Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel dead at 87

Elie Wiesel, the Auschwitz survivor whose writing and activism uniquely forced the world to confront the horrors of the Holocaust, died Saturday at his New York home. He was 87 years old.

"Elie Wiesel was one of the great moral voices of our time, and in many ways, the conscience of the world," President Obama said in a statement. "After we walked together among the barbed wire and guard towers of Buchenwald where he was held as a teenager and where his father perished, Elie spoke words I've never forgotten — 'Memory has become a sacred duty of all people of goodwill.'"

Wiesel was a teenager when he was sent to Auschwitz and Buchenwald, where he watched his father, Shlomo, die just a few months before the camps were liberated. His mother, Sarah, and sister, Tzipora, were also killed in the Holocaust. Wiesel chronicled his recollections of the experience in Night, a memoir read by millions.

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