Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel has died at 87

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Elie Wiesel Charles Dharapak AP final

Charles Dharapak/AP

Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel, who survived the Holocaust and went on to become an influential author and Nobel Peace Prize winner, has died, according to numerous reports and a tweet from Israel's Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem on Saturday.

Born in 1928, Wiesel writing on his imprisonment in Nazi camps led to him winning the Nobel Prize for peace in 1986.

He was 87 years old.

Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, Romania. In 1944, when Hungary agreed to allow the deportation of Jews from Romania to concentration camps, Wiesel was sent with his father to Auschwitz. His father would die from a beating by a German soldier. His mother and sister also died in the Holocaust. In 1969, Wiesel married Austrian Holocaust survivor Marion Rose in New York, who would be the English translator for his books.

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