Elie Wiesel, the late Jewish novelist and human rights activist, was deeply affected by the Holocaust. He was personally traumatized by it and drew on its horrors as a writer.

Oren Rudavsky’s documentary, Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire, which is scheduled to be broadcast by the PBS network on Tuesday, January 27 at 9 p.m. (check local listings), focuses on this searing aspect of his life. By no coincidence, it will appear on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

This absorbing film is underpinned by old interviews with Wiesel, who died in 2016, and by black-and-white animation sequences pertaining to his pain and torment as a persecuted Jew in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camps in Poland and Germany.

It unfolds in chronological order, starting in Sighet, the town in the Carpathian mountains where he was born in 1928, and ending in New York City, where, ironically, a German doctor took charge of his medical treatment for blood cancer.

Wiesel, who described himself as a “teller of tales,” recalls Sighet fondly. The scion of a religious family who aspired to be a rabbi, he particularly remembers the beaming faces of its........

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