Elie Weisel was born in Hungarian Romania in 1928. When he was 15, he and his family were taken to Auschwitz, and then on to Buchenwald concentration camp, where his parents and eight-year-old sister were killed. Of the 750,000 Hungarian Jews deported to camps in the years 1944 to 1945, only a few thousand survived to be liberated. Among them was Elie Weisel. Weisel's extraordinary account of life in the camps is shattering. It tells how he and his father struggled to keep each other alive, only for his father to die, exhausted, a few weeks before the end of the war; his friendship with Primo Levi; and his encounters in the camps with Jewish relatives and friends from all over Europe. This first volume is more than an account of the Holocaust. It begins with a moving evocation of life in an Eastern European Jewish village, a world of piety, study and family rivalries, utterly destroyed by the Nazis.