Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor, dies at 87

Activist and writer Elie Wiesel, the World War Two death camp survivor who won a Nobel Peace Prize for becoming the life-long voice of millions of Holocaust victims, died on Saturday aged 87 at his home in Manhattan.

Wiesel was a philosopher, speaker, playwright and professor who also campaigned for the tyrannized and forgotten around the world.

“My father raised his voice to presidents and prime ministers when he felt issues on the world stage demanded action,” his son, Elisha Wiesel, said in a statement.

“But those who knew him in private life had the pleasure of experiencing a gentle and devout man who was always interested in others, and whose quiet voice moved them to better themselves.

“I will hear that voice for the rest of my life, and hope and pray that I will continue to earn the unconditional love and trust he always showed me.”

Born in Sighet, Romania on 30 September 1928, Wiesel became best known for his book Night, which drew on his experiences in Nazi concentration camps during the final years of the second world war. Barely a teenager when Hungary annexed his town and forced its Jewish people into ghettos in 1940, Wiesel was then sent with his father to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, Poland.

His mother and sister were killed in gas chambers. After a forced march to Buchenwald, his father, already suffering from dysentery, was killed by an SS officer’s beating.

Freed from the camp at 16, Wiesel moved to France with other Jewish survivors and became a journalist for French and Israeli papers in the late 1940s. He moved to the US in 1955 and became a US citizen in 1963. In the late 1950s he completed Night, which was translated into English in 1960.

In awarding the Peace Prize in 1986, the Nobel Committee praised him as a “messenger to mankind” and “one of the most important spiritual leaders and guides in an age when violence, repression and racism continue to characterize the world.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed Wiesel as a ray of light, and said his extraordinary personality and unforgettable books demonstrated the triumph of the human spirit over the most unimaginable evil.

“Out of the darkness of the Holocaust, Elie became a powerful force for light, truth and dignity,” he said.

Wiesel did not waver in his campaign never to let the world forget the Holocaust horror. While at the White House in 1985 to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, he even rebuked U.S. President Ronald Reagan for planning to lay a wreath at a German cemetery where some of Hitler's notorious Waffen SS troops were buried.

“Don't go to Bitburg,” Wiesel said. “That place is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.”

Wiesel confronted another president, telling Bill Clinton in 1993: “I cannot sleep for what I have seen” in the former Yugoslavia. “As a Jew I am saying that we must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country!” he said. “People fight each other and children die. Why? Something, anything must be done.”

Wiesel became close to U.S. President Barack Obama but the friendship did not deter him from criticizing U.S. policy on Israel. He spoke out in favour of Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and pushed the United States and other world powers to take a harder stance against Iran over its nuclear program.

Obama remembered him as “one of the great moral voices of our time, and in many ways, the conscience of the world.”