Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor, writer and Nobel peace laureate who worked to keep alive the memory of Jews slaughtered during World War II, has died aged 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.”
“Elie, a master of words, expressed in his unique personality and fascinating books the victory of human spirit over cruelty and evil,” the prime minister said in a statement. “In the darkness of the Holocaust, in which 6 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.”
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 travelled back to Auschwitz in 2006 with US talk show host Oprah Winfrey. He also accompanied US President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on a tour of the Buchenwald camp.
“After we walked together among the barbed wire and guard towers of Buchenwald ... Elie spoke words I’ve never forgotten — ‘Memory has become a sacred duty of all people of goodwill,’” Obama said on Saturday.
“Elie was not just the world’s most prominent Holocaust survivor, he was a living memorial. “His life, and the power of his example, urges us to be better,” Obama said.
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.
Michael Zank, director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies at Boston University, where Wiesel taught for nearly 40 years, said staff were heartbroken at his passing.
US Secretary of State John Kerry said Wiesel’s “words carried the weight of experience that could not and must not be forgotten — an experience we each are called upon to prevent in our own time.”
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Wiesel had turned “the nightmare of his youth into a lifelong campaign for global equality and peace.”
“The world has lost one of its most important witnesses — and one of its most eloquent advocates of tolerance and peace,” Ban added.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
RSS