Jerusalem // Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor, writer and Nobel peace laureate who worked to keep alive the memory of Jews slaughtered during the Second World War, has died at the age of 87.
Wiesel, a Romanian-born US citizen, was perhaps best known for his memoir Night detailing his experiences in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
He won the Nobel peace prize in 1986, when he was described as having “made it his life’s work to bear witness to the genocide committed by the Nazis during World War II”.
Once known as "the world's leading spokesman on the Holocaust," Wiesel died at his home in Manhattan on Saturday, the New York Times reported.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who reportedly tried to convince Wiesel to run for president in 2014, called him “an exemplar of humanity”.
“In the darkness of the Holocaust, in which six million of our brothers and sisters perished, Elie Wiesel was a beacon of light and an exemplar of humanity that believes in man’s good,” Mr Netanyahu said.
French president Francois Hollande said his country “salutes the memory of a great humanist” and a “tireless advocate of peace”.
Born Eliezer Wiesel on September 30, 1928, the Nobel prize winner grew up in a small town in Romania.
His parents raised him and his three sisters in a Jewish community, until they were all detained during the Holocaust when he was a teenager.
His mother and younger sister were killed in the gas chamber at Auschwitz, according to his biography. His father died of dysentery and starvation at Buchenwald, where Wiesel was freed by US soldiers at the age of 17.
He was reunited with his two older sisters in France, and eventually studied at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Wiesel's internationally acclaimed Night was published in 1956 and has been translated into more than 30 languages. It was later expanded into a trilogy with Dawn and Day.
Accepting the Nobel peace prize, he said the award “both frightens and pleases me”.
“It frightens me because I wonder: Do I have the right to represent the multitudes who have perished? Do I have the right to accept this great honour on their behalf?
“I do not. That would be presumptuous. No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.”
* Agence France-Presse
