Elie Wiesel says of himself, “I’m a storyteller.”

The setting for his childhood stories is the small town of Signet, located in the Hungarian Carpathian Mountains. He had aspirations of becoming a Talmud teacher. However, in 1944, the entire Jewish population of 12,000 to 15,000 was rounded up and transported to Auschwitz.

From that time, Jewish history ran through Auschwitz, not New York or London, says Wiesel. “We lived in death.”

Wiesel endured the forced march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald. He was 15 years old when Allied soldiers liberated Buchenwald.

He went to Paris where he began to write, living in solitude, rising each morning at 4, sitting in front of a typewriter. He drew away from people and lived only in books. He had lost his faith, his sense of belonging and his orientation.

Today, Wiesel is primarily remembered as a writer. Yet in 1986, when he won the Nobel Prize, it was not for literature; it was for peace.

In presenting the Nobel Peace Prize, the chair of the Nobel Committee said this about Wiesel: “His mission is not to gain the world’s sympathy for victims or the survivors. His aim is to awaken our conscience.

“Our indifference to evil makes us partners in the crime. This is the reason for his attack on indifference, and his insistence on measures aimed at preventing a new Holocaust. We know that the unimaginable has happened. What are we doing now to prevent its happening again?”

The documentary feature film “Elie Wiesel: Soul On Fire” screens on Sunday, March 15, at 7 p.m., and Friday, March 20, at 1 p.m., at the Evelyn Rubenstein JCC, as part of the Houston Jewish Film Festival.

Directed by Oren Rudavsky, the film includes interviews with Wiesel, his family members and his students.

Wiesel first wrote “And the World Was Silent,” 864 pages in Yiddish. He then wrote “La Nuit” (“Night”) in French, an account of his time in Auschwitz. It was more than history. It was testimony.

“But even if you read all the books, you would still not understand what it was like there,” Wiesel said.

Above all, Wiesel was a teacher.

“Suffering confers no privileges,” he taught. “It’s what you do with it.”

“Think higher. Feel deeper.”

In the preface to “Night,” Wiesel described himself as “a witness who believes he has a moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory.”

At the time, the original manuscript in Yiddish was condensed in size and translated into French, then English. Every major publisher rejected it. Through the efforts of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Francois Mauriac, the book was written and published. That information is missing in “Soul On Fire.”

The film’s interviews with Wiesel and his family, hand-painted animation and archival footage tell Wiesel’s story.

Rudavsky appears after the March 15 screening for a discussion with the audience.