– ‘Giant of all humanity’ –
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 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.”
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.
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.
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 programs.”
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.”
Ban added: “The world has lost one of its most important witnesses – and one of its most eloquent advocates of tolerance and peace.”
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