New York names street corner after Elie Wiesel

New York on Tuesday renamed a Manhattan street corner after Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor, Nobel peace laureate and humanitarian who died last year.

The southwest corner of 84th Street and Central Park West on the Upper West Side was permanently renamed at a ceremony attended by city officials under the baking heat of an early summer heatwave.

Wiesel, who was considered "the world's leading spokesman on the Holocaust," is remembered for his life's work in keeping alive the memory of the genocide that killed six million Jews during World War II.

Born in Romania, he became a US citizen and died at his home in Manhattan on July 2, 2016 at the age of 87.

In 1956, he published the internationally acclaimed memoir "Night" detailing his experiences in Nazi death camps. It has been translated into more than 30 languages and sold 10 million copies.

He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. At the time of his death, then US president Barack Obama called Wiesel "one of the great moral voices of our time, and in many ways, the conscience of the world."

Arrested during the Holocaust as a teenager, his mother and younger sister were gassed at Auschwitz. His father died at Buchenwald, where Wiesel was freed by US soldiers at the age of 17.

He was reunited with his two older sisters in France, and eventually studied at the Sorbonne university in Paris.

After he won the Nobel Prize, Wiesel and his wife founded The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity with a mission to "combat indifference, intolerance and injustice through international dialogue and youth-focused programs."