lizzie2000

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- Nobel laureate and Holocaust scholar Elie Wiesel was dragged from an elevator and roughed up during a peace conference at a San Francisco hotel last week, police said Friday. The author was not injured.

The assailant approached Wiesel in an elevator February 1 at the Argent Hotel and requested an interview, police Sgt. Neville Gittens said.

When Wiesel consented to talk in the hotel's lobby, the man insisted it be done in a hotel room and dragged the 78-year-old off the elevator on the sixth floor, Gittens said.

The assailant fled after Wiesel began to scream, and Wiesel went to the lobby and called police.

Gittens said police are investigating the incident as a crime. He said investigators were aware of a posting at an anti-Semitic Web site in which a man claimed responsibility for the attack, but declined to comment further.

Wiesel couldn't be immediately reached for comment at Boston University, where he teaches, or through his institute in New York.

Wiesel, who survived the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald during World War II, has worked for human rights in many parts of the world and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

I just found this online and thought it was really interesting that someone would do this to anyone, especially Elie Wisesel

Lexis

This guy had to endure so much horror during the war and has spent his whole life trying to make the world a better place where nobody will need to go through what he did and now some idiot thinks manhandling an old man is a point scorer.

I hope they get the sick freak who did this. Wonder if he feels like a big man when he tells this to all his pathetic anti-semitic pals. Ugh, I'm so digusted right now.

migamoo

I feel sorry for him. I remember reading Night in high school, and while it wasn't my favorite book, I cannot understand how anyone could do this to him.

elisheva

What kind of horrible person would, first of all, attack a 78 year old man? And how much more does it take to attack someone like Elie Wiesel, who has gone through so much and who really has done so much for the world?

Papri

I'm not sure "interesting" is the word I'd choose, but it's terrible. Like he hasn't been through enough in his life, he has to get roughed up by some brainless thug?

lizzie2000

I didnt mean interesting like that, i meant very sad, just no one had posted anything about it here. Trust me i understand to an extent what Elie Wiesel went through both my grandparents were in Auschwitz and I dont understand how anyone could do something like that to him. Apparently the man who attacked him wrote something on an anti semitic website talking about it.

sunnykerr

Oh, my God. Not that there aren't plenty of horrors going on in the world... but what has this world come to when an elderly man, one of the loudest voices in this world for peace and compassion, can be subjected to such a cowardly attack?

And at a peace conference, too!!!!

Bleh.

Okay, and a bit of the copy editor coming out here... you mean "accosted" in that title, right? Because now it sounds like he's been fitted with auditory aids or something...

Lexis

I missed that on first reading - changing now.

Hell on Heels

What the heck is wrong with people like that? I'm glad he's okay.

S.A.S.H.A.

Poor guy.

Sasha

lizzie2000

I just read an article of the San Francisco Chronicle's web site where the police are saying they think they have found the person who did this, they are looking at someone on the East Coast and that he had stalked Wiesel for a few weeks before this occured.

Elie Wiesel also, in a statement in an Italian newspaper said, that Holocaust deniers are become bolder and before they would just use their words and now they are using violence

sunnykerr

So, let's assume that the person who attacked Mr. Wiesel is a Holocaust denier... what's the plan here? "We're gonna rough up an elderly man, the best known survivor of the event, and so that'll prove it never happened?"

If these delusional individuals want to get proactive, then might want to visit the death camps. They're still there. They're World Heritage sites. Then again, in Poland, denying the Holocaust (in writing, but still...) is punishable by a three-year prison sentence. So maybe they want to stay away from the actual evidence.

Bella Grint

That is so sick. He shouldn't have to go through this after the Holocaust. I hope they catch the sick jerk who did this.