Elie Wiesel was 15 when he arrived at Auschwitz and, after a year in the Buna and Buchenwald concentration camps, he was liberated by Allied troops aged 16.

"Logically, I shouldn't have survived," Mr Wiesel wrote in his 1995 memoirs. "Sickly, tired, fearful and lacking all resourcefulness, I never did anything to stay alive."

After liberation, he spent two years in a youth home in Normandy, where he learned to speak and write fluently in French. From 1948 to 1951, he studied literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, and then worked as a journalist in France, writing for Yiddish and French publications.

Encouraged by French novelist Francois Mauriac, Wiesel started to write about his concentration camp experiences, but for years the resultant slim volume, Night, could not find a publisher.

With the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1960 and Holocaust survivors starting to speak about their traumatic experiences, the Shoah became a topic of conversation, as did, gradually, Elie Wiesel's writings and reputation.

In 1986, he won the Nobel Peace Price, with the selection committee describing him as "a messenger to mankind", who had come to speak for "all oppressed people and races."

As a Los Angeles-based journalist, I interviewed Mr Wiesel several times, once in November 1999. With a new century dawning, Mr Wiesel spoke at length about his past experiences and future expectations.

At the time, he was engaged in confrontations with leaders in Israel, American Jewish spokesmen and certain Holocaust scholars. But, he told me, "I want to be a defender of Jews, not their adversary. We have enough enemies as it is."

Nevertheless, he acknowledged keeping a secret file with the names and errors of "certain leaders". Apparently, so damning was the file that he had given instructions not to open it until 50 years after his death.

Mr Wiesel expressed his fear that the Holocaust was being eroded through trivialisation and misinterpretation. Even the most well-meaning of films, docudramas and novels on the Holocaust diminished its purity and sacredness, he asserted, and, ultimately, the only words that counted were those coming directly from survivors.

Wiesel generally spoke in a whisper, but his voice rose when asked how he felt about his public status as a "heroic Holocaust survivor" and now "the moral conscience of his time."

"Survival was sheer luck, nothing else," he said. "It wasn't heroism, or initiative, or intelligence, just sheer chance."