Commemorating Elie Wiesel

Wednesday, 6 July, 2016

Today we commemorate the life and achievements of Elie Wiesel, who died on the 2nd of July 2016 at the age of 87.

A survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Wiesel went on to have a profound impact on the global memory of the holocaust. His memoir ‘Night’, originally published in Yiddish, and then in 1958 in French, has gone on to sell over six million copies in thirty languages. 

In 1978 he was appointed the Chairman of The President’s Commission on the Holocaust by the U.S. President Jimmy Carter.  During his chairing of the Commission it was renamed the United States Holocaust Memorial Council and he was the driving force behind the process of planning the establishment of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Upon Wiesel stepping down from the chairmanship he was awarded the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the Commission.

In 2003, he was appointed by Romania’s President Ion Iliescu to lead the International Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, which published its findings in 2004 and led to the institution of October the 9th as Romania’s Holocaust Commemoration Day. In 2005 the Romanian government marked the day with the establishment of the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania.

Elie Wiesel was described by the Nobel Committee in 1986 as a “messenger to mankind”, and by President Obama in 2016 as “one of the great moral voices of our time and, in many ways, the conscience of mankind.”