish Culture in Maramureș. The display is devoted to Jewish life in the region before the Holocaust and to the Holocaust itself, with photographs, Wiesel’s books, a collection of documentary postcards and other testimonies. Most of the items were bought or donated.

Among the most moving are the postcards of the Hilman family of Sighet, written from the ghetto to their eldest son, then in a Hungarian labour camp. The last card was written on the train to Auschwitz and thrown out at a stop in Košice; a passer-by posted it, and the son received it four days later.

In May 2014, seventy years after the deportation, a Holocaust education centre, the “Holocaust Cellar”, opened in the basement of the house. It is dedicated to the roughly 13,000 victims from Sighet and its surroundings and was supported by the Romanian government, the town of Sighet, the Claims Conference, the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania and Limmud FSU. In August 2018 antisemitic slogans were sprayed on the façade, and the local authorities removed them.

Visiting

The house stands at Strada Tudor Vladimirescu 1, a few minutes’ walk from the Wizhnitz synagogue and the town centre. According to the national museum guide of the National Heritage Institute (CIMEC), it is open Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00–18:00 in summer and 8:00–16:00 in winter, and closed on Mondays. Memorial Museums defines the summer season as 15 April to 15 October. Check the hours with the Maramureș Museum before you go.

• The exhibition on Jewish life in Maramureș and on Wiesel and his family
• The Holocaust Cellar, opened in 2014
• Nearby: the synagogue on Strada Basarabiei, the memorial on Strada Gheorghe Doja and the Jewish cemetery