Elie Wiesel

Eliezer Wiesel was born in Romania on September 30, 1928, and was deported as a teenager to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. After liberation, he wrote Night, a spare account of those years that became one of the defining texts of Holocaust literature. He went on to write 56 more books, mostly in French and English, and became a professor of humanities at Boston University, where the university later founded a center for Jewish studies in his name. His activism stretched across decades and continents: he spoke for Soviet Jews, against apartheid in South Africa, and against genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, and Cambodia, among other causes. He was also an outspoken advocate for Israel, backing Netanyahu and opposing territorial compromise in Jerusalem. In 1986 he received the Nobel Peace Prize, and in 1993 he helped establish the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He died on July 2, 2016.