Wiesel attacked

last updated 8 January 2015

San Francisco

Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel was roughed up in a San Francisco hotel last week, apparently by a Holocaust denier. Wiesel, 78, whose experiences in Nazi death camps is chronicled in his memoir Night, was in San Francisco for a panel discussion at a local hotel. After the panel, he rode an elevator with a man claiming to want an interview. When the elevator stopped, the man pulled Wiesel out and began to berate him, fleeing when Wiesel called for help. Someone calling himself Eric Hunt later claimed responsibility for the assault in a posting on an anti-Zionist Web site, saying he intended to force Wiesel to “truthfully answer my questions regarding the fact that his nonfiction Holocaust memoir Night is almost entirely fictitious.” Wiesel, who was unhurt, said the attack marked a disturbing escalation of the Holocaust-denial movement’s tactics. “Until today they used words,” he said. “Now they have switched to violence.”