Elie Wiesel

Eliezer Elie Wiesel (September 30, 1928 to July 2, 2016) was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor. He wrote 57 books, mostly in French and English, among them Night, which draws on his experience as a Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. As an activist he spoke regularly about the Holocaust and for many causes around the world, among them Soviet and Ethiopian Jews, South African apartheid, and the genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia and Cambodia. He was a professor of the humanities at Boston University, which named its Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies for him, and he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He was a founding board member of the Human Rights Foundation and helped spearhead the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which was established in 1993.