JERUSALEM: 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 premier said in a statement. “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.”

Eliezer Wiesel on Sept 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.

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.”

While Wiesel’s focus was the Holocaust and the plight of the Jewish people, he was also a rights activist and a professor of Judaic studies and the humanities.

Soon after he won the Nobel prize, Wiesel and his wife Marion founded The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity with a mission to “combat indifference, intolerance and injustice through international dialogue and youth-focused programmes.”

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Wiesel had turned “the nightmare of his youth into a lifelong campaign for global equality and peace.”

Memorable quotes

• “No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night.” (Nobel peace prize acceptance speech, 1986)

• “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” (Nobel peace prize acceptance speech, 1986)

• “To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” ( Night, 1960)

• “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, but indifference between life and death.” (Interview with US media, 1986)

• “No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgements are wrong. Only racists make them.” (Interview with Parade Magazine, 1992)

• “Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.” ( The Gates of the Forest, 1966)

• “To forget the victims means to kill them a second time. So I couldn’t prevent the first death. I surely must be capable of saving them from a second death.” (Interview with National Public Radio, 2012)

Published in Dawn, July 4th, 2016