It was the summer I decided to travel alone from Paris to Istanbul. I had been in Poland for two freezing, rain-soaked weeks and was ready to leave. I was headed to Transylvania, drawn by the legend of the sharp-toothed man with a taste for hemoglobin. Wrapped in heavy sweaters, I boarded a battered dark green train in Krakow that would take me to the Romanian border. Passengers lugging bags crowded the train’s corridors amid a heavy fog of cigarette smoke, saying lingering farewells to loved ones on the platform. Beneath the human chatter, I heard the hum of the train, which had chugged right through Communism into the era of the European Union.
As a woman alone, I was in the habit of taking precautions against robbery or worse, so I found an empty compartment, only to be joined by off-duty members of the Polish military with a fondness for Zywiec beer. I moved to another compartment where a man with unblinking pellucid blue eyes stared at me for four hours. Finally, I settled into a seat near two young Finns, travelers like me. As they snored, I perused a weathered Lonely Planet guide to Romania. In its pages I discovered a region in arm’s reach of Ukraine that time had kindly ignored, where I could stay with a local family. Its capital was Sighet, the birthplace of Elie Wiesel. I decided to head directly there.
After two more trains—20 hours in all—I switched to a local van packed with farmers wearing traditional wool skirts with striped aprons, heavy sweaters that carried the smell of years of wear, and small traditional straw hats. Between trains, I had arranged my home stay in a matter of minutes. For six hours, I listened to violin solos and local news coming out in bursts from a radio duct-taped to the van’s ceiling. Arriving in the tiny town of Onçesti, three miles from Sighet, I was delighted to meet my host, the mustachioed Vassily Bud. Mr. Bud and I communicated easily in French. On vacation from his job as a biology teacher at the local school, he spent two days taking me around the small traditional villages surrounding Sighet, each boasting a Catholic and Orthodox church, mostly built from fir, many of them now UNESCO heritage sites.
On my third day, a rainy June afternoon that required a down coat and boots, I finally made my way to Sighet, a town of 44,000. Mr. Bud had put me in touch with Andrea Gherasin, a Sighet native who studied tourism at the University of Cluj-Napoca a few hours south. I met Andrea—thin, fair-haired and elegant despite her mud-covered sneakers and blue raincoat—at the apartment building where she lived with her family. With broken windows and indecipherable graffiti scrawled onto peeling paint, it was a cold, crumbling ode to Communism. But once we climbed the many flights of poorly lit concrete stairs, I found myself in a comfortable apartment filled with family life. Andrea’s father sat at a large wooden dining room table tutoring students from Onçesti, their heads bent over math textbooks.
The first thing I asked Andrea, young, bright and fluent in English, was to take me to Wiesel’s house. Back down the stairs, we exited onto Sighet’s damp streets, a smorgasbord of mundane Communist Bloc architecture and ornate older buildings, some still grand despite years of neglect. The only tall buildings in Sighet, were the churches with their towering spires and the aging Ceausescu-era high rises at the edge of the town’s center. On the main street, European Union flags flew above crowded cafés and nearly empty stores, all small, intimate and in want of a coat of paint.
“Have you read Elie Wiesel’s book, Night?” I asked Andrea as the row of small restaurants turned into a line of colorful, boxy houses. She shook her head no. She had heard of Wiesel but wasn’t sure why he was famous. I thought back to my 14-year-old self, comfortable in my parents’ house, reading Night for my freshman English class, shuddering at the human capacity for evil. I thought of the hours I had spent just days earlier walking the cold, wet grounds of Auschwitz and Birkenau. I thought about Wiesel and those many others who had traveled to Auschwitz, possibly on the same train tracks that had brought me here from Poland.
Andrea and I crossed a busy intersection, narrowly avoiding puddles and speeding Dacia cars. We passed by one of her favorite cafés, where teens were inhaling pizza to the beat of last summer’s nightclub anthems. She stopped briefly to say hello to one of them, exchanging a quick kiss on each cheek. It was clear that Andrea loved her hometown, much as Wiesel had loved the place of his upbringing. Andrea told me that after she graduated, she hoped to promote tourism in Sighet, aware of the lack of visitors to her hometown. Although it was the height of tourist season, I saw only two other foreigners—a couple from Italy—during my week-long stay.
“Why is it that my town enchants me so?” Wiesel asks in All Rivers Run to the Sea, his memoir of his post-war life. “In all my novels it serves as background and vantage point. In my fantasy I still see myself in it.” Wiesel lingers on memories from his childhood: watching a beautiful blond-haired girl, the judge’s daughter, walk by as he is frozen by lust; playing the violin while his teacher drinks tzuika, the region’s potent liquor; the characters who colored the town, “Yankel the horse thief” and “Berl the fink” and the guests who joined his family for Shabbat dinner; the birth of his golden-haired sister Tziporah. A childhood filled with religion and family and the good and bad of adolescence that, in looking back, seems only good.
Sighet’s history is an uneasy one. Romania and the town have been ruled by a series of oligarchic governments over the centuries. When the Second Vienna Award of August 1940 granted the region to Hungary, it was a center of Jewish culture. But the German army arrived in the spring of 1944, and all the Jews were rounded up and pushed into a ghetto. Most of the town’s 10,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz in four transports. Elie, his father Shlomo, his mother Sarah and his three sisters, Hilda, Bea and Tziporah, were taken on May 16, 1944. His mother and sister Tziporah perished at Auschwitz. Shlomo died there whispering his son’s name. Elie and his two older sisters survived.
As Wiesel explains in Night, the people of Sighet were unaware of the atrocities awaiting their Jewish neighbors. He devotes the first few pages of Night to Moishe the Beadle, a somewhat eccentric “man of all work at a Hasidic synagogue.” Foreign-born Jews, including Moishe, were the first to be expelled from Sighet. Then they were almost forgotten: it was reported in Sighet that they were working in Galicia, doing well, happy even. But Moishe found his way back to Sighet. The life had been run out of him. “Babies were thrown into the air,” he said, “and the machine gunners used them as targets.” Almost no one believed him.
The Wiesels’ Christian housekeeper, Maria, begged the family to follow her home, to hide out in the woods. Days before their deportation, she snuck into the ghetto to plead with them again. But they would not break up the family. If they had known what was at the end of those tracks, they would have stayed. “I think of Maria often, with affection and gratitude. And with wonder as well,” Wiesel writes. “This simple, uneducated woman stood taller than the city’s intellectuals, dignitaries and clergy… It was a simple and devout Christian woman who saved her town’s honor.”
I thought back on the tiny villages I had visited with Mr. Bud, of his town of Onçesti, where I was treated like family, invited to the mayor’s son’s wedding, where children held my hands in their sticky fingers as I walked down the street. Was it in one of these villages that the Wiesels could have hidden and perhaps been saved?
A few years after the town sent its Jews to Auschwitz, the Communists took Sighet and embarked on a campaign of intellectual repression. The Securitate—the secret police force of Communist Romania—transformed the town prison into a bastion of terror for anyone earmarked as an enemy of the state. Fifty-one prisoners died there, most of them members of the political and intellectual elite.
Like the Wiesel house, the prison has been made into a museum, which we visited on the way to his home. As I entered, a cordial woman handed me a bright green pamphlet written in English. Steep metal steps led us to the second-floor cells where straw beds covered in worn, striped fabric crouched past metal doors. Rooms housing an exhibit on Communist torture were filled with children just shy of their teens, gazing wide-eyed at the displays on re-education and psychological torture and turning away in disgust.
When we re-emerged into the cold afternoon, Andrea’s fiancé met us, standing beside his new car. With a long black ponytail streaked prematurely gray and a Bohemian air, he was the region’s only architect. “We just got engaged,” Andrea announced. “At first my father said I was too young, but...” She smiled and opened the car door, looking both very young and very much in love. Her fiancé, dark-eyed and stocky, drove us slowly through the quiet streets.
Wiesel’s house on Tudor Vladimirescu Street was a few blocks from the prison with no directional signs to lead visitors there. Both Andrea and her fiancé knew where it was but had never been inside. “Have you lived here all your lives?” I asked from the back seat. They both nodded yes.
We parked in front of a large, light-blue one-story building and stopped to read the marble plaque outside. The museum was the brainchild of Mihai Dancus, director of the Ethnographic Museum of the Maramures Region, located in Sighet. He first proposed the idea in 1987, continuing to push for it after the Romanian Revolution, and it finally opened in 2002, inaugurated by Wiesel himself.
This was not the first time that Wiesel had returned. He had come home in 1964, 20 years after being taken away, only to find that the house, like many that belonged to Jews, was occupied. The strangers who lived there then had no idea who he was. All that remained of his previous life was a nail hammered deep into the wall of his former bedroom. It had once held a picture of Rebbe Israel of Wizhnitz, his beloved master. When he returned, it held a wooden cross.
Inside, the house was white, airy and peaceful. The rooms were sparse and had a hushed quality since, unlike the prison museum, there were almost no visitors. Framed photographs of Wiesel were everywhere, but with very little furniture, it held few remnants of his childhood. I remembered that in Night, Wiesel wrote of his father’s burying the family wealth in the basement when Hungarian police began raiding Jewish homes. I wondered what had happened to those savings. Did the Hungarians or Germans or even Romanians find them, or were they left to decompose?
Back on the street, a radiant Andrea told me the details of her engagement. Together we walked a few blocks to the town square full of overfed pigeons and surrounded by churches. Walking slowly through the square, she opened the heavy wooden door of the Orthodox church where she was to be married. As happens so often in Sighet, the worn exterior hid an elaborate, in this case, gilded, incense-filled, interior. A Catholic church stood beside it. When we tried to visit the synagogue, on a narrow side street a few blocks from the main square, we found its doors locked. Of the 54 synagogues that once existed in the region, eight of them in Sighet, only this one built in 1885 remains. While not rundown, it looked forgotten, a place where the doors are seldom open.
Before heading back to the rural one-road village of Onçesti, we stopped at an orange-walled bakery where Andrea shared a soda with her fiancé—one glass, two straws. Children barely tall enough to see over the counters pulled on their mothers’ skirts, pointing to enormous cakes that they were certain they could consume.
“I often re-create my town, so like and yet so different from all others, refusing to accept that it ever changed,” Wiesel writes in his memoirs. “I stroll through it alongside my characters, who act as scouts, guides and guardian angels. With their help, evil remains hidden and time suspended.”
Despite the dark history that hangs over Sighet, life beats on. The town is full of love and life and youth—its inhabitants enjoy the first taste of freedom they have known in generations. But these emotions, so integral to the human experience, are now felt, are now lived, by a population very different from that of Wiesel’s memory.
It was the summer I decided to travel alone from Paris to Istanbul. I had been in Poland for two freezing, rain-soaked weeks and was ready to leave. I was headed to Transylvania, drawn by the legend of the sharp-toothed man with a taste for hemoglobin. Wrapped in heavy sweaters, I boarded a battered dark green train in Krakow that would take me to the Romanian border. Passengers lugging bags crowded the train’s corridors amid a heavy fog of cigarette smoke, saying lingering farewells to loved ones on the platform. Beneath the human chatter, I heard the hum of the train, which had chugged right through Communism into the era of the European Union. 
