2010 LANTOS HUMAN RIGHTS PRIZE RECIPIENT
PROFESSOR ELIE WIESEL
The 2010 Lantos Human Rights Prize was presented to Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel for his powerful advocacy for human rights and his tireless work to educate the world about the Holocaust. Throughout his life, Professor Wiesel received many human rights honors, including the Nobel Peace Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Born in present-day Romania, Elie Wiesel and his family were deported to German concentration camps during World War II. Thirteen years after the war, Wiesel published a memoir, Night, based on his experiences. It has become one of the most influential accounts of the Holocaust, and he wrote dozens of additional novels. He became an outspoken champion of human rights, especially concerning antisemitism and the persecution of other groups on the basis of religion or race.
In November 2010, Elie Wiesel received the Lantos Human Rights Prize at a ceremony held at The New School in New York City. Before Professor Wiesel delivered his keynote address, guests heard from New Mexico Governor and former United Nations Ambassador Bill Richardson and Pavel Khodorkovskiy, son of jailed Russian dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The program also included a performance of lullabies composed by musicians held captive in the Terezin concentration camp and a vocal performance by the opera singer Charity Sunshine, granddaughter of Tom and Annette Lantos.
In his speech accepting the Lantos Prize, Professor Wiesel remembered his friend and fellow Holocaust survivor Tom Lantos:
“So my good friends, what was Tom’s goal? Mine and his were the same. Simply to say, we don’t talk about our own suffering, we talk about other people’s suffering. We don’t talk about what hurts us, we talk about what hurts the other. It is the otherness of the other that makes that other a human goal that needs protection.”
Professor Wiesel passed away in 2016.
