Elie Wiesel’s Night and Corrie Ten Boom's The Hiding Place

Elie Wiesel’s Night and Corrie Ten Boom's The Hiding Place

Many outsiders strive but fail to truly comprehend the haunting incident of World War II’s Holocaust. None but survivors and witnesses succeed to sense and live the timeless pain of the event which repossesses the core of human psyche. Elie Wiesel and Corrie Ten Boom are two of these survivors who, through their personal accounts, allow the reader to glimpse empathy within the soul and the heart. Elie Wiesel (1928- ), a journalist and Professor of Humanities at Boston University, is an author of 21 books. The first of his collection, entitled Night, is a terrifying account of Wiesel’s boyhood experience as a WWII Jewish prisoner of Hitler’s dominant and secretive Nazi party.

At age 16 he was taken from his home in Sighet, Romania and became one of millions of Jews sent to German concentration camps. At the Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Wiesel witnessed the death of his parents and sister. In 1945, the latter of the camps was overtaken by an American resistance group and the remaining prisoners freed, including the drastically changed man in Wiesel. The once innocent, God-fearing teenager had become a lonely, scarred, doubting individual. Corrie Ten Boom (1892-1983), a religious author and inspirational evangelist, traveled and spread Christianity throughout sixty-one countries, even into her eighties. Her autobiography, The Hiding Place, is an account of her inner strength found through God in the midst of the physical and emotional turmoil of German concentration camps.

During World War II, the Ten Boom family took action against the Nazi movement and began an underground hiding system, saving over 700 Jewish lives. (Contemporary Authors, 470) They were discovered and sent from their Haarlem, Holland home to Scheveningen, a Nazi prison. Ten Boom, in her 50’s, was placed on trial for leading the underground system and sent to a German work camp. There she witnessed her father and sister’s death as well as the birth of her inner strength and hope for the future.

Upon release from Ravensbruck, Ten Boom began caring for victims of the war and Holocaust and used her powerful speaking ability to share the trials and triumphs of her life. Together, these two powerful authors relive the horror and pain of the Holocaust to educate the unaware world. They teach of the past, warn of the future, an...

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