Activist and writer Elie Wiesel, the World War II death camp survivor who won a Nobel Peace Prize for becoming the life-long voice of millions of Holocaust victims, died on Saturday. He was 87.
Wiesel was a philosopher, speaker, playwright and professor who also campaigned for the tyrannised and forgotten around the world. He died at his home in New York City, the New York Times reported.
The Romanian-born Wiesel lived by the credo expressed in Night, his landmark story of the Holocaust — “to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”
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 characterise 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.
“My husband was a fighter,” Marion Wiesel said in a statement. “He fought for the memory of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, and he fought for Israel. He waged countless battles for innocent victims regardless of ethnicity or creed.”
A private funeral will be followed at a later date by a public memorial, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity 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 US 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 became close to US President Barack Obama but the friendship did not deter him from criticising US 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 programme.
Obama remembered him as “one of the great moral voices of our time, and in many ways, the conscience of the world.”
Wiesel had raised his voice, not just against anti-Semitism, but against hatred, bigotry and intolerance in all forms, Obama said in a statement. “His life, and the power of his example, urges us to be better. In the face of evil, we must summon our capacity for good. In the face of hate, we must love,” Obama said.
Wiesel attended the joint session of the US Congress in 2015 when Netanyahu spoke on the dangers of Iran’s program.
German President Joachim Gauck wrote to Wiesel’s wife Marion praising him as a “wonderful person and extraordinary scholar and writer” who will never be forgotten.
“Your husband knew how to use vivid and empathic words to keep the memory of the darkest years of German history that he witnessed alive and to warn young people especially of the dangers of right-wing extremism and xenophobia,” he added.
Wiesel and his foundation both were victims of the wide-ranging Ponzi scheme run by New York financier Bernie Madoff, with Wiesel and his wife losing their life’s savings and the foundation losing $15.2 million.
