Activist and writer Elie Wiesel, the World War Two death camp survivor who won a Nobel Peace Prize for becoming the life-long voice of millions of Holocaust victims, has died.
Mr Wiesel, a philosopher, speaker, playwright and professor who also campaigned for the tyrannised and forgotten around the world, was 87.
Romanian-born Wiesel lived by the credo expressed in 'Night’, his landmark story of the Holocaust - "to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time".
In awarding the Peace Prize in 1986, the Nobel Committee praised Mr Wiesel as a "messenger to mankind" and as "one of the most important spiritual leaders and guides in an age when violence, repression and racism continue to characterise the world".
Mr Wiesel did not waver in his campaign to never let the world forget the Holocaust horror. While at the White House in 1985 to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, he even rebuked US President Ronald Reagan for planning to lay a wreath at a German cemetery where some of Hitler's notorious SS troops were buried.
"Don't go to Bitburg," Mr Wiesel said. "That place is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS."
Mr Wiesel became close to US President Barack Obama but the friendship did not deter him from criticising US policy on Israel.
He spoke out in favour of Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and pushed the United States and other world powers to take a harder stance against Iran over its nuclear programme.
Mr Wiesel also attended the joint session of the US Congress in 2015 when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke on the dangers of Iran's programme.
Statement by President Michael D. Higgins on the death of Nobel Peace Prize Winner #ElieWiesel: https://t.co/1IEHAcxTOy
— President of Ireland (@PresidentIRL) July 2, 2016
Peace is our gift to each other; No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. Elie Wiesel dies at 87 pic.twitter.com/kMa0AXZ51U
— (((Adam Milstein))) (@AdamMilstein) July 2, 2016
Mr Wiesel was a hollow-eyed 16-year-old when he emerged from the newly liberated Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945. He had been orphaned by the Nazis and their identification number, A-7713, was tattooed on his arm.
Mr Wiesel and his family had first been taken by the Nazis from the village of Sighetu Marmatiei in the Transylvania region of Romania to Auschwitz, where his mother and one of his sisters died.
Mr Wiesel and his father, Shlomo, ended up in Buchenwald, where Shlomo died. In Night, Mr Wiesel wrote of his shame at lying silently in his bunk while his father was beaten nearby.
After the war Mr Wiesel made his way to France, studied at the Sorbonne and by 19 had become a journalist. He pondered suicide and never wrote of or discussed his Holocaust experience until 10 years after the war as a part of a vow to himself.
He was 27 years old in 1955 when Night was published in Yiddish, and Mr Wiesel would later rewrite it for a world audience.
By 2008, the New York Times said "Night" had sold an estimated 10 million copies. He wrote more than 50 books - novels, non-fiction, memoirs and many with a Holocaust theme - and held a long-running professorship at Boston University.
A few years after winning the peace prize, he established the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, which, in addition to Israeli and Jewish causes, campaigned for Miskito Indians in Nicaragua, Cambodian refugees, victims of South African apartheid and of famine and genocide in Africa.
