The name of Nobel prizewinner and writer Elie Wiesel, a living legend, is inextricably bound up with the fate of the Jewish community in Europe and the memory of the holocaust victims. He lives in New York now, teaches in English and writes in French, but Wiesel still dreams, he says, in Yiddisch and he cannot forget that he was born in the shadow of the Carpathians in Transsylvania. At the age of fifteen he was forced to walk from his birthplace Sighet (then in Hungary, now Rumania) via Auschwitz and Birkenau to Buchenwald. The film follows the same route. In Sighet, Wiesel receives a warm reception and is made a freeman of the town. In Auschwitz he talks of the last time he saw his family. The journey is interspersed with wonderful old film material about Jewish life before World War Two.Elek: ‘Just as the village of Sighet symbolises the history of Eastern Europe, Elie Wiesel personifies the fate of the Jewish community in the twentieth century. My parents, my brother and I survived the Budapest ghetto. Wiesel and I are both convinced it is our mission to keep the memory alive. It is the only way to protect the living and do justice to the dead.’
