Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel dies at 87

Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and author who fought for peace, human rights and simple human decency, has died at the age of 87. Wiesel, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, recounted his family being sent to the Nazi concentration camps in his first book, “Night,” which was published in France in 1958. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lauded Wiesel as a “master of words.”Born

in Romania, Wiesel was 15 when he was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland with his family in 1944. The Nobel peace laureate, who wrote extensively about the horrors he and others endured, said he knew he’d have to write at some point but feared the words would elude him.

He was a professor at the City College of New York from 1972 until he left four years later to become a humanities professor at Boston University. Before that, Wiesel was a journalist in Paris and then New York.