The Town Beyond the Wall

Michael—a young man in his thirties, a concentration camp survivor—makes the difficult trip behind the Iron Curtain to the town of his birth in Hungary. He returns to find and confront “the face in the window”—the real and symbolic faces of all those who stood by and never interfered when the Jews of his town were deported. In an ironic turn of events, he is arrested and imprisoned by secret police as a foreign agent. Here he must confront his own links to humanity in a world still resistant to the lessons of the Holocaust.

ELIE WIESEL is the author of more than fifty books, both fiction and nonfiction. He is a recipient of the United States Congressional Gold Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the French Legion of Honor’s Grand-Croix, an honorary knighthood of the British Empire and, in 1986, the Nobel Peace Prize. Since 1976, he has been the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University.