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Auschwitz survivor and Nobel peace laureate Elie Wiesel has died in New York at the age of 87.

Elie Wiesel lived in Manhattan and had been a US citizen since the 1960s.

He became famous after writing about his experiences as a teenager in Nazi concentration camps, where he lost his mother, father and younger sister.

Elie Wiesel dedicated his life to ensuring the atrocities committed under the Nazis were never forgotten, and the president of the World Jewish Congress has called him “a beacon of light”.

Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust remembrance centre announced his death on July 2.

President Barack Obama said Elie Wiesel was “one of the great moral voices of our time”.

Photo Getty Images

Photo Getty Images

Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet, Romania, in 1928. In 1940, Sighet was part of a region that was annexed by Hungary. Four years later the town’s entire Jewish population, including 15-year-old Elie Wiesel and his family, was deported to Auschwitz.

Elie Wiesel’s mother and one sister were killed in Nazi death chambers. His father died of starvation and dysentery in the Buchenwald camp. Two other sisters survived.

After the war, Elie Wiesel lived in a French orphanage and went on to become a journalist.

He wrote more than 60 books, starting with Night, a memoir based on his experiences in the death camps.

Night included the lines: “For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living.

“To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”

Elie Wiesel’s use of the term Holocaust helped cement the word’s association with Nazi atrocities against the Jews.

In 1986, Elie Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace prize for his role in speaking out against violence, repression and racism.

After Elie Wiesel’s death, the head of the World Jewish Congress said he was “undoubtedly one of the great Jewish teachers and thinkers of the past 100 years”.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said Elie Wiesel “served as a ray of light and an example of humanity that believes in the goodness of man”.

Elie Wiesel leaves a wife, Marion, who also survived the Holocaust, as well as a son, Elisha.

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Auschwitz death camp survivor Yisrael Kristal has become the world’s oldest man, the Guinness World Records organization says.

Yisrael Kristal was born near Zarnow in Poland in 1903 and lived through two world wars before moving to Haifa, Israel.

He was 112 years and 178 days old on 11 March, Guinness World Records says.

The previous oldest-recorded man, Yasutaro Koide of Japan, died in January aged 112 years and 312 days.

As he received his Guinness World Records certificate, Yisrael Kristal said he did not know the “secret for long life” and that he believed everything was “determined from above”.

“There have been smarter, stronger and better looking men then me who are no longer alive,” he added.Yisrael Kristal worlds oldest man

“All that is left for us to do is to keep on working as hard as we can and rebuild what is lost.”

The son of a religious scholar, Yisrael Kristal was separated from his parents during World War One. He later moved to Lodz to work in the family confectionery business.

After the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany in 1939, Yisrael Kristal and his family were moved into the Lodz ghetto.

His two children died there and Yisrael Kristal and his wife Chaja Feige Frucht were sent to Auschwitz in 1944 after the ghetto was liquidated, the Jerusalem Post reports.

Yisrael Kristal’s wife was murdered in Auschwitz but he survived, performing slave labor in that and other camps. When he was found by the Allies in May 1945 he weighed just 81.5 lbs.

The sole survivor from his family, Yisrael Kristal emigrated to Israel in 1950 with his second wife and their son, where he continued to run his confectionery business until his retirement.

Yisrael Kristal’s daughter, Shula Kuperstoch, said the Holocaust had not affected her father’s beliefs.

“He is optimistic, wise, and he values what he has,” she told the Jerusalem Post.

The oldest person alive today is believed to be an American woman, Susannah Mushatt Jones, who is 115 years and 249 days.

The oldest person ever to have lived is thought to be Jeanne Calment from France, who died aged 122 years and 164 days.

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