Elie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and author of the famous 1955 Holocaust memoir “Night,” has died at age 87, Haaretz reports.
Wiesel, born in 1928 in a Romanian village, survived the Holocaust in the Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Buna concentration camps. In 1963 Wiesel became a US citizen. After the war he became a journalist and a writer, publishing 57 books during his lifetime, largely in French. A fervent activist, he strived to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive in the global public consciousness.
In 1963 Wiesel became a US citizen. He received some of the world’s highest distinctions, including the US Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1986, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. The committee said at the time:
Wiesel is a messenger to mankind; his message is one of peace, atonement and human dignity. His belief that the forces fighting evil in the world can be victorious is a hard-won belief. His message is based on his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler’s death camps.