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Sighet, Elie Wiesel’s 1928 birthplace, still survives — a town in northern Romania near the meeting of the Hungarian
and Ukrainian borders. But its character was irreversibly changed by the Holocaust. Where once it was a predominantly
Jewish community of some 15,000 souls, today only a handful remain.
But photos of the old city have survived, some in family collections, including those preserved by Elie Wiesel and his
surviving sisters. Others have been contributed to the photo archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington, D.C., most of them recovered from the work of an unknown Jewish studio photographer
who, from 1920 to 1939, recorded images of the town and the life of its Jewish community.
It is the recovery of those photos that makes this visit to pre-war Sighet possible. | |
