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About All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (Abridged)

The first volume of Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel’s passionate, poignant, and moving two-volume autobiography, detailing his imprisonment in Auschwitz, his life in Paris, and his journey to writing the acclaimed memoir Night This edition contains sixteen pages of black-and-white photographs. “From the abyss of the death camps Wiesel has come as a messenger to mankind—not with a message of hate and revenge, but with one of brotherhood and atonement.”—From the citation for the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize All Rivers Run to the Sea opens with a child’s entry into hell. We see the young Elie Wiesel torn from a traditional and loving Jewish family life in a Carpathian village and dragged through the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. We see him emerge a bloodless adolescent, a mute spirit, with no homeland. At war’s end, parents and youngest sister vanished, life begins anew in a French orphanage. Wiesel recalls his struggle with his God as well as his intense sorties into the study of philosophy, the Jewish Scriptures, and the lore of the mystics. He remembers the gradual rekindling of old dreams. He is comforted by the survival of his two sisters. We see him becoming once again fully alive. And in the late 1950s, inspired to write his first book, Night , he finds at last his voice as a witness for the Holocaust’s martyrs and survivors, and as a spokesman for humanity.