US News

Nobel winner Wiesel attacked by holocaust denier

Feb 10, 2007, 0:47 GMT

San Francisco - Nobel Prize-winning author Elie Wiesel was accosted recently by a Holocaust denier who dragged him from a hotel elevator and tried to force him into a hotel room to confront him about his writing, the San Francisco Examiner reported Friday.

The incident occurred last week in the Argent Hotel in San Francisco when an unidentified man entered the elevator with Wiesel and dragged him out on the sixth floor. The man fled when Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, screamed for help.

Though police have yet to identify an attacker, the report said the assailant has boasted about the incident on the anti-Zionist website Ziopedia.org and revealed that he had been stalking the writer for months.

'After ensuring no women would be traumatized by what I had to do (I had been trailing Wiesel for weeks), I stopped the elevator at the sixth floor. I pulled Wiesel out of the elevator. I said I wanted to interview him,' a posting by someone calling himself Eric Hunt said.

The writer said he tried to 'bring Wiesel to my hotel room where he would truthfully answer my questions regarding the fact that his non-fiction Holocaust memoir, Night, is almost entirely fictitious.'