Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel dead at 87

Photo of author

By BNO NEWS

Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and renowned author who was awarded the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, has died, according to Israel’s Holocaust museum. He was 87 years old.

Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, confirmed on Saturday that Wiesel had passed away at his home in Manhattan. Details about the cause of death were not immediately disclosed.

Wiesel was well known for his memoir “Night”, in which he wrote about his experiences in the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. The book, which was translated in more than 30 languages, has been sold tens of millions of times across the world.

Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, when the Norwegian Nobel Committee called the human rights activist “one of the most important spiritual leaders and guides” at a time of conflict, repression and racism in the world.

“Wiesel is a messenger to mankind; his message is one of peace, atonement and human dignity,” the committee said in 1986. “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.”

Wiesel was born in September 1928 in the Kingdom of Romania.

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